Dancing Wisdom, Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomble (review)

Whether or not she would describe Dancing Wisdom as such, Yvonne Daniel has written a near perfect example of “experimental ethnography,” of which such experimentation is outlined and analyzed in the now somewhat classic work Anthropology as Cultural Critique (Marcus and Fischer 1986). While some anthropologists and other social scientists will claim, and some of my students will hope, that the experimental moment in anthropology is now over, gratefully Yvonne Daniel seems to have resisted the trend if Dancing Wisdom is to be taken as evidence for my claim.

In keeping with the theme of experimental moment in the human sciences as put forth by George E. Marcus and Michael M.J. Fischer, Dancing Wisdom has the complex mixture of theory, various models of ethnographic descriptive narrative, and the intersubjective dimensions of fieldwork that I think fittingly matches the subject matter of the book: embodied knowledge in three of the major African Diasporic ritual/healing traditions of Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba and Bahian Candomble.

Some of the metaphors that have been used to describe both experimental ethnography and the African Diasporic religions are pastiche, collage, melange, hybridity, and mestizaje. Such metaphoric descriptions serve to undermine the more traditional characterization of these rich traditions of ritual healing as syncretistic. Syncretistic is a term that has long troubled me, since historically, it is understood that what is being synchronized are various so-called “primitive” religious traditions with, in this case, Christianity, thus implying that Christianity is the superior, more authentic and more sophisticated religious tradition to which these others only aspire. Thus they need to graft onto Christianity in order to have any kind of relevance or claim to truth whatsoever. Gratefully, Yvonne Daniel has managed to present to her readers a picture of the African Diasporic religions which depicts that as equal in sophistication and authenticity and which renders them as real and true as are any and all religious traditions of the world, past and present.

In my many years as student, dare I say scholar, of the African Diasporic religions in the Americas, Yvonne Daniel’s Dancing Wisdom is among the few books that I have encountered, which attempts to put the major African Diasporic religious/ritual healing traditions in conversation with each other. Whenever I have taught a course on the anthropology of religion or, more specifically, a course on the Africanbased religious traditions in the Caribbean and Latin America, one of the claims that I have made is that while Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba (I confess that in terms of the traditions that emerge out of Cuba, I continue to use the world Santeria rather than Yoruba) and Bahian Candomble (I confess I use the phrase Brazilian Candomble rather than Bahian), I often point out that while each of these traditions has its own unique local expression with a lot of room for variation, even within a particular tradition, nevertheless, all three share a common ritual structure, a common set of symbols and healing and ritual practices and a common worldview. This Daniel manages to demonstrate with skill in Dancing Wisdom’s Chapter One, “Deciphering Diaspora Dances: The Origin Nations and Belief Systems” and Chapter Two, “Body Knowledge at the Cross Roads.” By putting Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba and Bahian Candomble in conversation with each other in the way she does, Daniel provides a comprehensive view of both local knowledge and practice and global knowledge and practice, all within the context of rich and thick ethnographic description. To do this, as I am sure readers of this review will already know, is a central element of anthropological research, i.e., to explore the relationship between the particular or local and the universal or global, with the understanding, as Margaret Mead reminded us so many years go, that the particulars far outweigh the universals. Here too, Daniels exemplifies this important aspect of the ethnographic enterprise. She does as a thorough job as...