DISPLACING MAGIC: AFRO-CUBAN STUDIES AND THE PRODUCTION OF SANTERÍA, 1933 ...

317 Pages·2006·2.97 MB·English

DISPLACING MAGIC: AFRO-CUBAN STUDIES
AND THE PRODUCTION OF SANTERÍA, 1933-1956
David Adam Shefferman
A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in
partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the
Department of Religious Studies.
Chapel Hill
2006
Approved by
Advisor: Ruel W. Tyson
Reader: Alberto Moreiras
Reader: James Peacock
Reader: Randall Styers
Reader: Thomas Tweed
© 2006
David Adam Shefferman
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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ABSTRACT
DAVID ADAM SHEFFERMAN: Displacing Magic: Afro-Cuban Studies and the Production
of Santería, 1933-1956
(Under the direction of Ruel W. Tyson)
This study tracks magic as a recurring and ambivalent figure in early-twentieth-
century Cuban intellectual discourse. In the wake of Cuba’s formal political independence in
1902, magic surfaced as a major practical concern. Public debates swirled around questions
about the place of ‘primitive’ magical practices in Cuban society. In these collective
discussions, African-inflected traditions in Cuba commonly stood as the embodiment of the
primitive propensity to magic. The notion of “Afro-Cuban culture” emerged during the first
years of independence and, in turn, the notion of “Afro-Cuban studies” as a field of social
science also took shape. Thus, the title of the dissertation refers most immediately to the
widespread call for the elimination, or displacement, of magic in general and of Afro-Cuban
“witchcraft” [brujería] in particular as means to Cuba’s realization as a truly independent and
modern society.
At the same time, magic also appeared in other ways in the public discussions on
Cuba’s future. To many Cubans, modernity seemed to depend upon its own form of magic,
namely, a process of commodification that transformed everything and everyone into
inanimate entities for capitalist exchange. Cuban intellectuals responded by searching for
critical strategies that would displace not only the magical endeavors of primitives but also
what one critic identified as “the magic power of money” in modern life. The intellectuals
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typically framed the critical effort to displace different forms of magic as magical in its own
right.
In examining this repeated ironic gesture, the dissertation focuses especially on
intellectual activity in the years after the 1933 fall of Gerardo Machado’s regime, a period of
profound socio-political transition for Cubans. The study considers the intellectual
production of the Afro-Cuban tradition “Santería” as an enduring and emblematic
development of the times, when the island’s most prominent public figures formally
inaugurated Afro-Cuban studies as field of inquiry and as an alternate forum for political
action. Fernando Ortiz stands at the center of these events. The dissertation closely considers
his efforts to pioneer Afro-Cuban studies as well as engagements with Ortiz’s work—both
direct and indirect—by Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and Rómulo Lachatañeré.
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PROLOGUE
“To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution . . . “
1.
In the following study, I consider the activities of Cuban intellectuals during the early
twentieth century as they tried to define the new scholarly field of “Afro-Cuban studies.” The
group involved in these efforts included many—if not most—of Cuba’s intelligentsia and
undoubtedly revolved around the scholarship and personage of Fernando Ortiz. He was
credited with pioneering Afro-Cuban studies during the early 1900s, and in the ensuing
decades many writers, artists, historians, policy makers and others made use of and built on
Ortiz’s ongoing efforts. In my discussion, I examine some of Ortiz’s forays into Afro-Cuban
studies as well as contributions to the field by Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and Rómulo
Lachatañeré. The latter three all drew on and engaged Ortiz’s work. Arguably, Ortiz,
Carpentier, and Guillén stand as Cuba’s three most visible twentieth-century intellectuals.
Lachatañeré, though little-known outside of circles of Cubanist scholarship, frequently earns
critical recognition as one of the most important figures in the development of Afro-Cuban
studies. The examples that I investigate by these four writers date from different moments
between the mid-1930s and mid-1950s, but they continually refer back to the formation of
Afro-Cuban studies around Ortiz at the beginning of the century.
Curiously, in the course of trying to make sense of this material, the epigraph above
continually resurfaced. I did not plan on the recurrence, but at a certain point I realized that
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the phrase related to the history of Afro-Cuban studies in a fundamental, even if unexpected,
way. The remark appears in an article by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin about the
Paris-based Surrealist activities of the late 1920s. Benjamin presents his essay—written in
1929—as “the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia,” and his comment functions as a
summary of “the project about which Surrealism circles in all of its books and enterprises.”
As I moved deeper into my research, I increasingly recognized the relation of
Benjamin’s characterization of Surrealist “enterprises” to the group of Cuban intellectuals I
was considering. Most immediately, Ortiz and his partners in Afro-Cuban studies were direct
contemporaries of “the European intelligentsia” that Benjamin discussed. But, more than
mere contemporaneity, what especially struck me was how the Cubans also looked for ways
“to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution.” Like the Surrealists, a self-constituted
cluster of Cuban intellectuals endeavored to transform contemporary societies, beginning
with Cuba itself. In pursuing social revolution, the Cubans frequently talked about—and
searched for ways to generate—exuberant collective experiences. The intellectuals imagined
such events, coursing with enthusiastic or “intoxicating energies,” as the means to revitalize
social orders that had lost most of their vitality under the mechanizations of modern life. The
oft-repeated idea was that if people ‘lost’ themselves during some shared event then they
would find new, stronger social bonds in place of the rampant individualism and alienation
that seemed to define the modern experience.
From that standpoint, the members of the Cuban intelligentsia about whom I was
learning paralleled their European contemporaries in developing modernist critiques of
modernity. Both groups drew on ideas and techniques of the self-proclaimed “modernism”
unfolding in the literary and plastic arts as well as in philosophy and social science. As an
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historian of discourses on religion and magic, I was particularly interested in how both the
Surrealists and Cubans looked toward ritual in searching for socially transformative
experiences. As each group saw it, the ceremonies of so-called ‘primitives’ created an
enviable social interdependence, one that connected members of a community and made their
lives richer and more meaningful. Not surprisingly, a problem remained for these self-
identified “moderns”: how to recover the revitalizing energy of ‘primitive’ rituals without
falling prey to the ignorance that defined ‘primitives’ as primitive and apparently drove them
to ceremonial undertakings in the first place.
For the Surrealists and Cubans alike nothing symbolized more than magic the
paradoxes surrounding ritual. From their perspective, magic involved systematic efforts to
intervene in the world through the establishment of material correspondences: an individual
magician or a magically inclined group would create representations—images, effigies,
chants, material composites, and the like—in order to generate effects related to, or literally
embodied by, the propitiatory figures. The Cuban intellectuals admired the bombastic spirit
of magic but decried its fallacious pretenses; they identified with the impulse underlying
magic—to transform lived conditions—but disparaged practitioners’ misguided convictions
about the power to engender such change.
The title of the dissertation—Displacing Magic—encapsulates this ambivalence. On
one hand, the intellectuals targeted magical practices, with their roots in false notions of
causality and power, as an impediment to the proper development of contemporary societies.
On the other hand, modern intelligentsia also wanted to channel the revolutionary impulses
behind magical endeavors into new forms of social transformation. My main argument
follows from these points: according to their own terms, the intellectuals figured their
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enterprises, including efforts to displace ‘primitive’ magic, as magical. They developed their
own, paradoxical form of displacingmagic. And as modernist critique of modernity, that
endeavor also pointed at a certain “magic” endemic to modern life, namely,
commodification.
2.
Still, my study—and its title—ultimately addresses Cuban intellectuals more than
European Surrealists. So how does “displacing magic” separate from Surrealism and attach
more exclusively to early-twentieth-century intellectuals engaged in Afro-Cuban studies? I
discovered that, in this regard too, Benjamin served as an illuminating point of contact. As
my research developed, I found that the contemporaneity of the revolutionary “enterprises”
among the European and Cuban intelligentsia cut deeper. Benjamin had not simply exposed
parallel endeavors. Rather, the two fields of activity bled together in particular, geographic
places, such as Paris. In some cases, Cubans participated in Surrealist activities; in every
case, they were aware of their European counterparts. And in a number of situations, the
Surrealists made their way to Latin America and Cuba, particularly with the rising tide of
fascism during the 1930s.
However, the more intimate that the Cubans became with the European and North
American intelligentsia, the more they tried to distinguish themselves as unique, as
something other than copycats. As I proceed, I show how the early-twentieth-century Cuban
discourse of displacing magic—and, in a related way, an emerging field of “Afro-Cuban
studies”—developed largely out of experiences of displacement—as much literal as
figurative—when Cubans found themselves by choice and by circumstance off the island and
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in places like Madrid, Paris, and New York. In those contexts, Afro-Cuban studies and the
discourse on magic served as means to differentiate Cuba and Cubans. As my account
unfolds Benjamin surfaces regularly, not only as a commentator. As a continually displaced
member of the European intelligentsia, he appears as an important character in the story I
tell. For, like the Surrealists about whom he wrote, Benjamin also searched for ways “to win
the energies of intoxication for the revolution.” That quest led him to his own particular,
powerful modernist critique of modernity. At points, my discussion juxtaposes, even if in a
limited way, Benjamin’s undertakings with those of his Cuban contemporaries in order to
illuminate similarities among and distinctions between efforts that arose in what I insist is a
common “discourse circuit.”
3.
If Benjamin’s remark about the Surrealist “enterprises” repeatedly surfaced in the
course of my work on the present study—first, as an illuminating commentary on
developments parallel to my main subject; second, as a commentary within the contemporary
history I outline—then the phrase continues to have further, immediate, and more personal
relevance to my project. Undoubtedly, Benjamin’s observation is historically specific. He
clearly referred to a Surrealist “project” based in Paris during the late 1920s. While I insist
that 1920s Paris—a scene seemingly on the margins of my central narrative—is still part of
the history I recount, my conviction about the significance of that tangential field of activity
derives in part from my unwavering sense that Benjamin’s comment not only relates to
Cuban intellectual life at that time but also, on some level, to my own attempt to account for
those endeavors. Benjamin’s comment identifies an underlying tension in the Surrealists’
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efforts: they were intellectuals who struggled to find ways to overcome what they perceived
as the limits of intellectualism. After all, intellectual pursuits—especially when held to the
standard of objective detachment—are not necessarily associated with intoxicating,
revolutionary energies.
As Benjamin underscored, the Surrealists hoped to explode the rationalist myth of
objectivity as a key component of the deadening weight of modern life. The Cuban
intellectuals I discuss felt a similar disenchantment with the familiar scholarly appeals to
‘purely’ detached knowledge that seemed to define a disenchanted modern world. Like the
Surrealists, the Cubans also searched for forms of knowledge that were deliberately engaged
and directed toward reenchanting contemporary life. They too felt caught between the
rational pursuit of knowledge and a sense of hollowness associated with excessive
rationalism. As I note in the course of my discussion, this tension surrounding intellectual
undertakings continually resurfaces as endemic to what Michel Foucault identifies as a
“modern order” formalized by Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century.
Perhaps, then, it comes as little surprise that I experienced a certain measure of that
ambivalence in the course of my work on this project. The completion of a dissertation—an
entrenched mechanism of modern knowledge-production—necessarily requires large
stretches of isolation, so it is a curious process to retreat to solitary places as well as into the
privacy of thought in order to learn and write about early-twentieth-century intellectuals on
both sides of the Atlantic who hoped to overcome what they considered a dangerous,
disillusioning, and prevalent sense of solitude. There was—and still is—a palpable desire “to
win the energies of intoxication for the revolution” propelling my efforts with this
dissertation. I remain uncertain about the precise contours of “the revolution” I have in mind,
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