Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. By David H. Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. Pp. 440, 16 color plates. Cloth $95.00; Paper, $38.00.
AfroCuban Religions. By Miguel Barnet. Princeton: Markus Wiener Publishers, 2001: Pp. 161. Cloth, $36.95; Paper, $16.95.
These two books spark hope that the body of English language literature on Cuba’s distinctive religious traditions will be enhanced with all deliberate speed. Indeed, David Brown has researched and written a tour de force in Santería Enthroned. The book is an irregular eight and a half by nine and a half inches as compared to standard six by nine and half-inch readers. This allows Brown to use two-columned pages and to include some one hundred and eight black and white figures and twenty-seven color “plates” in the book. The volume begins with a Preface and Acknowledgements before preceding to the twenty-two page Introduction that is the best literature review that I have seen on Regla de Lucumí/Ocha, Afro-Cuban culture, and change and innovation in the two. There are also six appendices, fifty-eight pages of footnotes, a glossary, ten pages of “works cited,” and a most comprehensive index. Together, all of these comprise the four-hundred and thirteen pages of this heavy volume. Heavy is not merely an indication of the physical character of Brown’s book but is also meant to describe the content and the author’s thinking about the subject
David H. Brown was a fellow at the W.E.B. DuBois Institute at Harvard University and has also been Visiting Professor of Art at the University of Texas, Austin. His book contains two sections, “Institutional and Ritual Innovation” and “Iconographic Innovation,” with three and two chapters respectively. But do not mis-perceive that the author’s discussions are brief. As he says in his Preface, the book partly sorts out three social and cultural expressions of the African Diaspora. These expressions are;
Brown’s focus on art, ritual, and innovation demonstrates his training and study with Robert Farris Thompson as the book leaves few stones unturned in probing Afro Cuban religious traditions as the human process and socio-historical context of these creative endeavors. The author begins with the historical context of 1808 Havana when “Monfundi Siliman, the Congo” (sic) king” of a Havana religious fraternity (cabildo), addressed a gathering of Africans concerning news brought by an arriving Spanish fleet” (25). Siliman’s speech has profound implications in helping Brown begin identifying “cultural transformations” that occurred for Africans and their descendants in Cuba. Brown draws from conceptual works of Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, Stephen Palmié, Sally Price, and others in the theoretical foundations for his compilation of data that speaks to transformations in the cultural expressions of African, Afrocubans, and descendants of each.
The demonstration of the thesis takes time and pages. Scholars and researchers have taken many curves, detours, and backward roads in an attempt to comprehend how Africans in Cuba and throughout the Diaspora have transformed the articulations that emanate from their Africa-based epistemological core without radically altering that base. David H. Brown follows this progression among practitioners of Cuba’s Regla de Lucumí/Ocha, also known as Santería, from its early Havana roots to it’s migrated manifestations in Miami, New Jersey, and West New York. The author accomplishes the task through extensive historiographic integration of literature and field research data that engage salient themes, controversies and debates in the scholarship on Cuba’s distinct Yoruba-derived religious tradition. In the context of Yoruba practices of Havana and portions of Eastern United States, Brown includes Regla de Ocha/Lucumí as well as the Ifá customs that come from the African religious center.
It is significant that Brown engages the Ifá tradition, not merely because it is part of the Yoruba contribution to Cuba but because it is an intimate and interdependent component of the total religious complex. Whereas Regla de Lucumí/Ocha can be considered the worship practices of the complex, Ifá is the mandatory mechanism by which practitioners communicate and consult with spirit forces of the otherworld for prescriptive and prophetic understands for guiding their lives. Neither set of practices can be truly understood without the other and David Brown has done an outstanding job of introducing readers to intricacies of each.
Despite all of these complexities, Brown never relinquishes his focus on religious art, ritual, and innovation as he is clear that expressions in these categories cannot be fully understood without tapping the socio-historical roots that produced them. Thus, the completely developed chapters, “Black Royalty: New Social Frameworks and Remodeled Iconographies in Nineteenth-Century Havana” and “From Cabildo de Nación to Casa-Templo: The New Lucumí, Institutional Reform, and the Shifting Location of Cultural Authenticity” provide the deepest English probing into the foundations of Regla de Ocha/Lucumí that I have yet to read. In the last of chapter of section one, Brown uses the title, “Myths of the Yoruba Past and Innovations of the Lucumí Present: The Narrative Production of Cosmology, Authority, and Ritual Variation” before he opens section two and delves into the discussion of “iconography and the modern Lucumí initiation.”
Methodologically, many other researchers and scholars would be better served to follow Brown’s use of historical documents, observational participation, and informal directed interviews with practitioners as sources of information for their writings. This triangulated approach to data collection is one of the most productive that I have found for more fully comprehending human phenomena. In using this approach, David H. Brown’s book sets a benchmark in clarifying most issues related to Regla de Ocha/Lucumí, aka Santería, as it has evolved through Havana and into eastern parts of the United States. Students and faculty alike will use it for years to come.
When he published The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, Esteban Montejo, the Cuban writer Miguel Barnet gave the scholarly and general reading audiences one of the few autobiographical works from a person who had endured enslavement in Cuba. Barnet has also written many award winning poems and he is director of the Fernando Ortiz Foundation of Havana, Cuba. He may even be a long-time practitioner of one or more of Cuba’s distinct religious traditions. However, this English publication of AfroCuban Religions will not admit Miguel Barnet into the league of those who do serious scholarly and systematic research. Neither should a reader discern that Barnet is a well-informed and deeply educated expert on Cuba’s religious traditions.
Barnet’s book, AfroCuban Religions is a translation from his Spanish text that appeared in 1995. Christine Renata Ayorinde translated this Ian Randle publication and indications are that the English volume is a true representation of the Spanish. Barnet might have been better served had he revised the translated version and removed the preponderance of long quotes (e.g. pages 19-22), and the opinionated, signified language of the book. The book opens in chapter with an exceptionally brief and uncritical positioning “The Role of Myth in Cuban Culture” as theme of the work. This chapter is ten pages long with five pictures and a quote that consumes another page of print. This leaves approximately five or six pages for Barnet to engage the role of myth in Cuban culture. Needless to say, I could not find where he had even begun to do an adequate exploration.
In total, AfroCuban Religions is one hundred and sixty-one pages of text, with fifty-three black and white figures and photos divided into seven chapters, four pages of “Notes,” and a page of “Acknowledgements.” Although titled, AfroCuban Religions, Barnet’s book discusses only two of the seven sacred traditions distinct to Cuba. Titles of chapters in the volume foretell the author’s bias toward Western European and North American thinking about religious traditions, particularly those derived from the African continent. For example, chapter one is called “The Role of the Myth in Cuban Culture” and chapter five is titled “Firmas and Magic.” Neither of these chapters provide a critical discussion of such terms as “myth” or “magic” even as the fields of religious studies contain much contestation of them.
Barnet does offer English-reading audiences some insightful particulars to behaviors associated with the two religious traditions he engages. However, his biases are so strong that one leaves the text feeling there isn’t much integrity or legitimacy to the religions. For example, when discussing Regla Kimbisa, a branch of Regla de Palo Monte, Barnet signifies these practices as something less than religious when he says, “The Regla Kimbisa is an obvious example of religious syncretism, of the blending of Spanish superstitions and popular Catholicism with elements from African rites” (96-7). This choice of words not only denies integrity to popular Catholicism, but also de-legitimizes the African-derived Kimbisa system of practice. Afro-Cuban Religions also carries a strong and deep bias toward Yoruba practices with little clarification on how some customs of Regla de Ocha may have been fused/blended in the Cuban environment with Regla de Palo Monte (photo page 23).
I would have expected Miguel Barnet to develop the analytical language of “transculturation” that was introduced by his countryman and teacher Fernando Ortiz. Instead Afro-Cuban Religions uncritically employs a use of “syncretism” that continues to privilege Christian religious practice. Not the strongest of such usages occurs on page 18 when Barnet says, “This produced a spontaneous syncretism that engendered a new cosmogonic (sic) values and the equation of Yoruba divinities with Roman Catholic saints.” The fields of religious studies and contemporary research on Cuban religions are revealing that the more language of syncretism does not reflect the dynamic, reciprocal, and interactive processes that have brought forth cultural transformations, in Cuba and throughout the Diaspora (see Palmié, 2002; Brown, 2001).
Miguel Barnet’s treatment of Regla de Palo Monte and the variety of traditions derived from the Bantu Bakongo/Kikongo people of Africa is perhaps the more seriously maligned. Note in the following quote, how the author a-contextually uses “Christianity” to compare Palo Monte and then employs the terms “cult” and “mess” to refer to the Africa-based Cuban religion. He writes;
Mayombe (one of Cuba’s Bakongo/Kikongo practices) can also be “Christian” – that is, used for doing good works and healing. Those attempting to decipher the cults’ content and to devise a rigid structure are confronted by a confusing mess. This is due to the extremely loose nature of the surviving Congo religions…
He goes further to say;
It is easy, then, to see why some people regard mayombe as a “Jewish” sect in which black magic is practiced and whose members engage with the dead…”(93).
Unfortunately, such sweeping, over generalizing, and pejorative statements are common in this book.
Many of the photos and figures of Barnet’s volume are also disassociated with the text, and photo captions neither clarify images nor relate to the book’s content (23). But there are other issues. There are no data from practitioners except Barnet’s extensive quotes from The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, Esteban Montejo. Unfortunately, Montejo has been dead for almost thirty years. He was a self-proclaimed man who did not belong to a practicing community of either Cuban religious tradition and he was a man who Barnet himself interviewed and interpreted. This is hardly enough support for generalizing about “Afro-Cuban religions.” At the same time, Barnet references his thirty-year old Montejo text for statements that do not expand or clarify a point. If the extensive Montejo quotes are not to expand or clarify Barnet’s point, and they do not current evidence for his claims about particular practices, I wondered why were they used?
I am truly baffled as to why Barnet and/or the publisher would not have insisted on updating Afro-Cuban Religions. As published, it does not enhance the limited body of English literature on Cuba’s distinct religious traditions. Religious Studies, History, African American Studies, Sociology, and a host of other disciplines, including students of these fields, are better served to wait for other works.
Jualynne E. Dodson, Michigan State University
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