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Author: Christine Ayorinde Publisher: Gainesville : University Press of Florida ISBN: 9780813027555 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 283
Book Description
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.
Author: Christine Ayorinde Publisher: Gainesville : University Press of Florida ISBN: 9780813027555 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 283
Book Description
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.
Author: Eugenio Matibag Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 1947372610 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 429
Book Description
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.
Author: Edna M. Rodríguez-Plate Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press ISBN: 0807876283 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 214
Book Description
Lydia Cabrera (1900-1991), an upper-class white Cuban intellectual, spent many years traveling through Cuba collecting oral histories, stories, and music from Cubans of African descent. Her work is commonly viewed as an extension of the work of her famous brother-in-law, Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz, who initiated the study of Afro-Cubans and the concept of transculturation. Here, Edna Rodriguez-Mangual challenges this perspective, proposing that Cabrera's work offers an alternative to the hegemonizing national myth of Cuba articulated by Ortiz and others. Rodriguez-Mangual examines Cabrera's ethnographic essays and short stories in context. By blurring fact and fiction, anthropology and literature, Cabrera defied the scientific discourse used by other anthropologists. She wrote of Afro-Cubans not as objects but as subjects, and in her writings, whiteness, instead of blackness, is gazed upon as the "other." As Rodriguez-Mangual demonstrates, Cabrera rewrote the history of Cuba and its culture through imaginative means, calling into question the empirical basis of anthropology and placing Afro-Cuban contributions at the center of the literature that describes the Cuban nation and its national identity.
Author: Michelle A. Gonzalez Publisher: ISBN: 9780813039343 Category : Black theology Languages : en Pages : 191
Book Description
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.
Author: Kenneth Routon Publisher: ISBN: 9780813041964 Category : Cuba Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
Bringing together anthropology and history in the study of power, this book looks at the magical elan of politics in revolutionary Cuba, paying particular attention to the roles of memory and history in the construction and contestation of shared political imaginaries. --Book Jacket.
Author: Stephan Palmié Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 022601942X Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 373
Book Description
Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santería and other religions related to Orisha worship—a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa—Stephan Palmié has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In The Cooking of History he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of the Afro-Atlantic World. Understood largely through its rituals and ceremonies, Santería and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmié argues, precisely by relying on the notion of an aboriginal African past, and by claiming to authenticate these religions via their findings, anthropologists—some of whom have converted to these religions—have exerted considerable influence upon contemporary practices. Critiquing widespread and damaging simplifications that posit religious practices as stable and self-contained, Palmié calls for a drastic new approach that properly situates cultural origins within the complex social environments and scholarly fields in which they are investigated.
Author: Katrin Hansing Publisher: LIT Verlag Münster ISBN: 9783825896003 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 276
Book Description
Decades after its birth and subsequent tour du monde, Rastafari has more recently also appeared in revolutionary Cuba. How the movement has been globalized and subsequentially localized in a socialist and Spanish-speaking context are the main foci of this book. In particular it examines how Cubans have adopted and adapted the movement to their own socio-political and cultural context. Particular attention is paid to Rastafari's development in the context of Cuba's current economic crisis and re-appearance of more overt racism. Based on extensive ethnographic fieldwork in Cuba, the study shows how Rastafari's growth and presence on the island have influenced and contributed to the formation and expression of new cultural identities and discourses with regard to what it means to be young, black, and Cuban. Katrin Hansing is a social anthropologist who has worked on numerous Cuba-related issues. Her main areas of interests and expertise include: migration, race/ethnicity, and identity. She is currently the director of a German Research Council funded research project on Cuba's social collaboration ties in Africa.
Author: Kristine Juncker Publisher: University Press of Florida ISBN: 0813055024 Category : Art Languages : en Pages : 217
Book Description
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.