Less a book on Lucumi, Ifa, Regla de Ocha, Yoruba traditional religion, or Santería than a theoretical argument about the social and political creation of knowledge and names, Stephan Palmié the longtime scholar of Lucumi tradition employs culinary metaphors throughout The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion.
Palmié begins by questioning the labeling and content of the growing Library of Congress catalog classification, BL2532.S3 for books on “Santería.” He asserts that what we know about Afro-Cuban religion must be considered in the context of an “ethnographic interface” in which ethnographies shape their ethnographic objects and vice versa. Palmié problematizes the term “Afro-Cuban” as misleading because it: 1) harbors assumptions about the racial composition of its practitioners—“‘Africanity’ and ‘blackness’ often do not, and simply need not coincide” (27); and 2) presumes a “cultural survival” from Africa to the New World – an overly simplistic understanding of origins.
Similarly, Palmié complicates common ascriptions of “Yoruba origins” to Afro-Cuban religion. “Yoruba” was a label mistakenly applied by Christian missionaries, a term that “held little meaning” before that time and was not much used by religious practitioners until the mid-twentieth century. Palmié stresses that both “the Yoruba-nation” and New World Orisa religion “were actively conjured up” by particular people with particular interests, several of whom Palmié discusses (45).
Palmié next challenges conceptualizations of “Afro-Cuban” and “African American”; these are twentieth-century products that began with the work of scholars such as Rodrigues, Ortiz, and Herskovitz who identified African “survivals” in language and music. Building on those foundations, Fernando Ortiz posited the transculturación of cubanidad, illustrated with the metaphor of ajiaco; like the slow cooking stew with various layers and levels of dissolution into the whole, Cubanness is no simple hybrid of essential elements now merged into one. Instead it emerges as from a process of cooking in which “cultural becoming … looks and tastes different depending upon from which level of the pot… and at what time you take your sample” (99). In such manner, Palmié explains, the “’cooking of history,’ and the very terms by which we relate cultural and social phenomena to each other in time and space are necessarily contingent on the historical structure of our own experience, and the no less historical framing devices that allow us to reflect upon it” (100).
“Syncretism” is Palmié’s next target. Drawing on David Brown’s Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion (2003), Palmié notes two twentieth-century “metapragmatic narratives”: one emphasizing strict adherence to “African orthodoxy and orthopraxy” and the other stressing “adaptation, reform, and rectification of such knowledge and praxis under changing Cuban conditions” (137). Once adaptation has occurred, Palmié asserts, new ritual practices may be naturalized and viewed as timeless. Despite such historical reconstructions, perceptions of “cultural loss and debasement” --“notions about la tradición as an original body of sacred knowledge … that was once transferred to Cuba in toto, but has since become subject to erosion through amnesia and deliberate distortions” (135)—are central to debates concerning authenticity among various camps of religious practitioners in the U.S. Contested conceptions of authentic religious tradition have been affected by the ethnographic interface.
Palmié also explores issues of race, beginning with an analysis of primary documents surrounding the 1993 landmark U.S. Supreme Court Case, Church of the Lukumí v. City of Hialeah that affirmed the church’s religious right to animal sacrifice and Lukumi religious-legal standing. Given that priestly initiation proceeds only with divine assent and given the replacement of biological lineage with initiatory kinship in Lukumi tradition, Palmié contends that Lukumi now represents a “raceless Africanity.” He suggests that “we might be well advised to leave the question about the color of the gods unasked” (170).
In “Afronauts of the Virtual Atlantic,” Palmié examines several recent cases concerning religious practitioners that involved issues of authenticity, origin, history, and legitimacy: a priest of African traditional religion who was prosecuted for illegally importing giant African snails in 2010; the “War of the Oriatés” (public correspondence between representatives of Cuban Oriatés and priests of Yoruba Traditional Religion); and “a plague of Orichas” (the proliferation of Orishas and ritual previously unknown to Lukumi priests). Among other noteworthy points, Palmié notes that “the ‘ethnographic interface’ has all but dissolved” (179) given the preponderance of religious practitioners who are also scholars; “the tendency of anthropologists to gravitate toward babalaos… led to a proliferation of ‘ifá-centered’ scholarly accounts” (185); and a system of stratification among Cuban Orisha priests has developed due to ritual tourism. In the section “In Lieu of a Conclusion” in this very interesting yet fragmented chapter, Palmié suggests that the decentralized, non-institutionalized structure of Lukumi religion makes “quality control” difficult: “Theirs has become a runaway world that relentlessly churns out difference as it produces itself” (219).
In “Ackee and Saltfish vs. Amala con Quimbombó, or More Foods for Thought,” Palmié proposes food metaphors for distinct theoretical positions concerning African American history and culture. The first, modeling Mintz and Price’s historicized approach, “places prime emphasis on African cultural continuities” and the second, illustrating “new revisionist” critiques, “emphasizes the concrete conditions under which heterogeneous cultural forms came to integrate essentially novel collectivities” (224). The latter position suggests that direct attributions of Africanity to New World phenomena are overly simplistic.
Palmié offers a very sharp, very academic exploration of the socially constructed nature of “Afro-Cuban Religion” and the historical part played in its manufacture by both religious practitioners and anthropologists. Many of his insights should shake up individuals on both sides of the ethnographic interface. The problem with taking a critique of terminological objectification to its logical extreme, however, is that you are left with no common words to identify what you study to others. Palmié recognizes the absurdity of his position to those who are living the religion and who need words to identify socially and politically, and he ends with an apologetic note to religious practitioners. Despite Palmié’s concern with the effect of ethnography on religious practice, he has not written a book that is readily accessible or comprehensible to those outside the ivory tower. Nevertheless, this is an important book for scholars of religion, and particularly for those studying “Afro-Cuban religions.” It has certainly made me think carefully about terminological use in my own work and the influence it may have both on my discipline and on religious practitioners.
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[Review length: 1057 words • Review posted on January 21, 2015]