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This article is part of a more extensive research work on the oracular system of the snail [Mones 2022]. The article, as a part of a previous work, it is expressly dedicated to the review of the postulates of some authors on certain categories used in the analysis of the religious system of the Regla de Ocha. In order to structurally analyze the ritual system, it is necessary to examine the link of its main categories with the oracle, as well as with the concept of person managed within the ritual system. This proposal is aimed exclusively at bibliographic analysis and dialogue with these authors. Which was revealed fundamental for the development of fieldwork, reflected in the original research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Cuba constitutes a site of immense importance for the history of jazz (and Latin jazz) in the United States, and attention to the contributions of Cuban women artists contributes to a broader understanding of the gendered histories of global jazz. This article explores women jazz artists in Cuba and its diaspora, excavating how women instrumentalists and vocalists have transformed the landscape of Cuban, Latin, and global jazz through groundbreaking and experimental performances. I attend to how the fusion-centered approaches of Cuban women unearth an emic orientation towards collaborative experimentalism that builds upon specific, local histories of jazz performance on the island. These performances draw upon histories of revolutionary-era musical experimentalism and fusion (fusión) that have emerged since the late 1960s and 1970s in Cuba and which repeatedly tie jazz experimentalism closely--though not categorically--to dance forms (both popular and ritual). Amid Cuba's intensifying economic crises, I additionally engage how women regularly pursue careers--and, in an overwhelming number of cases, emigration--to Spain, Canada, the continental United States, Puerto Rico, and other international locales, in turn impacting local and translocal jazz scenes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Harlem's historic Sugar Hill neighborhood possesses several public parks and cemeteries used by African and Afro-Caribbean Diaspora communities for religious activities. In my research, I have identified and mapped sites of religious activities and conducted interviews with community members, revealing how practitioners of Santería, Vodou, and Yoruba traditions have adapted to their urban home via the use of public space. The religious traditions explored here require interaction with nature and the physical land. Therefore, I argue that public space serves as critical infrastructure for facilitating the practice of these religious traditions. I build on the views of Erika Svendsen, Lindsay Campbell, and Heather McMillen that practitioners who engage in this use of public space derive a psycho-socialspiritual benefit from those spaces, while simultaneously contributing to the diversity and democracy of these public spaces as Frederick Law Olmsted and others have theorized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rita Indiana's La mucama de Omicunlé challenges conventional articulations of the materiality of the body and its interaction with the natural environment. The protagonists do not merely inhabit the environment, rather, the environment inhabits them and challenges their separation from the natural world. In this article, I argue that by reading La mucama de Omicunlé through a lens of queer materiality, Indiana's novel uncovers two important considerations for the interaction between humankind and nature in the twenty-first century. First, she reveals the exigencies of reconceptualising humankind's interaction with and understanding of nature as a materially separate being from humankind. Secondly, Indiana represents a specifically Caribbean cosmology, one that goes beyond European and North American ontological states. The representation of this cosmology is achieved through the coexistence of past, present, and future, combined with the protagonists' doubling through space and time. Through the act of narrative generation, Indiana both represents and creates a material reality that dismantles static and fixed readings of the materiality of time, space, and being. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 2009 release of Disney's The Princess and the Frog, critiques from within religious studies have focused on the role of its villain, Dr. Facilier, and its stereotypical distortions of Haitian Vodou. These are but a fraction of the allusions made to Black Atlantic traditions, however; several scenes contain artifacts pulled from the material cultures of Afro-Brazilian Umbanda and Quimbanda, as well as Afro-Cuban Abakuá, Palo Mayombe, and Lucumí. I demonstrate that filmmakers not only accessed a broader range of ethnographically-informed sources than has been acknowledged, but also engaged in their own ethnographic data collection with Vodou and "Yorùbá" priestess Ava Kay Jones. As a result, the film reproduces an extensively-documented discourse promulgated by practitioners of Afro-Diasporic religions concerning the (im)morality of magic. The film even follows Jones and the foundational scholarly literature on Black Atlantic traditions in furnishing characters with ethnically differentiated props and dwellings, coded as either proximate (Black and West African) or Other (Caribbean and Central African). I argue that filmmakers erred primarily in harboring a Protestant normative bias and depicting things endowed with agency according to the logic of the fetish. I conclude by proposing strategies for more ethically viable future representation of Black Atlantic traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Originating among the Yorùbá of West Africa, Ifá is an ancient spiritual system that spread throughout the globe due to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade. But over the past 50 years because of a desire among various racial and ethnic groups, Ifá has grown and is seen as a ‘world religion’. Within Ifá resides the Orisha, representational forces serving the greater force of the Universe. Urban and rural natural environments are sacred spaces for practitioners as tourists to interact and communicate with these forces to intercede in their daily lives. This article will present the underlying environmental ethics of the system of Ifá and how it informs nature-based tourism and interactions with nature for both leisure and spiritual development. What is presented is a continued broadening of our understanding of differing cultural views, norms and behaviours with nature that has been initiated by Native-American-based scholarship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Any exploration of Fidel Castro racist views toward negro/as, or lack thereof, remains problematic if Cuban history is ignored; specifically, how negra/o identity was constructed differently than U.S. Black identity. As long as we keep the focus on the individual Fidel, we ignore the continuous structural racism faced by Cuban negra/os. Fidel, like most White Cubans, was influenced and shaped by how negro/as been historically seen, and by how bodies with darker hues continue to be constructed by the Revolution. Fidel, along with White Cubans, are part of a habitus which has taught us how to see, how to gaze upon negro/as. The question with which we should wrestle is how aware we Cubans who possess light-skin pigmentation are about our complicity with racist structures in Cuba? How has Cuban history and the construction of negro/a identity continued to manifest itself during the Fidel years. [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]

The article examines how hybrid bodies like the transgendered oricha (deity) of Inle from Cuban Santeria are understood in Caribbean mythology, literature, and folklore. Also cited are poet Edouard Glissant's concept of transphysical poetics via the representation of performance, sexuality, and vernacular religiosity, as well as the relationships of gender, sexuality, and place in circumCaribbean.

Despite recent attention to issues of religious diversification, mobility, and multiplicity, few sociologists have attended to the socio-cognitive dimensions of multiple religious participation. Sociologists have long suggested that the socio-mental processes involved in the addition of new religions differ from those found in religious conversion, but more work is needed to fill out this process. In particular, we need to move beyond seeing religious addition as simply a partial or lesser version of conversion. Analyzing narratives of people who include religious participation in African-derived traditions alongside other religious involvement may be particularly instructive in this regard, as they have an extensive history of multiple religious involvement. In the present article, I draw from interviews with Lukumi and Ifa multiple religious participators in the United States, noting three patterns in the narratives that display a sociomental "style" that may distinguish multiple religious participators from converts more generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Roots of the Spirit: Lonnie Holley, Mr. Imagination, Charlie Lucas, Kevin Sampson(September 19–November 26, 2014) at Notre Dame de Namur University's Wiegand Gallery in Belmont, California, presented the deeply rooted and widely ranging work of four untrained African American artists. The influences and intimations of these rich and multilayered pieces are explored in tandem with the richly imbued illustrations ofTheRed Book—created by the also artistically untutored C. G. Jung. Redolent with ritual and mythical themes, theseRootspieces provide numerous exemplars of the sociocultural experience and spiritual foundations of the African American psyche. These foundations have their origin in African ancestral traditions, such as Yoruba, which are examined in conjunction with Jung's African explorations. In addition, the alchemical nature of artistic expression and psychological integration are explored in the context of these two bodies of visual expression. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The afroamerican religions are currently experiencing various forms of being and belonging it is because the contexts of anchor are spread from the establishment of migrant communities as well as their cultural and legitimation/institutionalization among local. Santeria in their process religious transnationalization is manifesting like a non-placed mystic wave with proposes some particular features from their practices mainly among mentors/participants godparents/godchildren who are increasingly involved, this allow them extend their religious networks. With regard to the South American contexts, santeria stands as a religious phenomenon that has been linked closely with historical, cultural and political process from places such Lima, Peru, La Paz, Bolivia and Santiago, Chile since the arrival of Cuban immigrants and the rise of their cultural traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study describes the use of literacy—including the written word—in the maintenance and practice of Lukumí, a Diasporic African spiritual tradition. While Lukumí is decidedly orally transmitted, the written word is still a critical part of its contemporary practice. Relying on data collected during participant observation of ceremonies and rituals, semistructured interviews and focus groups, the study reveals the ways in which orality, material culture, and the written word exist within a communicative continuum critical to Lukumí devotion and practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

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]

This article discusses the religious beliefs and practices in Cuban Santería and Brazilian Xangô de Recife. The author comments on the treatment of human sexuality, beauty, and eroticism in these religions and describes their African origins. The rites, ceremonies, and social aspects related to these religions is also explored.

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]

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]

More than a state ideology, the concept of 'Revolution' holds multiple meanings for Cubans. A historic moment, the government, the country, the people-Revolution is any one of these and all of them at once. How, then, do people experience a permanent Revolution in their daily lives? The interactions between biomedicine, alternative health practices, and the syncretic system of beliefs known as Santería have important implications for the socialist project of the Revolution. As a central concern of Revolution, health provides a particularly clear example of the interaction between revolutionary ideology and practice. This distinction elucidates the epistemological and experiential complexity of Revolution, providing the Cuban state with a powerful signifier that allows it to adapt to situations of crisis, continuously reinvent itself, and be in a permanent state of Revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this paper is to explore the boundaries and intersection of religion, ritual, music and imagination in Ocha-Ifa drumming drawing on Eliot Eisners' "The Arts and the Creation of Mind", and Catherine Bells' "Ritual: Perspectives and Dimensions." Eisner believes that the arts transform consciousness by using the dimensions of representation, inscription, editing, and communication (Eisner, 2002). Bell locates performance in ritual symbols, syntax, and praxis. I apply these principles to the guild of drummers in the Ocha religion known as omo anya, who perform sacred bàtá drumming, and how ritual and their performance is framed by music. The theoretical principles advanced in these works help bring the "elusive" contents of the mind; ideas, images, and organized sound, to a state of stabilization that comes in many forms that allows us to dialogue with others. These "points of view" helps us express and understand social relationships in all aspects of the human endeavor. For example, Beliefs - as attitudes that we hold in response to how we think should be; aliefs – as expressions of how things seem. Beliefs may tell us we are safe - imagination; aliefs tell us we are in danger - reality. In short, the fine line between pretense and reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores and examines Santería's function as a culturally congruent informal mental health support that assists U.S. Latinos to cope with the psychosocial sequelae of living with cancer. Research has demonstrated that Santería serves as a mediating institution for many Latinos. The tradition functions as both a religion and a health care system within various Latino subgroups and has functioned as an informal mental health service in occurrences of health versus illness. [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]

The role of gender in Cuban Ocha-Ifá, or Santería, has attracted the attention of scholars from several disciplines for at least two decades, leading some to conclude that this African-derived tradition tolerates homosexuality or that there is more gender equality in ritual relationships than in broader social relationships between men and women. These works, however, have not addressed the changing meanings of gender and sexuality as responses to ideologies concerning African sexuality, police repression or the ensuing social stigmatisation of devotees that endured for almost a century. My article addresses this gap through an analysis of the creation of a society of witches and the initiation of women to the all-male priesthood of Ifá. Specifically, I examine how initiating women to Ifá incorporated and challenged stereotypes concerning African religious traditions to demonstrate that adherents constantly negotiated the precepts upon which they based their beliefs and ritual praxis. I argue that fluid gender relations enabled adherents of Ifá to destabilise ritual practice by assimilating dominant beliefs guiding social roles for men and women, thereby upholding the dominant gendered social order. By closely examining changing roles in Ocha-Ifá, this article reveals competing socio-religious interests as gendered projects for ritual inclusion and exclusion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

ABSTRACT Santería religious travel and media circulations between Cuba and the United States have created new multilateral transnational linkages since the mid-1990s. U.S.-based Santería travelers and the Cuban priests who engage with them draw on global-local theoretical models in their interactions, in which video recording of rituals, a putatively prohibited practice in Santería, is becoming increasingly common. I suggest that ontological formations are shifting understandings and uses of religious media. Videos are used as sources of ritual knowledge and as part of rituals themselves and are thought of as ways to virtually and spiritually 'travel.' I show how U.S. and Cuban practitioners draw on shared but uneven 'religious cosmopolitanisms,' whereby they reconfigure notions of 'mobility' through travel-by-video and infuse transnational experiences with new spiritual-religious meanings. [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 article aims to analyze the origin and development of translocal religious tourism related to the afro-cuban santeria in Lima, Peru. Using theoretical positions and concepts related with religion, tourism and business, based in camp work realized between 2009 and 2010 in "Casas Templo" in Lima, La Habana and Mexico City. The investigation focuses the use of observation/direct participation, full interview, and the snowball effect. The results indicate consumption of exotic practices linked with the deterritorialization, geopolitics and marketing of the santeria like a marketable product an ideology adopted by the upper and middle class in Lima. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Syncretism is the mixing of beliefs, concepts, customs y practices, as well as the omission of essential truths of the gospel and the incorporation of non-Christian elements. Among the factors that contribute to syncretism are partial conversions, lack of contextualization in discipleship and leadership training, the importation of expressions of the faith, and spiritual and human aspects. In Latin America syncretism can be observed in Catholic popular religion, santería, and various aspects of Protestantism. Syncretism can be very subtle and devastating. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That language and sexuality are closely connected is one of the enduring themes in human sexuality research. The articles in this special issue of the Journal of Homosexuality explore some of these language-centered insights as they apply to same-sex related desires, identities, and practices and to other dimensions of non-normative sexual experiences. The articles address language use over a range of geographic and social locations. The linguistic practices discussed are diverse, including the language associated with Santeria, comments viewers make about gay pornography, homophobic discourse, coming out stories, stories where declarations of sexual identity are tacitly withheld, sexual messages in Black hip hop culture, assessments of urban AIDS ministries, and policies that limit transgender subjects' access to urban space. Taken together, these articles demonstrate that language matters in the everyday experience of sexual sameness and they model some of the approaches that are now being explored in language and sexuality studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) people in Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the United States are, to varying degrees, practitioners of the Afro-Cuban religion popularly known as Santeria. Cuban and Puerto Rican forms of referencing LGBT populations are illustrated in this article, which is drawing from interviews and participant observation conducted in the United States, with close to 30 practitioners, many of whom were Cuban, Cuban American, and Puerto Rican. I discuss the ways in which Santeria gatherings produce an alternative use of otherwise stigmatized language for 'gay' practitioners. Through the use of distinctive language to reference all of these populations, we may rethink the relationship between identities and practices, and within that, gender presentations vis a vis identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article offers a background on the Islamic practice of veiling and its conflict with the legal system and provides an overview of the Free Exercise Clause jurisprudence. It discusses a need to review the Church of Lukumi framework and the relevant Confrontation Clause case law. It cites the need to understand the reason for the veiling practice by Muslim women and the conflicts that have played worldwide. It indicates a strong protection for Muslum women and free exercise rights in general.

This essay addresses how religion and gentrification become interconnected for the Puerto Rican community in Ernesto Quiñonez's Chango's Fire. The move from Pentecostalism to Santeria for the protagonist Julio emphasizes an assertion of ethnic identity that the community of Spanish Harlem needs in order to interrogate the process of gentrification. Moreover, an analysis of the religious discourses in this novel exposes economic and social inequities and their critical impact on Spanish Harlem as well as demonstrates the significant connection between ethnic and religious identity for Latino/as. [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]

The article discusses "María Antonia," a 1967 play by Eugenio Hernández Espinosa that was produced during the first ten years after the Cuban Revolution. The rituals and symbols of santería used in possession ceremonies, the strictures of gender roles and machismo, and the inability of the female character to challenge the social constructs of race and class are discussed. The idea that the santería value system limits female agency or reduces it to a self-destructive or utopian fantasy is also discussed.

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.

Devotional objects from diverse sources are arranged in beautiful and efficacious ways at local botánicas, retail stores that sell spiritual goods to a Latino-based, but increasingly diverse clientele. A two-year study of eighteen botánicas in Washington, DC, reveals a complex layering of spiritual traditions from Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas. While the foundational hybrids of the botánica are of Caribbean origin, new immigrants to Washington from Central America, Africa and Asia are creating stunning juxtapositions of religious meaning and practice. This paper looks at the notion of creolization as a way to understand the power of the spiritual array spatialized in the botánica [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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.

Santeria and Palo Mayombe are syncretic religions created in the New World based upon African religious beliefs combined with Christianity. The main worship of Palo Mayombe involves religious receptacles that may contain earth, sticks, varied artifacts, and animal and human remains. Due to the use of human and nonhuman remains, discovery of these items often leads to involvement by the police due to a concern of homicide. We review in detail the medical examiner records of two of these ritualistic cases including the autopsy, anthropology, police, and investigators’ reports. For the human remains, careful consideration of the context in which the remains were recovered, their state of preservation, and the associated artifacts (e.g., beads and mercury) are important in determining the appropriate level of forensic significance. Anthropological examination with particular attention to taphonomic characteristics also may help determine the origin and forensic significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

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.

Existing academic analyses of Santería portray it either as homophobic because of its hierarchical restrictions, or as the ultimate liberatory space for 'sexual minorities'. Meanwhile, complicated uses of homophobia circulate in Santería in ways often overlooked because of these aforementioned portrayals. This article examines constructions of homophobia as rooted in Whiteness/gayness, and how communities of color reproduce homophobia narratives. It then analyzes the charges of homophobia in relation to the everyday experiences and views among a group of US Santeros - many of whom are US ethnoracial minorities. I posit that national identity and ethno-racial background are key elements used by Santería practitioners in charging each other with homophobia. This argument has implications for the study of Santería spaces of worship, ethnic and racial studies, and sexualities more broadly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]