Keith E. McNeal

Keith McNeal holds the title of Assistant Professor. His dissertation (Anthropology, Emory University), based on 2.5 years of ethnographic and historical field research, was a comparative study of the psychocultural aesthetics and sociohistorical dynamics of African- and Hindu-derived possession performance in contemporary Trinidad, West Indies. This work is part of a larger, ongoing project on religion and society in Trinidad and Tobago, with the next phase incorporating other local ecstatic ritual traditions and focusing on more person-centered dimensions of divinity and ritual performance.

McNeal's theoretical interests center primarily on comparative religion, the intersection of anthropology and psychoanalysis, and comparative ritual and performance studies. He has conducted previous research on drag performance as well as Pentecostalism in the southern U.S., and he has several long-term video documentary projects in the works on religion, ritual and performance in the Caribbean.