A Year in White

C. Lynn Carr

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780813572666
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Ethnic & Tribal Religion

In the Afro-Cuban Lukumi religious tradition—more commonly known in the United States as Santería—entrants into the priesthood undergo an extraordinary fifty-three-week initiation period. During this time, these novices—called iyawo —endure a host of prohibitions, including most notably wearing exclusively white clothing. In  A Year in White, sociologist C. Lynn Carr, who underwent this initiation herself, opens a window on this remarkable year-long religious transformation.
 
In her intimate investigation of the “year in white, ” Carr draws on fifty-two in-depth interviews with other participants, an online survey of nearly two hundred others, and almost a decade of her own ethnographic fieldwork, gathering stories that allow us to see how cultural newcomers and natives thought, felt, and acted with regard to their initiation. She documents how, during the iyawo year, the ritual slowly transforms the initiate’s identity. For the first three months, for instance, the iyawo may not use a mirror, even to shave, and must eat all meals while seated on a mat on the floor using only a spoon and their own set of dishes. During the entire year, the iyawo loses their name and is simply addressed as “iyawo” by family and friends.
 
Carr also shows that this year-long religious ritual—which is carried out even as the iyawo goes about daily life—offers new insight into religion in general, suggesting that the sacred is not separable from the profane and indeed that religion shares an ongoing dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life. Religious expression happens at home, on the streets, at work and school.
 
Offering insight not only into Santería but also into religion more generally, A Year in White makes an important contribution to our understanding of complex, dynamic religious landscapes in multicultural, pluralist societies and how they inhabit our daily lives.
 

1

Situating the Iyawo

Lukumi is an initiatory religion in the United States. In contrast to the emphasis placed on belief or faith in the Christian tradition or on submission in Islam (Prothero 2010), “it is participation in ritual and ceremonial activities . . . that is the focus of religiosity” in this “Afro-Cuban” religious tradition (Clark 2005, 73). Initiations are a primary source of one’s status in Lukumi culture; they determine the practices one is obligated and privileged to perform and the religious knowledge one is permitted to receive. The kariocha ceremony is a particularly important one in Lukumi culture; it is the ticket to entrance “behind the sheet,” the area the uninitiated are not permitted to see. Thus, in many Lukumi houses in the United States, priestly status is more common than the term “priest” generally suggests in Abrahamic traditions.1

In many communities, children are commonly initiated via the kariocha. Some ilés consist of extended families in which priests outnumber those who have not undergone the kariocha ceremony. Children may be initiated as priests because of a promise a parent has made to an Orisha, because there is a health problem the family wants to avoid or overcome, because the parents have been advised in divinatory consultation to do so, or simply because it is now seen as advantageous in some Ocha communities to initiate children as early as possible. I was recently at a Lukumi ceremony where I spoke to an olorisha who told me that all her young grandchildren had undergone priestly ordination already. “People initiate their children as soon as they can afford to do so,” she said. “It’s easier that way.” The perceived advantages of initiating children are that the discipline of the yaworaje is seen as less difficult for very young children, the children’s lives are expected to have fewer obstacles, and the extensive divination that accompanies the initiation is believed to be of great assistance to parents in bringing up their children. Despite the increased popularity of initiation, the process, for both children and adults, is neither simple nor casual.

In the Lukumi tradition, for a year after the kariocha ceremony—alternately called asiento, ocha, crowning, coronation, making santo, making ocha, or having one’s head made—iyawos are encumbered by scores of rules and regulations that encompass most daily and many occasional behaviors and social situations:

He must always dress in white; must not visit bars, jails, cemeteries, hospitals, or other places of contamination; must not drink alcohol or use recreational drugs; must not use profane language; must not shake hands or eat with a knife and fork. A female iyawo may not wear makeup or curl, cut, or dye her hair; a male must be clean shaven. All iyawo must keep their heads covered and may wear no jewelry except their Santería necklaces and bracelets. For the first three months after the initiation, the iyawo may not use a mirror, even to shave. In addition, during that initial period he must eat all meals while seated on a mat on the floor using only a spoon and his own set of dishes. During the entire year, the iyawo loses his name and is simply addressed as “iyawo” by his family and friends (Clark 2005, 77).

This list includes behavioral guidelines regarding dress and adornment, grooming and hygiene, eating and drinking, social interactions, and prohibited areas and activities. Yet that inventory is only partial.2 In addition, iyawos are often told to avoid physical contact with other people unless those others are Lukumi priests or children. They are not to take things directly handed to them from others. In the first three months or longer, iyawos must keep their bodies mostly covered, except for the hands, neck, and face, even in the heat of summer. They should not allow rain to fall on their heads, and (with few exceptions) they must avoid going out after dark. Although the rules vary among houses of Ocha and even sometimes within the same ilé, iyawo life is highly regulated. And lest they seek freedom on the sly, iyawos are traditionally monitored by community members, including those belonging to other religious houses, and are subject to disciplinary penalties for breaking rules.

While allowances are often made for conduct in the workplace, iyawos generally must wear only white. They are even required to use white bags, purses, and umbrellas. But why white? There are several reasons. “White . . . is the color of orí, embodies the purity of the creator and metaowner of this head, Obatalá, and is consistent with the spiritual protection and evolution of the iyawó. White clothes are also consonant with the iyawó’s regimen of spiritual hygiene and regulated program of behavior during the obligatory yaworage, or ‘year of white’” (Brown 2003, 196).3 The multiple associations of white include the clarity of orí, the wholesomeness of Obatalá, and general cleanliness. Yet white dress may be a relatively new addition for iyawos, perhaps chosen for its associations with “the sanitary customs of medical practice—particularly in the context of childbirth,” given the metaphor of birth and rebirth of the priestly initiation ceremony that precedes the yaworaje. White is also associated with “the purity of a woman’s bridal status,” which accords with the theme of sacred marriage in the kariocha (Brown 2003, 354).

In contrast with the detailed accounts and analyses of the Lukumi priestly initiation, scholars have written little about the year in white that follows.4 The focus on the seven-day ocha ceremony at the expense of the 365-day ritual that follows privileges the spectacular over the ordinary and risks missing much of the sociological and religious import of this transformative religious practice in which the extraordinary and the everyday merge. The existing scholarly analyses of the yaworaje can be grouped into three basic sociological themes. First, the year in white is part of a process of identity change that begins in the priestly initiation ceremony to realign the iyawo’s personal and social identification with the Orisha to whom the novice has been dedicated. Second, during the yaworaje, new priests learn to subordinate themselves to the needs of the Orisha and the religious community. Third, the iyawo year is a time when “newborn” initiates are sheltered as children by their “parents” and are viewed as being in need of special protection.

Transformation

The yaworaje can be seen as part of a process of identity death and rebirth that begins with the seven-day priestly initiation ceremony. The kariocha generally proceeds in a manner consistent with rites of passage (van Gennep [1909] 1961) that consist of three basic stages: separation, liminality, and reintegration (Clark 2005; Mason 2002). During the week-long initiation the novice is removed from her home, work, and daily routine and is confined to a single room. In part of the ritual, the initiate is considered “symbolically dead” and “icons of the initiate’s old life and identity” are removed (Mason 2002, 79). The initiate sheds important signifiers of self and status: name, hair, and clothing. This is separation. “During the rest of the year the iyawo’s status is ambiguous” (Clark 2005, 74). During this time, his or her previous name is not supposed to be spoken; s/he is referred to only as “iyawó,” further “distancing her even more from her previous identity and reinforcing the agency of the oricha” (Mason 2002, 79). This is liminality. “As the year progresses, the restrictions that surround him are loosened or lifted,” and the process of reintegration begins (Clark 2005, 74). Thus, the year in white continues a journey of change that begins in the kariocha ceremony. Through a sequence of initiatory phases, the novice is transformed.

Iyawos are encouraged to leave their old selves behind and gradually align their sense of self with particular Orisha. As iyawos are separated from their previous identities, they are encouraged to identify with the Orisha who is said to “own their heads,” or to “crown” them. They are given a ritual name associated with that Orisha, and over time there is a “slow merging of their personalities” (Mason 2002, 81).

A wealth of material culture—intricate costumery and ritual—is used in the asiento (initiation) as symbolic power to affect change in the initiate: “A series of clothing changes, physical modifications, and body adornments over the course of twenty-four hours registers a person’s transformation from an uninitiated state (aleyo), to the highly liminal and symbolically dead condition of abokú . . . to the living vessel of an oricha’s aché:5 the iyawó, the newborn condition that begins after the mounting of the oricha on the head and for a period of one year afterward” (Brown 2003, 195). During the kariocha ceremony, initiates are stripped of the clothing and hair that helped identify them to others and to themselves. They are dressed in elaborate attire in the colors associated with the particular Orisha to whom they have been assigned. The removal of the material signs of former life (a symbolic death) is followed by symbolic “rebirth” and identification with an aspect of divinity. One day after losing former markers of identity—hair, name, colored clothing—the iyawo is dressed in elaborate ceremonial dress that includes the symbols of office that correspond with the Orisha to whom he or she has been assigned in prior divination. At the same time, these iyawos are not permitted to view themselves in mirrors: “Seen by an ‘audience,’ they cannot (fully) ‘see themselves.’ Indeed, the absence of self-reflection—in a mirror, for example—discourages reversion of identification to the former ‘self’ (is it ‘me’ in these clothes?), leaving the elders and audience to recognize and constitute the object of their gaze as an oricha king, queen, or warrior” (Brown 2003, 198–199).6 When one is denied a mirror, s/he relies much more heavily on the eyes of others. Beginning in the initiation ceremony and continuing throughout the first few months of the yaworaje, iyawos become accustomed to seeing themselves as their community views them: as children, as new brides of the Orisha, and as embodiments of the Ocha who “rule their heads.”

The year in white is a continuation of the transformative process of identity shedding and renewal begun in the kariocha ceremony. This theme is highly present in the narratives of iyawos and former iyawos.

Socialization

The yaworaje is also a socialization process. Socialization is an induction into a social world. Through socialization we learn fundamental things such as language, meaning, norms, values, and what constitutes “sense” and “nonsense” (Berger and Luckmann 1967). Over the course of a year, iyawos learn to subordinate themselves to the needs of the Orisha and the religious community. The term “iyawo” is a designation of status, specifically gendered and ranked status. In the context of precolonial, patrilocal Yoruba culture, “iyawo” originally referred to a new wife, a woman who had recently married in to a community.7 This was a low-status position: “Among the Yoruba a newly married iyawo has the lowest status in her husband’s household, since she is considered younger than even the youngest child. By calling new priests iyawo, Orisha worshippers are subjecting them to the status loss experienced by every new bride”. In this way, iyawo, whether male or female, are “subordinate new wives,” to both the Orisha and to other religious community members who have already completed the iyawo year (Clark 2005, 44).

To the extent that the Lukumi priestly initiation involves a temporary loss of status, the kariocha ritual may be seen as a “degradation ceremony” (Garfinkel 1956), a ritual in which an individual’s identity or status is stripped away so that it can be replaced by another. Degradation ceremonies often accompany resocialization, as in the case of mental patients, prisoners, and military recruits (Goffman 1961), and can be seen as one form of a “commitment ritual,” as in the case of Christian baptism, which reinforces “the rejection of old patterns and behaviors and the incorporation of new behaviors into one’s life” (Rambo 1995, 127).

Iyawos are expected to perform “wifely” duties for the community, such as cleaning and cooking, maintaining Orisha shrines, and caring for animals (Clark 2005, 79). In return for this loss of status, iyawos are ranked above aleyos, those in the religious household who have not undergone priestly initiation. Thus, from a sociological perspective, the year in white can be seen as resocialization. This theme frequently arose in the accounts of iyawos and former iyawos, especially with regard to relationships with the Orisha and relationships with families, friends, and co-workers.

Seclusion

The year in white is a time when newborn iyawos are sheltered like children by their parents:

During this time, often referred to as the Year of White, he [the iyawo] lives surrounded by cool, peaceful white, and encumbered with an array of restrictions on his behavior. . . . These rules are designed to protect the iyawo, who is considered especially sensitive, from places and situations that are physically, emotionally, or spiritually dangerous. They teach the iyawo to remain cool, calm, and clear-headed, in control of himself and aware of his environment. They help him to solidify his understanding of himself as both the priest and the embodiment of his Orisha. His ongoing adherence to these rules helps to establish and maintain his commitment to his Orisha and the practices they demand (Clark 2007, 129).

The yaworaje is a time when susceptible iyawos are secluded from many ordinary worldly things (such as darkness, mirrors, forests, revelry, rain, the uncleanliness of the uninitiated, and forks and table knives) that might cause them to lose their “cool” heads or bring upon them physical or spiritual harm.

The view that iyawos are vulnerable has at least three interrelated aspects. First, in a continuation of the metaphor of rebirth, new initiates are viewed as infants, especially during their first three months. (It is common for Lukumi priests to reckon their “age” as beginning with initiation.) As babes, these infant priests are forbidden to eat with forks and knives, are required to be home by dark, and must subordinate themselves to the authority of their godparents regarding a range of everyday activities. Especially in the first three months of the yaworaje, they may be pampered by their godparents and other priests, for example by being served food before most “adults” partake. Second, iyawos are newborn specifically with regard to Orisha. As Clark (2005, 76) explains, novices are encouraged to understand specific Orisha as parents. Through divination, for each iyawo, a “father” and a “mother” Orisha is determined. Thus, “the initiate’s first relationship to the Orisha . . . is that of a child to a loving parent.” Third, iyawos are seen as open and therefore at risk because of the exposure of their heads during the kariocha. At the asiento, when the head is shaved, the tutelary Orisha is said to be “seated” in the head of the initiate. As a result, the newly consecrated iyawo becomes “a walking temple” whose head is “a mobile sacred site” (Clark 2005, 76) that must be kept clean from the defilement of the world.

Thus, in various ways, iyawos are seen to be in need of protective seclusion. This is a theme iyawos and former iyawos spoke of frequently, especi...