GARIFUNA RELIGION. The Garifuna are an ethnic group numbering roughly 300,000 with communities in some 40 villages dotting the Caribbean coasts of Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala, and Belize. Their traditional ancestor-focused religion presents a multilayered confluence of Amerindian, African, and Roman Catholic influences.

History

The Garifuna are descendants of Africans and Amerindians (Carib and Arawak) who shared the island of Saint Vincent beginning in the second half of the seventeenth century. Garifuna is properly the name of their language, which is affiliated with the Arawak linguistic family. The term is derived from Kalinago, the ethnic title used by Island Carib Amerindians to describe themselves but misrecognized by Christopher Columbus as "Carib." Europeans called the Garifuna "Black Caribs" because of the group's apparent African ancestry. That appellation was in common usage until the shift to Garifuna as a standard ethnic name after the middle of the twentieth century.

The African...