Cited by 92Caribbean and African Literature and CultureAnthropological Studies and InsightsArts and Performance Studies

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 43 of the 45 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 1 of the 41 sources its claims cite were checked for support.

Santería Copresence and the Making of African Diaspora Bodies

Open access
Beliso-De Jesús, Aisha·2014·Cultural Anthropology

Abstract

In Santería priesthoods, practitioners are “made” into African diaspora bodies in what is called “making santo.” These embodied epistemologies reveal not only the complex historical practices that have emerged through processes of racialization and enslavement but also how a body logic resituates the formations of diasporic feeling and sensing. I argue that practitioners’ everyday acts redefine the capacities of and for action as part of a spiritual habitus. The various rituals, works, and spiritual acts in Santería thus culminate in a different form of bodily engagement with the world, operating in racial space. This article examines Santería body logics, showing how what I call copresences are activated in somatic racial ontologies. I suggest that these diasporic sensings resituate anthropological universalisms, arguing for a disruption in the debate between mediation and practice in the anthropology of religion. Rather than assuming notions of presence, copresence allows for an intervention that hails Santería’s embodied epistemology as a form of diasporic sensing.

Overview

AI snapshot

Written from the paper’s full text.

TL;DR

The article argues that Santería practitioners are “made” into African diaspora bodies through copresences—Orisha, ancestors, and spirits sensed on, around, and within the body. It reframes diaspora as embodied racial-spiritual sensing and proposes copresence as an intervention in anthropological debates about mediation versus practice.

Key findings

  • Copresences are not mediated through a distant divine “Other” but are felt as intimate bodily presences; practitioners describe chills, shivers, tingles, premonitions, and possessions as “felt” (*los siento*), and initiation “seats” the Orisha on the crown of the head, making practitioners “Lucumí.”
  • Copresences emerged from enslaved black people’s negotiations with Cuban colonialism and racial violence; the article traces this through figures such as Ma Monserrate, a priestess of Changó who began the Cabildo Egwardo in 1830s Matanzas, and Fermina Gómez, born October 12, 1844, during La Escalera, who began full-seating initiations in the 1940s and in 1944 began feeding Olókun at the ocean.
  • Practitioners’ everyday acts with copresences constitute a spiritual habitus that redefines capacities for action; copresences can defend, heal, or cause *trastornos*, as when Inez had to become Lucumí to remove a dead African slave spirit, and Belkis described being mounted by different copresences as feeling like “falling asleep” or being “violently flung around.”
  • Drawing on Fanon’s racial corporeal schema, the article argues blackness cannot be removed from Santería copresences’ body worlds; making Lucumí bodies creates somatic registers of diaspora and challenges anthropological universalisms in the mediation/practice debate.

Methods

  • Ethnographic field research conducted between 2004 and 2011 with Santería practitioners in Matanzas and Havana, Cuba, and in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area; pseudonyms are used for priests who requested confidentiality.
  • Historical and secondary-source analysis of Afro-Cuban religion, slavery, La Escalera, cabildos, and Lucumí lineages, alongside interviews with priests and elders.
  • Phenomenological and embodiment framework drawing on Fanon, Csordas, Mahmood, Ochoa, Matory, and others to develop the concepts of copresences and spiritual habitus.

Limitations

  • Stated: the author says her interest is not to posit Santería solely as a liberatory experience, as an exemplary site of decolonization, or as pure resistance, but to examine attempts “whether successful or incomplete” to constitute embodied subjecthood within abject power.
  • Evident from the text: the paper does not include a formal limitations section; its claims are based on ethnographic interviews and historical sources without a described systematic sampling strategy or generalizability claim.
  • Evident from the text: confidentiality and pseudonyms limit verifiability of some individual accounts, and the analysis is situated within a specific transnational Cuban/U.S. Santería context.

Model-written summary. Check it against the paper before relying on it.

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.14506/ca29.3.04

Cites

43 of 43 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Nothing to recompute.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

68 Own interpretation · 23 Sources not found · 13 Own result · 5 No basis given · 4 No full text of the sources · 3 Not checked yet · 1 Couldn’t confirm · accuracy not yet measured

Show all 48 claims

  • It may state two separate claims as one. 35
  • Probably not a substantial claim. 42
  • The quote only partly states this claim. 2
69 of 69
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    Sensory experience produces worlds.

    “Since sensory experience produces worlds, each form of bodily register constitutes a form of world-making.”
  • The paper relies on this without support.

    The dead contain agency and influence.

    “The dead contain agency and influence.”
2 of 2

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.

2 of 2

Citations

Cites

Show all 45 references

Research works printed but not linked: 21

  1. Michael Atwood-Mason (2002, 91, 94) attentively draws on Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus to show how Santerı ´a embodied rituals demonstrate the structuring of actions in Santerı ´a. In particular, he is concerned with how "symbolic work" is mapped onto bodies where the "source image (the item which is symbolically brought into play) is transferred and mapped onto the target situation (the situation or object symbolically described by the source)" (Atwood-Mason 2002, 102).
  2. Talal Asad's comments are taken from the question and answer section of a transcribed talk given by Jacques Derrida in 1997 in Paris, France, during a workshop entitled "Religion and Media." The proceedings from the workshop were published in de Vries and Weber (2001).
  3. Lydia Cabrera (1970, 81, 230; my translation) defines "Bi" as "born, engender, or alive" and describes "Ocha Bi" as the religious name for a priest of Yemaya ´.
  4. Bordo, Susan 1998 "Bringing Body to Theory." In Body and Flesh: A Philosophical Reader, edited by Donn Welton, 84-97. Oxford: Blackwell.
  5. Brandon, George 1997 Santerı ´a from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  6. Brown, David H. 2003 Santerı ´a Enthroned: Art, Ritual, and Innovation in an Afro-Cuban Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  7. Canizares, Raul (1993) 2002 Santerı ´a Cubana: El Sendero de la Noche. Mexico, D.F.: Lasser Press Mexicana. Clark, Mary Ann 2007 Santerı ´a: Correcting the Myths and Uncovering the Realities of a Growing Religion. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood.
  8. Cros Sandoval, Mercedes 2008 "Santerı ´a in the Twenty-First Century." In O `rı `sa `Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yoruba Religious Culture, edited by Jacob K. Olupona and Terry Rey, 355-71. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
  9. de la Fuente, Alejandro 2001 A Nation for All: Race, Inequality and Politics in Twentieth-Century Cuba. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
  10. de Vries, Hent, and Samuel Weber, eds. 2001 Religion and Media. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press.
  11. Falola, Toyin, and Ann Genova, eds. 2005 Orisa: Yoruba Gods and Spiritual Identity in Africa and the Diaspora. Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press.
  12. Fernandez Olmos, Margarite, and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert 1997 Sacred Possessions: Vodou, Santerı ´a, Obeah, and the Caribbean. New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press.
  13. Ferrer Castro, Armando, and Mayda Acosta Alegre 2006 Fermina Go ´mez y la casa olvidad de Olo ´kun. Caracas, Venezuela: Fundacio ´n Editorial el perro y la rana. Fontan ˜ez, Jovita 2006 "Folk Healing Traditions." In Latinas in the United States: A Historical Encyclopedia, edited by Vicki l. Ruiz and Virginia Sa ´nchez Korrol, 266-70. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
  14. Matory, James Lorand 2005 Black Atlantic Religion: Tradition, Transnationlaism and Matriarchy in the Afro- Brazilian Condomble ´. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 2009 "The Many Who Dance in Me: Afro-Atlantic Ontology and the Problem with 'Transnationalism.'" In Transnational Transcendence: Essays on Religion and Globalization, edited by Thomas Csordas, 231-62. Berkeley: University of California Press.
  15. Merleau-Ponty, Maurice 1964 The Primacy of Perception: And Other Essays on Phenomenological Psychology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics. Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press.
  16. Miller, Ivor 2009 Voices of the Leopard: African Secret Societies and Cuba. Jackson: University of Mississippi Press.
  17. Olupona, Jacob K., and Terry Rey, eds. 2008 O `rı `sa `Devotion as World Religion: The Globalization of Yoru `ba ´Religious Culture. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.
  18. Otero, Solimar 2010 Afro-Cuban Diasporas in the Atlantic World. Rochester: University of Rochester Press.
  19. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press. 2010 "Now You See It, Now You Don't: Santerı ´a, Anthropology, and the Semiotics of 'Belief' in Santiago de Cuba." New West Indian Guide 84, no. 1: 87-96. 2013 The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
  20. Velez, Maria Teresa 2000 Drumming for the Gods: The Life and Times of Felipe Garcı ´a Villamil, Santero, Palero, and Abakua ´. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.
  21. Wirtz, Kristina 2007 Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santerı ´a: Speaking a Sacred World. Gainesville: University of Florida Press.

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Metadata

Authors
Beliso-De Jesús, A.
Venue
Cultural Anthropology
Published
2014-08-11
Volume
29
Issue
3
Pages
503-526
ISSN
  • 0886-7356 (ISSN-L)
  • 1548-1360
OpenAlex
W2153863099
Cited by
92
References
45
Citations by year
2025: 3 · 2024: 47 · 2023: 4 · 2022: 3 · 2021: 5 · 2020: 12 · 2019: 1 · 2018: 14 · 2016: 3
FWCI
24.79
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
cc-by-nc
Locations
Cultural Anthropology (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
Funders
  • Yale University
  • Army Research Office
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Literature and Literary Theory › Caribbean and African Literature and Culture
  • Social Sciences › Anthropology › Anthropological Studies and Insights
  • Social Sciences › Arts and Humanities › Visual Arts and Performing Arts › Arts and Performance Studies
Keywords
Santería, co-presence, embodied epistemology, racialization, enslavement, ritual, anthropology of religion, universalism

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