Santeria Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion (review)

Santería Enthroned opens in the mid-1980s as the author begins fieldwork for his dissertation by visiting a botánica in Union City, New Jersey. He can make no sense of the heterogeneous items displayed: It would be ethnocentric to dismiss them as "urban kitsch," he figures, but they certainly don't look African to him. It is a false start; when he visits house-temples in the region, he is at last on the right track, one that leads him to comparable venues in New York, Miami, and eventually, Havana. For years, most Sundays find him present at Middle Day celebrations in which new initiates "gorgeously dressed in regal satin clothes and pasteboard crowns appeared under grand canopied 'thrones' before 'the people'" (2). What are the stylistic origins of these thrones? An admired costurera insists they are purely Cuban—her godmother's tradición creatively extemporized. On the other hand, "Louis XV—all the Luises" serve as an inspiration for a highly regarded throne-maker. Still another expresses disapproval of all this highfalutin' garb and urges a return to African sources. Thus is a colorful investigation introduced, although readers, alas, have to wait until the second half of the book to hear the rest of the story.

Meanwhile, the concatenation of objects viewed in the botánica is followed by an exasperating run-down of all the theories of tradition and innovation, to say nothing of a tangle of references, stubborn metonymies, and nit-picking. Academe at its worst, one might say. Herskovits gets his comeuppance from Andrew Apter; even the Thompson school of "Black Atlantic Cultural Currents" takes a hit, as Brown validates his own performance in advocating "hard-won struggles" over "passive survivals." Somewhat indelicately he makes much of the fact that Sidney Mintz and Richard Price quote his dissertation with approval in the 1992 reprinting of their 1976 essay, "The Birth of African-American Culture."

With part 2, Brown's genius for descriptive presentation of handwork is finally allowed to arise from the clutter in which it has been mired. Here his imagination takes off on wings provided by Lydia Cabrera, Cuba's outstanding ethnofolklorist of La Regla de Ocha. During early phases of fieldwork in her native Havana, Cabrera accompanied two elderly priestesses, Omí Tomí and Oddedeí, to a Middle Day celebration of a newly initiated daughter of Cabrera's own tutelary santo, Yemayá. Was this the occasion, Brown wonders (210), when Oddedeí famously observed that "to make a santo is to make a king, and kariocha is a ceremony of kings, like those of the palace of the Obá Lucumí"? (El Monte 1968: 24 n.1). And where is this palace? Perhaps always virtually over there in Africa, but most reliably in the here-and-now toward which the three ladies wend their way. Only a few more strides will suffice for them to cross the threshold beyond which a patiently rigged stage set will disclose its soaring canopy, valances, panels, and gleaming swatches of rich cloth suspended and parted to reveal the initiate costumed as her oricha.

Brown's leap across the Atlantic from the pseudohistorical, prototypical palace of Obakòso (aka Chango) to the local throne room communally prepared to receive a new daughter of the goddess of the sea into the Lucumí religion is followed by another happy speculation. Omí Tomí is a seamstress who had sewn imported fabrics for Lydia Cabrera's grandmother and presumably also for other privileged colonial women, as well as for statues of Catholic saints on the occasion of their feasts. Surely her needle and thread had also put together festive costumes for dignitaries of cabildos, auxiliary Catholic associations which painstakingly evolved into casas de ocha, the basic units of creolized Yoruba/Lucumí religion. A half-century later their accoutrements continue to reflect Oddedeí's visionary palace and Omí Tomí's amalgamated patterns.

A resourceful...