The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

By Stephan Palmié

Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santería and other religions related to Orisha worship—a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa—Stephan Palmié has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In The Cooking of History he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of the Afro-Atlantic World.
 
Understood largely through its rituals and ceremonies, Santería and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmié argues, precisely by relying on the notion of an aboriginal African past, and by claiming to authenticate these religions via their findings, anthropologists—some of whom have converted to these religions—have exerted considerable influence upon contemporary practices. Critiquing widespread and damaging simplifications that posit religious practices as stable and self-contained, Palmié calls for a drastic new approach that properly situates cultural origins within the complex social environments and scholarly fields in which they are investigated.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Jun 14, 2013
• ISBN: 9780226019734

Stephan Palmié

Stephan Palmie is associate professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago.

Book preview

STEPHAN PALMIÉ is professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition and, most recently, coeditor of The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

© 2013 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2013.

Printed in the United States of America

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01942-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01956-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01973-4 (e-book)

Cataloging-in-Publication data available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01942-0 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01956-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-01973-4 (e-book)

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

The Cooking of History

How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

STEPHAN PALMIÉ

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

CHICAGO AND LONDON

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Spelling

Introduction. BL2532.S3 or, How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

CHAPTER 1. On Yoruba Origins, for Example . . .

CHAPTER 2. Fernando Ortiz and the Cooking of History

CHAPTER 3. Or Syncretism, for that Matter . . .

CHAPTER 4. The Color of the Gods: Notes on a Question Better Left Unasked

CHAPTER 5. Afronauts of the Virtual Atlantic: The Giant African Snail Incident, the War of the Oriatés, and the Plague of Orichas

Coda. Ackee and Saltfish versus Amalá con Quimbombó, or More Foods for Thought

Epilogue

Notes

References

Index

Acknowledgments

Intellectual projects have ways of their own. Some appear to spring from our heads in the manner of Athena, fully formed, ready to engage the world, and be engaged by it in turn. Others appear to sneak up on their authors, revealing their contours only in occasional, blurry glimpses at the limits of one’s visual field that one catches, seemingly fortuitously, while pursuing other questions. Such fleeting glimpses, however, can gradually build up to where they begin to force upon us the dawning realization of a presence that has begun to work itself into the author’s life, demanding recognition and acknowledgment. So it was in the case at hand. I did not know it at the time, but in the aftermath it seems to me as if the project that became this book had been following me around ever since I was twenty-four years old, setting out to do ethnographic fieldwork on what I then thought was Afro-Cuban religion. I like to think of it as a patient companion, looking over my shoulder and watching over the years with detached bemusement how I again and again practically stumbled over it, without ever fully perceiving it. But while many such presences surely never attain recognition, and many books remain forever unwritten, this one eventually took me by the hand and said, Write me. I can even date the moment with some precision.

Parts of several chapters in The Cooking of History have led prior lives in articles that I published in journals and edited collections over the past twenty-some years. It was my friend Bobby Hill, and my editor, David Brent, who initially encouraged me to integrate them into a coherent text. The book proposal I eventually sent to the University of Chicago Press got favorable reviews, and I received a contract. But then I sat on it for a number of years (probably to David’s dismay). Not that the initial proposal was a rabbit I had pulled out of a hat. On the contrary, I had put considerable amount of thought into putting it together. But it was really only in late February 2009 that it dawned upon me precisely what this book was all about.

Midway through the winter term I had received news that my father had fallen gravely ill, and I flew to Germany to be with him during what clearly was a terminal illness. During the days I kept him company at the hospital. At night I sat alone at the dining room table in his house in the foothills of the Bavarian Alps, among piles and piles of books with which he had covered practically every horizontal surface in the house—novels of all sorts, historical biographies, the diaries of Thomas Mann and Viktor Klemperer, a new edition of Herodotus, and who knows what else. I spent long evenings at the spot I had cleared for my dinner plate (my father had taken to eating his meals in the kitchen), smoking, drinking beer, and trying to write my presidential lecture for the Meetings of the Society for the Anthropology of Religion in late March. And then, one of these evenings, The Cooking of History snuck up on me. It was like seeing an old friend again after many a year, or like finally meeting someone in person with whom one has carried on a lively correspondence for the longest time. Just a little more patience, I said. I know who you are, and I’ll write you as soon as I can—which I did when I was finally able to take a leave from my academic responsibilities for two academic quarters and a summer in 2011.

My father died on March 3, 2009, and while I know that he would have loved to see this book, I like to think that the great library in the sky where he has reserved for himself a cozy alcove with smoking privileges and full bar service will eventually acquire it (and, who knows? shelve it under BL2335.S3). In any event, I dedicate The Cooking of History to the memory of Peter Palmié, pediatrician to a generation or two of Murnauers, country doctor, and incorrigible bookworm, a man who never lost his curiosity, and who had a lot to do with awakening and supporting mine.

Needless to say, I had other fellow travelers—too many, in fact, to properly acknowledge their help and generosity at various stages of the quarter century of research and writing the result of which (at least for now) is this book. I have not gone back to the original essays to extract the names of those whom I thanked there, but a few of them are still on my mind and need to be mentioned—not just because my work would have been impossible without them, but also because I think of them as long-time mentors of one kind or the other, and certainly dear friends. They include Andrés Balaez Chenicle, Misty Bastian, David William Cohen, Kit Davis, María del Rosario Díaz, Bobby Hill, Cecilia Laca, Sidney Mintz, John Peel, Ernesto Pichardo, Bonno Thoden van Velzen, Natividad Torres, Ernesto Valdés Janet and the members of the Proyecto Orunmila, Brad Weiss, and the late Ineke van Wetering.

Over the years, I have been privileged to have had many intellectual sparring partners, both patient and, at times, pleasingly punchy. Among them count Greg Beckett, Rob Blunt, David Brown, Stefania Capone, Jean and John Comaroff, Colin Dayan, Erwan Dianteill, Karen Fields, Paul Johnson, Webb Keane, Aisha Khan, Randy Matory, Rich Price, Michael Ralph, Karen Richman, Rosalind Shaw, Michael Silverstein, Charles Stewart, Kristina Wirtz, and Kevin Yelvington, as well as my other colleagues and students at the University of Chicago. I have learned a lot from you all (even if, in the case of the latter, I happened to be your teacher), and I want to thank you for that. David Cohen, Michael Ralph, and Kristina Wirtz read the entire manuscript, and offered invaluable advice and criticism; David Brent at the University of Chicago Press not only was patience incarnate, but shepherded this project through with unflagging support; and Therese Boyd did a splendid job at copyediting. My final edits and corrections to the manuscript were undertaken while I was a fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala, and I want to thank its Principal, Björn Wittrock for the invitation, and its wonderful staff for their help and patience with someone who, when it comes to electronic matters, has never really left the twentieth century.

Remains to thank the single one person without whom none of my books would have ever been written: my dear wife, Doris, soulmate and companion for by now more than thirty years. I know full well that living and dealing with me when I am writing a book has never been a piece of cake, but I hope that this time around I have convinced you that I have grown quite a bit easier to handle in such situations. I love you, Doris, and perhaps by the time another book sneaks up on me, writing it will be a breeze.

A Note on Spelling

Orthographic usages and the standards to which they conform are neither innocent nor immediately transparent conventions. Instead, they form part and parcel of what one might call linguistic ideologies. These comprise, among other things, socially distributed notions and norms concerning how spoken language can, or ought to, be rendered in writing so as to become properly legible, that is, convey not only correct phonetic values, but evoke meanings taken to be adequate, within a certain community of linguistic practice and interpretation, in regard to the socially normativized ways in which spelling itself is understood as playing a role in the conveyance of semantic values.

This is no great problem in languages whose orthography underwent a process of (usually state-directed) standardization, such as most European languages did in the course of the nineteenth century. No major problems arise either (at least not for professional linguists) when one is faced with monolingual discourse in a language arbitrarily reduced to writing according to a fairly unchanging standard. But none of this is the case in the following.

Instead, we are not only dealing with languages such as Yoruba whose initial standardization, mainly in the course of missionary endeavors in the second half of the nineteenth century, was followed by repeated orthographic reforms. Rather, what we are faced with is a situation where the literature on which I will draw in the following also, and perhaps necessarily so, reflects multiple and oftentimes conflicting attempts to reduce a ritual language—lucumí—to writing, and in a manner, at that, which reflects the authors’ knowledge of, ideas about, and visions concerning the relations obtaining between modern Yoruba and Cuban ritual idioms that they have variously come to trace to African origins.

This is all the more problematic for two reasons. The first one concerns the fact that—whatever the historical relation between modern Yoruba and lucumí may be—the former’s tonal features are, to say the least, only present in a reduced fashion in the latter. The second is that long-standing interference of Hispanic phonology, and some three generations of (perhaps even more important) interference of Hispanophone ideas about orthography have rendered written lucumí a linguistic palimpsest right from the start. That contemporary priestly (as well as scholarly) reformers are trying to push lucumí toward more correct orthographies only adds to a fascinating set of wrinkles. Examples for such reforms range from spelling lucumí with a k, to substituting the putatively Yorubaphone (but arguably Anglophone) sh or s for the Hispanophone ch as in Changó vs. Shango and Sango, or adding modern Yoruba-derived diacritics in order to encourage a (re-) assimilation of proper tonal values in ritual speech.

These issues, in themselves, are worthy of sustained scholarship. But they cannot play a role in the present book. For the purposes at hand, I would simply ask the reader to keep in mind the following: since I do not aim (but might be taken) to engage in a language politics of my own, I should point out that (1) I have sought to omit Yoruba diacritics in any but direct quotations; (2) my orthography of lucumí terms aims to stay as close to my (usually Hispanophone) sources as possible; and (3) the only extravagance I have allowed myself is to differentiate between the spelling babalawo when I refer to Nigerian priests of the ifa-oracle, and babalaos when referring to Cuban ones.

As the reader will see, this may be of little consequence throughout much of this book (other than perhaps indicating that while the phonetic stress in the Cuban version falls on the penultimate vowel, it falls on the last one in the Nigerian case). But at least in chapter 5, such orthographic choices will carry considerable argumentative weight.

INTRODUCTION

BL2532.S3, or How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

Had anyone asked me perhaps only ten years ago what I was studying, I might have said Afro-Cuban religion, Santería, or something along such lines. Today you may still catch me saying so in an unguarded moment. But the difference is that while I would have been pretty sure of what that might have meant then, I am no longer so sure now. What does it mean to study something? Well, that depends. It is, of course, perfectly legitimate to claim to study theoretical entities. Mathematicians do so all the time. At least in the social sciences, however, conventional realist wisdom has it that statements such as I study Afro-Cuban religion would presuppose considerably robust convictions in the existence of what is so studied. We expect an object that, as the old Cartesian saw has it, confronts the inquiring subject in its ostensibly unavoidable givenness and so comes to constitute a problem worthy of sustained attention.

Surely, however, such expectations would hinge upon prior descriptions, and ones that enjoy a certain degree of social currency, under which such objects of study become conceivable as part of the world’s furniture in the first place. While it probably makes little sense for a zoologist to say that he or she is studying unicorns, an art historian might quite legitimately make such a statement, especially when qualified by phrases such as in medieval and Renaissance art. What is more, it will not cost the art historian much effort to point to an exemplar of such an object, for of course unicorns abound in medieval and Renaissance art. You don’t believe me? he or she might say, "well, then look: here’s Rafael’s Lady with the Unicorn, and here’s a fine thirteenth-century tapestry depicting just such a beast. But can an anthropologist professing to study Afro-Cuban religion" do so, too?

To be sure, I could ask you to accompany me to what I might call a ritual event, and say, Look, what these people are doing is Afro-Cuban religion: they drum, they sing, they dance, some of them fall in trance and then speak to us in what many people present here think is the voice of numinous entities. I might even go so far as to tell you, "and they are doing this because they believe that the world is populated with deities and spirits they call oricha and muertos who exert influence upon their lives and demand their attention. Of course, saying so could already get me in trouble, not the least because you might ask, How do you know that they really believe this?," thus exposing the dangerously tautological nature of my argument.¹ In case you didn’t raise this point, I would likely leave this time-hallowed and rather weighty problem aside and might instead say, In case you are interested to know: these ritual activities I am pointing out to you take such and such a form for historical reasons. Look, I might say, this, incidentally, is why I am calling this an instance of Afro-Cuban religion: I don’t mean to imply that these people are all Cubans or all of African descent. It’s just that both they and I think that parts of their practices and beliefs originally came from Africa, got modified in Cuba in ways that neither they nor I fully understand, and then started spreading across the globe in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution.

Depending upon where I took you, you might say, Ah, now I understand why there are all these Mexican Americans, Germans, or Filipinos present here. If this was not your first visit to a place where people engage in what many of them will nowadays refer to by a bewildering number of names—Lukumí tradition, la regla de ocha–ifá, Yoruba Traditional Religion, la línea africana, and so forth—I might lamely say, Yes, I know, they do things differently here. And this too has historical reasons. But such would only be the start of my troubles. At the very least, I would still have to explain to you how and why what I am showing you warrants objectification as something genuinely different, and justifiably set apart, from a situation where you and I watch the same people doing laundry, standing in line in front of a bodega in Havana, or taking snapshots of each other in front of the Grand Canyon or the Eiffel Tower.²

I could, of course, take a different approach altogether and send you to the library. Go to the shelves with the call number BL2532.S3, I could tell you. There you’ll find plenty on ‘Santería.’ And what a splendid cop-out that would be indeed, for you would find quite a bit there. According to the Library of Congress online catalog, in January of 2009 the number of acquisitions catalogued under BL2532.S3 reached exactly one hundred (with thirty-some new additions since the beginning of the millennium). And many more books have been shelved there since. Of course, BL2532.S3 locates a rather heterogeneous array of publications ranging from full-fledged academic monographs to practitioner manuals and memoirs, or the type of flimsy mimeographed booklet of divination verses and ritual recipes one is likely to encounter in dog-eared versions on the used book market at Havana’s Plaza de Ármas. Nonetheless, despite BL2532.S3’s intrinsic heterogeneity, we seem to know more about Santería than ever before: nowadays even specialists are likely to throw up their hands in despair over the increasingly dwindling prospects of being able to keep up with this flood of publications on the subject BL2532.S3 locates.³

What is less clear, however, is what this stupendously growing literature is all about. This, obviously, is of no great concern to the bibliographers at the Library of Congress. For all I know, there may well be a call number locating monographs on unicorns on the shelves devoted to cryptozoologica—or, and this is not a trivial point, their representations in medieval and Renaissance art. But the question "what, after all, is BL2532.S3 all about?" is of concern—or should be so—to those of us who are not content with the kind of Aristotelian nominalism that suggests that if there is a name for something, then that something must (somehow) exist.

When anthropologists go out into the field to study Santería, what exactly is it that we study? Practices? Beliefs? A religion? If so, which practices fall under that rubric, and which do not? When we watch former Chicago White Sox coach Ozzie Guillén (who happens to be a babalao, or priest of the Afro-Cuban ifá oracle) giving tactical instructions to his team during a game, are we observing behavior that can be lumped under the rubric Santería? Or consider, for the case of beliefs, the yearly divinatory readings known as the letra del año: if all Santeros believe in the infallibility of the ifá oracle, why is it that the three major groups of babalaos in Havana will (predictably) disagree over each other’s yearly prognostications? Worse yet, if what we are studying were to be a religion, then what about all the statues of Catholic saints, Buddhas, Indians, Dr. Gregorio Hernándezes, porcelain tigers, K-Mart plastic dolls, or Masonic implements on the shrines of our interlocutors? What of Allan Kardec’s Oraciones escogidas, flowers, and water on a shelf in their living room, the nganga power-objects they keep hidden in a shed in the backyard, the Spanish translations of the Egyptian Book of the Dead, Nostradamus’s prophecies, Reiki-manuals, or indeed ethnographies of Afro-Cuban religion that we might find on their bookshelves? Is all of this Santería? And if yes, where does it begin or end?

Next, think of the sociological problems involved in deciding who is or isn’t a Santero. Every so often publications shelved under BL2532.S3 will present estimates of how many practitioners of Santería there are in this or that region. Some even feature sanguine assessments about the growth of Santería (e.g., fastest growing religion in America). How such numbers are put together has always eluded me. True, it is easy to spot newly initiated persons (iyawos), given that they must wear while clothes and colorful beaded necklaces (elekes or collares) for the first year of their novitiate. Take a stroll through Havana today, and you might see dozens of such iyawos in the course of one afternoon. You might see many others who wear their collares more discretely under their polo shirts. Some of the latter may be highly respected ritual experts with years and years of practice and experience. Others may have just received their collares as protections to ward off illness or bad fortune. Their neighbor might have told them to see a Santero for help in difficult times, but they neither intend nor are required to undergo initiation into the cult of an oricha. Does that make them Santeros? That obviously depends: I, too, have received such a set of collares. Does that make me one? I think not.

Or take public possession rituals (tambores). Invariably, the ritual space—usually someone’s living room, cleared of furniture for the occasion—will be full of neighbors and people walking in from the street. A good number of them may think of themselves as Santeros, and may become identifiable as such when we see them prostrating before the altar or their elders. But many others will simply have come to catch up on the latest gossip, to enjoy the music and visual spectacle, partake of the free food and drink, or because the din of the drums echoing across Havana’s narrow streets made it hard to concentrate on the latest telenovela. Some may even be anthropologists from abroad. But were such anthropologists to think that surely, those who fall in trance and lend their bodies to the presence of the orichas will be Santeros they might be up for surprises—such as when, as phenotypically unmistakable foreigners, they becomes the target of faked possession (Palmié 2004), or when a policewoman who attends the ceremony since she is in a romantic relationship with one of the drummers is being rushed out of the room because she exhibits the convulsions indicative of the onset of possession trance (a situation to be strenuously avoided if the person has not been initiated). Are all these instances of Afro-Cuban religion? If so, who are its practitioners? And who are not?

But we can open up another can of worms and ask: what about the writings of anthropologists, art historians, and musicologists who in the course of their research became initiated practitioners themselves? All three North American researchers who began working on Afro-Cuban religion (whatever that may be taken to mean) in the mid-1980s—at the time that I did—are now fully initiated Santeros. Has that stopped them from representing what now could be construed as their religion in print? By no means. Nor is there any reason why it should have. But by the same token: what of the writings of initiated practitioners who now are getting academic degrees? Miguel Willie Ramos is currently completing a dissertation in history at Florida International University, and my old friend Ernesto Pichardo—who won a U.S. Supreme Court case legalizing animal sacrifice for his Church of the Lukumí Babalu Ayé—has occupied lecturer positions there for a number of years now. Both have several publications to their name, and while these have not received the attention they deserve, they are to be found under the call number BL2532.S3.

Or consider the case of one of my closest friends in Cuba, Ernesto Valdés Janet, who after graduating from La Habana’s cadre school Escuela Vocacional Lenin once was chosen as the first Cuban to study anthropology at the University of Leningrad. He returned with an MA in that discipline—only to be sent off to do classified ethnographic survey research in war-torn Angola and later in the mountainous regions of eastern Cuba. Now a practicing Santero, Ernesto and a small team of collaborators have worked out of his home in Regla since the early 1980s to self-publish upwards of seventy volumes of Documentos para la História de Osha-Ifá en Cuba—consisting, in the main, of ifá-divination verses and commentaries. Is this scholarship or Afro-Cuban religious praxis? I find it hard to say. Where does the one begin and the other end? Sign up to their mailing list at www.proyecto-orunmila.org, and you will see that their patient labors are not just directed toward documenting divination practices, but toward turning them into textual artifacts: portable, replicable, recontextualizable as authentic exemplars of correct praxis. It is a modest effort, but one that encapsulates a project that goes well beyond mere documentation.⁴

By the same token: what about the now-classic works of early Cuban ethnographers—Fernando Ortiz, Romulo Lachatañeré, Lydia Cabrera, or Teodoro Díaz Fabelo—on the bookshelves of our ethnographic interlocutors, from where some of their content has long fed back into the very practices these writings are supposed to describe? Are these still scholarly works? Should they be regarded as part and parcel of contemporary Afro-Cuban religion? Or both—depending upon who reads them? No question, Santeros have mulled over them for almost a century now—rejecting (and sometimes vociferously so) what they perceive as ethnographic errors and misrepresentations. But they have also given their authors credit for having recorded bits and pieces of (an always elusive) tradition that are now no longer present in living memory and so can be textually recovered, or retrofitted to current understandings and projects. Where is the line to be drawn? According to whom? On what grounds? And most important: why have we anthropologists so consistently dodged these questions while plodding along ethnographically like the proverbial blind men groping the elephant?⁵

Of course, all this may be taken to constitute a somewhat artificial set of problems. Sure, we might say, these conundrums relate to the well-known epistemic quandary of recursivity of scale and resolution. Obviously, the growth of knowledge always eo ipso implies a growth of ignorance. Map is not territory. As one scales downward from ostensible typological clarity, pesky detail increases, boundaries desolidify, and complexities proliferate on different levels. Conversely, setting up any kind of typology (however much ideal, in Weber’s sense) involves a degree of epistemic violence, to put the matter in somewhat melodramatic terms. Still, we routinely operate with the most precariously objectified conceptions—many of which are no more likely to withstand empirical scrutiny than Afro-Cuban religion. Some of these operative fictions, as I think we should call them (cf. Knorr-Cetina 1994), are vital to the conduct of normal social science, in the Kuhnian sense: cultures and societies, religions and languages all render us important services as tools for producing and organizing data in ways that, or so we hope, further certain intellectual or other projects. Yet upon close inspection, they are no less likely to disintegrate into chaotic patterns of proliferating difference and unbounded continua than what I am calling Afro-Cuban religion here.

Anthropology, says Roy Wagner (1981, 10), is the study of man ‘as if’ there were culture, and pretty much the same could be said about sociology, economics, linguistics, or, indeed, the study of Afro-Cuban religion (thankfully, there is no -ology word for it). There are no cultures, societies, economies, languages, or Afro-Cuban religions out there in the world—only slices of life variously put under cultural, social, economic, linguistic (or, if you will, Afro-Cuban religious) descriptions, differentially institutionalized as such, and given consensual reality to locally and historically varying degrees by human collectivities: Santeros, anthropologists, bibliographers at the Library of Congress, or whoever else might be interested in providing and upholding such descriptions.⁶

Not that there is anything wrong with this, in principle. It is, after all, how social worlds become inhabitable in the first place. But once we let this particular genie out of the bottle, there simply is no honest way back to a naively objectivist realism. Whatever it is that BL2532.S3 is meant to capture bibliographically—in an empirical sense that something not only exhibits a remarkable resistance to attempts at demarcating its boundaries, or identifying the degree of internal variability beyond which the phenomena observed no longer fit a coherent description. Like all other social realities, it is also always about to fall apart. It needs constant maintenance work (of which being slotted into LOC call numbers is only a rather peripheral, but not entirely unimportant example). This is a fact, of which—as I will show—practitioners of Afro-Cuban religion themselves are also only too well aware, though their predicament is somewhat different from ours.

The Ethnographic Interface

But let us return to the business of studying Afro-Cuban religion. Is there a way out of the dilemmas outlined above? I happen to think so. But only if we agree to face up to a number of facts concerning how ethnographic objects such as Santería come into the world in the first place; only if we consider how some such objects subsequently begin to do things in the world; and only if we are honest about the extent to which we, who fashion and circulate such objects, are neither their sole creators nor fully in control of the ways in which our second-order discourses intersect with the (putative) first-order discourses we record and analyze.⁷ In order to introduce the bitter, but to me eminently health-promoting, pill that I think we need to swallow in that regard, let me resort to the case I know best: the history of my own involvement with, and (however peripheral) role in, the collaborative confection—a making up, or putting together, as the OED will tell you—of my own object of study, Afro-Cuban religion. Before I do so, however, some brief theoretical reflections are in order about the sites at which such objects emerge.

Perhaps the first thing to note here is that—whatever they are—ethnographic objects tend to behave in curious ways. Although they clearly are our constructions and not simply out there in the world, fieldsites, and even topically circumscribed ethnographic problems, lead double lives: places and problems change not merely because they change in fact—which, of course, they inevitably do. They also change because we come to them from historically no less changing epistemic vantage points. One can thus 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 (organized according to changing theoretical conceptions) are no less subject to history than the empirical grounds from which our discursive efforts call them forth. Acknowledging the essential rather than accidental historicity of both subjects and objects of study is a step in the right direction. But, of course, to leave it at that is to tell only half of the story. In fact, it may well be to tell the wrong story.

No doubt, to phrase matters in such a way grants historicity not just to the objects of ethnographic observation, but to its subjects as well. There is epistemological charity in such a move, for it allows us to unburden ourselves of the terrible fiction of a view from nowhere and reveals ethnographic inscription for what it is: the situated and contingent crafting of representations of a no-less-situated and contingent world out there. As our perspectives change, so do our representations of that changing world. This much is certainly important to acknowledge. Still, what it leaves intact is the no-less-troubling fiction that our inscriptive agency could somehow be regarded as not (or, at least, not really) part of the world it aims to ethnographically render by lifting bits and pieces of what we take to be our interlocutors’ first-order languages up into the realm of the second-order discourse of anthropological scholarship.⁸ Ironically, this is a fiction that students of scientific practices—not normally focused on objects even capable of talking back—have managed to dispel far more effectively than anthropologists (who, after all, deal with loquacious fellow humans rather than comparatively taciturn bacilli or photons) have cared or even dared to attempt.

As Steven Woolgar (1989, 134) thus notes, agents of representation in the social sciences are still widely considered passive in the sense that they are not thought capable of affecting the character of the world [they represent]. According to the ideology of representation underlying such views, as a mere mediator—producer of ethnographic signs purporting to represent the world as it is (even if only now, and on the horizon of his or her epistemological vantage point)—the agent of inscription does not intrude to the extent that s/he is in any way responsible for the character of the de-sign-ated object. The agent, Woolgar continues, is held responsible for the character of representations. While correct mediation amounts to author-itative speech about the objective world, incorrect mediation can be said to be the source of distorted representations of the (unchanging) world. The appeal of such an ideo logy of representation, thus Woolgar, lies in the notion that, given the right kind of circumstances, any other agent could equally have produced the same results, facts, insights, and so on. This is the corollary of the view that the same facts were already there, enjoying a timeless existence, merely awaiting the arrival of a transitory agent. This, as we now know, is a patently wrong account, even in the case of hard sciences. As Woolgar’s comrade-in-arms, Bruno Latour (1989, 1999, 2000), has never tired to point out, what is at issue is not whether the American continent, gravity, electrons, or lactic fermentation existed before Columbus, Newton, Millikan, or Pasteur proved their existence. It is that, as he puts it, Columbus, Newton, Millikan, and Pasteur happened to America, gravity, electromagnetism, and fermentation, bringing them into a novel form of existence in relation to historical human worlds as part and parcel of the very furniture of such worlds—all the while transforming Columbus, Newton, Millikan, and Pasteur themselves into the discoverers of entities and forces that the world will have to count with in the foreseeable future. None of them will ever be the same again: the American landmass, gravity, electrons, lactic fermentation—all of them have become entities or forces to be reckoned with by those into whose worlds their discoverers inserted them.

I find this a useful analogy for the matters that concern me here. Might we not say that, in rather comparable ways, anthropology happened to what I am calling Afro-Cuban religion? Of course, in Wool-gar’s and Latour’s terms, the analogy goes only so far. Still, Ian Hacking (1999) has given us a pretty good recipe for how to extend and translate it from the realm of actants such as gravity or yeast cells to self-aware and speech-enabled actors in a more conventional anthropological sense. He does so by distinguishing between indifferent and interactive kinds. The former remain unaffected by whatever descriptions and predications we may devise for them—like elements in a periodical table, plants catalogued according to Linnean binomials, or books shelved under BL2532.S3. The latter, in contrast, constitute what Hacking calls moving targets. They react to whatever representations of them are set into social circulation: waxing and waning, changing shape or character, and sometimes coming into being (or to naught) as a result of designation. So it is in the case at hand, though of course what Hacking’s account lacks is a proper explanation for the conditions under which what we (in Austin’s [1962] terms) might call performative classificatory speech attains ontological felicity or resonance among those whom it aims to designate (cf. Barnes 1983).

This, however, is not a theoretical but empirical question, and much of the following will be devoted to detailing instances where historically contingent articulations between the language games of practitioners and scholars of Afro-Cuban religion engendered what one might call lasting reality effects. As I will argue, among the many things that happened to Afro-Cuban religion to bring it into being as what we think it is today was what we might call the anthropology of Afro-Cuban religion. One of the premises of this book is that what Louis Pasteur did for lactic fermentation was what the Cuban scholar Fernando Ortiz, and those who followed in his footsteps (including, I should say, myself), did for Afro-Cuban religion—with the singular and radically important caveat that the collaborators Ortiz and the rest of us enlisted in the making of Afro-Cuban religion were historical subjects, and so agents in their own right: people pursuing projects of their own—all the while they were being drawn into the projects of people like Ortiz (and, again, myself) and, in turn, drew us into theirs.

Rather than perpetuate the Cartesian fiction of unidirectional knowledge production, we thus need to speak of two practical as well as discursive fields that have been in constant and intimate interaction ever since they emerged as such around the turn of the twentieth century: one circumscribed by the handy, but problematic, label Afro-Cuban religion, and the other designated by whatever label one might like to affix to the study of it. It is, I suggest, the interface between these two practical and discursive traditions—in MacIntyre’s (1978) sense of long conversations, whose participants may agree on little else than the moral worth of keeping them going—that we need to train our lenses on. Once we do, what emerges is no longer an anthropological project conceivable as a window (however tinted) onto another world. Instead, that window has become a permeable membrane or interface between two worlds at which different actors attempt to recruit and enlist each other into their own projects, try to entangle each other in discursive engagement, and, by reflexively monitoring their own actions and utterances (as well as those of their counterparts across a porous divide) set in motion the kinds of looping effects (Hacking 1999) that increasingly turned some them into practitioners, others into anthropologists of Afro-Cuban religion—or both.⁹

At this point, my worries over how to explain what studying Afro-Cuban religion might possibly mean are, I hope, becoming clearer. On the one hand it should be obvious that the phrase Afro-Cuban religion has always designated what Star and Griesemer (1989) call a conceptual boundary object that partially and ambiguously bridges the interests and concerns of differently constituted communities of practice and so allows for a certain degree of collaboration.¹⁰ To switch theoretical registers, what this object—given appropriate historical felicity conditions—drew into itself were several different orders of enunciation, each based on fundamentally heterogeneous but at least momentarily productively aligned semiotic ideologies in Webb Keane’s (2007) terms, or metacultural stances as Greg Urban (2001) would put it.¹¹ What I am calling the ethnographic interface is thus perhaps best envisioned as a switchboard in the old sense of analog communication technologies, or a two-way transducer that, in mediating conversions between data pertaining to differently structured domains, not only introduces information loss but also generates what essentially is a novel signal that can come to cascade through and reverberate across all the channels it happens to connect.

If so, then the objects that emerge at the ethnographic interface—in this case, the thing I call Afro-Cuban religion—are in themselves deeply, indeed, irremediably, heteroglossic hybrids, and ones that are produced not the least by our own attempts to purify our referential language of all but the most anecdotal, purely illustrative evidence of the kind of indexical iconicity that implicates us in their making (rather than mere representing). Here it is worth keeping in mind Bakhtin’s (1981) original distinction between organic and intentional hybridity: I may be aware (however dimly) of what went into the making of what I present to you as an ethnographic fact. Yet other than in my use of direct quotation of my informants’ voices, you might have little ways of telling where my language begins and that of my interlocutors leaves off. And even then: might not even those instances of reported speech reflect responses to questions or other dialogic cues that I provided at the time I recorded them? Conversely, might it not be that my informants steered our conversation toward a point they wanted to make—and wanted me to write up?¹²

Is this a problem? That depends. If we continue to subscribe to a representational ideology according to which ethnography ought to aspire to the production of signs merely indexical of a reality out there, then surely we have a problem—especially since the piling up of books in the BL2532.S3 section of our libraries will likely do more to obscure and blackbox this issue than to clarify that what is building up on these shelves are not just the (however edifying) residues of past social interactions at the ethnographic interface. Instead, the steady growth of BL2532.S3 is not merely a metric for, but part and parcel of, the process by which the object now known as Afro-Cuban religion is constantly being made and remade, as new agents enter into this processual constellation on either side of the porous membrane at which the boundary object—shared and unshared at different levels of interest and social articulation—continues to emerge and transform.

Discoveries and Finds: Confecting Santería

If this sounds fiercely abstract, let me illustrate it with the case I know best: my own involvement in the shaping of an object that I first came to know as Santería. So picture the author of this book as a young man just having written what, to my shame, I must admit was a monstrous (250-some page) MA thesis on Afro-Cuban religion based entirely on library research and a good deal of Frazerian letter-writing to several dozen of scholars in the field. The results of my labors did not secure me the grant to do fieldwork in Cuba that I had hoped for.¹³ But I did get—if in a slightly devious way—money to pursue ethnographic work among Cuban Santeros in Miami. Of course, I received such funding not because I proposed to simply go there and see what Afro-Cuban religion in Miami was all about. All disciplinary commitments to ethnographic inductivism notwithstanding, the time when graduate students were sent into the field simply because no one had studied certain peoples and practices before had long since passed. Instead, I obtained funding because I had an ethnographic object on my hands—and one that seemed to pose an attractive problem.

What I proposed was to do ethnographic research on the role of Afro-Cuban religion in Cuban immigrant adaptation. Even worse, as a condition of the grant, I proposed to later follow this up with research among Turkish migrants in Germany—a part of the bargain that I never fulfilled, and was never too serious about in the first place. Yet the point is that even before I met my first Cuban, let alone any self-identified practitioner of an Afro-Cuban religion, I had a project. Different from what the Mexican philosopher Edmundo O’Gorman (1961) said about Columbus’s accidental find of a novel continent, I was out to make a discovery of something that I knew was principally knowable—the key difference being, of course, that you can only discover what you already presume to be there.¹⁴ A