journal of

AFRICANA
RELIGIONS
vol. 1 no. 2
2013

A S W A D
ASSOCIATION FOR THE STUDY OF THE WORLDWIDE AFRICAN DIASPORA

the pennsylvania state

university press
e di tors
Edward E. Curtis IV, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
Sylvester A. Johnson, Northwestern University

a s s i s ta n t e di tor
Tera Agyepong, Northwestern University

e di tori a l boa r d
Afe Adogame, University of Edinburgh
Stephen Angell, Earlham College
Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
Herman Bennett, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Joan C. Bristol, George Mason University
David Chidester, University of Cape Town
Yvonne Chireau, Swarthmore College
Dianne M. Diakité, Emory University
Jualynne E. Dodson, Michigan State University
Carol B. Duncan, Wilfrid Laurier University
Musa Dube, University of Botswana
Michael Gomez, New York University
Rachel E. Harding, University of Colorado Denver
Kelly Hayes, Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis
Tracey Hucks, Haverford College
Paul C. Johnson, University of Michigan
Charles H. Long, University of California, Santa Barbara
Laurie Maffly-Kipp, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Maha Marouan, University of Alabama
Adeline M. Masquelier, Tulane University
Elizabeth McAlister, Wesleyan University
Jacob Olupona, Harvard University
Anthony B. Pinn, Rice University
David Robinson, Michigan State University
Lamin Sanneh, Yale Divinity School
Jon Sensbach, University of Florida
James Sweet, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Emilie Townes, Yale Divinity School
Richard Brent Turner, University of Iowa
Nicole von Germeten, Oregon State University
Judith Weisenfeld, Princeton University
Cornel R. West, Union Theological Seminary
Vincent L. Wimbush, Claremont Graduate University
Jason R. Young, SUNY Buffalo
 Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh
Historicizing the Initiation Narrative
in Afro-Cuban Religions

e lizabeth p érez

Abstract
This article examines the ceremonial practice of smallest scale and
greatest prevalence in Afro-Cuban religions: elders’ oral narration
of initiation as an “unchosen choice,” pursued solely as a response
to affliction. This article marshals evidence to show that the condi-
tions of scholars’ involvement in these traditions have contributed
to the dearth of analysis concerning these stories and proposes that
the initiation narrative be classified as a distinct speech genre, with
both traceable historical sources and concrete social effects. Drawing
on several years of ethnographic research, the author contends that
the verbal relation of such narratives has redounded to the enlarge-
ment of Afro-Cuban traditions, chiefly by promoting the spirits’
transformative reality and healing power. Both the methodological
critique and theoretical argument are offered in hopes of redirecting
the study of Africana religions toward embodied micropractices that
assist in the gradual coalescence of social identities and subjectivity.

[He] was learning to be a healer as part of his being cured from a deeply
disturbing affliction. In so doing he was going through a cycle of affliction,
salvation, and transformation that seems as eternal as humanity. Yet the
power of this cycle stems not from eternity, but from the active engagement
with history that affliction depends upon for its cure.
— m ic ha e l taus s ig 1

Journal of Africana Religions, vol. 1, no. 2, 2013

Copyright © 2013 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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 152 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l ig ions

In the study of Afro-Cuban religious formations, the lion’s share of scholarship

has centered on rites of passage, ceremonial protocols (including dance and the
assembly of altars), and ritual discourse (such as oracular utterances and praise
songs).2 Lucumí, popularly referred to as Santería, continues to generate volumes
of increasingly sophisticated studies elaborating on these themes, not only in the
storied cities of Havana and Regla but also farther to the south, in Oriente, in a
number of North American metropolises, and transnationally.3 Indeed, it was in
a Lucumí community located on the South Side of Chicago that I came to base a
long-term and ongoing ethnographic project on orisha worship. For over twenty-
five years, the head of this community, called Ilé Laroye, has been Nilaja Campbell,
a priestess of Eleguá, master of crossroads and messenger of the gods; renowned
orisha praise singer; sixteen-cowries diviner; Spiritist medium; and elder in the
Kongo-inspired tradition Palo Monte. It was within Nilaja’s home—one that
often rang with mischievous laughter—that I became most intimately acquainted
with the institutions documented in the literature on Afro-Cuban religions, as
well as aspects of everyday religious life that have eluded serious analysis.4
One of these was the language that practitioners employ to refer to initia-
tion, both their own and others’. Among the younger members of Ilé Laroye,
including the daughters, nieces, and other family members of elders, it was not
infrequently announced that they were “initiating” me into African American
culture, and that I was becoming “ghetto.”5 Being ghetto was understood at that
moment to be a matter of class more than color; being ghetto, in either the
pejorative or positive senses of the term—cheap, ignorant, and ersatz; or real,
resourceful, and adept at improvisation—did not mean inhabiting a geographi-
cal place but, rather, acting in a manner informed by a ghettoized social location.6
I was generally perceived as having a bourgeois, if not “bougie,” upbringing, and
my initiation into “ghettoness” was cast as the result of transformative peda-
gogical endeavor.7 For instance, after explaining that the nearby Evergreen Mall
has been called “Ever-Black” by residents of the South Side for as long as anyone
could remember, one of my companions interjected, with impeccable comic
timing, “We’re inducting you,” into a style of relating to “ghetto” spaces that had
to be learned, along with modes of bodily carriage, comportment, and internal-
ized dispositions categorized as “ghetto.”8 Signs of my successful initiation into
this radically ambivalent modality of blackness would be teasingly identified
and celebrated, then recalled triumphantly, days (or sometimes months) later.9
One afternoon, Nilaja’s goddaughter Imani Crawford was washing
dishes with me during an ocha birthday when she exclaimed, “Her is ghetto
now. Her initiated!” Imani was describing with approval a recent instance of

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 153 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

behavior thought to prove, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that my catechesis

was complete. Such initiation was constructed as a vector of power: I was
a subject upon whom overwhelming forces had acted.10 There was no hint
that I or anyone else could have resisted initiation into ghettoness, once
the prospect had been raised, any more than one marked for ocha—that is,
ordination—could possibly refuse it. I cite this hyper-local analogy of cul-
tural and religious initiation not only to illustrate the “tactical essentialism”
occasionally deployed by its African American members, and their appro-
priation of Lucumí discourse to express emergent, dynamic understandings
of class and racial identity.11 I am also interested in emphasizing that, for all
of my informants, initiation meant acceding to a differentiation and hier-
archical ordering of persons in which changes in one’s “socio-ontological”
status were to be confirmed by elders through the assessment of conduct,
not physical appearance.12 And—to arrive at what is the central concern of
this article—no one spoke of initiation as a decision, made with pleasure
or at the behest of reason. It was instead discussed as a sort of unchosen
choice.13
During my first tentative forays into the ethnographic field—first, in
Chicago, Boston, and Miami, then in Havana and Guantánamo—I had made
a point of posing the same question to Lucumí priests: “Why did you get initi-
ated?”14 Beginning with William James in 1902, the scholarship on conversion
had tended to locate causal explanations for religious change in interpersonal
crises or persistent psychological tensions, resolved through the adoption of a
new community’s beliefs and practices.15 I therefore expected my interlocu-
tors to describe their discovery of and eventual commitment to the Lucumí
deities in almost romantic terms, perhaps as a means of recruiting me to their
service. However, again and again, the answers I received made it clear that
they did not get initiated out of desire. In fact, the elders recounted their resis-
tance to initiation in extravagant detail, emphasizing their initial hostility to
the Lucumí tradition rather than their espousal of its spirits. Conceptualized
theologically as a wedding between divine husband and human wife, ocha was
portrayed not as the sacralization of a love match but as an arranged marriage
or ritualized bride abduction. As in Ilé Laroye, initiates said they only surren-
dered to the orishas because they faced incapacitating infirmity or adversity,
and ocha stood the only chance of saving them. Ordination into the priesthood
was framed as an alternative of “last resort.”16
Shifting my focus, then, to the autobiographical stories of initiates, my
purpose in this article is to establish that the oral narration of initiation as

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 154 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l ig ions

an “unchosen choice” is the ritual practice simultaneously of smallest scale

and greatest prevalence in Lucumí. I argue that the initiation narrative con-
stitutes a distinct speech genre and may be observed across Black Atlantic
traditions, although the metaphors enlisted to articulate the exigency of
priestly service to the spirits differs depending on practitioners’ sociocultural
milieu. In other words, while few may analogize getting initiated and becom-
ing ghetto, elders consistently reproduce a conventional communicative pat-
tern that calls out for greater attention. I begin by summarizing the main
features of ocha and delineating the norms governing the recitation of initia-
tion narratives. I draw on my ethnographic fieldwork to explore one story in
depth and contend that accounts such as these have combined with other rit-
ual performances to grind the hermeneutical lenses used to discern affliction,
interpret illness as a symptom of nascent vocation, and present ordination as
the ultimate healing ritual. After briefly considering the reasons that these
stories remain under-theorized in the scholarship on Afro-diasporic reli-
gions, I conclude by suggesting some possible historical antecedents for the
speech genre they comprise.
My principal objective is to reorient the study of Black Atlantic reli-
gions toward an interrogation of religious micropractices, in particular those
that progressively implicate their performers in the material and conceptual
worlds of virtuosi. This project is intended to complement, rather than sup-
plant, sociologically informed efforts to track the transnational social and cul-
tural networks that link practitioners to their communities.17 Both are of the
essence, for the scholarly agenda concerning these traditions has tended to be
nudged along by religious authorities, and the academic and popular literature
on Lucumí has thus far provided a series of comprehensive yet diagrammatic
mappings of the religion almost exclusively from the point of view of ordained
elders—often from that of initiated scholars themselves.18 Many of the result-
ing investigations have given short shrift to devotees’ qualms concerning their
ritual interventions, refrained from problematizing their autobiographical
narratives, and left the somewhat misleading impression that practitioners
understand the strictures imposed on them exclusively according to West
African Yorùbá precedents. As a result, the question of religious subject for-
mation has been elided, and the texture of embodied experience flattened.
In addition to compiling data that might engender more complex future
scholarship, the methodological critique that follows aims to be instruc-
tive not only for scholars of Africana traditions but also for those engaged
in the study of religion more generally, for it exposes analytical blind spots

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 155 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

unintentionally created by academics’ involvement in the communities they

research. Contemporary historians of religions in particular have tended
to concentrate on rituals amenable to analysis as containers of “meaning,”
defined by a religious elite, and extrapolated from their placement within
cultural systems, often themselves delineated by those advantageously situ-
ated within the economy of secrecy and power within their respective tradi-
tions.19 We have only begun to examine modalities of religious praxis that
assist in the gradual coalescence of practitioners’ social identities and reli-
gious subjectivity. Accordingly, the approach undertaken here connects the
everyday acquisition of a spirit idiom in informal conversation to processes
of religious self-fashioning among practitioners with varying levels of status.
It enters through the door that has been left open for critical, praxeological,
and reflexive accounts more attentive to the subtle transformations of both
persons and objects in religious life.

Initiation as Ritual Process

It is a far cry from informal affiliation with a Lucumí community to initia-

tion. In the most basic terms, Lucumí initiation denotes the ritual process that
effects entry into the priesthood of the tradition. As the principal vehicle for
obtaining seniority, and thus eldership, within houses of orisha worship, it is
what Pierre Bourdieu has called a “rite of institution.”20 It has long been per-
formed after practitioners have undergone a series of rites du passage, including
ceremonial receipt of the beaded necklaces called elekes and the consecrated
embodiment of the Warrior orishas and the spirit Olokún. Synonymous with
“ordination,” initiation turns mere aborishas, or “servants of the orishas,” into
olorishas, “owners of the orishas,” since priests are given the ritual sacra of sev-
eral deities, newly consecrated through sacrifice. This sacra not only represents
but is thought to personify materially gods of the Lucumí pantheon, includ-
ing an initiate’s tutelary deity, and it numbers among the objects that must be
present in order to initiate others. Practitioners describe the means devised
to bring the priest and her orishas into being through initiation using meta-
phors of pregnancy, parturition, and motherhood; both new priests and spirits
are said to be “born” through ocha. This language reflects the social fact that
initiations ensure the religious community’s reproductivity, guaranteeing the
endurance of its most durable forms of sociality even after the deaths of its
immediate leaders.

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 156 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l ig ions

Initiation takes place over the course of a week, wherein neophytes

undergo a series of transformative ordeals that have been quite extensively
documented: they are ritually secluded, stripped of old clothes, immersed in a
river, fed unfamiliar foods, and have their heads shaved and painted in prepa-
ration for the inducement of spirit possession.21 On the day after their ritual
objects have been consecrated, called the “Middle Day,” initiates are dressed as
their patron orishas and introduced to select visitors from outside the commu-
nity. In the next day’s divination, called itá, initiates are bestowed new priestly
titles and issued unique aggregates of sartorial, gastronomical, and behavioral
taboos that must be observed for the rest of their lives.22 None of this can
occur before the neophytes are declared symbolically dead, however, through
such means as tabooing their given names and referring to each of them indi-
vidually as aboku, “the dead one.” In order to be born as a priest, a practitioner’s
identity must be sacrificed, as literally as possible without physically injuring
the body soon to become a vessel for the vital energy and primordial sub-
stance of the spirits, termed aché. For the ill and otherwise suffering, healing is
thought to begin with this death, and with the demise of old ways of feeling,
behaving, and understanding, to be remade radically through the rigors of the
first year of initiation.
Throughout this calendar year, initiates will be referred to neither by
their religious titles nor by their given names; among other Lucumí practitio-
ners, an initiate will be called simply iyawo, or “wife” of the spirits.23 This is the
case regardless of the priests’ gender, sex, or sexual orientation; the year itself
is termed iyaworaje. In some communities, iyawos are prohibited from seeing
themselves in mirrors for the first three months, until after they have offered
a ritual sacrifice called the ebó meta—sometimes made long after three months’
time, bearing in mind the financial cost of this ceremony.24 In the words of
one initiate, an iyawo goes from infant to toddler after the three-months’ ebó,
which confers new privileges: after eating only on a woven mat, with her legs
splayed in front of her, the iyawo may sit on a chair for meals; after three
months of nearly head-to-toe coverage, save for her face, the iyawo may wear
short sleeves, comb and cut her hair, and let her head go bare for short peri-
ods of time. The orishas’ physical position within an iyawo’s home echoes the
latter’s religious state, for until the three months’ ebó, an initiate is unable to
lift her orishas from the floor; they rest on it in their vessels as if asleep, and
they cannot be aroused for ceremonial purposes. After the ebó, they are lifted

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 157 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

from the ground and onto altars, signaling that they have arisen from their
slumber.
For the rest of the year, however, the iyawo is still not allowed to be pho-
tographed; eat from china and silverware other than her own special set; go
out after sunset, unless accompanied by a godparent; imbibe alcohol; spend
time in crowded or noisy public places, such as shopping malls; use scented
soaps, deodorants, and other toiletries; and have sexual intercourse, unless she
is married. The iyawo must sleep on white sheets and pillows and attend to
her godparents whenever they call on her. Priests sometimes expound on the
theological purpose of these regulatory practices, yet it is indisputably the case
that disrupting an initiate’s daily routines and curtailing her movements act to
assert ritual godparents’ kinship and seniority, redrawing her bonds of affili-
ation, sentiment, and obligation within the boundaries of the religious com-
munity. The iyawo must in effect withdraw herself from circulation, as when
she must refuse to be handed anything and instead request that objects—such
as spare change at a grocery store—be set down on another surface first. She
cannot touch anyone, even socially, but blood relatives, spouses, and other
initiates. This attitude announces to her social world that the iyawo expects
different treatment after initiation and that her role within it has changed
irreversibly. She no longer occupies the place she once did.
Both the ethnographic record and my own research suggest that elders
intend for the iyawo period to support the cultivation of diverse forms of vir-
tue, in the conventional meaning of the term. Apart from humility, patience,
and integrity, the qualities to be fostered include the willingness to assume
gender roles associated with the opposite sex in ritual performance, the con-
trol of “involuntary” physical responses (for instance, in spirit possession and
animal sacrifice), and the capacity for reasoned critique in defense of com-
munal norms. Elders also promote initiation as fostering virtues in the archaic
sense, as “powers,” and as those capacities for ethical action inculcated by cor-
poreal training that Talal Asad has called “moral potentialities.”25 As an iyawo
copes with both drastic yet temporary restrictions shared by most new initi-
ates, and lifelong strictures exclusive to her, such virtues are supposed to take
firm root. For all of my ethnographic interlocutors, the virtue of obedience was
stressed, and after initiation, elders interpreted an iyawo’s behavioral submis-
sion to them as a sign of the ritual’s felicity and of a corresponding elevation in
the neophyte’s “socio-ontological” status.26

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 158 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l ig ions

The Initiation Narrative as Speech Genre

While the initiation ritual, the iyawo year, and these traditions’ role in the life
of a religious community have animated a number of pioneering studies, the
scholarship on Lucumí has yet to grapple with a fundamental irony: the vast
majority of practitioners have been initiated as adults and may thus be catego-
rized as converts, but they almost invariably have said that they “made ocha”
without wanting to do so. In textual records of elders’ narratives, as in my own
research, illness and injury have been the main catalysts for initiation. Rather
than sing the praises of the tradition in recounting their ordinations, practi-
tioners have professed themselves alarmed by the financial burden imposed
by ocha, suspicious of elders’ ulterior motives, and wary of its reputation as a
witchcraft cult for the destitute and credulous. Their resistance is invariably
recalled as futile—even dangerous to their health. In the seminal 1954 study
El monte: Igbo finda, ewe orisha, vititi nfinda, Lydia Cabrera was the first to record
multiple accounts of rebellion against the orishas’ wishes for practitioners to
become initiated, but she was certainly not the last.27 The ethnographic lit-
erature on Afro-Cuban religions is replete with such stories. They are most
pronounced in texts reliant on oral histories as a means of ascertaining practi-
tioners’ points of entry into Lucumí.
The stylistic and linguistic conventions of the initiation narrative are so
widely observed that they can be said to form their own category of verbal
composition or “speech genre.” A speech genre is defined as a type of utter-
ance that shares both the thematic concerns and situational context for the
performance of similar communicative acts.28 The stability of speech genres
over time derives, in part, from the frequency of their recurrence within
groups or among members of particular social strata. In his early study of
speech genres, Mikhail Bakhtin gave the example of the military command
and oral business contract; the courtroom jury summation, Roman Catholic
confession, and the individual therapy session and self-help meeting man-
dated in drug addiction programs are a few others.29 Those competent in a
speech genre may not realize that they are replicating a well-worn pattern,
yet the relatively predictable structure of a given utterance assists in render-
ing it intelligible and generating meaning. Speech genres are far from fixed,
however. Novelty may be introduced spontaneously into the expectations,
sequential organization, content, rhetorical form, or physical circumstances
of a speech event, to dazzling ideological and intersubjective effect.30

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 159 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

Despite the constraints imposed by conversational discourse, speech genres

expand and contract according to the needs of individuals and the institu-
tions they inhabit.
Social actors tend to appropriate the speech genres of those whose beliefs
and practices align with their own.31 This observation seems to be particu-
larly accurate with regard to religious specialists and virtuosi. In the literature
on prophets and shamans, for instance, they often claim to have resisted the
pull of their vocations until brought to a crisis. While Lucumí priests’ stories
bear a family resemblance to those of healers in other cultures, certain fea-
tures are specific to their experience within Afro-Cuban religions and merit
consideration on their own terms.32 Their oral narratives have been rife with
admissions of aversion not only to ocha itself, but also to discharging the func-
tions of priesthood, such as officiating during initiations for protégés, termed
“godchildren,” and performing divinations. In the mid-1980s, for instance,
one of David H. Brown’s informants told him that, when approached to serve
as a ritual sponsor for ocha, he has been liable to respond,

“I don’t want any more godchildren! I’m tired of this shit, I told you
I never wanted to [get initiated], and every time I don’t want to [offi-
ciate another ocha], everybody tricks me into making it. The Saints and
everybody are always blackmailing me into doing something, I’m sick
of it. I don’t go to nobody’s house, I don’t do readings. . . .” And as you
can see, every one of [the initiations over which I have presided] has
been a trick. I just look at him [my patron orisha] and I say, “Boy, you
really know how to screw me don’t you.” And everything that comes
to my house is this way. I don’t go out looking for it. I don’t read [the
cowrie shells oracle], I do nothing, it’s brought by other people.33

I would contend that only the vehemence and profanity of this diatribe
is unusual.
In the scholarship on Afro-Cuban traditions, the spirits most frequently
accused of extortionary behavior—and indicted in tirades peppered with
obscenities—are the ritually enslaved spirits nfumbi, of Palo Monte. The elder
above appears to put himself in the role of his orisha’s nfumbi, a manipu-
lated, ritually objectified bondsman, performing alienated labor for his dei-
fied masters.34 Although Lucumí practitioners have characteristically depicted
their relationships with the orishas in terms more heavily reliant on idioms of

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 16 0 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l igions

familial intimacy and mutual nurturance, the historical record shows that their
occasional complaints have not differed very dramatically, regardless of devo-
tees’ gender, race, or ethnicity. Nilaja Campbell instructed her godchildren,
“Don’t recommend me to nobody.”35 Quoting Bing Crosby’s character in White
Christmas (1954), Nilaja told visitors that initiation “costs somewhere ‘between
ouch and boing.’”36 This was an onomatopoetic way of conveying the pain-
ful surprises involved in supplying the herbs, vessels, cloth, sacrificial animals,
travel expenses of visiting priests, ritual fees (achedís), food, and myriad other
objects needed for ocha and the neophyte’s post-ceremonial seclusion. As Mary
Cuthrell Curry put it, “If a person decides to make ocha, (some people resist
this decision for years, some perhaps indefinitely) then they have an expensive
proposition ahead of them.”37
Another indispensable component of the “initiation narrative” speech
genre is the assertion that, despite the financial, emotional, and social price to
be paid for becoming a priest, the orishas literally saved one’s life. There is a
“speech genre among practitioners analogous to ‘being saved,’” although “sal-
vation” for priests has not entailed redemption from sin but, rather, a reprieve
from an impending death sentence, whether imposed by illness or calamity.38
Some elders, such as my interlocutor Yomí Yomí, cited oracular speech as
proving decisive in their understanding of ocha as a ritual death and rebirth
that staves off physical mortality. In one typical exchange, Yomí Yomí referred
to both the divinatory sign, or odu, cast for her in her itá, and the pronounce-
ment of an Espiritista:

EP: You said to me before . . . that you feel like the religion saved
your life.

YY: It did. My [priestly] name, “Yomí Yomí,” means “salvation.” And

my odu, and my odu in . . . ocha is, “The debt is paid.” I know Yemayá
saved my life. Well, my health is [still] an issue, but I was one time at
[a Spiritist medium’s home], and this other babaláwo who was a palero
too, he was sitting there in the basement. . . . All of a sudden it was like
[the medium’s] muerto [or possessing spirit] just came down on him—
we were just sitting there chit-chatting—and he said, “If you didn’t
make ocha, you’d be dead.” See, I get those confirmation messages,
and you may get them six years down the line—that’s when mine was
given to me—but they’ll come.39

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This statement strongly resembles other initiates’ recollections, particularly in

its characterization of ocha as the life-prolonging settlement of a balance with
the orishas.

The Emplotment of Affliction in the Initiation Narrative

As has been documented for other West and Central African-inspired

religious formations, in Lucumí “affliction is potentially a boon, not merely
a present pain, for it is the royal road to ritual eminence in a cult.”40 In the
course of my research among not only African American, but also Latino/a and
Anglo practitioners, a lone interlocutor told me that she was “crowned” sim-
ply out of what she called “love” for the tradition. Even those whose families
were involved in Lucumí did not say they wanted to get initiated. In fact, these
were the cases in which ocha was initially opposed with the greatest tenacity.
Tomás Fernández Robaina asserts that in colonial and early Republican Cuba,
“one only initiated a person as a santero, babaláwo, or palero who really needed to
enter the religion for reasons of health, or in the search for material or spiritual
improvement.”41 However, in relating their experiences, initiates in Ilé Laroye,
as in other communities, did not say that they made ocha in the pursuit of any
concrete result but release from affliction, and attributed not merely their
well-being but their very existence to the intervention of the orishas. 42 Oral
performances tended to progress from the onset of unexplainable and ineradi-
cable symptoms; frustrated appeals to medical authorities; struggle against the
suggestion of initiation; to eventual acquiescence.43
In their autobiographies, initiates have vividly described the symptoms
of corporeal affliction, signs from the spirits they said that they had been
determined to ignore or did not yet understand how to decipher. My inter-
locutors have told of disease and injury, of sudden diminishments of vigor,
lingering infections, temporary paralysis, nausea, unpredictable lapses of
consciousness, and heart-stopping medical diagnoses in which they were
warned that “the hole in the ground is open, waiting for [your] body,” forc-
ing them to conclude, “If I stay the way I am, I am going to die . . . not too
long.”44 Such stories are not exceptional, and find corroboration among prac-
titioners consulted by scholars throughout the twentieth century. Rodolpho
Martin, a Cuban priest interviewed by John Mason, told him with reference
to the pre-Revolutionary period,

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 162 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l igions

Look, in those days everybody cooperated. You never had to give

anyone a tip [for assisting in an ocha]. No, No, they’d tell you when you
offered. The majority of them were poor and made their initiations
to avoid that which cripples you (sicknesses).45

It is difficult to gauge the veracity of Martin’s claim, as much a critique of con-

temporary mores as a comment on the relationship between health and ocha.
Yet it would be even harder to transcribe an oral history from an initiate that
did not contain some version of the following statement: “One makes saint for
two reasons: for health or because one is born with that [oracular] sign, with
the odu to walk down that path, whether we like it or not.”46
Theresa Varela documents several contemporary examples of initiation
for health in the context of practitioners’ struggles with HIV/AIDS and can-
cer. Varela’s informant Tanía explained,

My brother . . . who had been a priest in Santería for many years,

did a spiritual reading for me. We were instructed, spiritually, that
I should be initiated into the religion of Santería in order to save my
life. Everything just hit the fan. I’d gone to readings and to misas but
here I was being told that before I had the mastectomy, I had to be
initiated, to make Santo. I had to get crowned to save my life. I really
didn’t know anything about the religion. I asked, what’s that? What’s
Santo? And I was told it would save my life and I went for it. Santería
turned out to be the most beautiful thing.47

Other scholars have recorded similar narratives, underscoring either their

animus toward or unfamiliarity with Lucumí, before they realized that ocha is
the healing ritual par excellence. 48 Although initiates generally refrain from
setting forth the precise mechanics of their restoration to health, elders of
Ilé Laroye maintained that in the initiatory rite of investiture, the heads and
bodies of iyawos were “sealed” corporeally by the aché of their orishas. Most
academic accounts of initiation have focused on the placement of consecrated
substances on the freshly shaved and incised head of the initiate, but according
to David H. Brown, the ritual has engaged the entirety of the body. The effi-
cacy of “Santo” has depended, Brown argues, on forging a connection between
the energies of the earth and heaven, as between the lower half of the body and
its upper limit.49

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In accounts depicting corporeal affliction as a catalyst for initiation,

practitioners have emphasized the puzzling, supernatural nature of their
somatic complaints, and that the suffering they endured lay beyond the
skill of allopathic physicians to diagnose or assuage. These testimonials have
dramatized the misrecognition of both the narrators and their doctors, the
“men of science” whose inability to detect the hands of the orishas in their
patients’ torments symbolizes the limitations not only of biomedicine, but
also of Enlightenment-derived secular epistemologies more generally. Tomás
Fernández Robaina records the story of an Abakuá initiate named Tato, whose
narrative is a case in point. Tato said that he grew up in a family of Lucumí
practitioners, and while he did not hesitate to pay for his young son’s ocha when
illness threatened his life, he was loath to invest in his own after he began
experiencing deep pain and fatigue:

Thirteen years passed after [my son’s initiation] before they did the
same to me. I didn’t have another choice. Health problems. I felt
very tired, without enough energy even to walk; I didn’t go to see
my brothers in [the Afro-Cuban secret society] Abakuá or go to our
gatherings because of how bad I felt. That made me feel bad, very
bad with myself. I went to the doctor, and after he reviewed the tests,
he told me that I didn’t have anything serious, a little anemia, noth-
ing more, and something in my spine. . . . But none of these ailments
caused my major illness. Because I pestered him too much about my
suffering, they referred me to a psychiatrist.50

Tato was diagnosed with hypochondria, and his wife suggested that he con-
sult a diviner, offering the opinion that his condition might improve with
initiation.
As Kristina Silke Wirtz writes, the narrators of such stories are ada-
mant that they adopted commonsense courses of action before pursuing
ritual intervention.51 In consulting the medical establishment first, the nar-
rator enhances his portrayal of himself as a reasonable—rather than naïve or
gullible—person by showing his awareness of some ritual specialists’ nefari-
ous motives.52 Accordingly, Tato said that he was dismayed to hear that his
son would need to undergo initiation since he was well aware of the way
some Lucumí ritual specialists profit from their clients’ desperation. He also
claims that he was uneager to follow his son into the religion because he was

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torn between his desire for wellness and his social obligations to his Abakuá
fraternal group:

But the Abakuás don’t have any remedy so that one might alleviate
one’s pains, besides [those that] help you with money and with
friends, those can facilitate your stay in a hospital or money for medi-
cine. . . . Because of that, there was no other path [open to me] but
to make saint; that’s how I was initiated into Santería as an Abakuá.53

The distinction Tato draws between Santería and Abakuá is instructive. The
word used for remedy, remedio, means both “recourse” and “medical remedy,”
implying that, although his Abakuá group operates as a mutual aid society,
he perceives Lucumí as holding a monopoly on the resources necessary for
healing. While complying with the directives of ocha could have reduced the
amount of time he was available to devote to Abakuá and strain relationships
with his brethren, Tato assures his interlocutor—and Fernández Robaina’s
readers—that ocha was the only avenue open to him.
Tato’s choice of words—“there was no other path”—was not coincidental. The
depiction of a choice as a “path” by practitioners is not merely a linguistic
trope, but an emplotment device.54 It is also a chronotope, a spatiotemporal
figuration that has historically organized the perception and representation of
reality for servants of the orishas, themselves understood in terms of “roads”
or manifestations.55 The chronotope of the path in the Lucumí tradition fuses
the ideas of egress, progress, itinerary, circuit, milestone (or “turning point”),
and way, in the sense of both “thoroughfare” and modus vivendi.56 Multiva-
lent iconographic, mythological, and ritual condensations of these concepts
have been generated in this chronotopic matrix, as epitomized by the figure
of Eleguá, the orisha with no less than twenty-one “paths”; “owner” of human
feet, and by extension, all perambulation; and master of intersections and
thresholds, prime sites for life-altering “meeting, separation, collision, [and]
escape.”57 While Mikhail Bakhtin focuses on the road as the vehicle of fate or
chance, in Lucumí narratives, the path embodies the divinatory paradox of
destiny as both multi-determined and preordained. The proverbs of sixteen-
cowries divination are strewn with paths, and its verses are said to “walk the
earth” the instant the shells are thrown.58
In practitioners’ accounts of their “journeys” to initiation, they have
repeatedly incorporated the image of the road as a place of transition, where

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time momentarily stops, and its recommencement propels narrators in

unexpected directions. To offer only one of many examples, when one inter-
locutor related his initiation story to me, he remembered Eleguá saying in a
dream, “Hey! . . . I cleared the road for you. Are you ready to walk?”59 Yet for initi-
ates, the road symbolizes the possibility of becoming disoriented and getting
lost, as well as advancing. They maintain that Eleguá both removes impedi-
ments from practitioners’ paths and ignores them, depending on whether he
has received the proper offering. For Bakhtin, the road, as a chronotopic motif,
pertains to “the adventure novel of everyday life,” composed according to the
theme of metamorphosis:

Metamorphosis or transformation is a mythological sheath for the

idea of development—but one that unfolds not so much in a straight
line as spasmodically, a line with “knots” in it, one that therefore con-
stitutes a distinctive type of temporal sequence.60

So it has been in accounts of initiation, where the path to ocha has tended to be
constructed as bumpy, narrow, and tortuous. In verbally retracing their steps,
practitioners have paused to recollect past blunders—not listening to advice
from practitioners, refusing to recognize the interconnectedness of their mis-
fortunes—and the gradual diminishment of their options until there was only
one choice left. It was not between going one way or another; rather, it was
between following the orishas or coming to a complete standstill, that is, death.

One Autobiography

Once the orixá calls, there is no other path to take.

— m ã e m e n i n i n h a de g a n toi s 6 1

Most of the elders I met through, and within, Ilé Laroye between 2000 and
2010—including Cuban elders from Miami and Anglo practitioners based in
the suburbs of Detroit—maintained that they had struggled with initiation. The
narrative recounted by Nilaja in January 2006 was a paradigm of the genre,
portraying not only initiates’ gradual acceptance of the orishas’ claims over
their persons—characteristically pressed with ever-increasing ardor—but also
their use of both medical and social situations as evidence adduced to sustain

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the validity of their decisions.62 Nilaja told me that her interest in Afro-Cuban
religions had begun in the early 1980s, when she was babysitting for a Latino
family involved in Lucumí: “I thought they were crazy.”63 She had met the fam-
ily’s godmother, and her “first impression was not good,” yet she came to feel
“there was something calling [her] to [the religion].” One afternoon, after the
family had gone elsewhere to perform a ritual for Shangó, she saw the vision of a
man dancing toward her; he was wearing a crown on his head and a fringe of raf-
fia at his waist. Nilaja maintained that this apparition arrived prior to her aware-
ness of this orisha’s iconographical representation as crowned and dancing, and
of his privileged role in ocha. She came to believe that Shangó had materialized in
order to lead her down the path of initiation, because “[she] had been searching
for something all the time.”64
In this discussion as in others, Nilaja emphasized that since childhood
she had longed for a religion that made the most of her talents and aptitudes.
After her disenchantment with Roman Catholicism and other Christian
denominations, she became fascinated by Buddhism and, for a time, by the
Black Hebrew Israelites. She felt an affinity with Haitian Vodou and sought
out a temple, finding one in Indiana, where she underwent the first level of
initiation called hounsi canzo. She began entertaining serious doubts about the
community at the same time she met the man later to become her godfather
in ocha. Then she fell ill, and her first major indication that “something was
wrong” with her religious family was that the healing rituals performed by
her mambo did not succeed in improving her condition. She was diagnosed
with an ectopic pregnancy and “was still alive by the grace of God” only
because her fallopian tube had not ruptured, but she was given six months to
live due to her response to the surgery. “I definitely could see myself separat-
ing from my body,” Nilaja said. This episode was not sufficient to precipitate
her flight from the group, however: “I was feeling that I had to get initiated—
why, I don’t know.” She leaned on the memory of her late grandmother for
strength, and continued to “give [her Vodou community] the benefit of the
doubt.”
When she left the hospital, she was drawn to a Lucumí community headed
by a white Cuban initiate as well as another led by an Afrocentric African
American figure.65 When she visited the latter’s community in Detroit to
consult a diviner, she was informed that her ancestors were displeased with
her and that if she returned to the “white guy” she would become ill once
again. Although she and other black nationalist practitioners “had [their]

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own ideology”—she wanted to get initiated in “African garb” rather than the
“creole style” favored by Lucumí practitioners—this obvious recruitment ploy
enraged her. Nilaja felt, “I am learning this religion; if this guy is going to tell
me this, I’m through [with the entire group].” On the drive home to Illinois
with her spouse, she continued to stew over the priests’ presumption: “How
are they going to tell me about my ancestors?” Just then, they were pulled
over by police because her husband was speeding. Ironically, they were both
dressed in Yorùbá-style clothing, and her fear of police harassment was so
great that she silently appealed to the spirit of her late grandmother, promis-
ing her that if they were to emerge unscathed from the encounter, she would
“go right to the [white] guy and get initiated.” The officer told them that they
could go.
This was only one turning point in her journey to becoming a priestess of
Eleguá, however. She had been told that the “owner” of her head was Obatalá,
and then that she was Yemayá’s child.66 About the time that she gave birth to
her son—thus putting an end to a series of miscarriages—Yemayá addressed
Nilaja through a woman able to mount spirits in the Spiritist rituals called
misas blancas. She instructed Nilaja to do a cleansing so that she would not need
surgery, because it would go badly. Nilaja ignored her advice, assuming that
she had time to weigh her options, and soon thereafter found herself in the
hospital with another tubal pregnancy. The operation to remove the fallopian
obstruction did not go well, and she was instructed to eat normally before her
system was prepared to deal with solid food, leading to nausea and vomit-
ing. At the same time, the incision was refusing to heal, and her stitches were
coming apart. Nilaja was a “terrible patient,” acting uncooperative because she
wanted to go home. After her ordeal, she went to her godfather—the “white
guy”—and, to her surprise, he determined that her tutelary deity was Eleguá.
She had to return to the hospital once again, and for protection, her godfather
told her to put a glass of water by her bed and pray to this orisha. She did so,
but also used it to administer a sort of religious paternity test, challenging him,
“if [you are] my father, get me out of the hospital.” She was out in the number
of days that Eleguá governs: three.
When Nilaja was informed that she had to return to the hospital in order
to resolve what had been diagnosed as an intestinal problem, she tried strenu-
ously to avoid surgery, but when she inquired about it through sixteen-cowries
divination, she was told to go through with it. Nilaja also interpreted it as a
positive sign that her doctor’s surname turned out to be Shangold, confirming

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for her the presence of Shangó in her personal struggle. She had been told
in divination that in the surgery, her attending physicians would go after one
thing and come out with something else; accordingly, instead of an intesti-
nal abnormality, her doctors discovered the remains of another, previously
undetected tubal pregnancy. This was the third time that oracular speech from
the orishas had proven correct—at least to her satisfaction—thus reinforcing
her perception that she had chosen the right godparent. In anticipation of
the next medical procedure, she also received the ritual paraphernalia of Inle
and Babalú Ayé, following the precedent of receiving these addimú, or auxil-
iary, orishas in order to improve one’s health. Nilaja credited them with her
survival: “Inle and Babalú Ayé saved my life. I shouldn’t be alive.”67 It was thus
with both astonishing understatement and aplomb that Nilaja had announced
at the start of our conversation, “I didn’t come to the religion because I had
[health] issues, but I did have issues.”

Narrative Transformations

Although Nilaja was initiated approximately six months after pouring out
her first glass of water to Eleguá, her story was far from a linear one. She
related instead the piecemeal acquisition of a hermeneutic, or an interpre-
tive frame of reference, that she adopted to read her body as exhibiting
symptoms of the orishas’ possession. She portrayed herself as afflicted by
physical complaints as well as social scourges—the threat of racist violence,
on the one hand, and the limitations of Afrocentrism, on the other. To the
extent that Nilaja presented herself as changing in the course of her narra-
tive, it was in her growing ability to recognize key moments of adversity as
“knots” to be unraveled: indexical signs of the orishas’ clamor for recogni-
tion. In this, she hewed closely to the theme of metamorphosis favored by
Lucumí practitioners, among other converts. As Bakhtin put it, “metamor-
phosis serves as a basis for a method of portraying the whole of an individu-
al’s life in its more important moments of crisis: for showing how an individual
becomes other than what he is.”68 Her crises led to a chain of revelations akin to
anagnorises in classical drama, crucial discoveries made through hardship.69
The peripeteia of rebirth through ocha, accompanied by renewed health,
comes with the concomitant realization of the orishas’ reality and that of
her identity as their child.

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Of the many descriptions of religious transformation assayed in analyses

of conversion narratives, the initiation stories of Lucumí practitioners such
as Nilaja most closely match Huon Wardle’s, portrayed as “an experience of
disambiguation, spiritual commitment, and semantic closure,” in which the
“narrative of religious calling and engagement . . . describes a sequence of
moments of experience understood in decreasingly ambiguous ways.”70 When
Nilaja started her story, she seemed to “subjunctivize [her] reality,” appreci-
ating the possibility of understanding major events in her life according to
multiple frames of reference.71 She depicted herself testing them out, as if
sitting in an optometrist’s chair while one lens after another flips before her
eyes, until she hits on the degree of magnification that her vision of herself
requires. The ambiguating social practices that had permitted her access to
a wide range of resources and relationships were cast as failing to fulfill her
twin quests for self-definition and well-being. In her telling, the ambigu-
ity, or blurriness, of her existence—perhaps augmented due to the “world-
destroying” effects of agonizing pain—resolved itself only with the adoption
of Lucumí as a semiotic system through which her existence finally achieved
“spatio-temporal order and teleological significance.”72 Accordingly, Nilaja
remembered her affiliation with her godfather’s Lucumí community displac-
ing other sources of meaning, and she imbued her recollection of religious
groups with distance and critique.
The rupture with her past was not total, however, nor was the closure
final. “It is the economy proper to metamorphosis,” Italo Calvino wrote of
Ovid’s epic, “which demands that the new forms should recover the materials
of the old ones as far as possible.”73 Tracey E. Hucks has characterized black
religion in terms of “religious coexistence and dual or multiple religious alle-
giance,” and scholars of Black Atlantic traditions have written at length on the
necessity of negotiating different traditions in heterogeneous religious envi-
ronments throughout the Americas.74 This experience was reflected in Nilaja’s
narrative: Nilaja maintained that during her most perilous episode of illness
prior to receiving Inle and Babalú Ayé, it was her current husband ‘Tunde’s
devotion to St. Jude and persistence in offering prayers for her in Roman
Catholic churches—rather than the intervention of any orisha—that probably
extended her life. Yet her story corresponded to her “disambiguation” by pro-
gressively shedding human characters such as ‘Tunde and her religious mentors
and replacing them with divine agents; by the end, the orishas alone possess
momentum, purpose, and energy—aché, in other words. The feats performed

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by Inle and Babalú Ayé eclipse those of her physicians; Dr. Shangold does not
restore her confidence in the medical profession, but instead, confirms her
faith in Shangó.75
There are as many types of religious transformation as there are
traditions, with practitioners telling stories that accent human agency to
a greater or lesser degree—representing personal change as an achieve-
ment as opposed to an undeserved gift, for instance, or vice versa—as well
as expressing different configurations of personhood, institutional values,
and descriptions of the arc of divine involvement in the process.76 In most
cases, privileged stories, such as conversion narratives, recapitulate religious
ideology or a tradition’s internal logic.77 Accordingly, I would submit that
Lucumí initiation narratives are as much a product of socialization into
a community and its repertoire of spatiotemporal practices as ocha itself.
Since priests have enforced a code of secrecy regarding ceremonial proce-
dures, the understanding of its curative effect among the uninitiated has
derived not from detailed verbal elaborations of the ritual, but from rec-
ollections of its outcome: the stories elders have related about their own
illnesses and the orishas’ role in their affliction and recovery. Initiation nar-
ratives have consistently placed orishas in telling relationship to practitio-
ners’ bodies—much as eyewitness accounts might place a suspect at a crime
scene—thus demonstrating the manner and degree of the spirits’ implica-
tion in the mundane world.78
In order to grasp the rhetorical significance of affliction in such nar-
ratives as Nilaja’s, it is necessary to contemplate not only the emplot-
ment of maladies and the pursuit of cures, but also the circumstances that
formed the context for initiates’ storytelling. Elders in Ilé Laroye shared
their experiences from the perspective of those professed to be healed by
the orishas and regarded as healers themselves. The definition of “healer”
within the community was analogous to “master of transformative ritual
power,” broadly conceived. Enacting their expertise, priests told me again
and again that they saw their actions as falling under the rubric of “heal-
ing,” whether they excelled in collecting herbs, mounting spirits, memoriz-
ing praise-songs, turning sacrificial animals into meals for the orishas, or
teaching (“the healing of ignorance,” as Hasim once put it).79 One aspect
of their identity-formation as healers involved the redaction of genealo-
gies that privileged ancestors reputed to possess mystically endowed heal-
ing abilities, as in misas blancas.80 The relation of initiation narratives may be

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viewed as another rite of self-fashioning that molds elders’ perceptions of

themselves, bearing in mind that religious subjectivity is continually in the
process of accomplishment.81

The Initiation Narrative and the Scholarship on

Afro-Cuban Religions

Those who do not believe in saints cannot be cured by the miracles of saints.
— a le jo ca r p e n t i e r 82

The initiation narrative has yet to excite substantial interest in the writing
on Afro-Cuban religions due to several factors. The first of these is the over-
whelming emphasis that has been placed on accounting for the continued sur-
vival, if not the globalization, of Lucumí in revolutionary Cuba and the United
States.83 Particularly after the Mariel boatlift of 1980, the literature on orisha
worship chiefly sought to quantify the amount of “syncretism” operative in
Afro-diasporic initiatory traditions and situate their growth within economic
and sociocultural macro-trends.84 The latter included the increased politici-
zation of black religious identity in the wake of the civil rights movement,
greater geographical mobility and improved communication technologies
among practitioners, and the expanded transnational market for African-
inspired cultural production. Such research created an historical record of
inestimable value by ceding precedence to the viewpoints of informants, but
it tended to replicate their discourses of “auto-legitimation” by elucidating
orisha worship in terms of self-empowerment and resistance.85 While earlier
writings predicated upon the “secularization thesis” cited social deviance or
psychological pathology to explain conversion to Lucumí, these studies joined
converts themselves in presenting initiation as an indictment of their political
oppression and material privations.86
A significant subset of this research sought to explore Lucumí’s potential
as an alternative medical system and to explain its popularity in Latino com-
munities through an appeal to its social and therapeutic efficacy.87 Initiation
narratives have largely conduced to the interpretation of ocha in these terms,
and not in the service of inquiry into the discursive construction of healing as
the domain of the spirits. In investigations less attentive to the role of illness
in practitioners’ lives, the motives that elders have declared for their original

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 17 2 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l ig ions

attraction to the tradition have been conflated with the impetus for their entry
to the priesthood. As a result, these studies have tended to assume that elders
sought ocha for the same reasons that they gravitated to Lucumí in the first
place. This has perhaps been inevitable, for the sociological models for inter-
preting escalating commitment within religious formations have not been for-
mulated with initiatory traditions such as Lucumí in mind. Unfortunately, in
delineating the purported bases for Lucumí ordination—a profound longing
for aesthetic and cultural authenticity, an interest in conceptually innovative
resources for subverting gendered and racialized forms of domination—schol-
ars have unwittingly minimized the issues of pedagogical praxis, cognition, and
affliction, obscuring the complex matrix of ideological operations that precipi-
tate ocha.
It is important to underscore that the issue of conversion, as a change
in belonging and association, has not been neglected in the scholarship on
Lucumí, especially in a handful of fine studies concerning African Ameri-
can practitioners.88 Some of the sociological literature on Cuban immigrants
has illuminated the imperative among these exiles to create community in a
“strange land”—the United States—as a reason for their high rate of conver-
sion between the 1960s through 1980s. Initiation was undoubtedly a part of
their search for gemeinschaft.89 Yet practitioners’ own words about their desire
for ocha itself, or the absence of it, have fallen beneath scrutiny as oral perfor-
mances, and a disproportionate emphasis on voluntaristic intentionality and
conscious identity formation has continued to dictate the terms of the wider
discussion. Practitioners’ stated ambivalence concerning their own financial
and emotional investment in much-maligned “prohibited epistemologies”
have been either downplayed or dismissed as a refusal to claim their cultural
patrimony. And since Lucumí practitioners do not proselytize, “micropractices
of persuasion” that have gradually convinced them of the spirits’ power, the
elders’ authority, and their need for initiation have seldom attracted the notice
of researchers.90
The most common iteration of the initiation narrative, with its claim
that ocha transpired against the will of the practitioner, may have also mili-
tated against its close analysis. In the early scholarship on Lucumí, research-
ers collected ethnographic data almost exclusively from authoritative senior
Cuban and Puerto Rican practitioners steeped in a lifelong familiarity with
the traditions they came to embrace. Academics collaborated with ritual spe-
cialists in rationalizing the practice of their traditions into systems expressive

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of a codified cosmology and consistent worldview.91 In the interest of rep-

resenting the tradition in a manner that would refute patently racist, sen-
sationalistic accounts and in order to corroborate practitioners’ claims to a
foundational African past that would ennoble them in the present, scholars
moved to cast Lucumí in the mold of familiar monotheisms, accentuating the
beliefs ostensibly to be deduced from practices, and bowdlerizing references
to those that seemed irrational or superstitious according to the hegemonic
“litmus test of legitimacy.”92 To the extent that an informant was portrayed
as wrestling with divinatory mandates and her religious vocation, the story
was cast as a comedy: a series of blunders that ended in a marriage, only in
this case, those joined together in holy matrimony were a divine husband and
human wife.
Moreover, the tendency of scholars themselves to “get hitched” to the
spirits—for to be a bride of the orishas is often to be their “horse,” or posses-
sion mount—has also fostered inattention to the typical initiation narrative.
While seldom discussed as a research phenomenon, it has been customary
for scholars to become ordained while gathering data on Black Atlantic reli-
gions, and to concede as much in print.93 They have largely been forthcoming
about their “double-consciousness” as both practitioners and academics, to the
point of operationalizing religious dreams, sensations, and encounters in their
analyses.94 Yet, with the exception of Michael Atwood Mason, scholars have
proven averse to tracing their own and others’ gradual implication in Afro-
Cuban traditions.95 More importantly, perhaps, the anomalous circumstances
surrounding their ordinations seem to have colored their depictions of ocha as
a desideratum. The authors of academic monographs have tended to say that
they sought to be initiated out of an affinity with the traditions under exami-
nation, combined with an aspiration to obtain ritual expertise and informa-
tion.96 This situation is decidedly at odds with that of most initiates, for they
overwhelmingly profess to have become priests not because they wanted to,
but because the spirits wanted them.
Finally, the initiation narrative has not occasioned more inquiry due to
its very banality. An ordinary, vernacular form of Lucumí discourse, it has no
place in the compendia of “secrets” that dominate the popular scholarship and
trade publications; its recitation is as easy to take for granted in a house of ocha
as wallpaper, and its prosaic design may seem to be just as monotonous.97 The
writing on Afro-Cuban religions may still be divided into the following, as
delineated by Stephan Palmié,

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 174 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l ig ions

three equally distinct genres: the academic monograph, the “eyewit-

ness account,” and the manual de santeria (the latter being one of what
can be considered two distinct types of Afro-Cuban “insider” writ-
ing: the libreta, a handwritten or typed notebook containing ritual
and theological information for the writer’s own religious use; and
the manual, a published tract directed at the layperson and contain-
ing, characteristically, an exposition of the “true nature of santeria,”
schematic descriptions of the major deities and their attributes, a
few myths, superficial accounts of divination procedures, and some
“magical” recipes for home use).98

While Raul Canizares’s 1993 Walking with the Night: The Afro-Cuban World of
Santeria occasioned these comments, they remain applicable to the sub-
field.99 Scholars with both personal and ethnographic experience in Lucumí
tend to publish a synthesis of eyewitness account and manual, although
with greater fidelity to the specifics of oracular methods and more eru-
dite ideal-typical accounts of the participant trajectory of practitioners.100
These volumes have furnished invaluable documentary material and theo-
logical introspection for the study of Afro-Cuban religions, yet in only the
rare academic monograph has the question of the initiation narrative as a
rhetorical construct, site of ritual performance, or analytical problematic
arisen.101

Toward a Genealogy of the Initiation Narrative

The initiation narrative did not develop in isolation but drew on a range of
preexisting utterance types, three of which it is necessary to mention here. The
first would be the Christian conversion story. Despite the widespread notion
that Saul’s epiphany on the road to Damascus set the template for such sto-
ries, historians of Christianity have shown that it did not emerge as a salient
speech genre until the early modern period. As Karl F. Morrison has docu-
mented, the idea of conversion as a bolt-of-lightning moment, “a dramatic
peripety,” is a quite recent phenomenon.102 The gradual interpellation by the
gospel or “delayed reaction” to it best exemplified by the Confessions of Augus-
tine of Hippo is congruent with, rather than a deviation from, earlier Chris-
tian understandings of conversion. Yet by the time Black Atlantic traditions

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 17 5 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

crystallized in the Caribbean and South America, both Roman Catholic and
Protestant conversion narratives, often including the miraculous physical
healing of an injured or ailing penitent, had become widely disseminated, if
not ubiquitous. Afro-Cuban religious practitioners did not elude exposure to
such narratives through popular devotional texts, such as hagiographies, saints’
vitae, apologia, herbal lore, and adages; religious practices (such as pilgrimage);
and oral traditions associated with holy sites.103
Other possible precedents for the Lucumí initiation narrative are older
Afro-Cuban modes of religious self-narration, including rhetorical forms that
originated within Bantu drums of affliction, called ngoma. In contemporary
ngoma and for centuries previously, the motive for participation has been cited
as infirmity, identified by a diviner as a call to service from the spirits, “both the
cause and the cure” of the sufferer’s malady.104 As John Janzen writes,

The [presenting] complaints [later] become stories, personal testi-

monials, that are repeated through song-dances within the ngoma cell
composed of the sufferer-novice’s therapist-teacher and all of his or
her novices. . . . In repeated ngoma sessions the individual develops a
song-story that interprets and culturally legitimates his understand-
ing of the world.105

Most slaves brought to Cuba between the sixteenth and the late eighteenth
centuries were Central African, and scholars have speculated that one iteration
of ngoma, the Lemba healing society, may have traveled with them and spread
throughout the New World.106 The crystallization of Yorùbá-based Lucumí
in Cuba followed long after that of several Kongo-inspired variants of Palo
Monte, and it is quite possible that, as multiple initiatory commitments among
practitioners became normative, Lucumí incorporated and operationalized
aspects of the ngoma song-story. Although the relation of its initiates’ stories
has not been accompanied by music or formally ritualized otherwise, their
narrative contents and stylistic features—including the chronotopic invoca-
tion of paths and the emplotment of autobiography as metamorphosis—would
reward comparison with those collected from ngoma practitioners.107
Indeed, the most obvious point of convergence between such “drums” and
Afro-Cuban traditions is their galvanization of the afflicted in propitiatory
and commemorative ceremonial action that “re-stories” suffering as a god-
send. Practitioners of the latter have tended to be initiated into Palo Monte

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 17 6 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l igions

before Lucumí, and these traditions cooperate to instill in devotees a sense of

indebtedness to their contrapuntally structured ritual complexes. Those initi-
ated into either, or both, as a result of infirmity have presented almost identi-
cal symptoms in oral histories, and cast themselves as “wounded surgeon[s].”108
Once cured of their most pernicious ailments, initiates are obliged to apply
their talents and energies to the collective search for wellbeing. In initiation
narratives, elders say that they have paid their dues—in blood, sweat, tears,
and other effluvia—to bolster their “professional qualification[s]” as healers,
and equally, as a means of grappling with illness as the “most unbeautiful” of
aesthetic objects.109 This, too, echoes the purpose of testimonials in ngoma.
However, Lucumí practitioners have not only incorporated recalcitrant idi-
oms developed in eastern Cuba and central Africa; they have also altered them
to reflect the historico-political context. It seems clear that the widespread
stigma attached to Afro-Atlantic religions shaped discursive practices in addi-
tion to institutional norms. Since the late-nineteenth century, to state a desire
for Lucumí initiation has been tantamount to rejecting God as well as science.
Both the popular press and academic scholarship have placed the onus on prac-
titioners to differentiate their practices from those of brujería, or witchcraft. In
what was perhaps the first public defense of Lucumí, in July 1913—exactly one
year after the massacre of over three thousand Afro-Cubans in a “race war”—
a certain Fernando Guerra circulated a manifesto addressed to the president
of Cuba and Havana’s mayor, among other government officials, and “to the
general public.” On behalf of practitioners, Guerra conceded the existence of
brujería but distanced Lucumí from it, exhorting journalists to aid the authorities
in distinguishing between the two. Asserting that practitioners had not aban-
doned Catholicism, he nevertheless inveighed against infringements on their
constitutional rights, declaring, “despite the fact that our ancestors are African,
we do not practice brujería, nor do we use the objects required for its rituals, and
if we practice the Lucumí religion, it is to console our suffering on this earth.”110
The source of Afro-Cubans’ suffering was left up to readers to infer.
Guerra was not a lone voice in the wilderness. He was secretary, and later
became president, of the Cabildo Africano Lucumí/Sociedad de Santa Bár-
bara, “the twentieth-century reincarnation of the great Changó Tedún, the
most widely remembered and important Lucumí cabildo in Cuba’s history,”
with a vast “institutional reach and diverse membership.”111 Guerra was a liai-
son between his cabildo and other mutual aid societies and represented them
both to the general public. Guerra corresponded with Fernando Ortiz, as well

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 17 7 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

as with other members of the Cuban intelligentsia and literati. As a small

group of Cuban- and African-born initiates strove to consolidate authority,
standardize protocols for rituals such as ocha, and ascertain the issues on which
distinct lineages could agree to disagree in the early twentieth century, they also
collaborated on what—pardoning the anachronism—closely resembles a public
relations strategy. A witch-hunting craze had begun in 1904 after a white tod-
dler was abducted and murdered just outside of Havana. A “witch doctor” and
his so-called accomplices, who had become acquainted through a local cabildo,
were accused of extracting her heart and blood to restore an ex-slave’s health.
Seven were eventually convicted, with two sentenced to death, and the rest to
harsh prison sentences. Similar cases followed over the next two decades, incit-
ing angry mobs to try, and occasionally succeed in, lynching alleged brujos.112 No
initiate—whether Lucumí, Palo, or Abakuá—was above suspicion.
Touted as Cuba’s foremost expert on brujería, Ortiz had advocated in 1906
for its elimination as a contagious disease or parasite enervating the body of
the fledgling nation, and Guerra was responsible for courting him in hopes of
modifying his diagnosis.113 Guerra appealed to his ambition by sending him
exclusive, as-yet-unpublished information on Lucumí practices—such as bàtá
drumming—and to his vanity by granting him privileged access to the Socie-
dad de Santa Bárbara, even offering him an honorary presidency in 1911.114
Guerra and his counterparts in other cabildos recognized the threats posed
to the religion by new forms of media spectacle and consumption, technical
improvements in state surveillance mechanisms, and the advent of a “scien-
tific” criminological discourse that marshaled “life-history documents,” such
as autobiographical accounts, in the study and prosecution of populations
branded mentally defective or morally delinquent.115 In boldly worded broad-
sides, Guerra waged his rhetorical campaign by admitting that his interlocutors
had grounds for opprobrium, then ingeniously shifting its targets. Attuned to
the prevalence of epidemiological metaphors in the political discourse of his
day, Guerra denounced the notion that Lucumí initiates harmed others for
physical cures and identified “the microbes infecting [Cuba’s] social body” as
corruption, ignorance, and prejudice.116
Accounts of initiation and other modes of self-narration among the
founders of modern-day Lucumí await further research. Yet it stands to reason
that Guerra and his peers endeavored to portray their religious commitment as
a response to their own suffering in terms reminiscent of Christian apologetics,
at least when acting as criminal-cum-ethnographic informants. Moreover, it

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 17 8 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l igions

appears that their efforts contributed to the adoption of the “unchosen choice”
as a rhetorical convention among successive generations of priests, whether at
the bidding of immediate elders, as a deliberate act of emulative self-fashioning,
or due to the attainment of competence in this conversational register through
everyday familiarity with its performance. Lest such an intimate relationship
between practitioners and texts sound far-fetched, initiates have creatively
appropriated the classic mid-century ethnographies of William Bascom and
Lydia Cabrera, revising their own discursive practices—particularly in ritual
registers such as divination and praise-singing—in light of their engagement
with these “canonical” volumes.117 The leap from the page to the tongue has
proven to be a short one for adepts, especially when the eminent personages
quoted have appeared in their ancestral prayers (moyuba).
Practitioners’ narrative approach to the pain they endured prior to ocha
also bears traces of the historico-political forces and discursive formations
that produced Lucumí. As noted above, initiates have shown a propensity
for itemizing the symptoms of illnesses that doctors failed to ameliorate and
accentuating their incomprehension in the face of intractable ailments. In the
nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Cuban medical establishment
conspired with the emerging disciplines of ethnography and criminology to
impute moral pathologies to “atavistic others,” chiefly lower-class women,
persons of African descent, and practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions.118 The
“truth effects” of “social hygiene” discourses remain, and continue to have
consequences for subaltern populations; the persistent effects of discredited
discourses cannot be understood merely with reference to explicitly stated
exclusionary and discriminatory policies.119 It should come as no surprise, then,
that a speech genre elaborated by Lucumí priests has consistently rejected the
central claim of medical science to be able to read the body. Their stories of
initiation have bristled with “metacomplaints” concerning the systematic dele-
gitimation of their subjective experience, and they have cataloged the myriad
ways that medical science has failed to assist them in mastering the quandary
of corporeality.120
Practitioners have limned the almost unverbalizable severity of their
symptoms in terms that gesture toward somatic and semantic excess—“I felt very
tired . . . very bad”—and faulted doctors for a startling dearth of understanding.121
The impotence of physicians, usually held in esteem as “paragons of learning
and virtue,” has functioned as a rhetorical foil for both the orishas’ power and
that of Lucumí as a ritual technology and structure of signification superior to

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medical science.122 This is not to insinuate, however, that the narrators have
always secretly longed for ocha while telling their interlocutors otherwise. It is,
instead, to historicize their speech practices and pursue the logic of their state-
ments, instead of—with all the exasperation of Tato’s doctor—referring them
to psychiatrists.123 The “language-game” of pain presupposes that the sensations
others claim to feel cannot be externally verified, and it is beyond the scope of
this article to assess any given story as a fact or record of true life experience.
What the expression of pain may reliably denote, however, is an attempt to
assign meaning to and operationalize affliction, particularly as a confirmation
of the spirits’ reality and power. In recounting initiation stories, priests have
shown their interlocutors how to articulate, and therefore comprehend, the
spirits’ role in their wellbeing. These narratives thus have redounded to the
conversion of speakers and listeners alike into religious subjects.

Conclusion

In the foregoing, I asserted that initiation narratives not only constitute

a speech genre but also play a major role in habituating practitioners to the
intersubjective frames of reference employed by Lucumí initiates to interpret
pivotal experiences, particularly as media for communication with the spir-
its. Far from idle chitchat, these stories have helped to enlarge the tradition
by persuading interlocutors of the reality of the orishas, and the efficacy of
rituals deemed to be felicitous, especially when formerly profane objects are
consecrated and endowed with agency. In relating anecdotes about their pre-
initiatory struggles, priests have celebrated what is seen as the spirits’ complete
ownership of comparatively weak human bodies and capacity to override any
conceivable opposition to their divine will. The subtext of practitioners’ rec-
ollections has been that Lucumí’s ritual protocols provide a uniquely potent
channel for the spirits’ energy, as harnessed by their authoritative representa-
tives. Although it behooves us to acknowledge that speech genres spring partly
from pre-existing sources, it bears repeating that priests’ stories do not simply
mobilize narrative formulae concerning religious transformation. They have
themselves been ideologically transformative. This has surely been the most
consequential social effect of initiation narratives.
The significance of religious narratives that are not “sacred”—not myths,
praise-songs, or oracular speech—must be fleshed out in order for scholars

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 18 0 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l igions

to develop a more sensitive approach to religious subjectivity as progres-

sively embodied, and to the relations of force obtaining in the most casual
of verbal exchanges. To this end, the argument I advanced here drew on
assiduously collected oral histories, an underexploited resource in the study
of Africana religions, to illustrate the prevalence of affliction, rather than
desire, as the main catalyst for initiation in practitioners’ stories. I identified
some precedents for the initiates’ self-representations, and showed that they
have woven their experiences into narrative patterns that appear to mani-
fest divine intentionality. I then demonstrated that their testimonials have
been both descriptive and prescriptive, not simply reporting the details sur-
rounding individual initiations, but also acting to pull interlocutors toward
an understanding of themselves as implicated within the world of the spirits.
The main incentive for scholars to conduct studies along these lines is that a
better grasp on Africana traditions’ mechanisms of socialization would offer
insight not only into the logic of their ritual practices, but also into the ways
that everyday speech genres have lent cohesion to religious identities, and
meaning to unutterable pain.

Notes
I want to thank Nilaja Campbell and the members of the community I call Ilé Laroye
in this article for their great patience, material assistance, and generosity with both
time and words. I remain indebted to Bruce Lincoln, Stephan Palmié, and Martin
Riesebrodt for their adroit commentary on earlier versions of this article. I am also
deeply grateful to David Coen, the conscientious and incisive anonymous referees,
and to my colleagues at Dartmouth College. Funding for the research and writing of
this article was provided by the University of Chicago Center for the Study of Race,
Politics, and Culture; the Martin Marty Center for the Advanced Study of Religion;
and the Ford Foundation.
1. Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1987), 142.
2. A small selection of significant titles include Fernando Ortiz, La Africanía de la música
folklórica de Cuba / Los bailes y el teatro de los negros en el folklore de Cuba / Los instrumentos de
la música afrocubana, 5 vols. (La Habana: Editora Universitaria, 1965); Isabel Castel-
lanos, The Use of Language in Afro-Cuban Religion (PhD diss., Georgetown University,
1976); Miguel F. Santiago, Dancing with the Saints: The Dance Experience in Santería (San
Juan, Puerto Rico: InterAmerican University Press, 1993); Jesús Fuentes Guerra,
Cultos afrocubanos: un estudio etnolinguístico (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales,
1996); Katherine J. Hagedorn, Divine Utterances: The Performance of Afro-Cuban Santería
(Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2001); David H. Brown, Santería

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 18 1 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

Enthroned: Art, Ritual and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 2003); and Yvonne Daniel, Dancing Wisdom: Embodied Knowledge in
Haitian Vodou, Cuban Yoruba, and Bahian Candomblé (Urbana and Chicago: University
of Illinois Press, 2005).
3. I have in mind such volumes as Robert Alan Friedman, “Making an Abstract World
Concrete: Knowledge, Competence, and Structural Dimensions of Performance
among Bata Drummers in Santería” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1982); Steven
Gregory, Santeria in New York City: A Study in Cultural Resistance (New York: Garland
Publishing, 1999); Stephan Palmié, Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt
einer afrokubanischen Religion (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1991); Kristina Silke Wirtz,
Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería: Speaking a Sacred World (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2007); Claire Garoutte and Anneke Wambaugh,
Crossing the Water: A Photographic Path to the Afro-Cuban Spirit World (Durham, N.C.:
Duke University Press, 2007); and Jualynne E. Dodson, Sacred Spaces and Religious
Traditions in Oriente Cuba (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2008).
Surveys of African American practitioners have also enlarged the field and drawn
vital attention to the growing demographic importance of Anglophone converts
to the tradition.
4. Most subsequent ethnographic references to Ilé Laroye and other fieldwork situ-
ations are based on four years of fieldwork, 2005–9, conducted with the approval
of the University of Chicago Social and Behavioral Sciences Institutional Review
Board. I have changed the name of this community and all my interlocutors for
reasons of confidentiality.
5. I hesitate to overstate others’ even joking perception of me as “ghetto” outside
the ilé.
6. See Cora Daniels, Ghettonation: A Journey Into the Land of Bling and Home of the Shameless
(New York: Doubleday, 2007). I write at greater length on the effect of my gender
and ethnic identity as a Cuban-American Latina within this community in “Nar-
rative, Seasoning, Song: Praxis, Subjectivity, and Transformation in an African
American Lucumí Community” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 2010).
7. This was no doubt attributable to both my self-presentation and academic
affiliation. I lived in painful awareness of the history of cultural appropriation
that would render indecorous attempts to ingratiate myself through “common”
speech or behavior to my interlocutors. For instance, I regarded the sort of verbal
minstrelsy employed by some to mimic what is perceived as African American
speech, or “black-’cent” (a play on the phrase “black accent”) as not merely unde-
sirable but offensive. Nevertheless, I heartily deserved any treatment as a figure
of fun.
8. The “Evergreen Mall” is called “Ever-Black” by both Anglos and blacks on the
South Side of Chicago.
9. The use of “ghetto” to mean bad, unclean, poorly made, or messy, is widespread.
Rita Astuti writes, “Throughout my stay with the Vezo [of Western Madagas-
car], I witnessed a constant stream of commentary on the making and undoing of

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 18 2 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l igions

Vezo-ness,” and there are several parallels in my experience with ghettoness as “an
activity rather than a state of being.” Rita Astuti, “‘The Vezo Are Not a Kind of
People’: Identity, Difference, and ‘Ethnicity’ among a Fishing People of Western
Madagascar,” American Ethnologist 22, no. 3 (1995): 469.
10. See Robin D. G. Kelley, “Looking for the ‘Real’ Nigga: Social Scientists Construct
the Ghetto,” in That’s the Joint!: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader, ed. Murray Forman and
Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge, 2004), 119–36; David West Brown,
“Girls and Guys, Ghetto and Bougie: Metapragmatics, Ideology and the Manage-
ment of Social Identities,” Journal of Sociolinguistics 10, no. 5 (2006): 596–610; and
Jennifer L. Cohen, “Global Links From the Postindustrial Heartland: Language,
Internet Use, and Identity Development Among U.S.-Born Mexican High
School Girls,” in Latino Language and Literacy in Ethnolinguistic Chicago, ed. Marcia Farr
(New York: Routledge, 2005), 187–216.
11. The term “tactical essentialism” is that of Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Dif-
ference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Durham, N.C.: Duke University
Press, 2001); Moreiras is building on Gayatri Spivak’s term “strategic essential-
ism,” used by Latino and African American youth “to claim the distinctiveness and
exclusivity of their cultural space while they also make room for their own excep-
tionality (and thus chances of individual upward mobility) by challenging the bio-
logical bases of race.” Amy C. Wilkins, “Puerto Rican Wannabes: Sexual Spectacle
and the Marking of Race, Class, and Gender Boundaries,” Gender & Society 18, no. 1
(2004): 113. See also Stuart Hall, “What Is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?”
in Black Popular Culture: A Project by Michelle Wallace, ed. Gina Dent (Seattle, Wash.:
Bay Press, 1992).
12. Brian K. Smith, “Ritual, Knowledge, and Being: Initiation and Veda Study in
Ancient India,” Numen 33, fasc. 1 (1986): 65.
13. Paul Ricoeur uses this term in Figuring the Sacred: Religion, Narrative, and Imagination, ed.
Mark I. Wallace, trans. David Pellauer (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995), 217.
14. For the most part, they had come to embrace Lucumí later in life, after diverse
experiences with a range of traditions.
15. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, Being the Gifford
Lectures on Natural Religion, Delivered at Edinburgh, in 1901–1902 (London: Longman, Green,
1902); Max Heirich, “A Change of Heart: A Test of Some Widely Held Theories
about Religious Conversion,” American Journal of Sociology 83, no. 3 (1977): 653–80.
16. See, for example, Richard G. Gelb, “The Magic of Verbal Art: Juanita’s Santería
Initiation” in Latino Language and Literacy in Ethnolinguistic Chicago, ed. Marcia Farr
(Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2005), 323–50.
17. For instance, Stefania Capone, Les Yoruba du Nouveau Monde: Religion, ethnicité et nation-
alisme noir aux États-Unis (Paris: Karthala, 2005).
18. David Scott, “‘An Obscure Miracle of Connection’: Discursive Tradition and
Black Diaspora Criticism,” Small Axe 1:19–38.
19. Roger M. Keesing, “Anthropology as Interpretive Quest,” Current Anthropology 28,
no. 2 (1987): 164.

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20. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, trans. John B. Thompson (London:
Polity Press, 1991), 117.
21. It is problematic to assume that these ritual protocols are normative within
such a decentralized tradition, especially in light of recent attempts at codifica-
tion and the formulation of orthodoxy among practitioners. However, I have
furnished this ideal-typical description of the initiation ritual in order to sug-
gest the arduous nature of the ritual process, at least according to published
accounts. No part of it comes from the Chicago-based house of ocha mentioned
above, for I have been neither an initiate—and therefore privy to the ceremonies
I describe—nor in a position to interview any of my informants concerning these
rites. The details in this section derive from the literature on Lucumí from the
mid-twentieth century onward; for a selection of references based on ritual pro-
tocols in Cuba and several cities throughout the United States, including Hous-
ton, as well as in Mexico, see Teodoro Díaz Fabelo, Olórun (La Habana: Ediciones
del Departamento de Folklore del Teatro Nacional de Cuba, 1960); Obá Ecún,
Oricha: Metodologia de la religión Yoruba (Miami: Editorial SIBI, 1985); Jorge Castel-
lanos and Isabel Castellanos, Cultura Afrocubana, vol. 3 (Miami: Ediciones Univer-
sal, 1988); Joseph M. Murphy, Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); Mary Ann Clark, “Asho Orisha (Clothing of the
Orisha): Material Culture as Religious Expression in Santería” (PhD diss., Rice
University, 1999); Michael Atwood Mason, Living Santería: Rituals and Experiences in
an Afro-Cuban Religion (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002);
Heriberto Feraudy Espino, Irna: Un encuentro con la santería, el espiritismo y el Palo Monte
(Santo Domingo: Editora Manatí, 2002); Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Liz-
abeth Paravisini-Gebert, Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou
and Santería to Obeah and Espiritismo (New York: New York University Press, 2003);
and Noemí Quezada, Religiosidad popular México-Cuba (Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Autónoma de México, Instituto de Investigaciones Antropológicas,
Plaza y Valdés Editores, 2004).
22. Elders’ protégés are called godchildren, and the priests, godparents. Some Lucumí
lineages employ the male diviners of the Ifá oracle, called babaláwos; other houses
initiate using the priests termed oriates as “masters of ceremonies” for initiation,
and they defer to the sixteen-cowries divination system—practiced by both men
and women—in almost all cases.
23. Perhaps the best extended consideration of the resonance of the term is to be
found in Mary Ann Clark, Where Men Are Wives and Mothers Rule: Santería Ritual Prac-
tices and Their Gender Implications (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005),
65–91.
24. In other houses of ocha, they are barred from seeing themselves in a mirror for a
year. The prohibition against mirrors may be thought of as interrupting the pro-
cess of an individual’s never-ending self-fashioning, in deference to the commu-
nity’s construction of her personhood through the regulations of iyaworaje and the
dictates of itá.

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 18 4 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l igions

25. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Palo Alto, Calif.:
Stanford University Press, 2003), 92.
26. Brian K. Smith, “Ritual, Knowledge, and Being: Initiation and Veda Study in
Ancient India,” Numen 33, fasc. 1 (1986): 65.
27. Lydia Cabrera, El monte: Igbo finda, ewe orisha, vititi nfinda (Miami: Colección del
Chichereku, 1983 [1954]). In Rómulo Lachatañeré’s El sistema religioso de los afro-
cubanos (La Habana: Editorial de Ciencias Sociales, 2004), published as articles
between 1939 and 1946 and in 1961—and still partly unpublished, according
to Jean Stubbs, Lila Haines, and Meic F. Haines, Cuba (Oxford: Clio Press,
1996)—the author writes, “Y como la iniciación no responde siempre a la nece-
sidad obligatoria de ejercer el sacerdocio, sino que ésta es una cualidad voca-
cional del individuo—los cultos se nutren con ‘hijos’ de santo que se inician
simplemente por su salud,” 114.
28. Mikhail M. Bakhtin, “The Problem of Speech Genres,” in Speech Genres and Other
Late Essays, ed. V. W. McGee, C. Emerson, and M. Holquist (Austin: University of
Texas Press, 1986), 60–102.
29. See Bettyruth Walter, The Jury Summation as Speech Genre: An Ethnographic Study of What
It Means to Those Who Use It (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins Pub. Co., 1988) and E. Sum-
merson Carr, Scripting Addiction: The Politics of Therapeutic Talk and American Sobriety
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2011).
30. Alessandro Duranti, “Samoan Speechmaking across Social Events: One Genre In
and Out of Fono,” Language and Society 12 (1983): 1–22.
31. William F. Hanks, “Discourse Genres in a Theory of Practice,” American Ethnologist
14, no. 4 (1987): 668–92.
32. Taussig, 142.
33. David H. Brown, “Garden in the Machine: Afro-Cuban Sacred Art and
Performance in Urban New Jersey and New York” (PhD diss., Yale University,
1989), 202.
34. Stephan Palmié, Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2003), 159–200
35. Personal communication, December 18, 2005, and January 7, 2006.
36. Personal communication, January 22, 2006. As of this writing, I am unsure of
whether Nilaja consciously chose these words as an invocation of the movie scene
or if the words came to her unbidden. The cinematic exchange is as follows:

Phil Davis (Danny Kaye): How much is “wow”?

Bob Wallace (Bing Crosby): It’s right in between, uh, “ouch”
and “boing.”
Phil Davis (Danny Kaye): Wow!

37. Mary Cuthrell Curry, Making the Gods in New York: The Yoruba Religion in the African
American Community (New York: Garland Publishing, 1997), 90.
38. Wirtz, Speaking a Sacred World, 120.

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 18 5 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

39. Personal communication, August 13, 2007.

40. Victor W. Turner, Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study in Ndembu Village Life
(Oxford: Berg, 1996 [1957]), 303.
41. Tomás Fernández Robaina, Hablen paleros y santeros (Havana: Editorial de Ciencias
Sociales, 2001), 2. Wirtz lists four motives for ocha identified by her main infor-
mant in contemporary Santiago: “family tradition,” “irresolvable problems,” “seri-
ous illness,” and “affinity for the religion” (2007, 89). Similarly, in his study of
Candomblé, Umbanda, and Kardecist Spiritism in Brazil, Stanley Krippner lists
“five pathways that allowed practitioners to receive their call,” but what he enu-
merates are entry points into the tradition, not participation trajectories, and they
do not necessarily condition continued participation. Stanley Krippner, “Learning
from the Spirits: Candomblé, Umbanda, and Kardecismo in Recife, Brazil,”
Anthropology of Consciousness 19, no. 1 (2008): 8.
42. Although in some cases, death looms in retrospect as fatal accident or homicide,
the death forestalled through ocha has most often been constructed by initiates as
the outcome of illness.
43. See Hagedorn, 40.
44. Richard G. Gelb, “Literacy and Magic: The Role of Oral and Written Texts within
a Santería Religious Community” (PhD diss., University of Illinois–Chicago,
1999), 106.
45. John Mason, Ìdáná Fún Òrìs.à: Cooking for Selected Heads (Brooklyn: Yorùbá Theologi-
cal Archministry, 1999), 3; italics mine.
46. Robaina, 6. For instance, in Tabaré Güerere, Hablan los santeros (Caracas: Alfadil
Ediciones, 1993), six of the seven practitioners questioned for his study pointed
to illness or detection of sorcery as “confirmations” for the existence of the spirits,
and fingered illness as motivating factors for initiation. But even this is to isolate
phenomena that have been apt to coincide in practitioners’ narratives, where ill-
ness has prompted the divination that in turn mandates ocha, and forces a reevalu-
ation of the religion.
47. Theresa Varela, “The Mirror Behind the Mask: Experiences of Five People Living
with HIV/AIDS Who Practice Santeria” (PhD diss., New York University,
2001), 77–78.
48. See, for instance, Argelio Frutos, Panteón Yoruba: conversación con un santero (Holguín,
Cuba: Ediciones Holguín, 1992), and Juan Manuel Saldívar Arellano, Nuevas formas
de adoración y culto: La construcción social de la santería en Catemaco, Veracruz, México (Madrid:
Editorial Vision Libros, 2009).
49. Brown, Santería Enthroned, 193. This symbol belongs to Shangó, but priests hold that
it would prove useless without the organic mixture placed inside of it, called osaín
for the herbalist orisha.
50. Robaina, 24–25; translation mine. This story resembles another recorded in
Germany by Lioba Rossbach de Olmos: “He was not really enthusiastic when he
heard that his son was going to be initiated into Santería, and he always remained
skeptical. It was by chance that Alexander got in touch with the Afro-Cuban

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 186 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l igions

religion. . . .” Lioba Rossbach de Olmos, “Santería Abroad: The Short History

of an Afro-Cuban Religion in Germany by Means of Biographies of Some of Its
Priests,” Anthropos 104, no. 2 (2009): 483–97.
51. Wirtz, Speaking a Sacred World, 91.
52. Mercedes C. Sandoval writes of an informant, “Many times she had been told by
other santeros that Yemaya wanted her head and that she had to be initiated. . . .
She never quite believed what they told her, because she did not believe too much
in this religion. . . .” Mercedes C. Sandoval, “Santeria as a Mental Health Care
System: An Historical Overview,” Medical Anthropology 13, no. 2 (1979): 137–51.
53. Robaina, 24–25; translation mine.
54. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe
(Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973).
55. Mikhail Bakhtin and Michael Holquist, eds., and Caryl Emerson and Michael
Holquist, trans., The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas
Press, 1981), 120–21.
56. In Lucumí, the metaphor of roads is privileged; for the different manifestations of
orishas, the West African Yorùbá use the image of rippling pools in a river, or ibú, that
are named extensions of the same body of water. See Karin Barber, “‘Oríkì,’ Women
and the Proliferation and Merging of ‘òrìs.à,’” Africa 60, no. 3 (1990): 313–37.
57. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 120. In fact, diviner Ócha’ni Lele writes, “In
Ifa, it is said that there are 256 paths of Eleggua, one for each odu.” Ócha’ni
Lele, The Diloggún: The Orishas, Proverbs, Sacrifices, and Prohibitions of Cuban Santería
(Rochester, Vt.: Destiny Books, 2003), 593.
58. Personal communication. Lucumí rites of passage also put their subjects on paths,
quite literally. For example, on the last day of an ocha, elders remove the new initi-
ate from her confinement, take her to a market, and ask her to deposit offerings
for Eleguá at the four corners around it. See Brown, Santería Enthroned, 167.
59. Personal communication.
60. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 113.
61. Krippner, 9.
62. On this occasion, I took notes by hand while Nilaja and another interlocutor,
Bobbi, spoke.
63. Personal communication, January 7, 2006.
64. I asked, “Did you read [about the religion]?” And she replied, “There were no
books to read, [just] Migene [González-] Wippler, that I now know is the worst.”
65. My field notes read, “contention between Black and Spanish folks in NY, ‘there
was a communication issue, nationalism, language issue, Blacks thought Spanish
speakers talking about them.’” In retrospect, Nilaja said, “he was another one who
was perpetrating.”
66. Field notes November 14, 2005.
67. On the practice of receiving such orishas by practitioners for health reasons, see
Brown, “Garden,” 206–7.
68. Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, 115.

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 18 7 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

69. To extend the analogy, narrators’ peripeteia, or reversal of fortunes, would be the
restoration of health experienced upon initiation.
70. “A Groundwork for West Indian Cultural Openness,” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 13, no. 3 (2007): 569, 570–71.
71. Jerome S. Bruner, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1986), 26.
72. Wardle, “A Groundwork,” 572. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and
Unmaking of the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 29.
73. Italo Calvino, The Uses of Literature: Essays, trans. Patrick Creagh (New York:
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1987), 157.
74. Tracey E. Hucks, “‘Burning with a Flame in America’: African American Women
in African-Derived Traditions,” Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion 17, no. 2 (2001):
90.
75. See Amy Hollywood, “Gender, Agency, and the Divine in Religious Historiography,”
Journal of Religion 84, no. 4 (2004): 514–28; and, for North American Roman Cath-
olics’ portrayal of doctors in their accounts of miraculous cures and healing, Rob-
ert Orsi, “The Cult of the Saints and the Reimagination of the Space and Time
of Sickness in Twentieth-Century American Catholicism,” in Religion and Healing in
America, ed. Linda L. Barnes and Susan Starr Sered (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2004), 29–47.
76. “To study conversion is . . . to study the variety of conditions under which it makes
sense to talk about being converted,” James A. Beckford writes. “Accounting for
Conversion,” The British Journal of Sociology 29, no. 2 (1978): 250.
77. Clifford L. Staples and Armand L. Mauss, “Conversion or Commitment?
A Reassessment of the Snow and Machalek Approach to the Study of Conversion,”
Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 26, no. 2 (1987): 144n2.
78. Martin Holbraad, “Definitive Evidence, from Cuban Gods,” Journal of the Royal
Anthropological Institute 14 (2008): S93–109.
79. “Enactment of expertise” is a term borrowed from E. Summerson Carr, in
“Enactments of Expertise,” Annual Review of Anthropology 39 (2010): 17–32.
80. Personal communication, October 9, 2006. See also Elizabeth Pérez, “Spiritist
Mediumship as Historical Mediation: African-American Pasts, Black Ancestral Pres-
ence, and Afro-Cuban Religions,” Journal of Religion in Africa 41, no. 4 (2011): 330–65.
81. See Peter A. Dorsey, Sacred Estrangement: The Rhetoric of Conversion in Modern American
Autobiography (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993). This is
not to say that these stories have served merely as ritualized declarations of bona
fides. Although a longitudinal study would be needed to establish a correlation
between narratives of ocha and the relative seniority of narrators, the members
of Ilé Laroye I interviewed immediately prior to their initiations offered more
diffuse and generally inchoate reasons for their ochas, while elders tended to
observe the conventions of the speech genre with greater fidelity. Other factors
that contributed to initiation—such as the corporeal training—were ignored or
relegated to a subordinate position.

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 188 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l igions

82. Alejo Carpentier, El reino de este mundo (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1984), 11; my translation.
83. I am thinking specifically of the work of Tracey E. Hucks, Mary Cuthrell
Curry, Steven Gregory, and more recently, Stefania Capone and Suzanne
Marie Henderson. See also Sixto Gastón Agüero, El materialismo explica el
Espiritismo y la Santería (La Habana: Orbe, 1961); Aníbal Argüelles Mederos
and Ileana Hodge Limonta, Los llamados cultos sincréticos y el espiritismo: estudio
monográfico sobre su significación social en la sociedad cubana contemporánea (La Habana:
Editorial Academia, 1991); George Brandon, Santeria from Africa to the New
World: The Dead Sell Memories (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993);
and Ivor L. Miller, “Belief and Power in Contemporary Cuba: The Dialogue
between Santería Practitioners and Revolutionary Leaders” (PhD diss.,
Northwestern University, 1995). In J. Lorand Matory, “The Many Who Dance
in Me: Afro-Atlantic Ontology and the Problem with ‘Transnationalism,’”
in Transnational Transcendence, ed. Thomas J. Csordas (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2009), 231–62, the author questions whether globalization
is the appropriate term to use for the phenomenon in question. Although
Matory had previously made similar arguments, this essay followed on the
heels of Jacob K. Olupona and Terry Rey, eds., Orisa Devotion as World Religion:
The Globalization of Yorùbá Religious Culture (Madison: University of Wisconsin
Press, 2008).
84. See Jesús Guanche, Procesos etnoculturales de Cuba (La Habana: Editorial Letras, 1983),
and Natalia Bolívar Aróstegui and Mario López Cepero, ¿Sincretismo religioso? Santa
Bárbara/Changó (La Habana: Pablo de la Torrient, 1990).
85. In this vein, one should mention Eugene Berhard Filipowicz, “Santería as
Revitalization among African-Americans” (MA thesis, Florida State University,
1998), and Carlos F. Cardoza Orlandi, “Drum Beats of Resistance and Liberation:
Afro-Caribbean Religions, the Struggle for Life and the Christian Theologian,”
Journal of Latino/Hispanic Theology 3, no. 1 (1995): 50–61. Apropos of a similar dynamic,
Matt Hills writes, “Previous fan-ethnography has largely erred on the side of
accepting fan discourse as interpretive ‘knowledge.’ My aim here is to reconsider
fan discourse as a justification for fan passions and attachments.” Matt Hills, Fan
Cultures (London: Routledge, 2002), 66.
86. The bulk of this scholarship also tacitly accepted a “push-pull model” of
conversion that explains religious commitment sociologically in terms of converts’
preadaptations. Rodney Stark and William Sims Bainbridge, “Networks of Faith:
Interpersonal Bonds and Recruitment to Cults and Sects,” American Journal of
Sociology 85, no. 6 (1980): 1376–95. Among those hewing closely to this model, one
could cite R. B. Simmonds, “Conversion as Addiction: Consequences of Joining
a Jesus Movement Group,” American Behavioral Science 20 (1977): 909–24; and
Peter Worsley, The Trumpet Shall Sound: A Study of “Cargo” Cults in Melanesia (London:
Macgibbon and Kee, 1968). Various scholars have traced the “push-pull model” of
conversion to a more general “deprivation theory of religion” that explains religious

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 18 9 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

participation as “otherworldly” compensation for different types of secular

disadvantage, according to a “rational choice” understanding of social action. See
R. Stark and W. S. Bainbridge, A Theory of Religion (New York: Lang, 1987).
87. The examples are too numerous to mention here, but representative works
include Anahi Viladrich, “Between Bellyaches and Lucky Charms: Revealing
Latinos’ Plant-Healing Knowledge and Practices in New York City,” in Traveling
Cultures and Plants: The Ethnobiology and Ethnopharmacy of Migrations, ed. A. Pieroni and
I. Vandebroek (Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2007), 64–85; and Johan Wedel, Santería
Healing: A Journey into the Afro-Cuban World of Divinities, Spirits, and Sorcery (Gainesville:
University Press of Florida, 2004).
88. Suzanne Marie Henderson, “The African-American Experience of Orisha
Worship” (PhD diss., Temple University, 2007); Tracey E. Hucks, “Approaching
the African God: An Examination of African-American Yoruba History from
1959 to the Present” (PhD diss., Harvard University, 1998) and Yoruba Traditions
and African American Religious Nationalism (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 2012); and Curry, Making the Gods in New York.
89. One notable exception is María Elena Puig, “Perceived Social Support, Subjective
Well-Being, and the Practice of Santería among Four Immigrant Waves:
A Comparative Study of Cuban-Americans in Dade County, Florida” (PhD diss.,
Barry University, 1997). Puig found no empirical evidence to demonstrate that
Lucumí gave practitioners either the social support system or sense of subjec-
tive well-being that previous studies—adopting the views of informants—had
claimed.
90. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 106.
91. Rane Willerslev, Soul Hunters: Hunting, Animism, and Personhood among the Siberian
Yukaghirs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 156. Occasionally this
was based on the assumption “that a body of context-free, prepositional knowl-
edge about spiritual beings, their characteristics and interrelations, lies fully
formed inside people’s heads.”
92. Aisha Khan, “Isms and Schisms: Interpreting Religion in the Americas,” review
of Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santeria to Obeah and
Espiritismo,” by Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert,
Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003): 769.
93. To compile a very abbreviated list of prominent scholars initiated in the course of
research or thereafter, one could mention Maya Deren, Katherine Dunham, and
Karen McCarthy Brown (into different levels of Vodou); Michael Atwood Mason,
David H. Brown, Katherine Hagedorn, Suzanne Marie Henderson, and Yvonne
Daniel (into Lucumí); Kamari Maxine Clarke (into the Oyotúnjí community);
Roger Bastide, Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara, and Jim Wafer (into Candomblé);
and Pierre Verger (into indigenous Yorùbá religion in Nigeria). The late Mary
Cuthrell Curry also made ocha and initiated godchildren.

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94. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (London: Longmans,
Green, 1965 [1903]).
95. Stephan Palmié, “Santería Grand Slam: Afro-Cuban Religious Studies and
the Study of Afro-Cuban Religion,” New West Indian Guide 79, nos. 3–4 (2005):
284–85. A welcome reevaluation of the “emic” has resulted from the critique of
positivist objectivity and postures of detachment in anthropology and sociology.
But adopting an emic perspective in the very course of study may well militate
against the formulation of that adoption process as an analytical problematic.
96. Brian Brazeal, “Africa, Exú and the Devil: Methodological Perspectives for the
Ethnography of Candomblé” (Paper presented at the Brazilian Studies Association
annual meetings, Chico Calif. March 29, 2008).
97. One could object that it is impossible to confirm whether elders in every house
of orisha worship tell similar stories, and that this claim only goes further in the
theoretically and politically dubious direction of trying to codify Lucumí as a tra-
dition with characteristic ritual practices seen as authentic. I would counter that
it is not necessary for every single Lucumí priest to reproduce the intiation narra-
tive in order to point out that a great number have found it important to relate it,
and the frequent incidence of its recurrence in the publications on the tradition
requires some in-depth analysis. It may well be that the initiation narrative as out-
lined here will lose its force and be replaced with other autobiographical speech
genres—and the tradition will still remain recognizable as Lucumí.
98. As Stephan Palmié, “Making Sense of Santería: Three Books on Afro-Cuban
Religion,” in New West Indian Guide/Nieuwe West Indische Gids 70, nos. 3–4 (1996):
291–300. See also Stephan Palmié, “Of Pharisees and Snark-Hunters: Afro-Cuban
Religion as an Object of Knowledge,” Culture and Religion 2, no. 1 (2001): 3–20. One
example of a libreta would be Enrique Cortez, Secretos del oriaté de la religión Yoruba
(New York: Vilaragut Articulos Religiosos Corp., 1980). The oldest libreta found
by Erwan Dianteill is the Folleto para uso del santero (Obba), which dates from approxi-
mately 1850. See Erwan Dianteill, Des dieux et des signes: Initiation, écriture et divination
dans les religions afro-cubaines (Paris: Éditions de l’École des hautes études en sciences
sociales, 2000). See also Nicolás Valentín Angarica, Manual de Orihaté: Religión
Lucumí (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1979 [ca. 1955]); Carlos Elizondo, Manual
del Italero de la Religión Lucumí (Union City, N.J.: [s.n.], 1979 [ca. 1937]); and Lázara
Menéndez, “Libreta de santería de Maria Antoñica Fines, Libreta de santería de
Jesús Torregrosa,” in Estudios afrocubanos: Seleccion de lecturas, ed. Lázara Menéndez
(La Habana: Facultad de Arte y Letras, Universidad de la Habana, 1998). Pos-
sibly the earliest manual was Rómulo Lachatañeré, Manual de Santería: el sistema de
cultos “lucumís” (La Habana, Cuba: Editorial Caribe, 1942). Among the more recent
manuals with a distinct how-to tone, one could list Agún Efunde, Los secretos de la
Santería (New York: Ediciones Cubamerica: 1978); Donna Rose, Santería,the Cuban-
African Magical System (Hialeah, Fla.: Mi-World, 1980); Julio García Cortez (Obbá
Bí), El Santo (la Ocha): secretos de la religión Lucumí (Miami: Ediciones Universal, 1983);
Tomás Medina Pérez’s La santería cubana: el camino de Osha: ceremonias, ritos, y secretos

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 191 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

(Madrid: Biblioteca Nueva, 1998); Ramón Andrés Quesada Suárez, Secretos de

santería afrocubana (Barcelona: Ediciones Obelisco, 2007); Paulino Hernández and
Marta Avedo, Santería afrocubana: sincretismo con la religión católica, ceremonias y oráculos
(Madrid: Eride Editorial, 1998); Luis Manuel Núñez, Santería: A Practical Guide
to Afro-Caribbean Magic (Dallas, Tex.: Spring Publications, Inc., 1992); and Ralph
Alpizar and Damián París’ Santería cubana: mito y realidad (Madrid: Ediciones Mar-
tínez Roca, 2004). Venezuelan author Héctor Izaguirre has published a series
of short pamphlets, including Los tambores de Africa en América (Caracas: Editorial
Panapo, 1997) and Kori-Koto Yemayá: Dada Baldone, Obañeñe, Los Ibeyis; sexualidad, mater-
nidad (Caracas: Editorial Panapo, 1998). This series combines the manual and the
libreta form, in much the same manner as those of the American babaláwo Awo
Fá’Lokun Fatunmbi concerning different orishas.
99. Raul Canizares, Walking with the Night: The Afro-Cuban World of Santeria (Rochester,
VT: Destiny Books, 1993). In Moreno Vega’s The Altar of My Soul: The Living
Traditions of Santería and Luisah Teish’s Jambalaya: The Natural Woman’s Book of Personal
Charms and Practical Rituals (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1985), the eyewitness
account assumes the form of a memoir, and borrows discursive modes from both
the academic monograph and manual.
100. The “eyewitness account” also often attempts to explain the development of
Lucumí as a tradition, as well as reveal its true nature or essence, as opposed
to the distortions of wayward fellow practitioners or the general public. See
Miguel A. De La Torre, Santería: The Beliefs and Rituals of a Growing Religion in America
(Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2004) and Mary Ann Clark,
Santeria: Correcting the Myths and Uncovering the Realities of a Growing Religion (Westport,
Conn.: Praeger Publishers, 2007). Migene González-Wippler’s Santería: African
Magic in Latin America (New York: Julian Press, 1973) and Santería: The Religion (St.
Paul, Minn.: Llewellyn Press, 1989) both relied overmuch on Cabrera’s research
decades earlier, yet they remain popular today.
101. This is also the case for monographs focused, in large part, on religious language
and the acquisition of ritual vocabulary as part of practitioners’ socialization into
ritual contexts and communities, such as Andrés Isidoro Pérez y Mena’s Speaking
with the Dead: Development of Afro-Latin Religion among Puerto Ricans in the United States
(New York: AME Press, Inc., 1991).
102. Karl F. Morrison, Understanding Conversion (Charlottesville and London:
University Press of Virginia, 2002), xii. I suspect that the instantaneous con-
version may owe much to television and filmic portrayals of the process, with
their time-lapse photography encapsulations of human experience. Morrison
writes that the term “conversion” originally referred to the process by which
art was restored to a pristine state through a process of cleansing and recon-
struction. Ibid., xiii.
103. In many European cultures not only conversion itself, but also special devotion
to particular saints, is still cast as the result of mysterious illness, either cured
or ameliorated through the intercession of a beatified or canonized personage.

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 192 jou r na l of a f r ic a na r e l igions

104. Kjersti Larsen, Where Humans and Spirits Meet: The Politics of Rituals and Identified
Spirits in Zanzibar (Oxford: Berghahn, 2008), 42; Tracy Luedke, “Healing Bodies:
Materiality, History, and Power among the Prophets of Central Mozambique”
(PhD diss., Indiana University, 2005).
105. John M. Janzen, “Self-presentation and Common Cultural Structures in Ngoma
Rituals of Southern Africa,” Journal of Religion in Africa 25, fasc. 2 (1995): 146.
106. See Todd Ramón Ochoa, Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010), 9; Betty M. Kuyk, African Voices
in the African American Heritage (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003),
96–99; Michael Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of Afri-
can Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: The University of
North Carolina Press, 1998); Wyatt MacGaffey, “Twins, Simbi Spirits and Lwas
in Kongo and Haiti,” in Linda M. Heywood, Central Africans and Cultural Transfor-
mations in the American Diaspora (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
211–26; and John M. Janzen, Lemba, 1650–1930: A Drum of Affliction in Africa and the
New World (New York: Garland Publishing, 1982).
107. It bears mentioning that just as Lucumí initiates have tended to rely on multiple
hierarchized and multiethnic spirits (orichas, nfumi, inquices, ancestors, and spirit
guides), so too have practitioners of ngoma turned to categories of spirits differ-
entiated by ethnicity and classed accordingly.
108. T. S. Eliot, Four Quartets (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1943), 29;
I. M. Lewis, Ecstatic Religion: A Study of Shamanism and Spirit Possession (New York:
Penguin Books, 1971); Oliva M. Espín, Latina Healers: Lives of Power and Tradition
(Encino, Calif.: Floricanto Press, 1996).
109. Lewis, 172; Thomas Carlyle, The Works of Thomas Carlyle (New York: Peter Fenelon
Collier, 1897), 489.
110. Alejandra M. Bronfman, Measures of Equality: Social Science, Citizenship, and Race in
Cuba, 1902–1940 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 95. See
also Alejandra M. Bronfman, “‘En Plena Libertad y Democracia’: Negros Brujos
and the Social Question, 1904–1919,” Hispanic American Historical Review 82, no. 3
(2002): 549–88.
111. Brown, Santería Enthroned, 70.
112. Aline Helg, Our Rightful Share: The Afro-Cuban Struggle for Equality, 1886–1912
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1995).
113. Fernando Ortiz, Hampa afro-cubana: Los negros brujos: Apuntes para un estudio de etnología
criminal (Madrid: Librería de Fernando Fé, 1906).
114. Palmié, Wizards and Scientists, 250.
115. Alfred Lindesmith and Yale Levin, “The Lombrosian Myth in Criminology,”
American Journal of Sociology 42, no. 5 (1937): 653–71.
116. Cited in Bronfman, 94.
117. See Kristina Silke Wirtz, “How Diasporic Religious Communities Remember:
Learning to Speak the ‘Tongue of the Oricha’ in Cuban Santería,” American Ethnologist
34, no. 1 (2007): 116; David H. Brown, “Review of Africa’s Ogun: Old World and New,”

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 193 Pérez Willful Spirits and Weakened Flesh

American Ethnologist 19, no. 2 (1992): 377–78; Edna M.Rodríguez-Mangual, Lydia

Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 2004), 64–65; Erwan Dianteill and Martha Swearin-
gen, “From Hierography to Ethnography and Back: Lydia Cabrera’s Texts and
the Written Tradition in Afro-Cuban Religions,” Journal of American Folklore 116,
no. 2 (2003): 273–92. Other written materials, such as dream interpretation
pamphlets, glossaries, and the libretas, or manuals, continue to serve as initiates’
personalized reference guides and records of religious training. They have also
played a part in practitioners’ “processes of entextualization to create a seem-
ingly shareable, transmittable culture.” Michael Silverstein and Greg Urban,
“The Natural History of Discourse,” in Natural Histories of Discourse, ed. Michael
Silverstein and Greg Urban (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 2.
118. Bruce Braun, “Biopolitics and the Molecularization of Life,” Cultural Geographies
14, no. 1 (2007): 6–28.
119. Michel Foucault, “Truth and Power,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other
Writings 1972–1977, ed. C. Gordon (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 109–33.
As John Kirk writes, “During the first two decades of the Revolution, people
who insisted on continuing their religious practice were routinely referred to
psychologists, and some were sent away to work camps for ‘anti-social elements,’
including homosexuals, deviants and criminals—that is, ‘those who were not
trusted for incorporation into the regular armed forces.’” John Kirk, Between
God and Party: Religion and Politics in Revolutionary Cuba (Tampa: University of South
Florida Press, 1989), 111–12.
120. James M. Wilce Jr., “‘I Can’t Tell You All My Troubles’: Conflict, Resistance, and
Metacommunication in Bangladeshi Illness Interactions,” American Ethnologist 22,
no. 4 (1995): 927–52.
121. Jean Langford, “Dosic Bodies/Docile Bodies,” in Beyond the Body Proper: Read-
ing the Anthropology of Material Life, ed. Margaret M. Lock and Judith Farquhar
(Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007), 376–82; David B. Morris,
“About Suffering: Voice, Genre, and Moral Community,” in Social Suffering,
ed. A. Kleinman, V. Das, and M. M. Lock (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1997), 25–46.
122. John Walton, Paul B. Beeson, and Ronald Bodley Scott, eds., The Oxford Com-
panion to Medicine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 322; Lydia Cabrera,
La medicina popular en Cuba: médicos de antaño, curanderos, santeros y paleros de hogaño
(Miami: Ultra Graphics Corp, 1984).
123. Palmié has quoted a diviner as saying, “none of my clients are any crazier than you
and me,” and this is also my assumption. Palmié, “Santería Grand Slam,” 283n4.

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