Worldview, the Orichas, and Santería: Africa to Cuba and Beyond (review)

Mercedes Cros Sandoval is Professor Emeritus at the Department of Social Sciences at Miami Dade College and former adjunct professor of anthropology, Department of Psychiatry, at the School of Medicine of the University of Miami. Her book, Worldview, the Orichas, and Santería: Africa to Cuba and Beyond, is organized in twenty-four chapters with their respective conclusions, and divided in three parts. It also includes seven appendixes (pp. 359–371). In terms of the methodology utilized to collect religious systems data, Cros Sandoval uses the following techniques: historical data analysis, formal interviews, participant observation, intimate personal conversations, recorded oral histories and musical reminiscences, as well as content analysis of Santería’s priests and priestesses’ notebooks (pp. xxx–xxxii).

Part 1 of this work addresses the origins of Santería (pp. 1–160). It describes aspects of the worldview of the Yoruba religion and characteristics of the worldview of a large portion of the Cuban population that were shared with the author through interviews. It also describes the establishment and development of this religion in Cuba; its structure, religious paraphernalia, and practices. Included in this section is a biographical account that sheds light and provides information on Santería’s functions and accommodations within a rural setting. In this section, the author discusses the loss of some of the Yoruba beliefs about reincarnation and the consequences of this loss for the religion. An additional discussion in this section is the significant value that Santería’s function as a health and wellbeing—therapeutic—delivery system has had in attracting new adherents, especially Cuban non-blacks and people of non-Cuban extraction.

Part 2 provides a comparison of the Orichas in Africa and their corresponding deities in Cuban Santería (pp. 161–306). This section is an English version, revised and expanded, of Cros Sandoval’s book La religión afrocubana (1975). It includes an extensive description of Nigerian and Afro-Cuban religious mythology. This segment is an effort to engage the reader in both the humane, and the extraordinary and supernatural elements and environment of Santería. The purpose is to provide a substantial basis for interpreting types and degrees of change in Santería.

In part 3 (pp. 307–358) the author focuses on the changes that have occurred to Santería in the island and in exile since the Cuban Revolution. It concludes with “New Ways and Current Trends” in Santería practice and suggests that worldview analysis of Santería (which is based in Michael Kearney and Florence Kluckhohn’s “Models for Worldview Analysis” (pp. xvii–xix) in new historical, socio-cultural, religious, political, and ecological contexts will be important, almost essential, for our understanding of cultural continuities and change in this specific African-derived religion in the Americas in the future. Systematically exploring every facet of Santeria’s worldview, Sandoval examines how practitioners have adapted received beliefs and practices in order to reconcile them with new environments, from plantation slavery to exile in the United States of America.

In this section, Cros Sandoval also discusses the moral dimensions of Santería, providing an outline of some of the ideals of behavior that are inhered in this religious system. The reason for this discussion is that the intermediary divinities (Orichas), along with all other Santeria’s Supreme Being (Olodumare) creations, reflect the simultaneous characteristics of virtuosity and malevolency, components of their essential nature. It also elaborates upon the value and usefulness of worldview analysis as related to the author’s understanding of religious logico-structural integration. This sort of analysis and understanding contributes to a better comprehension of continuity and change processes in Santería conceived as a cultural and religious system (pp. 307–358). Such examination and understanding supports her general hypothesis concerning the linkage that relates West African Yoruba worldviews and Afro-Cuban Santería. Ultimately, she asserts that...