Creolization as Cultural Creativity

Ritual Piracy: Or Creolization with an Attitude

109 Ritual Piracy Or Creolization with an Attitude —raquel romber It is a view that implicitly understands that folding of the underworld of the conquering society into the culture of the conquered not as an organic synthesis or “syncretism” of the three great streams of New World History—African, Christian, Indian—but as a chamber of mirrors reflecting each stream’s perception of the other. . . . [T]his chamber of mirrors was, from the colonizer’s point of view, a chamber conflating sorcery with sedition, if not in reality at least as a metaphor. — michael taussi Shamanism and Colonialism and the Wild Man The first thing that attracted my attention when visiting the altar room of a Puerto Rican bruja (witch-healer) was the bizarre mishmash of Catholic saints and Afro-Caribbean and Amerindian deities, standing in front of a Buddha and the chromolithograph of a blond Jesus, in the midst of all sorts of candles. I also noticed a small packet, hanging from a large bronze cross, a magic work that had been left there to be empowered by the cross.1 How could the same cross that once persecuted brujos (witch-healers) be now empowering their magic works, in partnership with African and Asian deities? Syncretism and creolization came obviously to mind. Similar uncanny kinds of religious mélange also found in Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candombl é, and Cuban Santería have been depicted both in scholarly works and lay parlance as syncretic and creole.2 Indeed, “creole” has been broadly used in scholarly and native discourses as a modifier for language, ethnicity , nation, or culture to suggest some form of “mixture” (Szwed 2003). Thus defined, and unless they are examined as emic terms used as parts of a politics of culture (Aijmer 1995; Allen 2002; Khan 2001; Romberg 1998; Raquel Romberg 110 Stewart 1995, 2007; Stewart and Shaw 1994; Trouillot 1992), “syncretic” and “creole” are more suggestive of end products and less of the production (the very processes and power relations) that shaped these so-called fusions in the first place.3 For even in their most sophisticated rendition, “mixture” and “fusion” reflect only the materialization of extremely witty, complex yet painful earlier processes of intercultural contact, involving unequally situated groups brought together in specific geopolitical contexts. In reassessing the kinds of religious mélange I address here, I thus limit my discussion to the historically specific circumstances of late nineteenthcentury Hispanic and Luso-tropic colonial societies, centered on urban slave and highland peasant-maroon societies under Catholic colonial rule (societies that were overall intensely linked to European settlers and their mores).4 For, within this particular set of historical circumstances, more than earlier ones elsewhere within the Caribbean, there was a persistent double bind resulting from the high value placed on the “purity” of metropolitan cultures and the actual “mixing” of uprooted people and cultures that were relocated in the colonies (cf. Mintz 1985). Rather than being the essence of “creole” and “syncretic,” mixture appears as its problematic referent , entangled in shifting racial, class, and nation-state ideologies.5 For example, during various centuries racial and class-based cultural and linguistic mixtures were vilified for trespassing the godly taxonomies of the natural order (Abrahams 2002a, 2003; Dayan 1995; Hall 1997; Kutzinski 1993; Rhys 1966).6 Further institutionalized, the vilification of such ungodly 1. Cosmpolitan spirits at a brujería altar and a magic work hanging from the cross. Photo: Raquel Romberg. Ritual Piracy: Or Creolization with an Attitude 111 mixture was publicly expressed in social ridicule, if not outright criminal persecution (Burton 1997, Romberg 2005). Once Creole societies entered the process of nation building, however, the tribulations of “creole” mixtures were silenced or at least smoothed to fit new nationalist agendas that portrayed the post-independence national community as the miraculous upshot of the “mixing” of indigenous, European, and African people under colonialism (Abrahams 2003; Bolland 1992; Brathwaite 1971; Burton 1997; Hintzen 2002; Taussig 1987; R. Young 1995). Turned now into a state ideology , “creole” was to signify the idea of creative—non-polluting—mixtures (cf. Bernabé, Chamoiseau, and Confiant 1989; Condé and Cottenet-Hage 1995; Moore 1997).7 My reflections on religious creolization processes stem from my work with various Puerto Rican healers, in particular, my close apprenticeship with Haydée, a self-defined espiritista bruja (Spiritist witch-healer) who was extremely well...