CHAPTER 1

On Yoruba Origins, for Example ...

Where better to start than at the beginnings? "The story of the spiritbegins in Africa, among a nation of people called the Yoruba inwhat is now known as Nigeria," wrote Joseph Murphy (1988, 7) in whatprobably was the first English-language monograph on regla de ocha entitled,not insignificantly, Santería: An African Religion in America. "Inglobal context," George Brandon (1993, 1) would echo him soon after ina book that bore the telling title Santería: From Africa to the New World,"Santería belongs to the transatlantic tradition of Yoruba religion, a religioustradition with millions of adherents in Africa and the Americas,and should be seen as a variant of that tradition, just as there are regionaland doctrinal variants within the Christian, Buddhist and Islamictradition." I, too, opened the published version of my dissertation by citinga vignette offered by Morton Marks (1974, 82–83) about an incidentof possession by the oricha Changó he had witnessed in New York's CentralPark in the summer of 1970, arguing that what Marks had seen wasthe "taking on of human shape" of the "deified fourth aláàfin (ruler) ofthe empire of the Oyo-Yoruba that had disintegrated more than a hundredyears earlier" (Palmié 1991, 1). How in the world, I must ask myselftoday, did I think I knew that?

The answer is as simple as its implications are complex. By then,of course, Murphy, Brandon, and I were all looking back on a long-consolidatedtopos that had enabled discoveries such as ours for closeto three generations. Nor was it difficult then to elicit corroborative evidencefrom the mouths of our priestly interlocutors in New York or Miami.And yet, I have scoured my old fieldnotes, but found no data on acrucial question: why did my friends in Miami think they were practicinga "Yoruba-derived religion"? The reason is simple: it never even occurredto me to ask! In part, this was so because I do not think that asingle self-identified santero I met in 1985 would have denied that his orher religion had "Yoruba origins"—whatever that might have meant tothem, then—or volunteered a different attribution of origin (except thegeneric "de orígen africano"). But this, of course, is no excuse. I do remembermy eyebrows rising when told that because Santería was a NewWorld branch of Yoruba religion, it was at least 4,000 years old ("másantíguo que todo este cristianismo" [older than all this Christianism]).Yet what I, like many others, failed to ask was precisely that: what in theworld the word Yoruba actually meant to them?

What I do know, of course, is what "Yoruba" meant to us—the Murphys,Brandons, and Palmiés who had embarked upon "studying 'Afro'-'Cuban''religion'" at the time. We had read the works of Ortiz, Cabrera,Herskovits, Bascom, Lucas, Farrow, Idowu, Verger, or Maupoil, and ourperusal of this literature had amply prepared us to find what we had setout to discover: namely more or less vivid correspondences between thepractices of our ethnographic interlocutors and the literature on "TheYoruba of southwestern Nigeria" (as the title of one of Bascom's [1969a]more popular books published in Holt, Rinehart and Winston's series ofpotted ethnographic syntheses reads). But so had a good number of myinformants. At the time, Miami's largest and best-stocked emporium forAfro-Cuban ritual paraphernalia, Botánica Nena, displayed overprizedcopies of Bascom's Ifa Divination (1969b) and Sixteen Cowries (1980)on its book racks, next to the volumes that Lydia Cabrera, who was thenliving in a pitifully small apartment in Coral Cables, was churning outat a fast clip to keep herself and her desperately ill partner María Teresade las Rojas financial afloat. And so did plenty of the several dozensof smaller botánicas in town. Indeed, if anyone still needed to bepointed toward discovering the obvious, the connection could be seenright there: on the bookshelves.

But why, I now ask myself (and I invite the reader to join me in this),was all of this so seemingly obvious to us? Why did we not bother toask what cultural work the by then routine attributions of "Yoruba origins"to Afro-Cuban ritual practices, liturgical objects, and theologicalconcepts were performing, not just for us students of such matters,but for our ethnographic interlocutors as well? As I have written elsewhere,apropos the patent similarities between Afro-Cuban and Yorubaceremonial objects, "I initially saw little reason to question the epistemologicalpremises on which [my discoveries of Yoruba elements in Miami'sAfro-Cuban religious praxis] were necessarily based. If a ritual flywhisk in Afro-Cuban religion looks like a Yoruba fly whisk, and is calledby the name of a Yoruba fly whisk—ìrùkè—then where is the problem?"(Palmié 2008a, 3–4). I took the question in a different direction in thepublication I just cited, basically asking what it might mean to use thequalifier "African" for anything occurring outside the African continent.Here I want to redeploy it to point to another problem: not whatdoes it mean to impute a Yoruba (or whatever other Old World) past toan object wielded in contemporary New World practices, but what doesit mean to affix the label "Yoruba" to such a past? In order to flesh outthe implications of this question, let me step back a good century anda half and take a look at the works and lives of two Yoruba-speakerswhose biographies never intersected, but whose agency arguably cameto underwrite the topoi that—however belatedly—guided the Murphys,Brandons, and Palmiés of the 1980s in essaying our characterizations ofSantería as a "Yoruba religion in the New World."

Two "Yoruba" and Their...