Stephan Palmié

Africas of the Americas: Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions

Until recently, African Americanist scholarship has been dominated by programmatic searches for African origins. This book aims to transcend this research agenda by exploring the ritual and discursive production and reproduction of conceptions of Africa and Africanity in the Americas.

Mixed Blessings and Sorrowful Mysteries

In recent decades, approaches championing conceptions of hybridity and the hybrid have proliferated in our discipline. This has been hailed as, and may well represent, a salutary reaction against earlier tendencies toward reificatory holism in the construction of units of ethnographic description and analysis. Yet both current anthropological deployments (and critiques) of hybridity have not superseded a fundamentally questionable logic that mistakes the output of the operation of rules of discernment and discrimination inherent to human classificatory activity (including those variously in play in our own discipline) for more or less adequate descriptions of the world and its furniture. If, in this sense, anthropological analysis has long aimed to reveal the fundamentally arbitrary nature of socially operative categories of identity and difference through what Bowker and Star call strategic “inversions of classificatory infrastructures,” it stands to argue that we have neglected to submit our own practices of knowledge production to such metacategorical reflexivity. In failing to do so, we have tended to proceed from what Bakhtin calls “intentional hybridity” (i.e., deliberate translational commensuration across heterogeneous universes of discourse) to increasing degrees of operationally normalized “organic hybridity” that have come to inform our very conceptions of “the cultural.”

SANTERÍA GRAND SLAM: AFRO-CUBAN RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND THE STUDY OF AFRO-CUBAN RELIGION

[First paragraph]Living Santeria: Rituals and Experiences in an Afro-Cuban Religion. MICHAEL ATWOOD MASON. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002. ix + 165 pp. (Paper US

The Cuban factors of humanity: Reproductive biology, historical ontology and the metapragmatics of race

16.95)Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santeria. KATHERINE J. HAGEDORN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001. xvi + 296 pp. (Cloth US

Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition

40.00)The Light Inside: Abakua Society Arts and Cuban Cultural History. DAVID H. BROWN. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2003. xix + 286 pp. (Cloth US

Creolization and Its Discontents

44.23)Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. DAVID H. BROWN. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2003. xx + 413 pp. (Paper US

Genomics, divination, “racecraft”

38.00)Ethnographic objects behave in curious ways. Although they clearly are “our constructions,” field sites and even topically circumscribed (rather than spatially delimited) ethnographic problems lead double lives: places and problems change not merely because they factually undergo historical changes, but because researchers come to them from historically no less changeable epistemic vantage points. One can imagine generational cohorts of ethnographers marching across the same geographically or thematically defined terrain and seeing different things – not just because of substantial changes that have factually occurred, but because they have come to ask different questions. The process obviously has its dialectical moments. The figures we inscribe in writing from fleeting observations (based on changing theoretical conceptions) are no less subject to history than the empirical grounds from which our discursive efforts call them forth. The result is a curious imbrication of partially autonomous, but also partly overlapping, historicities of lives and texts which, at times, are more difficult to keep apart than it would seem at first glance. At least in the study of Afro-Cuban religious culture, the two practical and discursive fields – one circumscribed by the practical, but perhaps misleading label “Afro-Cuban religion,”1 and the other designated by whatever term one might like to affix to the study of it – cannot be easily separated: much as in the Brazilian case (Braga 1995, Capone 1999, Matory 1999, 2001), practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions and their ethnographers have engaged each other in a dialogue since at least the second decade of the twentieth century. That it took us so long to understand this fact has much to do with the way both “Afro-Cuban religion” and “Afro-Cuban ethnography” originally (and lastingly) became discursively objectified: the former largely under the sign of a search for “authentically African” elements in New World cultural practices, the second as an instrument for “verifying” (and thereby authorizing) such “Africanisms” (Scott 1991).

Slave cultures and the cultures of slavery

Ostensibly a book written with a view towards publicly promulgating an anti-racist agenda by synthesizing a vast body of mid-20th-century biological and genetic science, Fernando Ortiz’s El engaño de las razas (1946) remains one his least commented-upon works. Eclipsed in its scholarly reception (both nationally and internationally) by its immediate predecessor, El contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940) and its English translation (1946), El engaño de las razas also appears to have been shadowed by (or simply assimilated into) the spate of post-Second World War anthropological anti-racist pronouncements culminating in the 1951 UNESCO Declaration Against Racism. However, paying close attention to Ortiz’s analytical and rhetorical strategies reveals that El engaño is by no means a mere anti-racist tract in the guise of a (characteristically learned and vociferously poetic) Latin American ensayo. As I will argue, the text merits our attention today not only because it refracted and subjected a larger, international anthropological agenda of the time to a local perspective, but also because its analytical tropology – arguably – only entered anthropological theorizing about human biology, heredity, and sociality under the sign of relationality from the 1990s onward. I suggest that in outlining a metapragmatic ethics and politics of metaphor Ortiz also anticipated a de-stabilization of representationalist accounts of ‘race’ that goes well beyond social constructionism.