Diaspora Conversions: Black Carib Religion and the Recovery of Africa

5. Ritual in the Homeland; Or, Making the Land “Home” in Ritual

chapter 5 Ritual in the Homeland; Or, Making the Land “Home” in Ritual Our journey has been sad, my grandchild, We have been searching for our grandchildren. We have been crossing the deep ocean, For our descendants are far away. Dügü song This chapter and the next juxtapose readings of ritual performance in the homeland and in the diaspora. In the homeland, the central ritual event brings into being, through performance, the momentary fusion of kin, ancestors, and territory. With the external boundary of the ethnic group rarely in question in Garifuna villages, the ritual primarily works on social relations at the level of the extended family. In the diaspora , the central ritual event defines and defends the social boundary of the ethnic group as a whole in relation to the plural urban context. This difference of emphasis transforms the ritual process. It becomes more verbally elaborated, more symbolic (in a Peircean sense), and more ideological , in that authenticity becomes a conscious problem. The ritual adapts to neighboring religious paradigms and seeks points of common ground. To make this distinction is not to call the homeland version original and the diasporic version mimetic. Both require representations of the homeland: even in rituals occurring “on the land,” physical space still must be transformed into a religious grammar and be made digestible in the form of power or cures conferred. The ritual “cures” by intensifying the experience of the land; it builds layers of consciousness 146 RITUAL IN THE HOMELAND 147 of that space in physical structures, songs, and boundary purifications that bodily inscribe the notion of return. The return is to the ancestral territorial center in a given Honduran village, and its message of return is doubled in the mirrored images of traveling family members and journeying ancestral spirits. Among New York Garifuna, not surprisingly, the natal land is represented primarily through memory and its technological extensions (photos, videos, and music recordings), and out of different material artifacts . The semiotics of territory and territorial belonging here, too, entail acts of representation, but diasporic ritual has a material and sensory character distinct from that of the homeland. Moreover, the territory that is remembered and ritualized is less self-evident in New York than in Honduran villages. Africa begins to occupy a place as important as that of Honduras and St. Vincent: it becomes a third diasporic horizon. I first describe the ritual sequence itself in detail, followed by accounts of crises that necessitated adaptation and improvisation and created opportunities for revision. I take these disruptions as windows of opportunity for analysis, as otherwise-hidden aspects of the ritual structures become conscious, visible problems in need of practical resolutions. I describe how homeland ritualizations exert centripetal pull and territorial authority over the New York–based emigrants but also construct their own indigenous authority in relation to those emigrants, by casting them as being in need of periodic territorial redemption. The diasporic and homeland modes of religion constitute a single system, each part of which constructs its authority in relation to the other. The Dügü The most elaborate of Garifuna rituals, the dügü, contains within it all the lesser interventions with the ancestors, like the chugu and the mass, and so is the fullest realization of the abstraction Garifuna religion. Yet although there is a general sense that dügüs must occur every year somewhere in Garifuna territory, there is no prescribed rhythm or cycle that affixes the frequency or location of the ritual. It must be called for by the spirits themselves. the call for a dügü The high god, the God of Roman Catholicism, is called Bungiu, and lumu Bungiu, “praise God,” is an everyday expression in Garifuna villages. 148 RITUAL IN THE HOMELAND Rituals are not devoted to Bungiu, however, but are reserved for more fickle and proximate powers, the ancestors. This generic category is broken into smaller categories whose precise order and rank depends on the speaker. In practice, the ancestors are divided into two groups: the ahari (or hiyuruha), “higher” spirits or “people,” who are the aides and guides to shamans, and the gubida. The latter are ancestors who have material needs and demands and who may afflict their descendants if not commemorated. The shamans’ subtle gradations are lost on most laypeople, and the various agents constituting “the ancestors” are lumped together as beneficial but potentially dangerous...