Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-c4f8m Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-20T01:44:20.505Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

When Is a Thing? Transduction and Immediacy in Afro-Cuban Ritual; or, ANT in Matanzas, Cuba, Summer of 1948

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 October 2018

Stephan Palmié
Stephan Palmié*
Affiliation:
Anthropology, University of Chicago
*
palmiestephan@gmail.com
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Revisiting William R. Bascom's 1948 ethnography of Afro-Cuban religious practices in Jovellanos (a semi-urban site in Cuba's Province of Matanzas) in light of current theoretical concerns in our discipline, this essay constitutes a thought experiment. As such it seeks to re-describe some of Bascom's data in terms of Actor-Network Theory, to see if his patent puzzlement over his interlocutors’ statements concerning the liveliness and even personhood of mineral objects—stones that embody, rather than represent deities—can be resolved that way. At the same time, I offer a critique of current attempts to redefine our discipline's mission under the sign of an “ontological turn” that recurs to notions of radical alterity that strike me as potentially essentialist, and certainly profoundly ahistorical. Drawing on Karen Barad's theories of “agential realism,” I suggest that contemporary concerns with post-humanist anti-representationalism need to be tempered by a view of our epistemic pursuits, including those of anthropology, as embedded in thoroughly historical—and so fundamentally emergent—ontologies. In light of such considerations, the essay concludes with a vision of anthropology as a form of knowledge that cannot afford to evade the historical transformations of the social worlds it aims to illuminate, nor those of the concurrent transformations in its own epistemic orientations. Instead, it must reframe its goals in terms of conjunctures of ontologies and epistemologies of mutually relational and, most importantly, historical scope.

Type
Gods in Things
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 60 , Issue 4 , October 2018 , pp. 786 - 809
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2018 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

REFERENCES

Barad, Karen. 2007. Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Barber, Karin. 1981. How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes towards the Orisa. Africa 51: 724–45.Google Scholar
Barthes, Roland. 1981. Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography. New York: Hill and Wang.Google Scholar
Bascom, William R. 1938. Letter to Melville J. Herskovits, 25 May. Northwestern University, Melville J. Herskovits Papers, box 3, f. 19.Google Scholar
Bascom, William R. 1948. William R. Bascom Papers, University of California Berkeley Bancroft Library, BANC MSS 82/163c, carton 26, f. 2, Cuba 1948.Google Scholar
Bascom, William R. 1950. The Focus of Cuban Santeria. Southwestern Journal of Anthropology 6, 1: 64–68.Google Scholar
Brandon, George. 1993. Santería from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Brown, David H. 1989. Garden in the Machine: Afro-Cuban Sacred Art and Performance in Urban New Jersey and New York. PhD diss., Yale University.Google Scholar
Brown, David H. 1996. Towards an Ethnoaesthetic of Santería Ritual Arts: The Practice of Altar-Making and Gift Exchange. In Lindsay, Arturo, ed., Santería Aesthetics in Contemporary Latin America. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 77–146.Google Scholar
Brown, David H. 2003. Santería Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Cabrera, Lydia. 1983 [1954]. El Monte. Miami: Edición del Chiucherekú.Google Scholar
Callon, Michel. 1986. Some Elements of a Sociology of Translation: Domestication of the Scallops and the Fishermen of St. Brieuc Bay. In Law, John, ed., Power, Action, and Belief: A New Sociology of Knowledge. London: Routledge, 196–223.Google Scholar
Cannell, Fenella. 2005. The Christianity of Anthropology. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 11: 335–56.Google Scholar
Capone, Stefania. 2010. Searching for Africa in Brazil: Power and Tradition in Candomblé. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Cerullo, Karen A. 2009. Nonhumans in Social Interaction Annual Review of Sociology 35: 531–52.Google Scholar
Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Descola, Philippe. 2013. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Descola, Philippe. 2014. Modes of Being and Forms of Predication. HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 4, 1: 271–80.Google Scholar
Dornbach, Mária. 1977. Gods in Earthenware Vessels: Gods and Their Representations in the Afro-Cuban Santeria Religion. Acta Ethnographica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 26: 285–308.Google Scholar
Engelke, Matthew E. 2007. A Problem of Presence: Beyond Scripture in an African Church. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Espírito Santo, Diana. 2013. Materiality, Cosmogony and Presence among Cuban Spirits and Mediums. In Santo, Diana Espírito and Tassi, Nico, eds., Making Spirits: Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religions. London: I. B. Tauris, 33–56.Google Scholar
Evans-Pritchard, E. E. 1937. Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. Oxford: Clarendon Press.Google Scholar
García, David F. 2014. Contesting Anthropology's and Ethnomusicology's Will to Power in the Field: William R. Bascom's and Richard A. Waterman's Fieldwork in Cuba, 1948. MUSICultures 40: 1–33.Google Scholar
Gell, Alfred. 1998. Art and Agency: An Anthropological Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Gellner, Ernest. 1975. Our Current Sense of History. In Dumoulin, Jerôme and Moisie, Dominique, eds., The Historian between the Ethnologist and the Futurist. Paris: Mouton, 3–24.Google Scholar
Goldman, Marcio. 2009. An Afro-Brazilian Theory of the Creative Process: An Essay in Anthropological Symmetrization. Social Analysis 53, 2: 108–29.Google Scholar
Gunning, Tom. 2004. What's the Point of an Index? Or, Faking Photographs. Nordicom Review 25: 39–49.Google Scholar
Hacking, Ian. 2002. Historical Ontology. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.Google Scholar
Halloy, Arnaud. 2013. Objects, Bodies and Gods: A Cognitive Ethnography of an Ontological Dynamic in the Xangô Cult (Recife-Brazil). In Santo, Diana Espírito and Tassi, Nico, eds., Making Spirits: Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religions. London: I. B. Tauris, 133–58.Google Scholar
Henare, Amiria, Holbraad, Martin, and Wastell, Sari. 2007. Introduction: Thinking through Things. In Henare, Amiria, Holbraad, Martin, and Wastell, Sari, eds., Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge, 1–31.Google Scholar
Henningsen, Gustav. 1994. La evangelización negra: diffusion de la magia europea por la América colonial. Revista de la Inquisición 3: 9–27.Google Scholar
Herskovits, Melville J. 1937a. African Gods and Catholic Saints in New World Negro Belief. American Anthropologist 39: 635–43.Google Scholar
Herskovits, Melville J. 1937b. Life in a Haitian Valley. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Herskovits, Melville J. 1948. Man and His Works. New York: Knopf.Google Scholar
Holbraad, Martin. 2007. The Power of Powder: Multiplicity and Motion in the Divinatory Cosmology of Cuban Ifá (or Mana Again). In Henare, Amiria, Holbraad, Martin, and Wastell, Sari, eds., Thinking through Things: Theorising Artefacts Ethnographically. London: Routledge, 189–225.Google Scholar
Holbraad, Martin. 2009. Ontology, Ethnography, Archaeology: An Afterword on the Ontography of Things. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 19, 3: 431–41.Google Scholar
Holbraad, Martin. 2012. Truth in Motion: The Recursive Anthropology of Cuban Divination. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Holbraad, Martin and Pedersen, Morton Axel. 2017. The Ontological Turn: An Anthropological Exposition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.Google Scholar
Hollis, Martin and Lukes, Steven, eds. 1982. Rationality and Relativism. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Irvine, Judith and Gal, Susan. 2000. Language Ideology and Linguistic Differentiation. In Kroskrity, Paul V., ed., Regimes of Language: Ideologies, Polities, and Languages. Santa Fe: School of American Research, 35–85.Google Scholar
Johnson, Paul C. 2014. Introduction: Spirits and Things in the Making of the Afro-Atlantic World. In Johnson, Paul C., ed., Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1–22.Google Scholar
Johnson, Paul C. n.d. (forthcoming). Spirit Incorporation in Candomblé. In Vasquéz, Manuel A. and Narayanan, Vasudha, eds., Companion to Material Religion. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb. 2003. Semiotics and the Social Analysis of Material Things. Language and Communication 23: 409–25.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb. 2007. Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Missionary Encounter. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Keane, Webb. 2013. On Spirit Writing: Materialities of Language and the Religious Work of Transduction. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 19: 1–17.Google Scholar
Kirksey, Eben and Helmreich, Stefan. 2010. The Emergence of Multispecies Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology 25: 545–76.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Cambridge: MIT Press.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 2009. Perspectivism: Type or Bomb? Anthropology Today 25, 2: 1–2.Google Scholar
Latour, Bruno. 2010. On the Modern Cult of the Factish Gods. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Meillassoux, Quentin and Mackay, Robin. 2012. The Contingency of the Laws of Nature. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30, 2: 322–34.Google Scholar
Mol, Annemarie. 2002. The Body Multiple: Ontology in Medical Practice. Durham: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
O'Neill, J. C. 2003. Son of Man, Stone of Blood (John 1: 51). Novum Testamentum 45: 374–81.Google Scholar
Palmié, Stephan. 1991. Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion. Frankfurt: Peter Lang.Google Scholar
Palmié, Stephan. 2013. The Cooking of History: How not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Peel, J.D.Y. 2000. Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.Google Scholar
Pels, Peter. 2008. The Modern Fear of Matter: Reflections on the Protestantism of Victorian Science. Material Religion 4, 3: 264–83.Google Scholar
Pels, Peter. 2015. The Raw and the Overcooked. Magic, Ritual and Witchcraft 10, 2: 218–24.Google Scholar
Pérez, Elizabeth. 2016. Religion in the Kitchen: Cooking, Talking, and the Making of Black Atlantic Traditions. New York: NYU Press.Google Scholar
Peters, John Durham. 2015. The Marvelous Clouds: Towards a Philosophy of Elemental Media. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Pickering, Andrew. 2010. The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency, and Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Pina Cabral, João de. 2017. World: An Anthropological Examination. Chicago: HAU Books/University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Portell Vilá, Hermino. 1929. El folklore en Jovellanos. Archivos del Folklore Cubano 4: 53–59.Google Scholar
Pyyhtinen, Olli and Tamminen, Sakari. 2011. We Have Never Been only Human: Foucault and Latour on the Question of the Anthropos. Anthropological Theory 11: 135–52.Google Scholar
Ramos, Arthur. 1934. O negro brasileiro: Ethnografia religiosa e psicanálise. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira.Google Scholar
Sahlins, Marshall. 1981. Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdom. ASAO Special Publications 1. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.Google Scholar
Sansi Roca, Roger. 2007. Fetishes and Monuments: Afro-Brazilian Art and Culture in the 20th Century. New York: Berghahn Books.Google Scholar
Scholte, Bob. 1984. Review: Reason and Culture: The Universal and the Particular Revisited. American Anthropologist 86: 960–65.Google Scholar
Schuetz, Alfred. 1945. On Multiple Realities. Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 5: 533–76.Google Scholar
Strathern, Marilyn. 1996. Cutting the Network. Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 2: 517–35.Google Scholar
Suchman, Lucy. 2011. Subject Objects. Feminist Theory 12, 2: 119–45.Google Scholar
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 2003. Adieu, Culture: A New Duty Arises. In Global Transformations. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 97–116.Google Scholar
Verger, Pierre. 1998. Notas sobre o culto aos orixá e voduns. São Paulo: Editora USP.Google Scholar
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo. 2003. And (after-dinner speech given at Anthropology and Science, 5th Decennial Conference of the Association of Social Anthropologists of the UK and Commonwealth). Manchester Papers in Social Anthropology 7. Manchester: Manchester University Press.Google Scholar
Viveiros De Castro, Eduardo. 2012. Cosmological Perspectivism in Amazonia and Elsewhere. Hau Masterclass Series 1. Manchester: HAU Network of Ethnographic Theory, http://Haubooks.Org/Cosmological-Perspectivism-In-Amazonia/.Google Scholar
Wagner, Roy. 1981. The Invention of Culture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.Google Scholar
Wilson, Bryan R., ed., 1977. Rationality. Oxford: Blackwell.Google Scholar
Wirtz, Kristina. 2007. Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería: Speaking a Sacred World. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.Google Scholar
Wirtz, Kristina. 2014. Spiritual Agency, Materiality, and Knowledge in Cuba. In Johnson, Paul C., ed., Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 99–129.Google Scholar
Wisdom, J., Austen, J. L., and Ayer, A. J.. 1946. Symposium: Other Minds. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 20: 122–97.Google Scholar