Afro Cuban Religious Experience

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Afro-Cuban Religious Experience

Author : Eugenio Matibag
Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 1947372610
Total Pages : 429 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (473 download)

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Book Synopsis Afro-Cuban Religious Experience by : Eugenio Matibag

Download or read book Afro-Cuban Religious Experience written by Eugenio Matibag and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2018-02-26 with total page 429 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The books in the Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series demonstrate the University Press of Florida’s long history of publishing Latin American and Caribbean studies titles that connect in and through Florida, highlighting the connections between the Sunshine State and its neighboring islands. Books in this series show how early explorers found and settled Florida and the Caribbean. They tell the tales of early pioneers, both foreign and domestic. They examine topics critical to the area such as travel, migration, economic opportunity, and tourism. They look at the growth of Florida and the Caribbean and the attendant pressures on the environment, culture, urban development, and the movement of peoples, both forced and voluntary. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series gathers the rich data available in these architectural, archaeological, cultural, and historical works, as well as the travelogues and naturalists’ sketches of the area in prior to the twentieth century, making it accessible for scholars and the general public alike. The Florida and the Caribbean Open Books Series is made possible through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, under the Humanities Open Books program.

Afro-Cuban Religious Arts

Author : Kristine Juncker
Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 0813055024
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Afro-Cuban Religious Arts by : Kristine Juncker

Download or read book Afro-Cuban Religious Arts written by Kristine Juncker and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book profiles four generations of women from one Afro-Cuban religious family. From a plantation in Havana Province in the 1890s to a religious center in Spanish Harlem in the 1960s, these women were connected by their prominent roles as leaders in the religions they practiced and the dramatic ritual artwork they created. Each woman was a medium in Espiritismo—communicating with dead ancestors for guidance or insight—and also a santera, or priest of Santería, who could intervene with the oricha pantheon. Kristine Juncker argues that, by creating art for more than one religion, these women shatter the popular assumption that Afro-Caribbean religions are exclusive organizations. Most remarkably, the portraiture, sculptures, and photographs in Afro-Cuban Religious Arts offer rare glimpses into the rituals and iconography of these religions. Santería altars are closely guarded, limited to initiates, and typically destroyed upon the death of the santera, while Espiritismo artifacts are rarely considered valuable enough to pass on. The unique and protean cultural legacy detailed here reveals insights into how ritual art became popular imagery, sparked a wider dialogue about culture inheritance, attracted new practitioners, and enabled the movement to explode internationally.

Living Santería

Author : Michael Atwood Mason
Publisher : Smithsonian Institution
ISBN 13 : 1588345483
Total Pages : 176 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (883 download)

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Book Synopsis Living Santería by : Michael Atwood Mason

Download or read book Living Santería written by Michael Atwood Mason and published by Smithsonian Institution. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1992 Smithsonian anthropologist Michael Atwood Mason traveled to Cuba for initiation as a priest into the Santería religion. Since then he has created an active oricha “house” and has initiated five others as priests. He is a rare combination: a scholar-practitioner who is equally fluent in his profession and his religion. Interweaving his roles as researcher and priest, Mason explores Santería as a contemporary phenomenon and offers an understanding of its complexity through his own experiences and those of its many practitioners. Balancing deftly between a devotee's account of participation and an anthropologist's theoretical analysis, Living Santería offers an original and insightful understanding of this growing religious tradition.

Crossing the Water

Author : Claire Garoutte
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 292 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (91 download)

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Book Synopsis Crossing the Water by : Claire Garoutte

Download or read book Crossing the Water written by Claire Garoutte and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the summer of 2000, two award-winning photographers, Claire Garoutte and Anneke Wambaugh, were researching Afro-Cuban religious practices in Santiago de Cuba, a city on the southeastern coast of Cuba. A chance encounter led them to the home of Santiago Castañeda Vera, a priest-practitioner of Santería, Palo Monte, and Espiritismo, a Cuban version of nineteenth-century European Spiritism. Out of that initial meeting, a unique collaboration developed. Santiago opened his home and many aspects of his spiritual practice to Garoutte and Wambaugh, who returned to his house many times during the next five years, cameras in hand. The result is Crossing the Water, an extraordinary visual record of Afro-Cuban religious experience. A book of more than 150 striking photographs in both black and white and color, Crossing the Water includes images of elaborate Santería altars and Palo spirit cauldrons, as well as of Santiago and his religious "family" engaged in ritual practices: the feeding of the spirits, spirit possession, and private and collective healing ceremonies. As the charismatic head of a large religious community, Santiago helps his godchildren and others who consult him to cope with physical illness, emotional crises, contentious relationships, legal problems, and the hardships born of day-to-day survival in contemporary Cuba. He draws on the distinct yet intertwined traditions of Santería, Palo Monte, and Espiritismo to foster healing of both mind and body--the three religions form a coherent theological whole for him. Santiago eventually became Garoutte's and Wambaugh's spiritual godfather, and Crossing the Water is informed by their experiences as initiates of Santería and Palo Monte. Their text provides nuanced, clear explanations of the objects and practices depicted in the images. Describing the powerful intensity of human-spirit interactions, and evoking the sights, smells, sounds, and choreography of ritual practice, Crossing the Water takes readers deep inside the intimate world of Afro-Cuban spirituality.

Living Santeria

Author : Michael Atwood Mason
Publisher : Smithsonian Inst Press
ISBN 13 : 9781588340528
Total Pages : 165 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (45 download)

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Book Synopsis Living Santeria by : Michael Atwood Mason

Download or read book Living Santeria written by Michael Atwood Mason and published by Smithsonian Inst Press. This book was released on 2002 with total page 165 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1992 Smithsonian anthropologist Michael Atwood Mason traveled to Cuba for initiation as a priest into the Santer'a religion. Since then he has created an active oricha house and has initiated five others as priests. He is a rare combination: a scholar-practitioner who is equally fluent in his profession and his religion. Interweaving his roles as researcher and priest, he explores Santer'a as a contemporary phenomenon and offers an understanding of its complexity through his own experiences and those of its many practitioners.

Santería Healing

Author : Johan Wedel
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780813030517
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (35 download)

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Book Synopsis Santería Healing by : Johan Wedel

Download or read book Santería Healing written by Johan Wedel and published by . This book was released on 2004 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Wedel's account will appeal to scholars and others interested in Santer a, Cuba, and religious healing. Santer a--with roots in Africa and the slave trade and rituals including divination, animal sacrifice, and possession trance--would seem an anachronism in the modern world. Still, Wedel argues, it offers treatment and ideas about illness that are flourishing and even spreading in the face of Western medicine. He shows that Santer a healing is best understood as a transformation of the self, allowing the patient to experience the world in a new way. He grounds his analysis of Santer a in lively and sometimes frightening narratives in which people reveal in their own words the experience of illness, sorcery, and healing.

Electric Santería

Author : Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
Publisher : Columbia University Press
ISBN 13 : 0231539916
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (315 download)

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Book Synopsis Electric Santería by : Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús

Download or read book Electric Santería written by Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Santería is an African-inspired, Cuban diaspora religion long stigmatized as witchcraft and often dismissed as superstition, yet its spirit- and possession-based practices are rapidly winning adherents across the world. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús introduces the term "copresence" to capture the current transnational experience of Santería, in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism. Drawing on eight years of ethnographic research in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, and in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area, Beliso-De Jesús traces the phenomenon of copresence in the lives of Santería practitioners, mapping its emergence in transnational places and historical moments and its ritual negotiation of race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and religious travel. Santería's spirits, deities, and practitioners allow digital technologies to be used in new ways, inciting unique encounters through video and other media. Doing away with traditional perceptions of Santería as a static, localized practice or as part of a mythologized "past," this book emphasizes the religion's dynamic circulations and calls for nontranscendental understandings of religious transnationalisms.

Wizards and Scientists

Author : Stephan Palmié
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822383640
Total Pages : 413 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Wizards and Scientists by : Stephan Palmié

Download or read book Wizards and Scientists written by Stephan Palmié and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2002-03-19 with total page 413 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Wizards and Scientists Stephan Palmié offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them. Highlighting the ways that Afro-Cuban discourses serve as a means of moral analysis of social action, Palmié suggests that the supposedly irrational premises of Afro-Cuban religious traditions not only rival Western rationality in analytical acumen but are integrally linked to rationality itself. Afro-Cuban religion is as “modern” as nuclear thermodynamics, he claims, just as the Caribbean might be regarded as one of the world’s first truly “modern” locales: based on the appropriation and destruction of human bodies for profit, its plantation export economy anticipated the industrial revolution in the metropolis by more than a century. Working to prove that modernity is not just an aspect of the West, Palmié focuses on those whose physical abuse and intellectual denigration were the price paid for modernity’s achievement. All cultures influenced by the transcontinental Atlantic economy share a legacy of slave commerce. Nevertheless, local forms of moral imagination have developed distinctive yet interrelated responses to this violent past and the contradiction-ridden postcolonial present that can be analyzed as forms of historical and social analysis in their own right.

Santería Enthroned

Author : David H. Brown
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1000124371
Total Pages : 870 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (1 download)

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Book Synopsis Santería Enthroned by : David H. Brown

Download or read book Santería Enthroned written by David H. Brown and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-10-24 with total page 870 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ever since its emergence in colonial-era Cuba, Afro-Cuban Santería (or Lucumí) has displayed a complex dynamic of continuity and change in its institutions, rituals, and iconography. Originally published in 2003 Santería Enthroned combines art, history, cultural anthropology, and ethnohistory to show how Africans and their descendants have developed novel forms of religious practice in the face of relentless oppression. Focusing on the royal throne as a potent metaphor in Santería belief and practice it shows how negotiations among ideologically competing interests have shaped the religion’s symbols, rituals, and institutions from the nineteenth century to the present. Rich case studies of change in Cuba and the United States, including a New Jersey temple and South Carolina’s Oyotunji Village, reveal patterns of innovation similar to those found among rival Yoruba kingdoms in Nigeria. Throughout, the book argues for a theoretical perspective on culture as a field of potential strategies and "usuable pasts" that actors draw upon to craft new forms and identities – a perspective that will be invaluable to all students of the African Diaspora.

Afro-Cuban Religions

Author : Miguel Barnet
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781558762541
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (625 download)

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Book Synopsis Afro-Cuban Religions by : Miguel Barnet

Download or read book Afro-Cuban Religions written by Miguel Barnet and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: African-derived religions enrich all aspects of Cuba's social, cultural, and everyday life, and encompass all ethnic and social groups. This work discusses the roles of music and dance as forms of Cuban religious expression and describes the specific instruments and symbols they employ.

Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity

Author : Christine Ayorinde
Publisher : Gainesville : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 9780813027555
Total Pages : 283 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (275 download)

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Book Synopsis Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity by : Christine Ayorinde

Download or read book Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity written by Christine Ayorinde and published by Gainesville : University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2004 with total page 283 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Afro-Cuban religions--especially the practice of santería, based on West African traditions--are an essential aspect of contemporary Cuban identity, Christine Ayorinde argues, and their existence has forced the current revolutionary state into bizarre and contradictory positions. Ayorinde's bold assertion confounds official pronouncements about the irrelevance of religion in a modern socialist state. The revolutionary leadership has acknowledged the centrality of Cuba's African heritage, while upholding the idea of a nationhood that transcends racial difference. Ayorinde proposes that the conflict between the desire to recognize the country's African roots and the official commitment to a secular state has created a complex, often paradoxical situation. Despite an ideological campaign to create a new, rational society, African-derived religions are emerging today for the first time from a position of marginality. Cuba now is beset with a sense of disorientation as well as a return to old habits and patterns, including racial inequality. Based mostly inside Cuba, Ayorinde's research includes interviews and conversations with individual Cubans, including practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions from different ethnic backgrounds. Some are movers and shakers in the liberal debate about contemporary religion, some are new initiates, others have been practicing for 50 years or more. Some have been members of the Communist Party; others never have been, and make their living from the practice of their religion. Ayorinde also interviewed both religious and atheist commentators on Afro-Cuban religions and culture, including academics, journalists, party officials, and members of governmental and nongovernmental institutions, many at the forefront of efforts to give santería greater recognition as a central component of the national culture. In addition, the book offers a fresh historical overview of changing religious forms and attitudes in Cuba, examining the encounter with European culture and the Roman Catholic Church, religious practice among slaves in the 19th century, the concept of racial fraternity articulated by Cuban patriot José Martí, and the witchcraft scares of the early decades of the 20th century, when religious practices were associated with criminality. Its emphasis on the period since 1959 and on the current decade, in which the government has begun to rethink aspects of the revolution, places it on the cutting edge of studies that examine contemporary Cuban culture.

Cuba

Author : Adrian H. Hearn
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 0822389487
Total Pages : 232 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (223 download)

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Book Synopsis Cuba by : Adrian H. Hearn

Download or read book Cuba written by Adrian H. Hearn and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 2008-08-18 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Cuba’s centralized system for providing basic social services began to erode in the early 1990s, Christian and Afro-Cuban religious groups took on new social and political responsibilities. They began to work openly with state institutions on projects such as the promotion of Afro-Cuban heritage to encourage tourism, and community welfare initiatives to confront drug use, prostitution, and housing decay. In this rich ethnography, the anthropologist Adrian H. Hearn provides a detailed, on-the-ground analysis of how the Cuban state and local religious groups collaborate on community development projects and work with the many foreign development agencies operating in Cuba. Hearn argues that the growing number of collaborations between state and non-state actors has begun to consolidate the foundations of a civil society in Cuba. While conducting research, Hearn lived for one year each in two Santería temple-houses: one located in Old Havana and the other in Santiago de Cuba. During those stays he conducted numerous interviews: with the historian of Havana and the conservationist of Santiago de Cuba (officials roughly equivalent to mayors in the United States), acclaimed writers, influential leaders of Afro-Cuban religions, and many citizens involved in community development initiatives. Hearn draws on those interviews, his participant observation in the temple-houses, case studies, and archival research to convey the daily life experiences and motivations of religious practitioners, development workers, and politicians. Using the concept of social capital, he explains the state’s desire to incorporate tightly knit religious groups into its community development projects, and he illuminates a fundamental challenge facing Cuba’s religious communities: how to maintain their spiritual integrity and internal solidarity while participating in state-directed projects.

Santeria

Author : Miguel A. De La Torre
Publisher : Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN 13 : 146743177X
Total Pages : 266 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (674 download)

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Book Synopsis Santeria by : Miguel A. De La Torre

Download or read book Santeria written by Miguel A. De La Torre and published by Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing. This book was released on 2004-08-23 with total page 266 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book by Miguel De La Torre offers a fascinating guide to the history, beliefs, rituals, and culture of Santería — a religious tradition that, despite persecution, suppression, and its own secretive nature, has close to a million adherents in the United States alone. Santería is a religion with Afro-Cuban roots, rising out of the cultural clash between the Yoruba people of West Africa and the Spanish Catholics who brought them to the Americas as slaves. As a faith of the marginalized and persecuted, it gave oppressed men and women strength and the will to survive. With the exile of thousands of Cubans in the wake of Castro's revolution in 1959, Santería came to the United States, where it is gradually coming to be recognized as a legitimate faith tradition. Apart from vague suspicions that Santería's rituals include animal sacrifice and notions that it is a “syncretistic” form of Catholicism, most people in America's cultural and religious mainstream know very little about this rich faith tradition — in fact, many have never heard of it at all. De La Torre, who was reared in Santería, sets out in this book to provide a basic understanding of its inner workings. He clearly explains the particular worldview, myths, rituals, and practices of Santería, and he discusses what role the religion typically plays in the life of its practitioners as well as the cultural influence it continues to exert in Latin American communities today. In offering a balanced, informed survey of Santería from his unique “insider-outsider” perspective, De La Torre also provides insight into how Christianity and Santería can enter into dialogue — a dialogue that will challenge Christians to consider what this emerging faith tradition can teach them about their own. Enhanced with illustrations, tables, and a glossary, De La Torre's Santería sheds light on a religion all too often shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding.

Afro-Caribbean Religions

Author : Nathaniel Samuel Murrell
Publisher : Temple University Press
ISBN 13 : 1439901759
Total Pages : 432 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (399 download)

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Book Synopsis Afro-Caribbean Religions by : Nathaniel Samuel Murrell

Download or read book Afro-Caribbean Religions written by Nathaniel Samuel Murrell and published by Temple University Press. This book was released on 2010-01-25 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religion is one of the most important elements of Afro-Caribbean culture linking its people to their African past, from Haitian Vodou and Cuban Santeria—popular religions that have often been demonized in popular culture—to Rastafari in Jamaica and Orisha-Shango of Trinidad and Tobago. In Afro-Caribbean Religions, Nathaniel Samuel Murrell provides a comprehensive study that respectfully traces the social, historical, and political contexts of these religions. And, because Brazil has the largest African population in the world outside of Africa, and has historic ties to the Caribbean, Murrell includes a section on Candomble, Umbanda, Xango, and Batique. This accessibly written introduction to Afro-Caribbean religions examines the cultural traditions and transformations of all of the African-derived religions of the Caribbean along with their cosmology, beliefs, cultic structures, and ritual practices. Ideal for classroom use, Afro-Caribbean Religions also includes a glossary defining unfamiliar terms and identifying key figures.

A Year in White

Author : C. Lynn Carr
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
ISBN 13 : 0813572665
Total Pages : 244 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (135 download)

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Book Synopsis A Year in White by : C. Lynn Carr

Download or read book A Year in White written by C. Lynn Carr and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2016-01-19 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the Afro-Cuban Lukumi religious tradition—more commonly known in the United States as Santería—entrants into the priesthood undergo an extraordinary fifty-three-week initiation period. During this time, these novices—called iyawo—endure a host of prohibitions, including most notably wearing exclusively white clothing. In A Year in White, sociologist C. Lynn Carr, who underwent this initiation herself, opens a window on this remarkable year-long religious transformation. In her intimate investigation of the “year in white,” Carr draws on fifty-two in-depth interviews with other participants, an online survey of nearly two hundred others, and almost a decade of her own ethnographic fieldwork, gathering stories that allow us to see how cultural newcomers and natives thought, felt, and acted with regard to their initiation. She documents how, during the iyawo year, the ritual slowly transforms the initiate’s identity. For the first three months, for instance, the iyawo may not use a mirror, even to shave, and must eat all meals while seated on a mat on the floor using only a spoon and their own set of dishes. During the entire year, the iyawo loses their name and is simply addressed as “iyawo” by family and friends. Carr also shows that this year-long religious ritual—which is carried out even as the iyawo goes about daily life—offers new insight into religion in general, suggesting that the sacred is not separable from the profane and indeed that religion shares an ongoing dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life. Religious expression happens at home, on the streets, at work and school. Offering insight not only into Santería but also into religion more generally, A Year in White makes an important contribution to our understanding of complex, dynamic religious landscapes in multicultural, pluralist societies and how they inhabit our daily lives.

Afro-Cuban Theology

Author : Michelle A. Gonzalez
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780813037158
Total Pages : 208 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (371 download)

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Book Synopsis Afro-Cuban Theology by : Michelle A. Gonzalez

Download or read book Afro-Cuban Theology written by Michelle A. Gonzalez and published by . This book was released on 2011-04-01 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Comparing Cuban American and African American religiosity, this book argues that Afro-Cuban religiosity and culture are central to understanding the Cuban and Cuban American condition. It interprets this saturation of the Afro-Cuban as transcending race and affecting Cubans and Cuban Americans in spite of their pigmentation or self-identification.

Hidden Powers of State in the Cuban Imagination

Author : Kenneth Routon
Publisher : University Press of Florida
ISBN 13 : 0813043182
Total Pages : 217 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (13 download)

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Book Synopsis Hidden Powers of State in the Cuban Imagination by : Kenneth Routon

Download or read book Hidden Powers of State in the Cuban Imagination written by Kenneth Routon and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2010-07-18 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite its hard-nosed emphasis on the demystifying realism of Marxist-Leninist ideology, the political imagery of the Cuban revolution--and the state that followed--conjures up its own magical seductions and fantasies of power. In this fascinating account, Kenneth Routon shows how magic practices and political culture are entangled in Cuba in unusual and intimate ways. Routon describes not only how the monumentality of the state arouses magical sensibilities and popular images of its hidden powers, but he also explores the ways in which revolutionary officialdom has, in recent years, tacitly embraced and harnessed vernacular fantasies of power to the national agenda. In his brilliant analysis, popular culture and the state are deeply entangled within a promiscuous field of power, taking turns siphoning the magic of the other in order to embellish their own fantasies of authority, control, and transformation. This study brings anthropology and history together by examining the relationship between ritual and state power in revolutionary Cuba, paying particular attention to the roles of memory and history in the construction and contestation of shared political imaginaries.