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

Noted scholar of Cuban dance Yvonne Daniel has written the book of her life with Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé, covering nearly thirty years of research in Haiti, Cuba, and Bahia, Brazil. Through the accumulation of her anthropological fieldwork; her dance and religious studies of Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé; and her work as dancer, educator, and arts administrator for some of the key Cuban-U.S. cultural exchanges, Dancing Wisdom places the author front and center in her quest to understand the continuing influence of African religions in the Americas and their centrality in complex dance and drumming traditions.

Daniel covers a great deal of her own scholarly, spiritual, and personal experiences in this sweeping panorama of African-based religions and dance. As anthropologist Sheila Walker states in her book endorsement, Dancing Wisdom is “[a]n ambitious, foundational book that could not have been written by anyone else.” It is precisely because Daniel is so intimate with these traditions and culture bearers over such a large span of her life that she is able to go well beyond the participant-observer model of anthropology, like a twenty-first-century Katherine Dunham or Pearl Primus. She dissects similarities and differences of the three religious practices and their use of dance ritual, discusses cosmic theoretical frames within the ritual experience; discerns previous scholarly analyses and further explicates historical antecedents among the West and Central African nations from which the three religions were spawned; enumerates her development of teaching models to enable U.S. dance students to learn some of the depth of this cultural material; and, at the same time, entices us into the center of personal transformation through the experience of the dance movements and corresponding rhythms. Daniel allows herself to be at once an acute scholar, a precise and knowledgeable dancer, and a fully participating religious seeker.

In chapter I, “Deciphering Diaspora Dances,” the author immediately offers the reader snapshots of dance rituals in all three geographical sites. We are allowed into her first trip to Haiti in 1974 as a young dance student of the Dunham Technique and Haitian dances with Lavinia Williams Yarborough, then living in Haiti. From her first attendance at a ceremòni for the lwas (Haitian divinities) officiated by the oungan (priest), she draws conclusions about the centrality of dance when she observes:

During that first ceremony I realized how much I had learned from dancing in Haitian dance classes. I recognized and understood a great deal about Haitian religion just from the process of learning the dances. I knew that the dance ritual’s ultimate purpose was to bring transformation of the believing community, such that particular spirits would appear in the bodies of ritual believers.

(12)

She found the same purpose through the dance at a Cuban Yoruba ritual fourteen years later in 1987 in Matanzas, when she was doing her doctoral fieldwork. Yet she notices differences in the use of dance in Cuban ritual, where, “unlike in Haiti, more specific information guides each dance performance; that is, the personality and domain of each divinity” (15). Then, four years later in 1991, the fully degreed dance anthropologist draws us into a Bahian Candomblé ritual. Here she is taken by her friend Gracinha to one of the most recognized terreiros (Candomblé temples), Axé Opõ Afonjá, in Salvador da Bahia. She observes that these terreiros were like “cathedrals” or large compounds with structures for each of the orixás (divinities) and living quarters for the participating members, making the Candomblé ceremonies much more formal than those held in the Cuban casa (devotional space in a home) or Haitian peristil (thatched ritual space). In this way, the three sites and their respective religions and dances are immediately personalized, allowing the reader insider information in order to understand the “embodied knowledge” of the complex cosmology underlying...