Holbraad, M

English

UCL Discovery

Journal of Latin American Studieshttp://journals.cambridge.org/LASAdditional services for Journal of Latin American Studies:Email alerts: Click hereSubscriptions: Click hereCommercial reprints: Click hereTerms of use : Click hereDavid Brown, Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro­Cuban Religion (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. xx+413, $38.00, pb. Johan Wedel, Santería Healing: a Journey into the Afro­Cuban World of Divinities, Spirits and Sorcery (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004), pp. xiv+209, $55.00, hb.MARTIN HOLBRAADJournal of Latin American Studies / Volume 37 / Issue 02 / May 2005, pp 402 ­ 404DOI: 10.1017/S0022216X05349352, Published online: 19 May 2005Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0022216X05349352How to cite this article:MARTIN HOLBRAAD (2005). Journal of Latin American Studies, 37, pp 402­404 doi:10.1017/S0022216X05349352Request Permissions : Click hereDownloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/LAS, IP address: 144.82.107.43 on 16 Oct 2012http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Oct 2012 IP address: 144.82.107.43J. Lat. Amer. Stud. 37 (2005). doi:10.1017/S0022216X05349352David Brown, Santerı ´a Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-CubanReligion (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. xx+413,$38.00, pb.Johan Wedel, Santerı ´a Healing: a Journey into the Afro-Cuban World of Divinities,Spirits and Sorcery (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2004), pp.xiv+209, $55.00, hb.The ethnography of Cuba has for long been a Cold War victim. Followingthe debacle over the expulsion from the island of Oscar Lewis and his team inthe early 1970s with innuendos about his supposed collusion with the CIA, theCuban government eﬀectively shut the door on Western ﬁeldworkers, and, asCuban intellectuals today attest, the very word ‘anthropology’ became politicallysuspicious. In the 1970s and ’80s ethnographic studies of Cuban society and culturewere conducted only by Cuban researchers under government monitoring. Indeed,the Marxist-Leninist overtones that one still encounters in the local literatureare perhaps best interpreted as remnants of that period, when the scholarly taskof understanding Cuban society and culture was inextricably linked with the politicalone of changing it. Similarly, the emphasis in Cuban scholarship on historicaldocumentation and ‘folklorist’ data collection may be due partly to the stronginﬂuence of the Soviet school of ‘ethnology’, although the enduring inﬂuenceof the pre-revolutionary master Fernando Ortiz, with his abiding interest in docu-menting processes of creole ‘transculturation’, may have also played its part.Studies in the Euro-American ethnographic tradition – emphasising holistic re-search based more on participant observation than ‘normative’ data collection –have only begun to be possible recently, with the island’s piecemeal openingsto the West following the collapse of the USSR. Indeed, following pioneeringstudies by Daniel on rumba music and Rosenthal on political organisation, itmay be fair to say that the ethnography of Cuba is still lacking a deﬁnitivemonograph.The ﬁeld of Afro-Cuban religion, to which both books reviewed here belong,is the most likely to produce such a qualitative leap. With Cuban institutions suchas the Conjunto Folklo ´rico Nacional, the Centro de Antropologı ´a, the Fundacio ´nFernando Ortiz and some university faculties now keen to co-opt funded Westernresearchers in the study of the more dazzling expressions of the ‘cultura nacional’, anew generation of Europeans and North Americans (many of them PhD students)were able to conduct ﬁeldwork among religious practitioners from the mid-1990sonwards. As a result, the past ﬁve years have seen the publication of the ﬁrst402 Reviewshttp://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Oct 2012 IP address: 144.82.107.43English-speaking studies of Afro-Cuban religion on the island since the works ofWilliam Bascom in the 1940s and ’50s. While none of them has the scope and depthof a deﬁnitive ethnography, these works, including the two reviewed here, are in-valuable additions to a literature that had thus far consisted of accounts of thepractice of Santerı ´a and other Afro-Cuban religions in the USA, often written bypractitioners with a view to the New Age market.Johan Wedel’s Santerı ´a Healing is the ﬁrst book-length monograph in English toprovide a systematic ethnographic account of Santerı ´a practice in contemporaryCuba. Based on the author’s doctoral ﬁeldwork in Matanzas, a city well known forits Santerı ´a tradition, the book is focused on the medicinal aspects of cult practice.But in placing notions of aﬄiction and healing within the broader context ofSanterı ´a cosmology and ritual, the book also oﬀers an overview of the main aspectsof worship, including a description of the pantheon, accounts of divination andinitiation rituals, the role of music and possession, as well as the relationship ofSanterı ´a with other Afro-Cuban cults, including the ‘darker’ practices of sorcery.The central claim of the book is that while the remedies that Santerı ´a claims to oﬀermay not necessarily ‘cure’ the sick (in a biomedical sense), they can contribute to‘healing’. Healing, here, is understood as a process that allows the experience ofillness to be transformed for the better, by redeﬁning the illness in terms of thesuﬀerer’s relationships to particular deities and to his or her social and physicalsurroundings more generally. Initiation ceremonies, argues Wedel, are particularlyeﬀective in this respect, since they place the sick neophyte in a series of relationshipswith deities (and, by extension, the physical and social features with which each deityis associated), that from then on provide the terms with which the suﬀerer mayconceptualise his or her condition and its prospects. Adopting what he calls a‘phenomenological’ approach, Wedel builds his case mainly on accounts given tohim by a number of suﬀerers, showing how the experience of illness is formedthrough personal narratives about worship.From an ethnographic point of view, the weaknesses of Wedel’s book are thoseof a pioneering work conducted by a young scholar (the book is rather evidentlybased on the author’s doctoral dissertation). Valuable though it is, his attempt toembed suﬀerers’ narratives of illness within a comprehensive account of Santerı ´aworship does not quite work. His overview of Santerı ´a practice is spread too thinly,failing to provide a suﬃciently integrated context for the repetitive narratives of hisinformants, which often appear anecdotal. Wedel’s account is at its most sophisti-cated when suﬀerers’ narratives are countered by the critical commentaries of peoplewho see Santerı ´a as ‘exploitation’, thus placing Santerı ´a healing in the contrastingcontext of the socio-economic diﬃculties Cubans have been facing in the post-Soviet era. In fact, his theoretical attempt to make sense of Santerı ´a ‘healing’ canbe seen as an attempt to ‘defend’ it, and particularly to fend oﬀ Western mis-conceptions of Santerı ´a as a ‘primitive’ equivalent to Western medicine. The strat-egy is fair, and well-established in the ﬁeld of medical anthropology. Nevertheless,the distinction between ‘healing’ and ‘curing’ is not suﬃciently powerful toexpose the radically diﬀerent assumptions that underlie Santerı ´a and biomedicine.For, as it stands in the book, the point about healing does not amount to much morethan the claim that Santerı ´a makes suﬀerers feel better about their illness by pro-viding them with a fanciful aetiology, involving spirits and the like. More analyticalwork would be needed to distinguish Santerı ´a from what medics like to call ‘quack’medicine.Reviews 403http://journals.cambridge.org Downloaded: 16 Oct 2012 IP address: 144.82.107.43Unlike Wedel’s work, David Brown’s Santerı ´a Enthroned is not intended as anethnographic monograph in the classical anthropological sense. The objective hereis not so much to give a sense of practitioners’ experience of worship, but rather toprovide a scholarly account of the history and contemporary practice of Santerı ´a,based on twenty years’ ﬁeldwork among practitioners in the USA as well as Cuba.With his background in American Studies, Brown draws on the methods of per-formance studies, art history, folklore studies, as well as anthropology, to producethe most comprehensive account of Santerı ´a to date.The book is divided into two parts. The ﬁrst consists of three chapters that docu-ment, respectively, the transition of worship from West Africa to slavery in Cubain the nineteenth century, the gradual formalisation of distinct ritual protocolsduring the course of the twentieth century (also within Ifa ´, the male diviner cultassociated with Santerı ´a), and the complex processes – political as well asintellectual – through which contemporary Santerı ´a cosmology has been forged.Brown has something to say on just about every aspect of what is an extraordinarilycomplicated story of transformation. But the emphasis is on the role of particularauthoritative initiates who, veering for inﬂuence and prestige, have been able todevelop distinct versions of ‘authenticity’ by painting ritual and cosmologicalinnovations onto putatively ‘traditional’ canvasses, such as the practices of ritualancestors, inﬂuences of ‘Africa’, and the authority of the deities themselves, asrevealed through divination.In the second part, the focus narrows onto the imagery of Santerı ´a worship,illustrating the argument about the role of innovation in the ﬁeld of ritualiconography. With eﬀective use of visual illustrations, Brown shows howcentral tropes of Santerı ´a cosmology and ritual (the contrast between regaland warrior deities, the hierarchical structure of divine power, the dialectic of secrecyand revelation in worship, notions of initiation as the ‘birth of a king’, etc.)are rendered in aesthetic forms that amalgamate a complex historical trajectoryof ‘cultural borrowings’. Anchored in a close description of the dı ´a del medio –the ceremonial display of neophytes and their enthroned deities during in-itiation – this is a highly nuanced account of a ‘creole aesthetic’ that creates meaningby fusing the tropes of West African myth with the baroque lavishness of aEuropean past.Brown’s tome is a deﬁnitive work of scholarship and should become a standardreference for anyone interested in the diaspora of West African religion. While theguiding argument about the invented character of tradition is well rehearsed inanthropology, what makes this book so impressive is the subtlety and richness withwhich this process is described for Santerı ´a. Indeed, having taken my review copy toCuba on a recent ﬁeldtrip, it became apparent that the book is bound to oﬀer arecursive example of the feedback loops Brown so fascinatingly describes, wherebyacademic accounts of the religion are utilised by practitioners themselves as sourcesof knowledge and authority. Initiates pored over the book’s photographs of famousancestors, getting me to translate passages, which were then discussed and criticised.Since it was from their own ranks that this information was drawn in the ﬁrst place,it seems to me imperative – as it does to them – that the book be made available inSpanish at a price appropriate for a Cuban audience.MARTIN HOLBRAAD University College London404 Reviews

Joint review of David Brown, Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Johan Wedel, Santería Healing: a Journey into the Afro-Cuban World of Divinities, Spirits and Sorcery

Joint review of David Brown, Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Johan Wedel, Santería Healing: a Journey into the Afro-Cuban World of Divinities, Spirits and Sorcery

Abstract

Similar works

Full text

Available Versions

UCL Discovery