Speaking a Sacred World:
Discursive practices of skepticism and faith in Cuban Santería
Dissertation Committee Chair: Dr. Greg Urban
This ethnography of a local Santería community in Santiago de Cuba shows how practitioners’ ritual and reflective practices produce a common set of religious experiences and a distinct moral community. Religious life is marked by a series of “telling moments” or noteworthy events that practitioners retell as they reflect upon the meaning of potentially religious experiences. Surprisingly, santeros’ interpretive practices are marked as much by expressions of skepticism about one anothers’ expertise and motives as by faith in the power of the orichas (deities). In the very process of debating contradictory readings of the meaning of ritual experiences, practitioners construe individual and collective religious understandings that recreate their religion, moment to moment, as a tangible moral force. The critiques and controversies that arise as part of the normal discourse surrounding rituals in fact serve to draw the outlines and internal fracture lines of practitioners’ moral community.
What is novel about my approach is that I consider how santeros’ intense reflective practices serve the metacultural function of construing what Santería’s rituals, and Santería itself, are about. I focus upon how participants’ discourses about ritual performances serve to metaculturally frame phenomenological experiences shaped by ritual. Rituals envelope participants in lush sensory experiences and offer clues for interpreting them as communications with the divine. Santería’s rituals pose special problems of intelligibility for participants because they rely heavily upon an esoteric ritual jargon called Lucumí. Rituals thus cry out for interpretation, and much of santeros’ discursive activity engages in reflecting upon ritual experiences. Micro-discourse analyses of particular moments of ritual and its interpretation focus on how people report and react to their ritual experiences. Macro-analyses of broad discourses about religion, race, and history in Cuban society contextualize individual experiences and small-scale group dynamics among religious practitioners in a society that continues to view Afro-Cuban traditions like Santería with a mix of fascination, folkloric pride, and suspicion. I closely consider the cultural forms that comprise Santería—rituals, ritual language, community structuring, and discourses of critique and commentary—in order to demonstrate how they result from the dialectic of experience and reflection that I propose.
Kristina Wirtz, Department of Anthropology, Western Michigan University. Kalamazoo, MI 49008
Updated January 6, 2006