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

Palmié, Stephan

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022601956X ISBN 13: 9780226019567

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2013

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

Stephan Palmié is the Norman and Edna Freehling Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition and The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The Cooking of History

How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

By STEPHAN PALMI

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS

Copyright © 2013 The University of Chicago
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-226-01956-7

Contents

Acknowledgments............................................................
vii
A Note on Spelling.........................................................
xi
Introduction. BL2532.S3 or, How Not to Study "Afro"-"Cuban" "Religion".....
1
CHAPTER 1. On Yoruba Origins, for Example..................................
33
CHAPTER 2. Fernando Ortiz and the Cooking of History.......................
78
CHAPTER 3. Or "Syncretism," for that Matter................................
113
CHAPTER 4. The Color of the Gods: Notes on a Question Better Left Unasked..
149
CHAPTER 5. Afronauts of the Virtual Atlantic: The Giant African Snail 
Incident, the War of the Oriatés, and the Plague of Orichas................
173
Coda. Ackee and Saltfish versus Amalá con Quimbombó, or More Foods for 
Thought....................................................................
222
Epilogue...................................................................
253
Notes......................................................................
265
References.................................................................
313
Index......................................................................
349

Excerpt

CHAPTER 1

On Yoruba Origins, for Example ...

Where better to start than at the beginnings? "The story of the spiritbegins in Africa, among a nation of people called the Yoruba inwhat is now known as Nigeria," wrote Joseph Murphy (1988, 7) in whatprobably was the first English-language monograph on regla de ocha entitled,not insignificantly, Santería: An African Religion in America. "Inglobal context," George Brandon (1993, 1) would echo him soon after ina book that bore the telling title Santería: From Africa to the New World,"Santería belongs to the transatlantic tradition of Yoruba religion, a religioustradition with millions of adherents in Africa and the Americas,and should be seen as a variant of that tradition, just as there are regionaland doctrinal variants within the Christian, Buddhist and Islamictradition." I, too, opened the published version of my dissertation by citinga vignette offered by Morton Marks (1974, 82–83) about an incidentof possession by the oricha Changó he had witnessed in New York's CentralPark in the summer of 1970, arguing that what Marks had seen wasthe "taking on of human shape" of the "deified fourth aláàfin (ruler) ofthe empire of the Oyo-Yoruba that had disintegrated more than a hundredyears earlier" (Palmié 1991, 1). How in the world, I must ask myselftoday, did I think I knew that?

The answer is as simple as its implications are complex. By then,of course, Murphy, Brandon, and I were all looking back on a long-consolidatedtopos that had enabled discoveries such as ours for closeto three generations. Nor was it difficult then to elicit corroborative evidencefrom the mouths of our priestly interlocutors in New York or Miami.And yet, I have scoured my old fieldnotes, but found no data on acrucial question: why did my friends in Miami think they were practicinga "Yoruba-derived religion"? The reason is simple: it never even occurredto me to ask! In part, this was so because I do not think that asingle self-identified santero I met in 1985 would have denied that his orher religion had "Yoruba origins"—whatever that might have meant tothem, then—or volunteered a different attribution of origin (except thegeneric "de orígen africano"). But this, of course, is no excuse. I do remembermy eyebrows rising when told that because Santería was a NewWorld branch of Yoruba religion, it was at least 4,000 years old ("másantíguo que todo este cristianismo" [older than all this Christianism]).Yet what I, like many others, failed to ask was precisely that: what in theworld the word Yoruba actually meant to them?

What I do know, of course, is what "Yoruba" meant to us—the Murphys,Brandons, and Palmiés who had embarked upon "studying 'Afro'-'Cuban''religion'" at the time. We had read the works of Ortiz, Cabrera,Herskovits, Bascom, Lucas, Farrow, Idowu, Verger, or Maupoil, and ourperusal of this literature had amply prepared us to find what we had setout to discover: namely more or less vivid correspondences between thepractices of our ethnographic interlocutors and the literature on "TheYoruba of southwestern Nigeria" (as the title of one of Bascom's [1969a]more popular books published in Holt, Rinehart and Winston's series ofpotted ethnographic syntheses reads). But so had a good number of myinformants. At the time, Miami's largest and best-stocked emporium forAfro-Cuban ritual paraphernalia, Botánica Nena, displayed overprizedcopies of Bascom's Ifa Divination (1969b) and Sixteen Cowries (1980)on its book racks, next to the volumes that Lydia Cabrera, who was thenliving in a pitifully small apartment in Coral Cables, was churning outat a fast clip to keep herself and her desperately ill partner María Teresade las Rojas financial afloat. And so did plenty of the several dozensof smaller botánicas in town. Indeed, if anyone still needed to bepointed toward discovering the obvious, the connection could be seenright there: on the bookshelves.

But why, I now ask myself (and I invite the reader to join me in this),was all of this so seemingly obvious to us? Why did we not bother toask what cultural work the by then routine attributions of "Yoruba origins"to Afro-Cuban ritual practices, liturgical objects, and theologicalconcepts were performing, not just for us students of such matters,but for our ethnographic interlocutors as well? As I have written elsewhere,apropos the patent similarities between Afro-Cuban and Yorubaceremonial objects, "I initially saw little reason to question the epistemologicalpremises on which [my discoveries of Yoruba elements in Miami'sAfro-Cuban religious praxis] were necessarily based. If a ritual flywhisk in Afro-Cuban religion looks like a Yoruba fly whisk, and is calledby the name of a Yoruba fly whisk—ìrùkè—then where is the problem?"(Palmié 2008a, 3–4). I took the question in a different direction in thepublication I just cited, basically asking what it might mean to use thequalifier "African" for anything occurring outside the African continent.Here I want to redeploy it to point to another problem: not whatdoes it mean to impute a Yoruba (or whatever other Old World) past toan object wielded in contemporary New World practices, but what doesit mean to affix the label "Yoruba" to such a past? In order to flesh outthe implications of this question, let me step back a good century anda half and take a look at the works and lives of two Yoruba-speakerswhose biographies never intersected, but whose agency arguably cameto underwrite the topoi that—however belatedly—guided the Murphys,Brandons, and Palmiés of the 1980s in essaying our characterizations ofSantería as a "Yoruba religion in the New World."

Two "Yoruba" and Their Projects

Was the Reverend Samuel Johnson (1846–1901) a Yoruba? At first glance,and in the face of a massive scholarly consensus that Johnson's The Historyof the Yorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of theBritish Protectorate (1921) represents both a towering achievement ofcolonial African indigenous historiography and "the indispensable foundationfor all historical and anthropological work on the Yoruba" (Peel1989, 198), the question appears disingenuous if not perverse. If Johnsonhas indeed been hailed as the "Thucydides of the Yoruba," (Smith1994, 168) would it make any more sense to debate his "Yoruba-ness"than to question the "Greekness" of the author of the History of the PeloponnesianWar? Still, and in a rather concrete sense, any historicallymeaningful answer to a question about what some of us today might callJohnson's "ethnic identity" would demand specification not just of its objectbut of its predicate as well. What was he when?

This much is clear: at the time of his birth in Sierra Leone in 1846—oreven in 1897 when he completed the manuscript of the book elaboratinga sense of "Yoruba-ness" that would eventually become a critical qualifierof ethnic allegiances in the formation of the Nigerian nation state in1963—Johnson was not (at least not in any contemporarily valid sense)a Yoruba himself. He only became so in the aftermath of processes hehimself had helped set in motion, and within which we—in contrast tohimself—can retrospectively situate him. Such backward-looping formsof narrative incorporation—the inevitable tendency toward "retrospectiverealignment" of the past, as Arthur Danto (1965) calls it—are inthemselves hardly noteworthy. Surely, by calling Samuel Johnson in,say, 1854, an "eight year old Yoruba child living in Sierra Leone" weare simply placing the events of his life under a description that arguablywas not available to him (or anyone else for that matter) at a timewhen Sigismund Koelle (1854, 5) famously charged that his fellow CMSmissionaries

have very erroneously made use of the name "Yóruba" in reference to thewhole nation [known as Aku in Sierra Leone], supposing that the Yórubanis the most powerful of the Aku tribe. But this appellation is liable to fargreater objections than that of "Aku," and ought to be forthwith abandoned;for it is, in the first place unhistorical, having never been used for the wholeAku nation by anybody, except the Missionaries; secondly it involves a twofolduse of the word "Yóruba," which leads to a confusion of notions, for inone instance the same word has to be understood of a whole, in another, onlyof part; and, thirdly, the name being thus incorrect, can never be received bythe different tribes as a name for their whole nation.

History was to prove Koelle wrong. Within little more than half acentury of the publication of his Polyglotta Africana, Christianized Akureturnees like Samuel Johnson had not just invalidated Koelle's secondand third objection to the use of the term Yoruba among the literate elitein Lagos and some parts of its hinterland. They had also begun to projectit into the past to such an extent that even their mythical ancestorshad come under a "Yoruba-description." But here, precisely, is where theproblem lies: calling Samuel Johnson—or Oduduwa, for that matter—a"Yoruba" avant la lettre in any other than a metaphorical fashion locksus into the present in a way that risks obscuring precisely those historicalrealities this designation is supposed to address.

Of course, to dispense with (or even only bracket) principally inadmissiblecommonsense backwards extrapolations from twentieth-centurydata might invite the ultimately sterile sort of "invention of thisand that" arguments that, in denying the accessibility of any historicalreality beneath discourse, amount to "nothing but the reverse of the objectivismthey claim to denounce," as Amselle (1993, 23) puts it. Thereis, however, a middle ground that, so it seems to me, ought to be defensibleon both epistemological and methodological grounds. And it lies inthe recognition of the mutually implicated historicity of both social lifeand the languages, descriptive or analytical, by which we represent it.Few have better illustrated this than John Peel in his magnificently documentedReligious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (2000), andit is in the spirit (though not letter) of his contributions that I would liketo turn to Samuel Johnson and a number of his Atlantically dispersed"fellow-Yoruba" in spe to probe the limits of discourse and agency in themaking of what today arguably is the global rubric "Yoruba."

The son of a British-educated Saro who may have been related to theAlaafin (sovereign of the Oyo state) Abiodun, Johnson spent his formativeyears in a residually German Pietist Christian Missionary Societymission household in Ibadan in the 1860s, where, at the time, the termYoruba could have held little meaning other than as a Hausa epithet forthe subjects of the long-since-devastated empire of Oyo. That Johnsoneventually came to construct an Oyo empire he never had known into theprototype for a Christian Yoruba nation, on the basis of his experienceas a CMS catechist at Ibadan's Aremo quarter and pastor at New Oyo,is a story unnecessary to detail here. Instead, it is sufficient to note thatwhile by the time of Johnson's death the term Yoruba may have come tocircumscribe a project, perhaps even a vocation, for the good reverend,its referents were still a set of potentialities rather than sociological orpolitical facts antedating the Atlantic dispersal of significant numbers ofthe constituency of the Yoruba nation Johnson dreamed of:

In terms of a personal agenda, the History may be read as a resolute bid bya man who had been involuntarily torn from his roots—his parents were enslavedand became Christians in Sierra Leone, returning to Yorubaland in1858, when Samuel was eleven—to re-plant himself in his native soil; and whorealized that his homeland needed to be re-imagined and re-configured inorder for him to be truly at home there. The memory of Abiodun's vanishedOyo had to be connected to the new, extended category of "Yoruba" introducedby the CMS, and Christianity needed somehow to be integrated intoits history. (Peel 2000, 305)

To all extents and practical purposes, such a "nation" may nowadaysbe said to exist in the geographical ambit that once formed the southwesternpart of the British West African colonial protectorate to whichthe name "Nigeria"—originally suggested by Lady Lugard—was to becomepermanently affixed upon independence. But just as the name "Nigeria"had not been coined when Johnson died in 1901, the term Yorubadid not yet designate an entity that he could have claimed instrumentalallegiance to at the time of his death.

The same could be said of one of Johnson's contemporaries—a manwhose traces in the documentary record allow us to reconstruct a fewtantalizing details in the life of one Remigio Herrera, but whose historicalimportance is encapsulated in the (patently Yoruba) name Adechina,by which he is remembered today among practitioners of the AfroCubanreligious formation known as regla de ocha, Santería, or, morerecently, Lukumí religion. When Ño Remigio-Adechina died of seniledebility at the officially listed age of ninety-eight in his home on 31 CalleSan Ciprián (later Fresneda) in the town of Regla's Third Ward in 1905,he had already acquired the stature of a living legend as the last African-bornbabalao active in Cuba. Adechina is nowadays regarded as thefundamento (foundation) of the cult of ifá in Cuba, and hence as a crucialagent in the globalization of what the more than 600 delegates froma good score of countries to the Eighth Global Orisha Congress in Havanain June of 2003 unanimously endorsed as the "religion of the twenty-first century."

Yet irrespective of Ño Remigio-Adechina's African birth, the facialscarifications he proudly displayed in his only known photographic portrait,his polygynous (or bigamist—depending on the frame of reference)marriage patterns, and his reputation as the most formidable babalao inCuba in the late nineteenth century: if Ño Remigio-Adechina had everheard the word "Yoruba," it would likely have been late in his life, andon the western shores of the Atlantic at that. In other words, and similarto Samuel Johnson's case, his "Yoruba-ness" is an artifact of retrospectiverecognition—though, again, as with Johnson, such recognitionwould be unthinkable were it not for the impact of the very agency ofthese two men on the emergence of the social and discursive formationsin which we now, perhaps all too rashly, tend to locate them.

Probably born around the end of the first or beginning of the seconddecade of the nineteenth century, the man who came to be knownas Ño Remigio-Adechina enters the historical record as a youthful slavein 1833 when he was baptized in the parochial church of the Nueva Paztownship of the province of La Habana. The name he received was"Remigio Lucumí," in the characteristic fashion of the time where thebaptismal first name was modified with a term indicating African provenance(on which see below). We do not know when or how RemigioLucumí acquired his freedom, but it is clear that upon emancipation hetook the surname of his former owner, Don Miguel Antonio Herrera. By1881 he is listed in a census of the town of Regla as the financially unencumberedowner of the house on San Ciprián. We also have the birthcertificates of his daughter Josefa (1864) and son Teodoro (1866), and thelist of sponsors of his (second) 1891 Catholic marriage to Francisca Burlet(the mother of his known children) leaves no doubt that by the 1870s,Remigio Herrera—a stone mason by trade—had become a socially well-connected,modestly wealthy citizen of the town of Regla. In other words,he was a moderately successful, but otherwise not especially remarkable,member of the urban "bourgeoisie of color" (Deschamps Chapeaux andPérez de la Riva 1974) that had grown up under the shadow of the colonialstate and its agro-industrial slave economy. Given this social position,people like Remigio Herrera had tended to cast their lot with theindependence movements of 1868 and 1895 and were, by the time of hisdeath, becoming increasingly embittered about their lack of inclusioninto the republican Cuban national project (Helg 1995).

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022601956X
• ISBN 13: 9780226019567
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 368