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  • Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería: Speaking a Sacred World
  • Reinaldo L. Román
Kristina Wirtz. 2007. Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería: Speaking a Sacred World. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. 252 pp. ISBN: 0-8130-3064-1.

Wirtz's lucid and intimate ethnography of Santería practice in Santiago de Cuba addresses classic debates in the study of religions and African-derived cultures in the Americas. The book offers illuminating, empirically-grounded answers to such fundamental questions as: how do religious communities establish their boundaries and reproduce themselves?; and, how do certain practices come to be recognized as religious at all? A linguistic anthropologist, Wirtz underscores the centrality of discourse to the differentiation of Santería within a "popular religious complex" consisting of Palo Monte, Spiritism, Abakuá and a variety of other practices. Wirtz notes that despite the "practical blending" that characterizes the pursuit of Santería, sharp moral and rhetorical distinctions ("discursive polarization") between practices prevail.

"Discourse" takes on a variety of meanings throughout Wirtz's book; it refers to distinct "metacultural stances" toward religions and cultures designated as Afro-Cuban. But discourse also refers to specific modalities of speech, including conversion narratives and insiders' recurrent commentary on Santería's rituals. Moreover, Wirtz approaches initiation ceremonies and tambores as instances of ritual discourse, a kind of communication that is riddled with ambiguities because it is voiced in an esoteric register known as Lucumí. The Yoruba-related language of Santería's deities is not secret, but even trained initiates struggle with interpretation.

Matters of boundary construction have attracted a good deal of attention in the last decade, even if encyclopedic treatments, with their pantheons of cross-indexed orichas and Catholic saints, remain commonplace. Wirtz's original contributions owe less to her opening questions than to her novel and painstaking approach to these queries. Her attentiveness to discourse and her commanding analysis of Lucumí, notably in divination, songs, and recitations of priestly genealogies called moyubá, move the study along new directions. Until recently, works on Santería have focused on the redoubts of Havana and Matanzas. This has led some scholars to reproduce habaneros' claims to primacy despite growing challenges from specialists interested in the diffusion of Santería [End Page 223] within and beyond Cuba. In turning to communities in Santiago, Wirtz joins a small number of foreign and Cuban scholars focused on the island's eastern region, and moves toward the goals of the book: to offer a non-essentialist view of Santería, and an account of "the interpretive processes by which different essentializations… emerge (p. x–xi)." The dynamics of community formation are the stuff of living memories and lively debates in Cuba's second city in no small measure because the institutionalization of Santería in Santiago dates only to the 1930s.

The book is organized in three parts. In the opening chapters, Wirtz builds on recent scholarship to propose that Santería emerged as a distinct religion "at the juncture of three competing metacultural stances," which she dubs the sacred, the suspicious and the folkloric. Wirtz reminds readers that in the 1930s and 1940s, the suspicious stance, which characterizes Santería as an inchoate collection of dangerous superstitions, gave way, at least partly, to the sorts of folkloric valuations that are still seen today. The latter have represented Santería as the "emblem of Cuba's national ideology of hybridity," often linking the religion to discourses of mestizaje and racial democracy.

The denomination "Santería" and the insistence on its standing as a true religion are products of the gradual shift from suspicion to nationalist folklore propelled by Cuban scholars that include Fernando Ortiz and the Santiago-born Rómulo Lachatañeré. Although insiders have favored other labels, from religión lucumí in 1950s to regla de ocha today, Wirtz shows persuasively that the practitioners' sacred stance has long been under the influence of rival representations. In the republican period, santeros confronted often-cited anti-witchcraft campaigns that put them in a "double-bind." On the one hand santeros faced suspicion and the prospect of criminalization; on the other hand, they had to contend with...

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