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chapter 4 Shamans at Work in New York The traveler’s past changes according to the route he has followed: not the immediate past, that is, to which each day that goes by adds a day, but the more remote past. Arriving at each new city, the traveler finds again a past of his that he did not know he had; the foreignness of what you no longer are or no longer possess lies in wait for you in foreign, unpossessed places. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities The old buyeis didn’t want to tell anyone anything, they all wanted to be unique. But a culture can’t keep itself closed. For others to know you, you’ve got to talk about it. New York shaman In this chapter I consider Garifuna religious leaders in New York and the processes through which a religion derived from African, Amerindian, and European sources is being remade as an African Diaspora religion—a set of practices consciously part of a specific religious family that includes Santería, Palo Monte, Vodou, Candomblé, and Spiritism. I first present shamans’ own stories of how they became buyeis in a wider religious field and describe their altars as material indices of practice. I then give special attention to spirit geographies, examining the shifts in the places spirits are said to come from. I also explore the degree to which the new version of Garifuna is “hardened” into rational forms of texts and institutions and for that reason is likely 125 126 SHAMANS AT WORK IN NEW YORK to endure. Finally, I describe attempts to remit such innovations to the homeland, and the fissures produced in contests between differing versions of orthodoxy: New York Garifuna religious leaders pit their cosmopolitan authority against homeland religious leaders’ territorial or indigenous authority. Religious Autobiographies Many life stories of New York shamans begin by following the familiar account of becoming a buyei but go on to include striking departures from that predictable account. Here is the story of Tola Guerreiro, a senior buyei in New York: At six or seven years of age I would “see” people in our house eating with us. I told my grandmother, who said that wasn’t true, it couldn’t be. She denied what I saw. I remember that at around twelve I wasn’t normal—I wanted to hang around with the grandmothers [las abuelas], and I loved religious things. By the time I was fifteen we were already in the U.S. I came with my grandmother . I was aware of the spirits, I could feel them, even though they never spoke to me. Once we went back to Honduras, to Triunfo, and I went to see the buyei named Tino; he said I would become a buyei too. My grandmother said no, that “those people suffer too much.” My grandmother thought I would forget about all that in the U.S., that the spirits wouldn’t follow me. I went to church a lot, and took herb baths to keep the spirits away. At twenty-one, I got married and just wanted to have a normal life. But I still had nightmares of the spirits coming. I thought I was crazy! My family didn’t accept what I had. There weren’t any buyeis in the U.S. back then [ca. 1975]. I couldn’t work, I was always hearing voices, or people singing. Finally I ran away from New York to New Orleans to stay with a relative. Things were quiet for a while, but then one day I came back from work and heard them: “We found you!” And the same thing started again. My relatives in New Orleans were Baptist, they didn’t want me around at all, not like this, so I went to Miami to stay with an aunt. Same thing. In those days, I could hear people talking from a distance, and I overheard my aunt’s husband saying things about me, that I had the devil, or that I was nuts. The next morning I left a note, and was gone. My husband and I loved each other, you know, but this thing was so big. We got together again in New Orleans for three years, and I got pregnant with my oldest son. Things quieted down a little. Meanwhile, back in Honduras, in Triunfo, the buyei Tino had died, but Chichi, his successor, called for me to perform a dügü. The spirits really started...

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