SANTERÍA GRAND SLAM: AFRO-CUBAN RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE STUDY OF AFRO-CUBAN RELIGION.
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Review by Stephan D. Palmié, Associate Professor of Anthropology, University of Chicago.
This review appeared in redacted form in New West Indian Guide, Vol 79, No 3&4 (2005) under the same title.
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Michael A. Mason. Living Santería: Rituals and Experiences in an Afro-Cuban Religion. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2002.
Katherine J. Hagedorn. Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería. Washington D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2001.
David H. Brown. The Light Inside: Abakuá Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 2003.
David H. Brown. Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003.
Ethnographic objects behave in curious ways. Although they clearly are “our constructions”, field sites, and even topically circumscribed (rather than spatially delimited) ethnographic problems lead double-lives: places and problems change not merely because they change in fact, but because researchers come to them from historically no less changing epistemic vantage points. One can imagine generational cohorts of ethnographers marching across the same geographically or thematically defined terrain and seeing different things – not just because of substantial changes that have factually occurred, but because they have come to ask different questions. The process obviously has its dialectical moments. The figures we inscribe from fleeting observations (based on changing theoretical conceptions), are no less subject to history than the empirical grounds from which our discursive efforts call them forth. The result is a curious imbrication of partially autonomous, but also partly overlapping historicities of lives and texts which, at times, are more difficult to keep apart than it would seem at first glance. At least in the study of Afro-Cuban religious culture, the two practical and discursive fields – one circumscribed by the handy, but perhaps somewhat misleading label “Afro-Cuban religion” , and the other designated by whatever term one might like to affix to its study – cannot be held in easy separation: much as in the Brazilian case (Braga 1995, Capone 1999, Matory 1999, 2001), practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions and their ethnographers have engaged each other in a dialogue since at least the second decade of the twentieth century. That it took us so long to understand this has much to do with the way both “Afro-Cuban religion” and “Afro-Cuban ethnography” originally (and lastingly) became discursively objectified: the former largely under the sign of a search for “authentically African” elements in New World cultural practices, the second as an instrument for “verifying” (and thereby authorizing) such “Africanisms” (Scott 1991).
When the authors of the books under review here (as well as the author of this review) began their research on Afro-Cuban religions in the mid to late 1980s, this was still one of the reigning agendas in the anthropology of Caribbean and African American societies (by and large not exactly a hotbed of methodological reflexivity or theoretical sophistication at the time). Neither was revolutionary Cuba a particularly “well-worked” field. Though there did exist a sizable pre-revolutionary literature, ethnographic research on the island was languishing after an initial burst of important publications in the 1960s, and foreign (especially US-based) researchers had not been granted research visa for projects concerning “popular religious culture” ever since (and perhaps because) Oscar Lewis and his group had been asked to leave the island in 1970. Thus while the Cuban Editorial Ciencias Sociales mainly kept republishing Fernando Ortiz’ oeuvre throughout the so-called “period of scientific atheism”, up until the end of the 1980s, virtually all the genuinely fieldwork-based Anglophone monographs on the subject dealt with Afro-Cuban religious practices among Cuban exiles – in New York and New Jersey (as with the dissertations of Murphy 1980, Friedman 1982, Brandon 1983, Gregory 1986, and Brown 1989) or Miami (as in the case of Castellanos 1977 and Palmié 1991). All of us, in other words, began our fieldwork in Cuba at a very specific historical conjuncture: at the point when Cuba’s souring of economic and political relations with the Soviet Union, and the latter’s self-destruction in 1991, not only plunged the island into the unexpected and unprecedented crisis of the “périodo especial”, but fundamentally changed the “rules of ethnographic engagement” there. If, during the 1970s, ethnographic work on governmentally unsanctioned topics was made near impossible by the laws regulating Cuban citizens’ contacts with foreigners (to a point where unauthorized conversations with foreigners could be interpreted as a potentially “pre-criminal” act of ideological diversionism), by the early 1990s, not only could ethnographers submerge themselves in the waves of foreign tourists streaming to Cuba in ever larger numbers, the Cuban state’s own recognition that the nation’s African heritage represented a “country factor advantage” worked in our favor as well (to a point where, by now, publications by foreigners have completely overtaken the native Cuban output).
By then, of course, what we were seeing in Cuba not only had changed since Melville Herskovits had sent his student William Bascom to Cuba to gauge the strength of local “African retentions” and relative superficiality of Catholic “syncretism” (Bascom 1950, 1951, 1953). We also looked at it through very different sorts of spectacles. In good part, this was so because we had developed perspectives on our subject in tune with (as the glib phrases go) the “reflexive” and “historical” turns in the social sciences. We had also read Sidney Mintz and Richard Price’s influential 1976 essay (Mintz and Price 1992) that urged a rigorous historicization of the processes out of which contemporary African-American cultures had emerged. And we had become skeptical of the dubious methodological moves by which decontextualized data from both sides of the Atlantic tended to be short-circuited in order to derive “African origins” for contemporary New World cultural forms. Finally, in our North American fieldwork we had become dissatisfied with the neo-functionalist interpretations that reduced Santería to a surrogate “mental health care system” (e.g. Sandoval 1979) resorted to by immigrants riddled with acculturation-induced psychological problems , and we had plainly gotten bored with the descriptive laundry lists of deities and their attributes (“Chango’s color is red, he eats ram, owns the drums, manifests in thunder and lightning”, and so forth) characteristic of much of the recent literature at the time .
Of different, but perhaps not lesser importance, however, was that all three authors under review here, were then in the process of becoming practitioners of Afro-Cuban religion themselves. Following in the footsteps of French scholars of Brazil (such as Roger Bastide or Pierre Verger), but going against the grain of much of traditional Anglophone academic praxis , Mason, Hagedorn and Brown all underwent initiation into Regla de Ocha (better known as santería) – and so are writing about religious forms and traditions that they do not regard merely as ethnographic givens “out there”, but which, to varying degrees, and certainly with different rhetorical emphasis, these authors claim as parts of their own lives and biographies. If, as I have argued elsewhere (Palmié 1995, 2001), santeros have been “writing back” in rebuttal of academic treatments of their religion for quite some time, the line between “them” and “us” has now become blurred: the dialogues of the future, it would seem, may well be conducted between santeros who have turned themselves into scholars of their religion, and scholars who have turned themselves into practitioners thereof – with an occasional secular student of such matters (such as the author of this review) chiming in from the margins.
Starting at the most self-conscious end, Michael Mason’s Living Santería, in part, reads like a road map into Regla de Ocha. In four brief chapters, Mason tracks what he calls “experiences common to most practitioners as they enter the tradition” (11). His goal is to elucidate “the lived experience of various human subjects at different levels of involvement” in regla de ocha (11), and the transformation their “subjectivity” undergoes as their relationships and interaction with other practitioners, spirits, and divine entities develop and intensify. Framed by an introduction, a more analytical fifth chapter, and a conclusion, the course runs from an initial divinatory consultation undertaken by a female client for essentially secular reasons, through the rites of bestowal of the “guerreros” (the warrior deities Eleguá, Ochosi and Ogún) and its attendant establishment of moral relationships with a human initator and a set of deities, on to a chapter about the vicissitudes of managing religious and secular projections of identity among practicing santeros as they traverse North American social terrain, and culminates in a step-by-step description of the initiatory process itself. What Mason is after, it appears, is the gradual socialization into, and individual habituation of, conditions of agency and experience opened up, defined by, and validated through what, in effect, constitutes a process of religious conversion. For that, or so it seems to me, is largely what he is talking about when positing transformations of “subjectivity” through increasingly embodied knowledge that generates new feelings of both control and submission, as well as new arenas for engagement of similarly structured “subjectivities”, both human and divine . If so, however, it is not clear why Mason cuts himself off from the increasingly sophisticated literature on “conversion” – which has long left behind the lingering Weberian teleological emphasis on “properly rationalized” world religions, and might have opened up perspectives that Mason’s narrowly “phenomenological” approach cannot address. What Mason tells us is that the gradual process of becoming a santero or santera does something for one’s sense of self as a moral (and cosmological) agent. But were it not for the ideology of a necessary sudden conversion experience – where Saul falls from his horse, and stands up as Paul to thank his savior – the same could be said about evangelical Protestantism. Few people convert to even such zealous gods as Yahwe “all at once”, and Mason’s account of being “hailed by the oricha”, and gradually leaning to answer their call (and, one imagines, learning to want to answer it, too) might have been a useful addition to a literature that aims at removing what Robin Horton (1984) once called the “Judeo-Christian spectacles” still riding on the noses of far too many sociologists of religion.
As it stands, however, Living Santeria does not fully live up to the “interstitial” qualities the author sees as constitutive of all ethnographic endeavors (not that there are too many people around, these days, who think of ethnography as productive of morally unencumbered, purely “objective knowledge”!). Nor does its episodic structure, focusing on “representative events” in the life of santeros in a state of becoming, deliver the kind of sociological and historical depth that would allow other scholars to fruitfully generalize from it. Mason is at his most effective, when he deliberately dons both hats at once, and speaks about how e.g. dreaming of the deities he worships – and studies – for him comes to inform a unified vision of an epistemic project in which anthropological knowledge affects his religious quest, and divinely revealed truths must, for the practitioner-scholar, inform any auto-ethno-graphic endeavor. Having clarified the conditions of possibility for such a “hybrid” epistemological stance (if only for himself) is a contribution in itself . For despite their lack of educational credentials comparable to ours, the intellectual virtuosi (to use a Weberian term) among Mason’s santero peers, have done no less for at least the past century: poring over our textual productions, and engaging us in debate, they have been rationalizing our modes of knowledge production just as much as we have rationalized theirs.
This much quickly becomes evident in the second book under consideration here, ethnomusicologist Katherine Hagedorn’s Divine Utterances – a work that also aims to straddle the insider-outsider gap in the literature on Afro-Cuban religion. Much like Mason, Hagedorn tells her reader right off the bat that “[i]t has been through the lens of folkloric performances that I have framed lo religioso, the religious, and now it is through religious performance that I frame lo folklórico, the folkloric” (6f.) . She, too, steers her reader towards understanding her book as some sort of conversion narrative in which her spiritual persona as a future daughter of the deity Ochún repeatedly generates mythologically prefigured experiences of dramatic conflict with her divine guardian’s sexual antagonist, Ogún. Yet Divine Utterances has a very different agenda from Mason’s Living Santería. For while Mason aims to close the distance between “life and text”, foregrounding “lived experience” at the expense of analytical depth, Hagedorn seems far more comfortable with maintaining or even generating an ironic tension between them. In fact, she is arguably at her best when she foregrounds the paradoxical and contradictory – e.g. when she monitors the deliberate, but hardly successful attempts on the part of Cuban cultural engineers (both prior and during the revolution) to incorporate Afro-Cuban cultural forms into (changing) national projects by eviscerating them of their religious content; when she confronts the institutional history of the project of creating a “national Folklore” in step with revolutionary consciousness with the deeply conflicted memories of state agents whose well-meaning and deeply felt need to insure “authenticity” resulted in the growth of religiously defined networks of power and patronage within the Conjunto Folklorico Nacional – an ostensibly secular instrument of revolutionary cultural production; or when she exposes the covert racism at the heart of an supposedly emancipatory project (viz. to liberate the cultural expressions of black workers from pre-revolutionary bourgeois denigration) that nevertheless harked back to a conception of both “Africanity” and “religion” as impediments to social progress and modernization.
Such contextualization lends a quality of ironic distance to Hagedorn’s more personal reflections – such as those on her apprenticeship as a female batá drummer (an oxymoronic concept) to Alberto Villareal, one of the Conjunto’s current leading performers and practicing olú añá (consecrated drummer). But it never results in an authorial stance that betrays any less than her commitment to the eminently masculine musical tradition she is trying to formally master, and the religious precepts that stand at the back of it. This becomes even more evident in what is (at least in my idea) the most fascinating chapter of her book, aptly entitled “Blurring the Boundaries: Merging Sacred and Profane”. For what happens, conceptually, Hagedorn asks here, when a secularly conceived folkloric performance of programmatically modified sacred rhythms and chants in front of an audience composed of tourists, secular aficionados, hustlers, and practicing santeros not merely involves choreographed simulacra of possession behavior on stage, but accidentally triggers a divine possession among the audience? And how would we know the difference? Is a rhythmic performance conceived of as “sacred” audibly any different from the same set of drums-beats intended as a profane utterance? Hagedorn’s answer is yes – and no: “precisely because the performances sound the same”, she writes (111 emphasis mine) á propos the depiction of divine possession in Gloria Rolando’s 1992 film Oggún, because the space between the sacred and the secular is inaudible, understanding the terms of where and how the sound gets produced might be more important than what is heard. The intent of the possession performance gains primacy over the performance itself, but because of a shared corpus of body memories of possession, some aspect of the sacred is recalled. Clearly, in the case of the feigned possession, the intent is not to bring down the deity – that is, the intent is not to get possessed, but rather to mimic possession so expertly that the experience seems real on film. But the success of the staged performance relies almost completely on those bodies who have been possessed, so the boundaries between “source” and “derivation” become blurred or even irrelevant.
Quite clearly, Hagedorn puts her finger on a core contradiction at the heart of the “anatomía del proceso folklorico” (thus part of the title of Hagedorn’s original dissertation): neither we, nor the designers of the folkloric spectacles that “real santeros” produce under the auspices of a “real existing socialism” can really know. To what extent the sacred is prone to intrude into secular performance (or vice versa: to what extent such performances act back on the liturgical context off of which their choreography works) is a contextual issue – and one that cannot be blanketed by statements about the phenomenology of “lived experience” (for isn’t faking possession – even in a sacred context – a “lived experience”, too?). This is precisely because there simply is no empirical difference between the two kinds of “reality”, sacred and secular. For all practical purposes, they look and sound the same. For who could tell what really is “in the body” of someone enacting a divine persona? Someone wanting to show off his or her skills at performing the gestural repertoire of divine histrionics for a variety of personal motives? A state-employed santero trained to perform “as if”, and drawing a line between different values produced through gainful employment and sacred “work”? Or a genuine divine presence with its own “wholly other” reasoning and rhyme?
At moments such as these, Hagedorn makes a powerful – and really rather understated – contribution to a much larger set of issues and conversations (e.g. Boddy 1995, Das 1998). Rather than pursue such lines of inquiry beyond one (truly dazzling) chapter, however, she goes off on other tangents, chronicling the problems of life in Cuba during the “special period”, presenting descriptive data on ritual music and its ambiguous “folkloric” transformations (nicely accompanied by a CD), a somewhat disjointed account of the criminalization of Afro-Cuban religion, some rather impressionistic remarks on contemporary Cuban forms of racism and their articulation with the exploding tourist industry, and further explorations of her own relationships to the deities she studies and serves. Yet despite its somewhat disorganized character, Hagedorn’s book does represent a critical achievement – and precisely because she manages to successfully call into question the boundaries between the supposedly “authentic” and its “fabricated” doubles, exposing the difficulties of delimiting “real experiences” from its supposed “empirical symptoms” (which are visually and audibly indistinguishable from “good fakes”), and illuminating the range of contradictions the Cuban state courted in half-heartedly embracing its nation’s “popular traditions”.
If Hagedorn is at her most incisive when she switches from a romantic rhetorical mode to an ironic one, David Brown’s The Light Inside can be read as a brilliant, tongue in cheek epistemological meditation on method (and its madness) in Afro-Cuban, and Afro-Atlantic studies more generally – and it is instructive to consult it first before going on to read his long awaited magnum opus, Santería Enthroned. On the surface, The Light Inside is a book about a single set of unusual-looking objects assembled on, or next to, a table covered with a brightly silk-embroidered black velvet drape: plumed staffs, small cylindrical or goblet-shaped drums, a crucifix, something that looks like a monstrance, a red suit with a conical head-piece. Yet like all other things that humans tinker with or produce, this curious assemblage has not just a material, but discursive presence. As Brown argues in taking cues from Appadurai (1986) and Kopytoff (1986), the objects in question look back on a complicated social life and biography – one that is constituted through the accumulation of narratives around them: how they came to be assembled in the shape Brown was able to photograph in 1992, what highly differentiated meanings they hold for their makers and users, and how these and similar “sacra” pertaining to the male secret society Abakuá became the referents of a polyphonous swirl of public representations that have come to envelope them since the middle of the nineteenth century – all that is a matter that not only defies typologizing maneuvers (“this is an example of an abakuá-altar”), but asks for what Brown (241) calls a historical “contextualization of the archive” that nowadays enables the beholders of these objects to place them under coherent descriptions, be they of sacred or secular nature.
As Brown himself repeatedly acknowledges, his is ultimately just another such narrative. Yet precisely because he eschews a rhetorical stance “outside” the stream of discourses washing over the objects on the altar of the abakuá lodge he chose to call Eforí Eñongo, Brown manages to first “tell” these objects’s story in a manner that largely coincides with the views of both contemporary Cuban obonecues (members of abakuá) and their scholarly analysts – and then to read that story itself as a historically dense palimpsest of past accretions: an “archive”, the structure of which can be deciphered by careful historical contextualization. Accordingly, Brown initially situates the deeply personal meanings the altar objects of Eforí Eñongo hold for the man he calls Jesús Nasako (who renovated them in 1979) within larger narratives, internal to the association itself, that concern abakuá’s mythical origins and historical career. At the same time, however, he shows that at another level, parts of such stories also became canonical within very different discursive traditions: those produced by the Cuban state and its legal apparatus in its colonial, republican, and revolutionary incarnations; others generated by a variety of observers (ranging from police inspectors to artists and local color writers, on to ethnographers and art historians); and others yet originating with anthropologists and historians, for whom the “case” of Cuban abakuá appears to speak to a range of issues pertaining to the cultural history of the African diaspora.
The results of Brown’s exegesis of these partly autonomous, but mutually articulated discourses should give all of us a moment to pause. Take, for example, his characterization of the scholarly end of things: for too long, Brown argues, have we represented “art makers, objects, and ritual actions” as “’transparent’ to a set of timeless cultural values or ‘core principles’”, supposedly characteristic of ethnographically delimitable groups in Africa and the New World (4). Once such “transparency” has become discursively established, it is a short step to representing African American objects “as the essential descendants of their African source cultures” by imaginatively stripping away incongruent “additions” so as to render them “traceable, like isotopes, to a set of African morphological prototypes within a relatively uniform and transatlantic semantic field” (5). Yet even approaches based on models of interchange between heterogeneous cultural systems, and often associated with terms such as “syncretism” or “creolization”, for Brown, ultimately, generate stories whose analytical “signifying potential” ought to be confronted with the remarkable account of Brown’s key informant Jesús Nasako. “No one besides me would be able to explain to you the meaning of these things”, the man told Brown (5), “because they come from my personal experience and family history” – and, one would like to add, the history of Cuba itself. Never mind that when he renovated Eforí Eñongo’s title-holders’ sacred staffs of office Jesús Nasako did work off of a template that arguably has African origins, and that is seen as originating in Africa by contemporary obonecues and scholars alike: that the staff of the incumbent to the Abasonga-title bears a mass-produced brass medal depicting St. Christopher may be taken as evidence of a syncretistic process that analogizes the transitional role of the sainted ferryman in Catholicism with that of Abasonga, who, as a figure in abakuá’s founding myth, is instrumental in transacting the mystery from one side of an African river of the Cuban imagination to the other. That Jesús Nasakó affixed this medal to Abasonga’s staff, however, has nothing to do with what Herskovits (1937) called a mechanically evolving “confusion of theological concept”, but with the fact that Jesús Nasako received it as a gift from his baptismal godfather in 1958. The decision was entirely deliberate, and although informed by a specific “ethnoaesthetic” (as Brown might call it), ultimately cannot be reduced to it. The same holds for his 1979 decision to crown Mokongo’s staff with a chromed nude female figure with outstretched arms. Again, and for aesthetic, theological and biographical reasons very much his own, Jesús Nasakó saw a semblance to Sikan (the female mythological character who originally discovered the secret and was put to death for it) in a hood ornament of a Ford Edsel – which he stole well before the Cuban revolution put an end to the import of American gas guzzlers, and eventually inserted into a very different “regime of value”, thus “Africanizing” and “sacralizing” a North American commodity fetish (The Light Inside, 84-93) . Who, indeed, but Jesús Nasako, could have told that story? And what an allegory of transatlantic knowledge production it is!
But of course, ritual “art makers” such as Jesús Nasako never operated in a vacuum. Hence the story of how their productions “graduated” (in Browns terms) from public indexes of “African atavism” or “criminal evidence” to “folkloric specimens” and expressions of Cuba’s “national cultural heritage” is one that – or so Brown rightly insists – cannot be told separate from the story of the growth of African derived traditions in Cuba, or even apart from Jesús Nasako’s own biography as a maker of objects over which semantic and political contests have raged for well over a century now. And just as Brown’s fieldwork allows him to pinpoint inconsistencies in the stories members of abakuá tell each other (and their ethnographers) – e.g. about the historical transmission of the sese-drum’s shape and secrets (The Light Inside, 98-111) – so does his reading of the “archive” unearth a welter of contradictions. For Brown, “comparative ethnography and art history engage not simply in the contrast and comparison of practices, but in the contrast and comparison of representations of practices” (The Light Inside, 133, emphasis in the original). Hence the task he sets himself in the second part of The Light Inside is not to ask “whether Abakuá society objects are or are not ‘art and philosophy’ ”. What Brown wants to know is “what historically situated truth claims were made about and around [such] objects in order to constitute their particular status at a given moment [and] how individuals, groups, and institutions have appropriated things Abakuá […] in order to make cultural meaning and further local, national, and international agendas” (The Light Inside, 133).
This he proceeds to show in such stunning detail that a single example must suffice to render the flavor of his interpretations. Brown’s discussion of the long-term Cuban resident Basque artist Victor Patricio Landaluze’s depictions (published in 1881) of íreme (spirit-embodying dancers wearing a complexly patterned cloth-body mask) thus makes no bones about the African derivation of the “saco de íreme”. On one level of interpretation, Landaluze might well be said to have provided a visual record of a Cross River-type body mask in Cuba more than 30 years before P. Amaury Talbot published a photograph of its “supposed” ancestor in southeastern Nigeria. But this is precisely the kind of reasoning Brown wants to circumvent and complicate. For the transformation of Landaluze’s imagery into an icon of changing public meanings attached to Abakuá (from menace to Cuban civilizational progress to valued African heritage, from symptom of criminal atavism to evidence of “African art and philosophy” in the Americas) took off from what for all intents and purposes was already a deeply hybridized image. As a trained art historian, Brown has no trouble reading Landaluze’s work as a visual transposition of European postural principles (ranging from classically Greek to Renaissance and Baroque themes) onto an Afro-Cuban subject matter (The Light Inside, 133-144). What is “African” or “European” in the resulting image is hard to tell, and indeed perhaps beside the point. For given that Landaluze’s “El Ñáñigo” lithograph nowadays is held to represent an original stage of “African” authenticity in Cuba not just by scholars, but by members of Abakuá as well, would we even want to speak of syncretism here? And who would be its agent?
For Brown, it seems, the question itself is misguided. Rather than proceeding from postulated “cultural source entities” that supposedly come in contact with each other, and then generate “mixtures”, syncretisms, or more general states of “hybridity” and “epistemic murk” (as Homi Bhabha or Michael Taussig might put the matter in their own, more flamboyant ways), Brown sees his task in tracking the movements of single objects between and across fields of signification (whoever’s “culture” they may be thought to constitute). And this precisely is his agenda in Santería Enthroned , a magnificent and truly interdisciplinary book – in fact, perhaps several books rolled into one. Santería Enthroned can be read as the first genuine social history (worthy of the name) of Afro-Cuban religion in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, a superb ethnography of forms of historical consciousness based on more than a decade of intermittent fieldwork in Cuba, a richly illustrated art historical monograph, an eloquent testimony to the complexity of Caribbean cultures, and a searing challenge to methodology and theory in Afro-Atlantic studies. Organized around a central multivocal image of divine royalty, Santería Enthroned delineates a good century of changes in institutional structure, ritual practice and iconographic form, carrying the reader through a series of minutely detailed episodes crucial to the formation of what we, today, know as Regla de Ocha. In the process, Brown sweeps away a whole range of time-hallowed conceptions about the kind of “organic” processes that supposedly led to the implantation of originally African cultural forms in New World settings, and their gradual erosion (or, alternatively, retention) among the descendant of enslaved “bearers” of such African cultural forms. What emerges instead is nothing short of a radical revision of Afro-Cuban cultural history: for Brown, Regla de Ocha does not represent a diasporic specimen or variant of “Yoruba religion” (something that cannot be said to have existed in Africa even as late as the nineteenth century) that was imported whole-cloth by the thousands of enslaved Yoruba-speakers who reached Cuba in the first half of the nineteenth century. Rather, Regla de Ocha (and specifically the cult of Ifá) was literally cooked up, no earlier than the last two decades of the nineteenth century, by fewer than a dozen Africans and their creole descendants living in or near the Third “barrio” of the town of Regla, and continued to undergo dramatic and contentious transformations throughout the first half of the twentieth century as it spread through western Cuba’s provinces of Havana and Matanzas. What is more, while many of the founding figures are remembered today as “reformers” or “rectifiers” of traditions that had been incompletely transmitted, or become corrupted over time, when systematically correlated, such contemporary discourses, in fact, reveal exactly the opposite: most of the ancestral figures recalled in invocatory prayers (moyuba) today were crafty innovators who, in selectively drawing on heterogeneous cultural sources (some of which undoubtedly were of Yoruba provenance), not just systematized and theologically rationalized a “religion” that had not exited as such before (whether in Africa or Cuba), but strategically situated themselves in positions of authority and control over the dissemination of the knowledge and practices they had helped to institutionalize.
However, as Brown makes clear right from the start, to reduce the case to a simple matter of the “invention of tradition” would equally be to miss the point: “though I may use the term ‘innovation’ in generally describing the accomplishments of particular historical actors”, he writes in one of the few passages in the book where he seems to speak as both scholar and practitioner (Santería Enthroned, 11), “I apply the term ‘reform’ in specific cases to practitioners’ historical consciousness and their modes of explanation”, for in their view, “[b]aseless and unauthorized changes disrespect the priestly deceased, the egun, who delivered tradition, upon whose shoulders we stand, and to whom we must answer”. And it is in following practitioners’ own narrative constructions that Brown supercedes the sterile objectivism of the “invention of tradition” conceit. Obviously, discourses about “origins” and “traditions”, “continuity” or “discontinuity”, “authenticity” and “illegitimacy” inevitably express political positions and maneuver. However, the historical vision of contemporary practitioners acknowledges no less, revolving as it does around two ambivalently juxtaposed, and strategically activated, narrative constructions. As Brown (Santería Enthroned ,77) puts it, one is
a story of linear continuity with an authentic origin or primordial spiritual ground: the tierra (homeland) of the Yoruba of West Africa or an ancestral personage (egun), for example, or a Lucumí or creole who founded a rama (branch) of the Lucumí religion in Cuba. The other is a story about agency, struggle, discontinuity and heroic achievement.
As far as the latter storyline is concerned, Brown’s oral historical research leaves no doubt that right from the beginning, struggles over the authorization of what could count as “traditional” were part and parcel of the very process out of which the “tradition” itself grew – and are remembered as such to this day. Perhaps as early as the last decades of the nineteenth century, but certainly by the second decade of the twentieth, now famous priestly figures were forced to undergo reconsecration rituals in order to accommodate rival initiatory traditions that had begun to locally coalesce in Matanzas and Havana. By the mid-twentieth century, the emergence of a new priestly commission – that of the obá oriaté – not only had led to the emergence of what Brown calls two partly overlapping “ritual fields” (one centered on the “orichas” and another on the oracular deity Ifá/Orúnmila), but split practitioners along the lines of groups dominated by babalawos and others rejecting their claims to ultimate ritual and theological authority. At the same time, by the 1950s babalawos themselves began to engage in fierce struggles over the authority to control the crucial reproductive resource of the Olofin – a sacrum indispensable to the initiation of new babalawos, and therefore a key to the strategic building of hierarchical religious descent-lines (ramas) under the control of single senior priests.
Since Brown’s research into the initiatory genealogies of Cuba’s babalawos represents one of his most important contributions to an historical anthropology of Afro-Cuban religion, it is worth briefly expanding on the strange career of the Olofin. What Brown’s findings indicate is that virtually all babalawos active in Cuba today trace their initiatory descent to five African fundamentos (founding figures) active in the town of Regla in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Now according to the narrative tradition emphasizing continuity over disjunctures, some African-born babalawos carried their Olofin secrets to Cuba in the holds of slave ships (a topos repeated in stories about how enslaved babalawos tied their divining chains around their waist, or swallowed the consecrated palm nuts used in Ifá divination before embarking on the Middle Passage). In contradistinction, what Brown calls the “discontinuity/transformation cycle of diasporic narratives” posits the deliberate return of some babalawos to Africa and details their epic quest for this holy grail of Cuban babalawos (which, to my knowledge, so far lacks documentation in Africa), in order to create the conditions of possibility for the reproduction of the cult of Ifá in Cuba . Yet however the Cuban Olofin-tradition originated, its initial pace of dissemination was slow and linked to a mechanism of inheritance (by either biological offspring or ritual descendants of the original owner). By the first two decades of the twentieth century, a first and second generation of creole babalawos inaugurated a pattern, whereby strategic lending out of Olofin-objects by the heads of emerging religious lineages (ramas) to junior babalawo’s aspiring to build up groups of religious dependents on their own became a political tool for senior Olofistas to control the members of their ritual descent groups. But it also quickened the pace of initiations. By the 1950s, however, the enterprising and – according to Brown’s sources – ruthless third generation babalawo Miguel Febles y Padrón (1910-86) changed all of this. Although new Olofíns had been “born” (as babalawos would put it) in Cuba before, Febles now began to mass-manufacture and sell these objects. He also threatened and intimidated rivals who would dare to impugn the authenticity of his Olofin-objects, or try to impede his monopolistic project of turning himself into the founding figure for literally hundreds if not thousands of babalawos active, by then, not only in Cuba, but in exile in the U.S. Venezuela, Panama, or Mexico.
As a result, “the operative location of Olofin’s ‘authentic origin’ shifted over time”, as Brown (Santería Enthroned, 90f.) sums up the bearing of these “stories” on any conception of Afro-Cuban religious history: In the beginning, as it were, Africans in Cuba saw Olofin’s ultimate source as ‘West Africa’, from which nineteenth century babalawos had embarked, and to which their agents are believed to have returned to reclaim Olofin’s secrets. Then a small Havana collective of Lucumí founders and later, a short roster of early creoles, became the proximate or local ‘origin’ of this jealously guarded fundamento […]. After the 1950s, the ‘origin’ of Olofin, for all intents and purposes, became sited in the fundamento of Miguel Febles.
Yet this transatlantically shifting pattern of allocations of “origin” did not end here. For in a move deliberately designed to thwart Febles’ project of installing himself as the future fons et origo of Ifá in the New World, in 1975 a group of disgruntled Miami babalawos headed by José Miguel Gómez Barberas flew to Nigeria, acquired what was represented to them as the equivalent of the Olofin, and later invited their Nigerian benefactor Ifá Yemí Eleguibon to officiate over the – now autonomous – initiation of new babalawos in Miami. Clearly, and much as in the case of the North American black Yoruba Reversionist Movement , Gómez and his group’s shrewd maneuver to re-activate “Africa” as a viable chronotope of primordial authenticity and legitimacy constituted a major break with “tradition” – both in the sense of established practice, and in regards to how practitioners imagine a seamless flow of knowledge and practices through the conduit of the genealogical construct of the “ramas” of initiatory descent. However, as Brown is able to show, they did not – and perhaps could not – dispense with elements of the trope of linear continuity: constructing an arguably “postmodern”, but nonetheless highly “traditional” transatlantic spiritual genealogy, Gomez claimed that his Nigerian benefactor Yemí Eleguibon was the grandson of one of the four enslaved Africans who, in his view, installed the cult of Ifá in Cuba in the first place! Thus closing a circle of the Diasporic imagination, these Miami babalawos not only emancipated themselves from their Cuban “sources”, but – in conflating suburban South Florida with a “Yorubaland” which they had been reading about since at least the 1930s – generated a continuity narrative harking back to those very enslaved African fundamentos in Cuba whose legitimatory capacity, to this day, cannot be called into question.
As this example shows, all representations of pastness and becoming in contemporary Afro-Cuban religion are highly overdetermined composites – “marvelous hybrids” (Santería Enthroned, 288), to use Brown’s phrase – whose internal tensions and productive potential is ill-captured by our attempts to sort out its constituent elements according to criteria which ultimately fail to do justice to the historicity of even our own constructions of “Africa” and “Europe” (e.g. Mudimbe 1988, Appiah 1992)! This, arguably, is the gist of the second half of Brown’s book which he devotes to a painstaking analysis of the ritual iconography of contemporary Regla de Ocha. For the ideal of divine radiance contemporary practitioners aim to achieve in the assemblages composing the thrones on which recent initiates display the splendor of the “palace of the obá Lucumí” is no less than such a “marvelous hybrid” – the result of long and complicated histories of strategic (or even just opportunistic) appropriation of heterogeneous symbols of prestige and grandeur into an “ethnoaesthetic” that cannot be said to have preceded such processes of hybridization, but emerged from them, and presents their momentarily visible result. For how else to reconcile a contemporary New Jersey thronemaker’s predilection for the style of Louis XV (“in fact, all the Luises”) with the fact that what he is creating is an iconic landscape explicitly gesturing towards both “Africa” and “Cuba” as points of reference? Or how to explain the long history during which an originally “Yoruba” model of containers of the sacred got transposed upon the ceramic forms provided by mass produced “French style” British soup tureens “trickling down” in their function as prestige goods from nineteenth century grand bourgeois Cuban households to the “casas de santo” (cult groups of modern Regla de Ocha) forming at just about the same time? Indeed, “the possibility that priests could ‘choose’, through purchase, the way their Ocha houses and ceremonies looked by selecting from an array of African and European trade goods, as well as from the mundane houseware shelves at the corner bodega, renders quite uninteresting any essentialist argument for African origin as a determinant of any given diasporc cultural arrangement”. For ultimately, “the place of ‘origin’ of Cuban Lucumí iconography belongs to the specific historical conjunctures, spaces, and cultural and countercultural imaginations of the ‘modern’ Atlantic world” (Santería Enthroned, 273) – a conceptual location, that is, which opens up the possibility of tracking the historical as well as discursive movements of “putatively stable and legitimating origins” as they shift between different temporal and spatial registers (Santería Enthroned, 17).
In his discussions of all this – and more! – Brown goes so far beyond the bounds of the theoretical literature on “creolization” or “syncretism” available today, that one wonders if such conceptual abstractions really can deliver the cargo we have long expected from them. At least in the Cuban case, we now know that this is not so. We need a more differentiated data base, a more reflexive methodology, and a sharper focus on what exactly the people whose agency we have become accustomed to subsume under such facile labels intended to achieve, what, historically speaking, such agency amounted to, and how its effects are retrospectively interpreted. Arguably, Brown has farther advanced this goal in the context of a thoroughly documented case study than anyone since the publication of Roger Bastide’s Les Religions Afro-Brésiliennes in 1960. And I don’t think I could do any better than to cite his own conclusions (Santería Enthroned, 296) about the “state of the art” in the field of inquiry I share with him and the other authors of the books reviewed in this essay:
Clearly, the study of Afro-Cuban religions deserves greater dialogue with the full range of Black Atlantic historiography, including studies that contextualize black cultures in relation to national and Atlantic histories […]. At the same time, I would not wish to see detailed local ethnographic, closely focused art historical and ethnohistorical inquiry fall by the wayside in such historical investigations. As scholars, we continue to labor under an extremely undeveloped ethnographic and chronological picture of the Afro-Cuban religious systems and their local variations. We have few biographies or close historical studies of Black Atlantic or African Diaspora religious or artistic practitioners […]. No intensive ethnohistorical studies exist on the differences in practice among religious houses in Havana and Matanzas, within and among northeastern Brazilian cities in the Candomblé,or between Haitian regions in Vodou, let alone between practices in New York Miami, and California. A growing number of self-reflexive ethnographic studies of Santería, Vodou, and Candomblé, which revolve around their authors’ experiences in relation to these religions, are welcome, but do not always paint the kind of detailed historical picture most needed.
Instead, Brown finds “much to be said for straightforward antiquarian studies of local religion” – and if Santería Enthroned were to represent such “antiquarianism”, I at least, would heartily concur. Brown’s Santería Enthroned has set a standard that will be hard for any of us to match – and whether we regard our endeavors as “religious ethnographies” or “ethnographies of religion” may well not matter much in this respect. More importantly, however, its ethnographic richness, conceptual power, theoretical subtlety, and sheer brilliance ought to earn it recognition well beyond the field of Afro-Atlantic studies.
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(I thank my dear colleague Stephan Palmie for this kind and incisive review).
