The Cooking of History

How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

Stephan Palmié

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780226019734
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Soziologie

Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santería and other religions related to Orisha worship—a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa—Stephan Palmié has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In The Cooking of History he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of the Afro-Atlantic World. Understood largely through its rituals and ceremonies, Santería and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmié argues, precisely by relying on the notion of an aboriginal African past, and by claiming to authenticate these religions via their findings, anthropologists—some of whom have converted to these religions—have exerted considerable influence upon contemporary practices. Critiquing widespread and damaging simplifications that posit religious practices as stable and self-contained, Palmié calls for a drastic new approach that properly situates cultural origins within the complex social environments and scholarly fields in which they are investigated.

CHAPTER ONE

On Yoruba Origins, for Example . . .

Where better to start than at the beginnings? “The story of the spirit begins in Africa, among a nation of people called the Yoruba in what is now known as Nigeria,” wrote Joseph Murphy (1988, 7) in what probably was the first English-language monograph on regla de ocha entitled, not insignificantly, Santería: An African Religion in America. “In global context,” George Brandon (1993, 1) would echo him soon after in a book that bore the telling title Santería: From Africa to the New World, “Santería belongs to the transatlantic tradition of Yoruba religion, a religious tradition with millions of adherents in Africa and the Americas, and should be seen as a variant of that tradition, just as there are regional and doctrinal variants within the Christian, Buddhist and Islamic tradition.” I, too, opened the published version of my dissertation by citing a vignette offered by Morton Marks (1974, 82–83) about an incident of possession by the oricha Changó he had witnessed in New York’s Central Park in the summer of 1970, arguing that what Marks had seen was the “taking on of human shape” of the “deified fourth aláàfin (ruler) of the empire of the Oyo-Yoruba that had disintegrated more than a hundred years earlier” (Palmié 1991, 1). How in the world, I must ask myself today, did I think I knew that?

The answer is as simple as its implications are complex. By then, of course, Murphy, Brandon, and I were all looking back on a long-consolidated topos that had enabled discoveries such as ours for close to three generations. Nor was it difficult then to elicit corroborative evidence from the mouths of our priestly interlocutors in New York or Miami. And yet, I have scoured my old fieldnotes, but found no data on a crucial question: why did my friends in Miami think they were practicing a “Yoruba-derived religion”? The reason is simple: it never even occurred to me to ask! In part, this was so because I do not think that a single self-identified santero I met in 1985 would have denied that his or her religion had “Yoruba origins”—whatever that might have meant to them, then—or volunteered a different attribution of origin (except the generic “de orígen africano”). But this, of course, is no excuse. I do remember my eyebrows rising when told that because Santería was a New World branch of Yoruba religion, it was at least 4,000 years old (“más antíguo que todo este cristianismo” [older than all this Christianism]). Yet what I, like many others, failed to ask was precisely that: what in the world the word Yoruba actually meant to them?

What I do know, of course, is what “Yoruba” meant to us—the Murphys, Brandons, and Palmiés who had embarked upon “studying ‘Afro’-‘Cuban’ ‘religion’” at the time. We had read the works of Ortiz, Cabrera, Herskovits, Bascom, Lucas, Farrow, Idowu, Verger, or Maupoil, and our perusal of this literature had amply prepared us to find what we had set out to discover: namely more or less vivid correspondences between the practices of our ethnographic interlocutors and the literature on “The Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria” (as the title of one of Bascom’s [1969a] more popular books published in Holt, Rinehart and Winston’s series of potted ethnographic syntheses reads). But so had a good number of my informants. At the time, Miami’s largest and best-stocked emporium for Afro-Cuban ritual paraphernalia, Botánica Nena, displayed overprized copies of Bascom’s Ifa Divination (1969b) and Sixteen Cowries (1980) on its book racks, next to the volumes that Lydia Cabrera, who was then living in a pitifully small apartment in Coral Cables, was churning out at a fast clip to keep herself and her desperately ill partner María Teresa de las Rojas financial afloat.¹ And so did plenty of the several dozens of smaller botánicas in town. Indeed, if anyone still needed to be pointed toward discovering the obvious, the connection could be seen right there: on the bookshelves.

But why, I now ask myself (and I invite the reader to join me in this), was all of this so seemingly obvious to us? Why did we not bother to ask what cultural work the by then routine attributions of “Yoruba origins” to Afro-Cuban ritual practices, liturgical objects, and theological concepts were performing, not just for us students of such matters, but for our ethnographic interlocutors as well? As I have written elsewhere, apropos the patent similarities between Afro-Cuban and Yoruba ceremonial objects, “I initially saw little reason to question the epistemological premises on which [my discoveries of Yoruba elements in Miami’s Afro-Cuban religious praxis] were necessarily based. If a ritual fly whisk in Afro-Cuban religion looks like a Yoruba fly whisk, and is called by the name of a Yoruba fly whisk—ìrùkè—then where is the problem?” (Palmié 2008a, 3–4). I took the question in a different direction in the publication I just cited, basically asking what it might mean to use the qualifier “African” for anything occurring outside the African continent. Here I want to redeploy it to point to another problem: not what does it mean to impute a Yoruba (or whatever other Old World) past to an object wielded in contemporary New World practices, but what does it mean to affix the label “Yoruba” to such a past? In order to flesh out the implications of this question, let me step back a good century and a half and take a look at the works and lives of two Yoruba-speakers whose biographies never intersected, but whose agency arguably came to underwrite the topoi that—however belatedly—guided the Murphys, Brandons, and Palmiés of the 1980s in essaying our characterizations of Santería as a “Yoruba religion in the New World.”

Two “Yoruba” and Their Projects

Was the Reverend Samuel Johnson (1846–1901) a Yoruba? At first glance, and in the face of a massive scholarly consensus that Johnson’s The History of the Yorubas from the Earliest Times to the Beginning of the British Protectorate (1921) represents both a towering achievement of colonial African indigenous historiography and “the indispensable foundation for all historical and anthropological work on the Yoruba” (Peel 1989, 198), the question appears disingenuous if not perverse. If Johnson has indeed been hailed as the “Thucydides of the Yoruba,” (Smith 1994, 168) would it make any more sense to debate his “Yoruba-ness” than to question the “Greekness” of the author of the History of the Peloponnesian War?² Still, and in a rather concrete sense, any historically meaningful answer to a question about what some of us today might call Johnson’s “ethnic identity” would demand specification not just of its object but of its predicate as well. What was he when?

This much is clear: at the time of his birth in Sierra Leone in 1846—or even in 1897 when he completed the manuscript of the book elaborating a sense of “Yoruba-ness” that would eventually become a critical qualifier of ethnic allegiances in the formation of the Nigerian nation state in 1963—Johnson was not (at least not in any contemporarily valid sense) a Yoruba himself. He only became so in the aftermath of processes he himself had helped set in motion, and within which we—in contrast to himself—can retrospectively situate him. Such backward-looping forms of narrative incorporation—the inevitable tendency toward “retrospective realignment” of the past, as Arthur Danto (1965) calls it—are in themselves hardly noteworthy.³ Surely, by calling Samuel Johnson in, say, 1854, an “eight year old Yoruba child living in Sierra Leone” we are simply placing the events of his life under a description that arguably was not available to him (or anyone else for that matter) at a time when Sigismund Koelle (1854, 5) famously charged that his fellow CMS missionaries

have very erroneously made use of the name “Yórūba” in reference to the whole nation [known as Aku in Sierra Leone], supposing that the Yórūban is the most powerful of the Aku tribe. But this appellation is liable to far greater objections than that of “Aku,” and ought to be forthwith abandoned; for it is, in the first place unhistorical, having never been used for the whole Aku nation by anybody, except the Missionaries; secondly it involves a twofold use of the word “Yórūba,” which leads to a confusion of notions, for in one instance the same word has to be understood of a whole, in another, only of part; and, thirdly, the name being thus incorrect, can never be received by the different tribes as a name for their whole nation.

History was to prove Koelle wrong. Within little more than half a century of the publication of his Polyglotta Africana, Christianized Aku returnees like Samuel Johnson had not just invalidated Koelle’s second and third objection to the use of the term Yoruba among the literate elite in Lagos and some parts of its hinterland. They had also begun to project it into the past to such an extent that even their mythical ancestors had come under a “Yoruba-description.” But here, precisely, is where the problem lies: calling Samuel Johnson—or Oduduwa, for that matter—a “Yoruba” avant la lettre in any other than a metaphorical fashion locks us into the present in a way that risks obscuring precisely those historical realities this designation is supposed to address.

Of course, to dispense with (or even only bracket) principally inadmissible commonsense backwards extrapolations from twentieth-century data might invite the ultimately sterile sort of “invention of this and that” arguments that, in denying the accessibility of any historical reality beneath discourse, amount to “nothing but the reverse of the objectivism they claim to denounce,” as Amselle (1993, 23) puts it. There is, however, a middle ground that, so it seems to me, ought to be defensible on both epistemological and methodological grounds. And it lies in the recognition of the mutually implicated historicity of both social life and the languages, descriptive or analytical, by which we represent it. Few have better illustrated this than John Peel in his magnificently documented Religious Encounter and the Making of the Yoruba (2000), and it is in the spirit (though not letter) of his contributions that I would like to turn to Samuel Johnson and a number of his Atlantically dispersed “fellow-Yoruba” in spe to probe the limits of discourse and agency in the making of what today arguably is the global rubric “Yoruba.”

The son of a British-educated Saro who may have been related to the Alaafin (sovereign of the Oyo state) Abiodun,⁴ Johnson spent his formative years in a residually German Pietist Christian Missionary Society mission household in Ibadan in the 1860s, where, at the time, the term Yoruba could have held little meaning other than as a Hausa epithet for the subjects of the long-since-devastated empire of Oyo. That Johnson eventually came to construct an Oyo empire he never had known into the prototype for a Christian Yoruba nation, on the basis of his experience as a CMS catechist at Ibadan’s Aremo quarter and pastor at New Oyo, is a story unnecessary to detail here.⁵ Instead, it is sufficient to note that while by the time of Johnson’s death the term Yoruba may have come to circumscribe a project, perhaps even a vocation, for the good reverend, its referents were still a set of potentialities rather than sociological or political facts antedating the Atlantic dispersal of significant numbers of the constituency of the Yoruba nation Johnson dreamed of:

In terms of a personal agenda, the History may be read as a resolute bid by a man who had been involuntarily torn from his roots—his parents were enslaved and became Christians in Sierra Leone, returning to Yorubaland in 1858, when Samuel was eleven—to re-plant himself in his native soil; and who realized that his homeland needed to be re-imagined and re-configured in order for him to be truly at home there. The memory of Abiodun’s vanished Oyo had to be connected to the new, extended category of “Yoruba” introduced by the CMS, and Christianity needed somehow to be integrated into its history. (Peel 2000, 305)

To all extents and practical purposes, such a “nation” may nowadays be said to exist in the geographical ambit that once formed the southwestern part of the British West African colonial protectorate to which the name “Nigeria”—originally suggested by Lady Lugard—was to become permanently affixed upon independence. But just as the name “Nigeria” had not been coined when Johnson died in 1901,⁶ the term Yoruba did not yet designate an entity that he could have claimed instrumental allegiance to at the time of his death.

The same could be said of one of Johnson’s contemporaries—a man whose traces in the documentary record allow us to reconstruct a few tantalizing details in the life of one Remigio Herrera, but whose historical importance is encapsulated in the (patently Yoruba) name Adechina, by which he is remembered today among practitioners of the Afro-Cuban religious formation known as regla de ocha, Santería, or, more recently, Lukumí religion.⁷ When Ño Remigio-Adechina died of senile debility at the officially listed age of ninety-eight in his home on 31 Calle San Ciprián (later Fresneda) in the town of Regla’s Third Ward in 1905, he had already acquired the stature of a living legend as the last African-born babalao active in Cuba.⁸ Adechina is nowadays regarded as the fundamento (foundation) of the cult of ifá in Cuba, and hence as a crucial agent in the globalization of what the more than 600 delegates from a good score of countries to the Eighth Global Orisha Congress in Havana in June of 2003 unanimously endorsed as the “religion of the twenty-first century.”

Yet irrespective of Ño Remigio-Adechina’s African birth, the facial scarifications he proudly displayed in his only known photographic portrait, his polygynous (or bigamist—depending on the frame of reference) marriage patterns, and his reputation as the most formidable babalao in Cuba in the late nineteenth century:⁹ if Ño Remigio-Adechina had ever heard the word “Yoruba,” it would likely have been late in his life, and on the western shores of the Atlantic at that. In other words, and similar to Samuel Johnson’s case, his “Yoruba-ness” is an artifact of retrospective recognition—though, again, as with Johnson, such recognition would be unthinkable were it not for the impact of the very agency of these two men on the emergence of the social and discursive formations in which we now, perhaps all too rashly, tend to locate them.

Probably born around the end of the first or beginning of the second decade of the nineteenth century, the man who came to be known as Ño Remigio-Adechina enters the historical record as a youthful slave in 1833 when he was baptized in the parochial church of the Nueva Paz township of the province of La Habana.¹⁰ The name he received was “Remigio Lucumí,” in the characteristic fashion of the time where the baptismal first name was modified with a term indicating African provenance (on which see below). We do not know when or how Remigio Lucumí acquired his freedom, but it is clear that upon emancipation he took the surname of his former owner, Don Miguel Antonio Herrera. By 1881 he is listed in a census of the town of Regla as the financially unencumbered owner of the house on San Ciprián. We also have the birth certificates of his daughter Josefa (1864) and son Teodoro (1866), and the list of sponsors of his (second) 1891 Catholic marriage to Francisca Burlet (the mother of his known children) leaves no doubt that by the 1870s, Remigio Herrera—a stone mason by trade—had become a socially well-connected, modestly wealthy citizen of the town of Regla. In other words, he was a moderately successful, but otherwise not especially remarkable, member of the urban “bourgeoisie of color” (Deschamps Chapeaux and Pérez de la Riva 1974) that had grown up under the shadow of the colonial state and its agro-industrial slave economy. Given this social position, people like Remigio Herrera had tended to cast their lot with the independence movements of 1868 and 1895 and were, by the time of his death, becoming increasingly embittered about their lack of inclusion into the republican Cuban national project (Helg 1995).

More significant for our present purposes is a set of documents dating from the period of the first American occupation of Cuba (1899–1902). For here, the octogenarian Remigio Herrera appears as a signatory of a petition to the Office of the Mayor of Havana and the American military government filed by José Cornelio Delgado and Francisco Roche on behalf of an association named Sociedad de Socorros Mutuos bajo la Advocación de Santa Bárbara Perteneciente a la Nación Lucumí, sus Hijos y Descendientes.¹¹ This society had legally registered with the Spanish colonial authorities in 1893, but now saw its privileges of performing “the African dance known by the name of tambor [i.e., drum]” on public holidays unjustly curtailed by Havana’s new civilian administration.¹² Like the other signatories to the petition, Ño Remigio stated his civil status as “born African, nationality Lucumí” (“natura[l] de África de nacionalidad lucumí”), and the attached reglamento (official statutes) of the association shows that he had been its honorary president since at least ...