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Abstract The scholarship on Afro-Atlantic religions has tended to downplay the importance of Kardecist Espiritismo. In this article I explore the performance of Spiritist rituals among Black North American practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions, and examine its vital role in the development of their religious subjectivity. Drawing on several years of ethnographic research in a Chicago-based Lucumí community, I argue that through Spiritist ceremonies, African-American participants engaged in memory work and other transformative modes of collective historiographical praxis. I contend that by inserting gospel songs, church hymns, and spirituals into the musical repertoire of misas espirituales, my interlocutors introduced a new group of beings into an existing category of ethnically differentiated 'spirit guides'. Whether embodied in ritual contexts or cultivated privately through household altars, these spirits not only personify the ancestral dead; I demonstrate that they also mediate between African-American historical experience and the contemporary practice of Yorùbá- and Kongo-inspired religions. [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]

A high level of unintelligibility in ritual utterances would seem to inhibit their meaningfulness to participants, but I argue that the opposite is the case when deities called oricha descend to possess and speak to humans in Santería ceremonies. My analysis of how an oricha's message to a ritual participant is delivered, interpreted, and received illustrates how the oricha's ambiguous and semantically opaque utterances are rendered into a specific message that reveals a secret and ‘proves’ the divine origin of the message. I also argue that the oricha's use of particular esoteric registers does not make the message particularly unintelligible, despite a widespread metapragmatic characterization of their ritual register, Lucumí, as semantically opaque and in need of ‘translation’. Rather, the markers of unintelligibility deployed by the oricha function to highlight the message's divine authorship, urgency, and importance. They also trigger a participation framework in which the metapragmatic frame of ‘unintelligibility’ and the meaning of the message are co-constructed by speaker and audience. That is, the oricha's speech is rendered unintelligible at the same time that it is interpreted into a meaningful divine message. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: In this article I consider how registers of speech can index distinct chronotopes by indexing historical ‘voices’. Practitioners of Cuban Santería can temporally inflect their ritual speech by deploying two marked registers that contrast with standard Cuban Spanish and each other. These registers, called ‘Lucumí’ and ‘Bozal’, are associated with particular historical or mythic character-types and with distinct but overlapping domains of ritual practice. I examine how contrasts in the ideological values of these registers bring three distinct chronotopes into play, thereby projecting the continuing power of ancestors and African deities, and serving as forms of ‘enregistered memory’. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Anthropologists since Malinowski have noted the unintelligibility of many types of ritual and magical speech. What has not been sufficiently explored are the links between how unintelligibility is actually produced and how unintelligibility contributes to meaningfulness in ritual performances. Examining these links can deepen our understanding of what makes rituals efficacious and accounts for their impact on social life. This paper compares two genres of Lucumí ritual speech in Cuban Santería, songs and possession trance speech, to argue that unintelligibility is produced through different semiotic and metasemiotic processes in each case. Even within the same ritual register, unintelligibility can be performed differently, and its consequences can correspondingly differ. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

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.