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The Mexican city of Catemaco is famous for its diversity of African-American religious traditions. Although Santería was originally shaped in Cuba, the local Mexican versions show not only a variety of references regarding their origins and influences, ranging from West Africa and Cuba to local indigenous traditions, but also (re)interpretations of historically and geographically diverse contents. Based on interview data gathered during field research in 2017, this article outlines the different hybrid (re)configurations of African-Mexican Santería in Catemaco by tracing the changes made by the practitioners in order to adapt existing traditions. The corresponding adaptation processes include beliefs, practices, lore and material assets. Under a critical perspective, concepts of transnationalism, syncretism and glocalization are discussed, focussing on the dynamics between local and global aspects of Santería in Catemaco and shedding light on the processes of inclusion, exclusion and the shift of boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this volume, we bring together research on African derived Religions in Latin America and African American Religions in the USA. Theoretically, the concepts of hybridity and syncretism are discussed, in the introduction as well as in the papers included. The papers featured deal with Brazilian Umbanda, Cuban Santería, US African Black Hebrew Israelites, the Five Percenter movement (an offspring of the Nation of Islam), and one single person, Robert T. Browne, an activist in the Black Nationalist movement. In the religions covered – that are an outcome of the historical circumstances of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade – elements taken from West and Central African traditions, European Christianity, and Kardecian Spiritism blend to new forms of religious movements. This being the "fundamental" transformation of religion addressed here, some essays in the volume also look at the further transformation of those traditions in a "glocalized" world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of human capital is born. This article analyzes how is ruled this human asset in the history. It has a journey since the creation of Israel to high technology organizations the great sport teams and the non-formal organizations, as the Italian mafia and the afrocuban religion (Santeria). It were analyzed some excellence firms in the world and the main management thinking tendencies. The article proposes the university-firm relation, in order to obtain the most effectiveness in the human capital management. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The so-called Transatlantic Traffic imposed new linguistical and cultural configurations on the three continents involved in this tragedy: Africa, America and Europe. Such configurations acquire a complex of dynamics that, nowadays, we speak of flux and reflux of traffic, because of the intense and broad cultural and social exchange between these continents. Religion is one of the main or fundamental elements that is diluted in the cultural exchanges between Africa and America, especially those of the so called Sudanese nations, which receive various denominations: santeria, vodun, and Candomblé, among others. I will deal with the presentation of the Jeje nagô pattern in order to promote a dialogue, taking in account manifestation in Cuba, Haiti, Brazil and Benin. I will choose, describe and analyse from a comparative perspective a sample of songs and ritual lexicon (including terms of kinship) of Dahomean and Ewé-Fon origin in arará santeria, vodun in Haiti, and Mina-jeje candomblé in Brazil in one part of the study, and in the other part, with the vodun of Benin. This experience will undoubtedly shed light on the diversity and richness of meanings attributed from cultural and social relations in religious spaces and in society as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Santería and Palo Mayombe are West African-derived religions/sects with components of Catholicism, and both involve the ritual use of nonhuman skeletal remains which make them an increasing object of forensic interest. Palo Mayombe specifically involves also the use of human skeletal remains placed within ritual cauldrons or ngangas along with multiple ritual artifacts. A case of a nganga recovered from a periodically drained canal in Western Massachusetts, U.S.A. is presented. This nganga contained multiple items indicating its origin, including railroad spikes, coins, other metal objects, a stone, a glass bead, and multiple labeled and unlabeled sticks and was associated with a knife. It also contained skeletal remains of a bird and a snake as well as a nearly intact human skull of an adult male. The origin of the human remains is likely from a cemetery or as a former anatomical specimen. The find of this nganga is atypical in that it is away from the usual urban centers of Palo Mayombe in the U.S.A., and forensic practitioners should be aware that such sources of human remains may occur in their jurisdictions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article begins by analyzing the possible interpretations of the Spanish word el monte. In Lydia Cabrera's El monte it is a cosmos or a setting where the spirits are born, where they reside, it is their oikos, their home, precisely where they decide on man's fate, and everything that is necessary to perform magic. In the monte of the herbalists and the santeros, everything that is natural is also supernatural. Through an ecocritical approach to Lydia Cabrera's representation of the monte —work considered to be the santería bible— this article analyzes Cabrera's monte not as a forest primeval or nature untouched but through Cuban environmental history. In other words, through the idea of nature regarded simply like a raw material to be exploited, as well as a history of indifference to the protection of the natural world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Mexico, adherence to santería as a choice of religious belief began to spread in the 1970s, if not earlier, though that was but an incipient diffusion with its epicenter in Mexico City and the surrounding metropolitan area. Over the past twenty years, however, the presence of santería has gained new strength and extended further, together with certain complementary uses and resignifications of its symbolic universe. This essay examines some of the main tendencies in santería's interactions and complementarities with other forms of religiosity, especially in Mexico's capital city, based on ethnographic examples that make it possible to demonstrate that thisreligion has neither eliminated "old ways of understanding" the world, nor generated a "true transformation" of the religious beliefs among new adepts in Mexico. Rather, santería operates from a field of complementarity and therapeutic logics linked to "divine agents". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Divination --the consultation of an oracle in order to determine a course for future action-- has long been considered a practice characteristic of "primitive mentality." We describe research with the babalawo of Santería, who are expert in the divinatory system of Ifá. Our first goal is to offer an example of what Vygotsky called "concrete psychology": the study of particular systems of psychological functions in the concrete circumstances of specific professional complexes. Our second goal is to explore the character of divination as psychological and social process, given the somewhat negative views of divination expressed by many social scientists, including Lévy-Bruhl and Vygotsky himself. Analysis of a recorded consultation identified features characteristic of institutional discourse. We argue that the institutional facts of divination may constitute an unfamiliar ontology, but the epistemology --the appeal to logic and to empirical evidence-- is a familiar one. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the importance of the bullroarer cult in Cuban orisha worship. Though the cult was one of the most feared collectives of precolonial Yorubaland, carrying out the executions of criminals and witches on behalf of the state councils, the cult that came to be recreated in Cuba after the transatlantic separation took on a quality that was more devotional, though equally secretive. Given that so much change has occurred among the bullroarer cults in Cuba and Yorubaland since the termination of the slave trade, the conspicuous links between the two cults have all but disappeared. The case will be made however that, by lending particular attention to the bullroarer and other accouterments of the cult in Cuba, links can be re-established that explain the persistence of the cult in Cuba and demonstrate the ways in which ironically this emblematic sounding instrument of the cult is often constructed in a manner that actually "mutes" the instrument. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An essay that explores the popularity of the Cuban patroness the Virgin of Regla is presented. It explores African-Cuban religious history and discusses the role that Regla's color has served among those that follow her. It examines the relationship between Christianity and the religious formation called Santería and Regla and the Yorùbá deity Yemayá, and discusses how Afro-Cubans came to view Regla as one of their own.

The article discusses the role of the ritual of dance in Cuba in light of the country's African Latin national identity, which was declared by Cuban political leader Fidel Castro in 1976. The author examines the national and political aspects of the Conjunto Folklórico Nacional de Cuba (CFN) dance group and the relationship between dance choreography and Cuban cultural policy in the 20th century. Topics include state-sponsored dance performance, the cultural experience of Cubans of African descent, and the role of the religion of Santería in the race identity of blacks in Cuba. The author also examines folklore in religion and the relationship between philosophy, the arts, and politics.

The present article is a product of a social-anthropological research about the religion know as santeria performed in Catemaco, Veracruz, México in 2008. The principal objective was to explore and to analyze the different ways in which people build their realities the lifestyles, the spaces (domains) and interaction the main symbols and the local traditions, searching for the origin relationship and mixing by specific practices such as witch craft the spiritism, the folk-healing, craft, etc. At last, to discover the use and the ways that the men and women use them inside the region, from the acquisition of transnational images, discourses and ideas that establish on an imaginary way, building a Mexican santeria. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I compare the status of a sacred language in two very different religious traditions. In Judaism, the Hebrew language is the language of liturgy, prayer, and the Written Law. The traditional way of reading Torah passages involved translating them into Aramaic, the everyday language of communication in the Middle East in the first half of the first millennium CE. Later, other Jewish languages, such as Yiddish, played a role similar to that of Aramaic in the Talmudic period, constituting a system referred to as the "Traditional Jewish Bilingualism". Hebrew lexemes had denotations related to the realm of Biblical texts, while Aramaic/Yiddish lexemes had everyday references. Therefore, the act of translation connected the two realms or domains. The Lucumí (Santería) Afro-Cuban religion is a syncretic tradition combining Roman Catholicism with the Ifá tradition, which does not have a corpus of written sacred texts, however, it has its sacred language, the Lucumí (Anagó) language related to the Yoruba language of West Africa. While the Spanish-Lucumí bilingualism plays an important role in Santería rituals, the mechanisms of reference are very different from those of the Hebrew-Yiddish bilingualism in Judaism. In Santería, divinations about the meaning of Lucumí words play a role similar to the translations from Hebrew in Judaism. I further discuss the role of ritual dances in Santería for the transition from the sacred to the secular domain and a function of Hebrew epitaphs to connect the ideal world of Hebrew sacred texts to the everyday life of a Jewish community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Cuba, amongst many Afro-Cuban religions, there is the Palo de Monte religion, also known as Regla Conga. This religious-and-therapeutic, Bantu-influenced practice is now a widespread practice in Bogotá, Colombia, where it recreates certain elements taken from other religious experiences such as the Regla de Ocha and spiritualism. The scenario presented in this essay is based upon ethnographic research and narrative analysis, and it intends to explain how when people experience extreme situations which undermine their ontological certainty, they start to redress the existential order by starting a specific ceremonial path which involves Palo de Monte.The focus is upon a Palo de Monte ceremony which took part in Bogotá, Colombia. The occasion was the visit of a Mexican-Colombian medical doctor who traveled from México City to seek a healing cure to a trabajo (sorcery) which was placed upon her by a former lover. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay discusses the relationship between the sacred and the secular in the Western World in light of the legal status of animal sacrifice established by the U.S. Supreme Court case of the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye Inc. v. City Of Hialeah, Florida. The political aspects of legal definitions of sacrifice are considered in light of the history of secularization in Europe. The interpretation of sacrifice in the Roman empire by the Early Modern humanist Niccolo Machiavelli is described. The relationship between Roman religion and politics is considered in light of the efforts of Early Modern scholars including Hugo Grotius, James Harrington, and Thomas Hobbes to understand the relationship between Christianity and politics.

The conception of health and illness in Cuban Santeria goes much further than traditional western ideas about them. The etiology of illness finds her cause in aspects that are much more profound, transcending the physical sphere, the visible world of the subject. Being or feeling ill is a product of a variety of situations which may confluence and are beyond organically explications. For the determination of illness the divinatory systems appear as therapeutic technologies which discern the different possible causes of the suffering tormenting the subject. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author reflects on the origins, diffusion and connections of Reiki's Cuban culture, one of the so-called bioenergetic techniques of Japanese origin which have a relative cultural influence on Havanan population since its introduction in Cuba in the middle nineties of the recently concluded 20th century. From the many observations and interviews performed in field work, it is very interesting the similarity of concepts, practices and principles existing between Reiki's initiation ceremony of the self called Tibetan School of Old Havana Municipality and the ones of two of the most popular African origin religions: santería and Palo Monte. Also, he analyses the meanings shared by the three phases dividing the rites of these practices, -according to the classification of anthropologist Arnold van Gennep-: personal motives, with sacred connotations for some of its participants, and the mysticism-esoteric environment promoted by school's teachers. The author concludes demonstrating how the double function fulfilled by Reiki's initiation ceremony (one psychotherapeutic and the other cultural), is one of the most attractive features to practising members of Reiki with religious beliefs of African roots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars tend to regard enslavement as a form of disability inflicted upon the enslaved. This paper confronts the irony that not all black Atlantic peoples and religions conceive of slavery as an equally deficient condition or as the opposite of freedom and other rights that are due to respected human beings. Indeed, the religions of enslaved Afro-Latin Americans and their descendants—including Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban and Cuban-diaspora Ocha (or Santería) and Haitian Vodou—are far more ambivalent about slavery than most scholars and most Black North Americans might expect. In these religions, the slave is often understood to be the most effective spiritual actor, either as the most empowering servant of the supplicant's goals or as the most effective model for supplicants' own action upon the world. These ironies are employed to illuminate the unofficial realities of both the Abrahamic faiths and the North American practices of 'freedom'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I examine the assumptions underlying scholars' use of etymological reconstruction to connect ritual registers in African diasporic religions with African 'sources', and to thereby reclaim African diasporic history by recovering 'lost' or hidden meanings. I compare these efforts to the interpretive practices of practitioners of Cuban Santería, who engage in textual and performative 'divinations' of hidden or lost meanings in Lucumí and in ritual modes of 'temporal telescoping' through which an African past becomes transcendent and ritually immanent. I suggest that religiously informed modes of historical subjectivity can illuminate the efforts of linguists and other scholars of the African diaspora who are engaged in seeking 'lost' or hidden memories and meanings and in 'temporal telescoping'. I argue that scholars of African diasporic religion and language must attend more carefully to issues of time, historical consciousness and historicity, especially as they are embedded in our own language ideologies and historiographic interpretive practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores African American and Latino relations and comparative race relations in the Afro-Cuban religious practitioner community in Chicago, Illinois. African American appropriation of Orisha practices in the United States is looked at. How African Americans and Latinos have formed multiethnic religious communities through Ocha, Palo, and Spiritism is explored. The book "The Altar of My Soul" by Marta Moreno Vega is mentioned. Afro-Cuban religious practices in American cities are discussed, as well as how religion has reshaped race and community in Chicago.

The article examines the relationship between historical consciousness and cultural transmission in Cuban Santeria. The author studied the Santeria's ritual register is actively regimented through the ways in which Santeria's practitioners learn, use and interpret it. She argues that locally situated language practices generate two types of historical process at the nexus at which tradition is produced even as it is transformed.

The article discusses how African ritual and spiritual influences in have become commodified in Puerto Rico. The author interlaces first person accounts of time spent in Puerto Rico with observations concerning the incorporation of African deities and religious objects with Latin American artistic expressions. The author also discusses colonial rule by Spanish Catholics, spiritism, and the African spiritual tradition known as santería.

Elemental mercury has been imbued with magical properties for millennia, and various cultures use elemental mercury in a variety of superstitious and cultural practices, raising health concerns for users and residents in buildings where it is used. As a first step in assessing this phenomenon, we compared mercury vapor concentration in common areas of residential buildings versus outdoor air, in two New Jersey cities where mercury is available and is used in cultural practices. We measured mercury using a portable atomic absorption spectrometer capable of quantitative measurement from 2 ng/m3 mercury vapor. We evaluated the interior hallways in 34 multifamily buildings and the vestibule in an additional 33 buildings. Outdoor mercury vapor averaged 5 ng/m3; indoor mercury was significantly higher (mean 25 ng/m3; p < 0.001); 21% of buildings had mean mercury vapor concentration in hallways that exceeded the 95th percentile of outdoor mercury vapor concentration (17 ng/m3), whereas 35% of buildings had a maximum mercury vapor concentration that exceeded the 95th percentile of outdoor mercury concentration. The highest indoor average mercury vapor concentration was 299 ng/m3, and the maximum point concentration was 2,022 ng/m3. In some instances, we were able to locate the source, but we could not specifically attribute the elevated levels of mercury vapor to cultural use or other specific mercury releases. However, these findings provide sufficient evidence of indoor mercury source(s) to warrant further investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the role of Santeria in the creation of ethnic identity in Cuba. Potential of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre/Ochún to inspire the theory of reconciliation; Religious contributions of Ochún to reconciliation; Creation of religion of resistance.

Offers a reading of diasporic possession cult activities as found in vodun and codified in Santeria and candomble. Concept of Charles Long on the religions of the oppressed; Information on Ogou; Description of the dance of Ogou-mounted performers; Information on the performative signs of Ogou; Major genealogies of loa; Representation of Ogou in Haitian history; Information on the dramaturgical personas of the spirit world that embody contradiction.

Explains the aesthetics of Santeria through the poetry of Orlando Ricardo Menes in Cuba. Description of religious practices of black slaves; Modes of worship depicting Santeria practices; Interpretations of poems about Santeria.

Focuses on the essentiality of the Santeria cult. Analysis of the Santeria altar; Absence of opposition between the materiality and spirituality; Reflection on several Spanish religious terms.

Discusses the public use of religious symbolism and practice in the political performance of Fidel Castro and other former presidents of the Cuban Republic, such as Gerardo Machado and Fulgencio Batista. Implications of the issue; Use of Afro-Cuban symbolism; Machado's use of Santeria practice.

This paper is a study of Santeria, a religion that developed in Cuba from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries as a syncretism of African religions, Roman Catholicism, and French spiritism. Still an important religious influence in Cuba today, its beliefs and practices have diffused to many other countries including the United States. The argument presented in the paper is that Santeria can be understood as a "textual" rewriting and rereading of the biographies, the histories, and the social contexts of its adherents. Using the oppositional, revisionary, and subversive hermeneutical principles inherited as part of their West African cultural heritage, the creators and followers of Santeria developed their religion as a counterhegemonic challenge to the social, economic, and political order that controlled their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Looks at the uses of plants in healing in Santeria, an Afro-Cuban religion. African origins of Santeria; Religious contest of plant use; Role of plants in healing rites, communal ceremonies and individualistic practices of magic, witchcraft and sorcery.

Examines the role played by the body in performance-oriented folkloristic exercises such as the initiation ceremonies of the Cuban-American Santeria cult. Washing; Sacrifice; `Moforibale' ritual touching of one's head to the ground; Ritual significance of gestures executed by the initiate.

In this article, we trace the syncretic origins and development of the new religious movement centered on the Mexican folk saint of death, Santa Muerte. We explore how she was born of the syncretic association of the Spanish Catholic Grim Reapress and Pre-Columbian Indigenous thanatologies in the colonial era. Through further religious bricolage in the post-colony, we describe how as the new religious movement rapidly expanded it integrated elements of other religious traditions, namely Afro-Cuban Santeria and Palo Mayombe, New Age beliefs and practices, and even Wicca. In contrast to much of the Eurocentric scholarship on Santa Muerte, we posit that both the Skeleton Saint's origins and contemporary devotional framework cannot be comprehended without considering the significant influence of Indigenous death deities who formed part of holistic ontologies that starkly contrasted with the dualistic absolutism of European Catholicism in which life and death were viewed as stark polarities. We also demonstrate how across time the liminal power of death as a supernatural female figure has proved especially appealing to marginalized socioeconomic groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on strategies for determining the exposure to metallic mercury among the children of mothers in New York state who are participants in the Afro-Caribbean religion, Santeria. Levels of mercury detected from the children's urine and blood samples; Amulets used in ceremony identified as the major source of the contaminant.