Jualynne E. Dodson’s text is a broad sociological study of Afro-Cuban religious culture found in the Oriente or eastern province of Cuba. Her work grows out of fieldwork done by the African Atlantic Research Team (AART) based at Michigan State University. The book attempts to reveal aspects of the understudied traditions of Palo Monte/Palo Mayombe, Espiritismo, and Vodú in a regional context that is also underrepresented in literature about Cuban vernacular religion. In the end, we get a study of worldview and community-remembering that also ironically erases practitioners from the text as their individual voices are rarely quoted.
There are several issues with the study that emerge from the research team’s lack of familiarity with the literature stemming from Cuban ethnologists, folklorists, material culture specialists, and art historians on the subjects of Afro-Atlantic sacred spaces and religion. Studies by Cabrera (1986), Cros Sandoval (2007), Cosentino (1995), Flores-Peña and Evanchuck (1994), Blier (1995), Nuttal (2006), and pieces like that offered by Viarnés in the recent special issue of Western Folklore (2007) dedicated to Afro-Caribbean religion, respectively, all should have been consulted for their insights on sacred spaces and the reconstruction of the public sphere. Perhaps, one of the most troubling aspects of the work is its open disregard for engaging with the Spanish-language materials on the subject (6–14). Largely critical of Ortiz and Cabrera, Dodson herself does not offer an alternative framework for understanding the “worldview” that grows organically from the religious culture itself. Instead, there is the projection of North American understandings of race, society, culture, and religion throughout the text that is largely unexamined. For example, Dodson declares that the revolution “dealt a death blow” (12) to institutional racism in Cuba, without addressing how Afro-Cuban religious practitioners had to go underground, as Ayorinde describes in Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution and National Identity, up until the mid 1990s because of government persecution. It is also unfortunate that Dodson and her team show a misunderstanding of what folklore studies constitute, opting for a nineteenth-century vision of the field that perhaps informed the team’s decision to ignore important literature on their topic (6–8).
The text offers insights similar to those of material culture specialists on the subject, like Blier (1995) for instance, in terms of relating how sacred spaces behave as sites for recreating history. The chapters read like field notes that summarize large cosmological concepts. One useful way that Dodson and her team deal with the ritual enunciation of cosmic ideas like returning ancestors is by invoking the term “re-member-ing” (71–78). “Re-member-ing” focuses on how the ritual calling down of ancestors helps to re-solidify the group as one for the spiritual work to be done. It re-assembles the community. This phenomenological interpretation is to be applauded for its astute understanding of how the Afro-Cuban religious community lives its history in this cooperative manner.
As mentioned previously, the study presents worldview analysis of understudied traditions in a systematic manner. The photos of sacred spaces and ritual practices perhaps speak more clearly than the book itself, with Shanti Ali Zaid, the photographer in the AART, giving the reader/viewer glimpses of the texture of the ritual contexts that create these living traditions. To Dodson’s credit, the text does provide an accurate view of how “Africa-based cosmic orientations” continue to matter in Oriente (163). These orientations work within a context that is densely layered and where different religious cultures merge and compete for articulation in sacred spaces. Dodson and the AART provide a text that is a good start for looking at the broad “principles” found in some Afro-Cuban traditions of eastern Cuba. However, as both practitioners and scholars of these traditions know, it is the context of ritual practice that helps to shape these principles as they continue to grow and change with the communities who create them.
Works Cited
Ayorinde, Christina. Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution and National Identity. Tampa and Miami: University Press of Florida, 2004.
Blier, Suzanne Preston. African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Cabrera, Lydia. Reglas de Congo: Palo Monte, Mayombe. Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1986.
Cosentino, Donald, ed. The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Los Angeles: University of California, Fowler Museum, 1995.
Cros Sandoval, Mercedes. Worldview, the Orichas, and Santería: Africa to Cuba and Beyond. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007.
Flores-Pena, Ysamur, and Roberta J. Evanchuck. Santería Garments and Altars: Speaking Without A Voice. Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1994.
Nuttal, Sarah, ed. Beautiful/Ugly: African and Diaspora Aesthetics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006.
Otero, Solimar, ed. Special issue on Afro-Caribbean Religion. Western Folklore 66, no. 1/2 (Winter and Spring 2007).
Viarnés, Carrie. “Cultural Memory in Afro-Cuban Possession: Problematizing Spiritual Categories, Resurfacing ‘Other’ Histories.” Western Folklore 66 (2007): 127–60.
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[Review length: 783 words • Review posted on April 6, 2009]