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, Santerieda 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.
About the Author
Stephan Palmie is professor of anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of "Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition" and, most recently, co-editor of "The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples", also published by the University of Chicago Press.
Reviews
"What does it mean to 'study something' – like Afro-Cuban religion, for instance? In this wise, witty, and uncommonly erudite book, Stephan Palmie unseats key premises regarding the stability of social science knowledge. Afro-Cuban religion, he shows, is at best an 'organic hybrid', a 'multiuser domain', born of the chance meeting of scholars and practitioners, each in pursuit of their own, self-conscious mysteries. Yet his acute analysis shows us something more: not merely must we live with such uncertainty; we can make it the basis of compelling forms of insight" – Jean Comaroff, Harvard University
"The book is a chef d'ouevre. Stephan Palmie examines the recipes by which ethnographic animals like religions or history are 'cooked': hunted, sliced, prepared, and consumed. The dishes are heated on what Palmie names the 'ethnographic interface', where anthropological recipes and the confections that anthropologists study boil together to constitute the regular fare of social life. It would be enough to have penned the first anthropological history of this interspace, exploring, as Palmie does, the lives and practices of those who regularly consume a menu of 'Afro', 'Cuban', and 'religion'. This book does much more, serving up a radical critique of anthropological knowing and its time-honored techniques of cookery and, dare we say it, crockery. Brilliantly iconoclastic, Palmie tosses even the unsavory ethnographer into the pot" – Paul Christopher Johnson, University of Michigan
"Stephan Palmie has brought forth once more a work of stunning originality that is certain to have a lasting impact on the study of Afro-Cuban religion and, more generally, the whole field of Afro-American cultural formation. Part auto-ethnography of self-making, part historical ethnography of Afro-Cuban worldmaking, and part homage to the progenitors and bearers of the tradition – with a pinch of chaos and fractal theory thrown in for good measure – 'The Cooking of History' turns 'cooking' into a 'turning', a turning upside down of the stale, conventional story based on the idea of cultural holism, and replaces the idea of cultural endowment and transmission with the idea of an analytic space or 'ethnographic interface' as the locus of the creation of the episteme called 'Afro-Cuban religion'. Palmie has thrown down a most formidable challenge. Now let the fireworks begin!' – Robert Hill, University of California, Los Angeles
