This post builds on the research article “Prendas-Ngangas-Enquisos: Turbulence and the Influence of the Dead in Cuban Kongo Material Culture,” which was published in the August 2010 issue of the Society’s peer-reviewed journal, Cultural Anthropology.
Questions for Classroom Discussion
1. What is the difference between realism and materialism?
2. Why should “the influence generated in prendas-ngangas-enquisos” be “a problem for Euro-American materialism?” Euro-Americans aren't held "under this influence," or are they? Is the problem “merely academic?” What are the effects of a “staged” confrontation between dialectical logic and Cuban Kongo practice?
3. Has could the “intimate receptivity” to the dead that the author learned from Isidra change listening practices in ethnographic data-collection and analysis? In everyday life? Could we glean from Isidra, for example, techniques for oscilating between more “global” and “pointed” modes of listening and consciousness?
4. The author writes about expanding the task of ethnography to include the creation of concepts, and then to “grow these terms into a new problem for prendas-ngangas-enquisos that is better staged than the interrelated problems of 'the object' and 'the fetish'” in which previous analyses have been nested. It seems to point out a number of productive uses of theory in ethnography: 1) draw on diverse philosophical conceptualizations to help situate and understand ethnographic material, 2) use ethnographic material, in turn, to question these conceptual tools and generate new concepts, 3) use these new concepts to open up new problem-spaces. What are the differences between generating new concepts, terms and problems?
5. Why does the author choose the Hegelian subordination of “objects” as an important target? He writes about shifting from a vision of “objects” and “subjects” to “”points of convergence in an association.” The latter “are capable of producing revaluations of the relations of dominance and subordination immanent to association itself.” The subject is a target too. "By turning the discourse on the object into and over itself, such that 'the subject' becomes a much less important, if not irrelevant, way of thinking about action, or life, in Palo praise associations." What are the dangers of seeing the world as a "dialectical universe of subjects who act and control, and objects that receive action and only submit to control?"
Related Reading
Creole Religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santeria (2003), by Margarite Fernandez Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini Gebert, especially chapter 3 "The Afro-Cuban Religious Traditions of Regla de Palo and the Abakua Secret Society."
"Palo Monte Mayombe and Its Influence on Cuban Contemporary Art," by Judith Bettelheim, in African Arts, Vol. 34, 2001
La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami (2003), by Miguel A. De La Torre
"Cuba: Religion and Revolutionary Institutionalization," by Margaret E. Crahan, in Journal of Latin American Studies, Vol. 17, 1985
"Deterritorialization and Reterritorialization of the Orisha Religion in Africa and the New World (Nigeria, Cuba and the United States)," by Erwan Dianteill, in International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Vol. 26, Issue 1, 2002
Archaeologies of Materiality (2005) by Lynn Meskell
Black Religion and the Imagination of Matter in the Atlantic World (2009), by James A. Noel