Description

Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santeria and other religions related to Orisha worship - a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa - Stephan Palmie 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, Santeria and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmie 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, Palmie calls for a drastic new approach that properly situates cultural origins within the complex social environments and scholarly fields in which they are investigated.

The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

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Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santeria and other religions related to Orisha worship - a practice also found among... Read more

    Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
    Publication Date: 14/06/2013
    ISBN13: 9780226019567, 978-0226019567
    ISBN10: 022601956X

    Number of Pages: 368

    Non Fiction , Politics, Philosophy & Society

    Description

    Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santeria and other religions related to Orisha worship - a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa - Stephan Palmie 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, Santeria and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmie 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, Palmie calls for a drastic new approach that properly situates cultural origins within the complex social environments and scholarly fields in which they are investigated.

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