Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. David H. Brown. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003. 413 pp. Reviewed by Kristina Wirtz David H. Brown’s beautifully produced and important book, Santería Enthroned,
is one case in which a book can and perhaps should be judged by its
cover. Brown’s project on Santería ritual, aesthetics, and historical
change is ambitious: he combines the methods and materials of
anthropology, art history, and social history, among other disciplines,
to consider what this case can contribute to the ongoing debate over
the source of African diasporic cultural forms. A major contribution of
the book is to challenge the very terms of the debate between
Africanist and Creolist interpretations of origins. He engages both
Sidney Mintz and Richard Price’s “rapid creolization” model and the
Herskovitsian “African retentions” paradigm still apparent in Robert
Farris Thompson’s art historical analyses, which seek to reveal African
continuities beneath changes in diasporic forms. Brown advocates
Stephan Palmié’s “New World ethnogenesis” model, which envisions
innovation—creative responses to changing conditions by historically
self-conscious actors—as the driver of cultural change and continuity
alike. His analysis shatters any simplistic dichotomy of change versus
continuity, and in doing so goes beyond any previous work on Santería
to provide the most careful and historically nuanced account of this
religion’s origins and contemporary practices yet written.
Brown
examines the emergence of Cuban Santería and its transformation from
antecedents—particularly Yoruba religious practices—into its modern
form by proposing that its story of historical change is best explained
in terms of agentful, self-conscious innovations, reforms, and
inventions of tradition. He documents how Africans and their
descendents in Cuba drew upon African and European aesthetic
repertoires and cultural logics to recreate African practices in novel
forms and contexts. A major theme through which he develops this
argument is the prevalence of royalty and royal metaphors in Afro-Cuban
ritual and iconographic practice. Hence the book’s title: Santería Enthroned.
The
book is based on considerable research over more than two decades in
both Cuba and the United States, and is a substantially reworked and
refined version of what was already a masterful Ph.D. dissertation in
1989. It is organized into two sections, in which the first considers
institutional and ritual innovation, while the second considers
iconographic innovation. The text is greatly enhanced by extensive
visual documentation, including a hundred figures and some two dozen
gorgeous color plates of Santería thrones and “clothes of the saint”
that illustrate the sumptuousness and artistry of Santería’s aesthetic
practices.
The
book is clearly and cogently written, if at times so densely packed
with detail and careful discussion that it would likely daunt anyone
not already familiar with the topics and theoretical debates he
engages. While it is essential reading for specialists in African
diasporic and Caribbeanist history, comparative religion, visual
anthropology, and ethnography, it would be most useful (in whole or in
part) for advanced undergraduate and graduate seminars. And yet I am
tempted to press it upon anyone expressing any curiosity about
Santería, precisely because it so carefully dissects and questions the
assumed wisdom about what Santería is and where it comes from,
providing an authoritative and insightful alternative account.
In
Chapter One, as he does throughout the book, Brown makes brilliant use
of colonial-era visual and textual documentation of Santería’s origins
in Cuba, including traveler accounts, paintings, and lithographs. He
uses these to address what is known about how the precursors of
Santería and other Afro-Cuban religions arose out of colonial-era
social institutions such as urban religious co-fraternities for Blacks
(called cabildos). While the broad outlines of this account are well-known, for example, from George Brandon’s (1993)
book, Brown’s careful discussion of the evidence sets a higher standard
for reconstructions of Santería’s early history and suggests fruitful
directions for additional research. He argues that the religious
co-fraternities were “not ‘direct survivals’ of African government and
communal infrastructures but loan translations or remodelings as
mediated by colonial social, administrative, and political categories”
(p. 55).
Brown’s
exploration of Santería’s early development continues in Chapter Two,
where he applies oral histories he collected among practitioners in
Havana and Matanzas to the question of how Santería moved out of
cabildos and into the realm of modern, rationalized religion. Always
careful not to push his interpretations too far, he patiently exercises
his oral history data to offer a reconstruction of how Yoruba-derived
practices moved out of “Lucumí” cabildos and into “house-temples” based
on ritually-established lineages of fictive as well as genealogical
kinship. This process, he argues, happened late in the 19th century and
into the early 20th century through the historically-reflexive efforts
of a small number of African and creole priests who actively negotiated
what would henceforth be considered authoritative “African” knowledge.
One line of evidence from the oral history sources themselves is a
clear “sense of dynamic process and conflict” in their recollections of
their ritual elders’ efforts to mobilize ritual authority by recreating
or reforming “tradition” (p. 75). This interpretation of self-conscious
and active programs of “reform” resonates with my own and others’
analyses of the constitutive role of conflict in contemporary Santería
(Dianteill 2002; Gobin in press; Palmié 1995; Wirtz in press).
Brown concludes: “In a sense, the ‘starting point of the Cuban
Santería’ was not a place or institution—the ‘cabildos’ or even ‘the
ramas’ [lineages]—but the process of ongoing negotiation of interests
among the emergent ramas” (p. 112).
In
Chapter Three he continues his thorough and theoretically nuanced
historical account of the emergence of Santería as a “modern,
theologically rationalized twentieth-century religion.” To do so, he
continues to question, rather than simply repeating, received wisdom
about Santería that too often becomes established through
mutually-entailing repetitions by scholars and practitioners. For
example, he interrogates the depiction of Santería’s deities or orichas
as a “pantheon” and the “syncretism” of Yoruba deities and Catholic
saints. He also closely examines how particular liturgical
practices—divination techniques, initiation procedures—arose as a
product of experimentation, alongside the efforts of practitioners to
professionalize their ranks. Remarkably, he accomplishes this
innovation-centered reading of Santería practice while simultaneously
providing as thorough an overview of ritual practice in Santería as any
account available, save perhaps a few manuals published by
practitioners. His conclusion is compelling: “Through discussion,
debate, experimentation, and the advancing of self-conscious ‘reform’
agendas, African and creole leaders worked to theologize and
pantheonize the Lucumí religion and standardize the orichas’
iconographic attributes, mythology, and associated liturgy” (p. 130).
The second half of the book, on iconographic innovation, shifts its focus to a “cultural biography of things” (Kopytoff 1986).
While continuing to develop the themes of historical agency,
self-conscious innovation, and royalty, Brown turns his attention to
the iconography of initiation rituals, altars, and the myriad “stuff”
of modern Santería practice. In Chapter Four he explores how modern
initiation rituals in Santería incorporate symbols of royalty that draw
upon multiple European and African influences: the altar, sacred
garments and cloths, representations and accessories of each saint,
beaded sashes, and head and facial decoration of initiates. In a clever
reading of this iconographic evidence, he shows how distinctions
between “warrior” and “court” orichas are manifested in altars,
garments, and rituals, despite the development of a standardized ritual
protocol for all initiations (itself a product of earlier negotiations
among priests over ritual authority).
Chapter
Five presents a “biography of things” by re-examining the various
components of altars and clothing documented in his
illustrations—fabrics, styles, ceramic and other vessels—in a broader
historical context, in order to tease out the contributing influences
and functions of these particular choices. Brown’s exposition is a
lesson to all ethnographers to ask the obvious questions: why do
Santería practitioners put their sacred stones into decorative china
soup toureens? Why do they cover their altars with what, at first
glance, seems a mishmash of kitsch? Why do they dress initiates in
shiny satin “princess” dresses and pant-suits reminiscent of the “Three
Musketeers?” To answer such questions, he juxtaposes wide-ranging
examples of diverse origins to argue that there is never just one
simple source, African or European, and that the multiple
significations of any choice—be it fine porcelain vessels for the
“santos” or sumptuous cloth draping these vessels—make these into
overdetermined symbols charged with spiritual power. That is, such
masterful bricolages of European, Cuban, and African forms (fine
fabrics and porcelain together with painted facial cicatrices and
animal skins, and so forth) are not simply superficial decorative
“window dressings” over some “real” African substrate (Bascom’s 1971[1950] “stones, herbs, blood”), but are “traditionalized and cherished expressive means to celebrate the greater glory of the orichas” as well as becoming sources of power in their own right (p. 288).
Brown
has opened up rich territory for further historical, ethnographic, and
iconographic exploration. With all he does do in this book, there are
many lines of evidence he barely considers—language and dance come to
mind, as do greater attention to regional variation in Cuba, the U.S.,
and Yorubaland—and much else that, as he himself admits in his
conclusion, could not be treated to fully “thick” ethnographic and
historical description. These are hardly complaints, given the scope of
the book he has written. To such a masterful work as Santería Enthroned, one can only respond ¡Aché! and get on with the work he has challenged us to continue. References CitedBascom, William R.1971 [1950] The Focus of Cuban Santería. In Peoples and Cultures of the Caribbean. Michael M. Horowitz, ed. Pp. 522-527. New York: Natural History Press.Brandon, George 1993 Santería from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Dianteill, Erwan 2002
Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization of the
Orisha Religion in Africa and the New World (Nigeria, Cuba and the
United States). International Journal of Urban and Regional Research
26(1):121-137.Gobin, Emma In press Ethnographie d'un conflit religieuz à la Havane. Ateliers.Kopytoff, Igor 1986 The Cultural Biography of Things: Commoditization as Process. In
The Social Life of Things: Comodities in Cultural Perspective. Arjun
Appadurai, ed. Pp. 64-91. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Palmié, Stephan 1995 Against Syncretism: 'Africanizing' and 'Cubanizing' Discourses in North American Orisa Worship. In Counterworks: Managing the Diversity of Knowledge. Rirchard Fardon, ed. Pp. 73-104. New York: Routledge.Wirtz, KristinaIn
press Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban
Santería: Speaking a Sacred World. Gainesville: University Press of
Florida.Kristina
Wirtz is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology at Western Michigan
University. In her study of Santería in contemporary Cuba, Wirtz
examines religion, discourse, ritual performance, and negotiations
between identity and community (racial, religious, and national). Her
book Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería: Speaking a Sacred World will be published later this year by the University of Press of Florida.