Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santeria (review)

This deeply engaging and stimulating study opens with the description of a poster of an upcoming Afro-Cuban folkloric performance at Brown University in the fall of 1988. The transformative experience of the "drumstruck" that night (to borrow the title of the first section) is the radical force that has compelled Katherine Hagedorn, then a graduate student in musical anthropology, to pursue her program of research. The result is a passionate study located precisely at the intersection of the integral relationship between anthropology and autobiography. Immersing the reader deeply in Afro-Cuban folkloric and religious performance, both as an intellectual and as an emotional experience, the book flows easily and poetically, to a constant background drumbeat, awakening the reader in the same way that, a decade ago, it evidently awoke the scholar.

Through the exploration and decoding of the sacred in Afro-Cuban performance, Hagedorn addresses the complex relationship between race and religion, the aesthetic issues that inform that relationship, the politics of pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba, and contemporary practices of santería and folklore. The Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba, a state-sponsored troupe founded in 1962 and the embodiment of postrevolutionary Cuban songs, dances, and rituals of santería, serves as the subject of her thick description. Hagedorn successfully integrates her anthropological analysis with personal experience of religious performance: she learned how to play the balá drums with some of the members of the group, was introduced into the different degrees of santería, and culminated the experience with her initiation as a priestess of Ochún.

But her analysis goes beyond the decodification of the religious by further exploring the complexity of "divine utterances," addressing, for instance, some of the contradictions involved in performing santería for tourists, beginning in the late 1980s, with the government-sponsored tours to the island for foreigners who wished to become initiated. The institutionalized workshops called "FolkCuba" and "Ochaturs" and "Santurismo" are some of the designations given by those who perceive the irony of a communist government sponsoring and profiting from religious initiations. She also points out the other (most obvious) consequence, the touristic folklorization of a religious and ethnocultural tradition and the subsequent decontextualization. In this sense, her chapters explore the delicate intricacies of sacred and secular, the public and the private, audience and performance interaction, and the polyvalence of the musical and gestural articulations of performance, together with the negotiating rules of engagement. Furthermore, gender issues are fundamental to Hagedorn's study; the newly elasticized boundaries for batá drummers are also reassessed, together with the taboos surrounding women playing consecrated religious pieces.

Passionately written and carefully thought out, this book will be of tremendous interest to readers and specialists in many different fields, including sociology, art history, folklore and dance, cultural studies, religious studies, and performance studies, among others. Above all, it is, of course, a serious contribution to ethnomusicology. The CD recording accompanying the text is a very felicitous addition to the book.