Divining The Past

Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 242-274 www.brill.
nl/jra
Divining the Past:

The Linguistic Reconstruction of ‘African’ Roots
in Diasporic Ritual Registers and Songs
Kristina Wirtz
Anthropology Department, Moore Hall,
Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, MI 49008, USA
[email protected]
Abstract
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 interpre-
tive practices of practitioners of Cuban Santería, who engage in textual and performative ‘divina-
tions’ 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.
Keywords
Historical consciousness, language ideology, ritual speech, Santería, African diaspora
Introduction
Itowele wele ita Ochún Idπe wπerπewπerπe ni tπoßun

(Tiny pieces of brass are the mark of Oshun)
Ocha kini gba ita Ochún Òjé gìdìgbà ni tòòßà
(Very heavy beads are the mark of the orisha)
Chekecheke ita Ochún itowele wele Íπekπeßπekπe ni tògún
Rough handcuffs are the mark of Ogun
– from Cuban sacred song to Ochún – from Yoruba praise poem about Waru1
The juxtaposition of the two texts above, one from a Cuban, the other from
an African source, suggests a connection between the two, but what kind of
© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/157006607X166645
JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 242 4/19/07 2:40:24 PM

K. Wirtz / Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 242-274 243
connection? As the story is usually told, the Cuban text seems to derive from
the Yoruba text because, different phonological and orthographic systems
aside, in places they sound similar. But are they the ‘same’ lines, such that the
meaning of the Yoruba lines tells us something about the meaning of the
Cuban lines? What of other Yoruba texts that bear resemblance to the Cuban
song?2 On what basis would it be reasonable to suggest that the Cuban reli-
gious song to the deity Ochún derives from the Yoruba praise poem above, or
from some other Yoruba text? In this article I examine the interpretive work
through which scholars and religious practitioners recognize religious songs
and ritual speech from the African diaspora as ‘African’. I ask what it means for
scholars to link words and longer texts to some particular site or region in
Africa, such that they become an ancestral link conveyed more or less faith-
fully from an African ancestral ‘homeland’ into the present. What epistemol-
ogy and what historical subjectivity underlie the ‘recognition’ or ‘discovery’ of
such connections? In exploring how scholars approach African diasporic lin-
guistic materials (especially those related to African diasporic religions) by
seeking first and foremost to connect them to African sources and give them
African histories and meanings, I wish to suggest that the interpretive process
of forging such connections is key to the meaning the ‘discovered’ connections
have. To make my case I will work against the grain to use divinatory practices
of Cuban religious practitioners of Santería (including those applied to ritual
texts) to draw attention to similar ‘divinatory’ practices by scholars. By com-
paring scholars’ and non-scholarly (that is, ‘local’) recoveries of African dia-
sporic language history I seek to make explicit the chronotope underlying the
scholarly production of history. Specifically, I will look at the historicity of
African diasporic cultural forms like the song above and the ritual registers
used in Santería and other African diasporic religions. This comparison is
meant to highlight how meaningful historical connections are forged (rather
than ‘discovered’) by scholars in ways that are never entirely separate from the
efforts of the peoples of the Atlantic World to make meaningful historical con-
nections through techniques of remembering.
This project, then, involves reflecting on the historical subjectivities of lin-
guistic researchers in light of the historical subjectivities of those whose speech
they study. Its genesis was my own ethnographic fieldwork among religious
practitioners in the eastern Cuban city of Santiago de Cuba (ongoing since
1997 and mainly in 1999-2000).3 My primary interest was Santería’s ritual
register, Lucumí. Lucumí clearly has an historical connection with Yoruba
antecedents, but I slowly realized that an understanding of the register based
solely on etymological correspondences to Yoruba (or any other African lan-
guage) would be a limited view indeed. Consider the two juxtaposed texts
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244 K. Wirtz / Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 242-274
above: each fragment is presented in isolation from its rich pragmatic and
performative context, leaving behind essential information about how the
longer texts are performed, by whom and for what reasons. The lexical corre-
spondences that remain are a narrow basis for reconstructing meaning in the
Lucumí song. During the course of my research, I came to appreciate that I
could not focus on such philological reconstruction if I wanted to understand
how and why religious practitioners themselves were often so keen to do so
and to enlist my help in those efforts. I began to focus on their strategies for
learning and using Lucumí and on how these strategies generated interpretive
frames for Lucumí (Wirtz 2007).
By interpretive frames I mean the explicit and implicit ways in which reli-
gious practitioners and scholars assign meaning and social value to Lucumí
through their ways of talking about or using it—that is, the metapragmatic
effects of pragmatic activities like learning new words, defining their mean-
ings, performing them in rituals or excavating their etymologies (Silverstein
1993). Asif Agha (2003, 2005) uses the term enregisterment to describe how a
recognizable register of speech—an accent, in his example—emerges out of
the accumulation of discourse events in which it is used. Agha’s notion of
enregisterment suggests a shift away from viewing Lucumí as a decayed ver-
sion of Yoruba that is a passive product of language obsolescence. Instead,
Agha’s processual view suggests a focus on how Lucumí, as it appears in per-
formances and printed texts, is a product of semiotic activity that recognizes it
as such and imbues it with sacred and historical value, for example, as a divine
language or a remnant of Yoruba. Rather than discard the etymological
approach out of hand, I have become interested in what metapragmatic effects
such efforts have on enregistering Lucumí. When I have been struck by a pas-
sage or song fragment of Lucumí that readily lines up with a modern Yoruba
text, it is because such correspondences seem pregnant with meaning. I sug-
gest that this is so because scholars and practitioners engage in interpretive
activities to learn, use and study Lucumí, and their hermeneutics prioritize its
African genealogy, albeit sometimes for rather different reasons.
There is a long history of scholar-practitioner dialogue (Dianteill and
Swearingen 2003, Matory 2005) around African diasporic religions like
Santería and Candomblé, one that continues to be evident in recent scholarly
production (Palmié 1995, 2005, Vincent 2006, Wirtz 2004). Not only have
scholars and practitioners been reading one another’s work (as well as contrib-
uting to each other’s practices, whether as ‘informants’ or ‘experts’), but
increasing numbers of scholars have become practitioners and practitioners
have become scholars. This can be seen as a special case of a wider dynamic in
studies of the African diaspora, which always implicate the identity politics of
us as scholars and as racialized and national subjects who negotiate our own
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historical consciousness in our research and in our lives more generally. It is

thus important, as Matory (2005) stresses, to consider the ‘translocal’ dia-
logues among those being studied, including dialogues that bridge academic
and ‘local’ discourse. My focus in this paper, however, is on a more specific
sort of parallel, or convergence, between scholars and practitioners, albeit one
that is undoubtedly related to the dialogues and crossovers among them.
I will show how scholars and practitioners engage in interpretive strategies
that I refer to as etymological reconstruction and divining meanings, but that
their efforts are driven by somewhat different language ideologies and have
similar but not completely overlapping effects. Cuban religious practitioners
are engaged in ‘divining’ hidden meanings that relate to a sacred and tran-
scendent Africa, based on Lucumí’s status as an esoteric divine language and its
capacity to store and transmit deep religious knowledge without revealing it.
Secular scholars’ notions of a transcendent Africa are based on a scholarly par-
adigm of Africanisms that, I argue, seeks to reveal a hidden or forgotten past
that is envisioned as locked into words themselves and therefore recoverable
through etymological analysis. Scholars, in their own framing of their investi-
gations, discover this past by recognizing diasporic words as Yoruba or KiKongo
or Fon, and then use these etymologies as metonyms of more broadly envi-
sioned cultural transfers (i.e., that Santería is Yoruba and should be understood
as such). That is, the recovered etymological meanings are often used (by schol-
ars and practitioners) to illuminate what are posited to be the original and
therefore true meanings of contemporary texts in ways that claim to supersede
the rich pragmatic meanings texts such as the song to Ochún already have for
practitioners. I argue that the real semiotic work being accomplished in both
cases is not about the recognition of original (and therefore true and authentic)
meanings, but rather about processes of enregisterment that imbue both
diasporic religious texts and registers and African ‘source languages’ with con-
trasting chronotopic value. That is, by lining up the African and the diasporic,
implicit metapragmatic work is accomplished that projects African ‘sources’
into a transcendent and unchanging past at the same time that diasporic texts
signify the possibility of transcendence in the contemporary diaspora as well.
Imagining Africa in the diaspora: chronotopes of survival

and transcendence
The emphasis on cultural transcendence over time and space, common to

dias-poric identities and to research on diasporic practices, has a long intel-
lectual history. Melville Herskovits promoted a paradigm of African diasporic
research in which linguistic and cultural correspondences would link specific
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cultural forms (and the people who practice them) in sites of the New World
African diaspora to specific African locales—usually broad culture areas (Apter
1991, Herskovits 1966). The sort of ‘roots’ search emblemized by Herskovits’s
tables of ‘Africanisms’ and by my opening text samples has long since come
under criticism as relying upon a problematic chronotope of Africa, in which
Africa-past serves as Africa-eternal, a temporally transcendent ancestral source
that can still be accessed in contemporary African practices, and that can
explain African diasporic practices (Scott 1991, Yelvington 2001). As Scott
(1991) describes, a strong humanist empathy underlies the scholarly impulse
to reinforce African diasporic identities by authenticating the pasts that Afri-
can diasporic groups claim as ‘what really happened’.
Herskovits’s ‘African survivals’ approach has long been counterposed to
E. Franklin Frazier’s emphasis on the diaspora’s historical rupture with Africa
and a ‘shallower’ history of creativity of Africans and their descendents in the
diaspora (Frazier 1966, Herskovits 1966, Yelvington 2001). For both Hersko-
vits and Frazier, however, Africa represented the past to the diasporic present,
but where Herskovits emphasized historical continuity between past and
present, Frazier’s Africa was cut off in an unreachable past. Slavery, in Frazier’s
paradigm, was the cultural crucible for Africans in the diaspora. In their
important updating and revision of Frazier’s paradigm, Mintz and Price (1992
[1976]) focus on the present and near past of New World contexts, thereby
displacing Africa further into a distant past, on the far side of the rupture
called the Middle Passage. They replace Herskovits’s Africanisms with much
deeper and more tacit continuities in cultural grammars.
Paul Gilroy’s (1993) recent notion of the ‘Black Atlantic’ relies instead upon
a chronotope characterized by contemporaneity or coevalness across an oce-
anic basin that connects, rather than separates Africa, Europe and the New
World. His approach decenters African sources to focus instead on intercon-
nections among diasporic sites, such as the Caribbean and Britain. He par-
ticularly attends to the modernity or alternative modernity of the Black
Atlantic, and to how it develops out of the forms of (double) consciousness
that arose within diasporic experiences of Africans and their descendents.
Recent work by Matory (2005) and Otero (2002) in particular applies what
Gilroy (1993) punningly calls a ‘routes’ approach, opening up from unidirec-
tional flows from Africa to the New World, to more complex routes of coeval
influence and feedback. For example, Matory re-examines Yoruba ethnogenesis
as a ‘translocal’ phenomenon involving complex circuits between Brazil, Sierra
Leone and the regions of modern-day Nigeria and Benin that are today known
as Yorubaland. He argues that ‘this story defies . . . also the old chronotope
(Fabian 1983) that homelands are to their diasporas as the past is to the present
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and future. The irony at the core of this story is that diasporas create their
homelands’ (Matory 2005: 3). To extend Matory’s insight, scholarly activities,
too, can create homelands. I suggest that much of the scholarship that focuses
on reconstructing African links to diasporic registers like Lucumí is drawing
upon an outdated Herskovitsian chronotope of a transcendent Africa-past that
can be divined out of fragments and clues in diasporic practices.4 These divina-
tory processes can be elucidated by comparison with the metapragmatic activ-
ities of Santería’s practitioners, who also strive to make sense of Lucumí.
Interpretive strategies and historical subjectivity in Cuban Santería
Background on Santería and Lucumí

Santería, also known as La Regla de Ocha, is a widespread popular religion in
Cuba whose practitioners worship Yoruba deities known as orichas. Santería is
closely identified with Yoruba (also called Lucumí) origins, although it is part
of a broad complex of popular religions that draw upon an array of African
and European influences. For example, Santería is often counterposed to the
religion called Palo Monte (or the Regla de Congo), which is closely associated
with a western Central African cultural area referred to in Cuba as Congo or
Bantú (Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler 2005, Palmié 2002). Although accurate
statistics are not available, some estimates suggest that perhaps eight percent
of Cubans have been initiated as santeros (priests), while a higher percentage
of the population participates in ceremonies or seeks consultations with initi-
ated santeros (Argüelles Mederos and Hodge Limonta 1991, CIPS 1998, Mil-
let, Brea & Ruiz Vila 1997, discussed in Wirtz 2003: 38-41). Those who seek
deeper involvement in the religion choose a godparent to guide their spiritual
progress and may eventually be initiated, joining the ritual lineage of their
godparent. Although Santería is popularly conceived to be Afro-Cuban
because of its historical roots among enslaved Africans, its contemporary
adherents span class, racial and regional distinctions in Cuba. As Palmié
(2002) describes, the relationship between ‘Afro-Cuban’ religions and ‘Afro-
Cuban’ people is by no means simple or transparent, nor are the African ori-
gins of particular ritual practices always clear or uncontested (see also Brown
2003). One aspect of Santería strongly identified with its specifically Yoruba
origins is its ritual register, Lucumí.
Santeros describe Lucumí as a divine language, calling it the ‘tongue of the
oricha’ (la lengua de los oricha) to highlight its tremendous importance in
maintaining ritual channels of communication with the orichas. Lucumí texts
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such as songs and invocations are widely known among santeros, who can
expertly perform them in rituals, whether or not they profess any understand-
ing of a text’s referential content. Indeed, only a few santeros feel able to offer
translations or detailed explanations of even a few Lucumí texts, despite the
fact that most santeros control a lexicon from a few dozen to hundreds of
Lucumí words and phrases. Santeros thus display a bifurcated and very partial
linguistic competence in Lucumí, in which they control a set of individual
Lucumí words and phrases that have denotational (semantic) meaning and a
set of phrases and longer texts that have primarily pragmatic and connotative
meanings and often cannot even be segmented into individual words and
translated. This state of affairs came about through particular modes of lan-
guage learning and religious socialization, incorporating both literacy prac-
tices and more embodied learning through participation in ritual performances
(see Wirtz 2007). One important and longstanding literate practice among
santeros is their keeping of personal religious notebooks (libretas) in which
many santeros record their religious knowledge, including Lucumí vocabulary
lists, texts of prayers and songs, ritual procedures, and information pertaining
to divination signs. A number of published manuals of Santería contain simi-
lar information and, in fact, serve as both templates and fonts of information
for private efforts (Angarica n.d.(a), Angarica n.d.(b), Arango 1998).
Recuperative strategies of santeros

Having perused the ubiquitous Lucumí glossaries that now appear in virtually
every book on Santería, whether written by a practitioner or not, and having
studied modern Yoruba in preparation for my fieldwork, I began with the
naïve assumption that my task would primarily involve eliciting Lucumí words
and texts or listening for them in rituals, then inquiring about their meanings
and drawing upon my knowledge of Yoruba to learn Lucumí meanings. Sev-
eral santeros and babalawos in Santiago were happy to oblige by sharing their
Lucumí vocabulary lists with me, and two in particular also patiently shared
the texts of songs and prayers with me. Indeed, many santeros, especially of
the younger generation, shared both my desire to learn Lucumí and my
assumption that learning Yoruba was key to understanding Lucumí. When
they were discussing isolated Lucumí words or phrases, the santeros I worked
with would almost always provide a gloss in Spanish. For example, omí meant
‘water’, oñí meant ‘honey’, and obini meant ‘woman’. However, for some
expressions they would instead give me pragmatic accounts of performative
value or proper context of use, rather than a semantic definition. For example,
one santero, Emilio, explained what the frequently used expression maferefun
meant by providing examples of its use, even as I persisted in trying to pin
down a simple gloss:5
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Emilio Maferefun. Eso quiere decir con el permiso. Maferefun Chango Abicolá,
Changó Abicolá Reynerio Pérez. Con el permiso de Changó Abicolá, que era el santo
que tenía hecho Reynerio Pérez.
Maferefun. That means to say with the permission, Maferefun Changó
Abicolá Changó Abicolá Reynerio Pérez. With the permission of Changó Abicolá,
who was the saint that Reynerio Pérez had made.
Kristina Entonces, es-
So, it is—
E Que era el mayor santero de Cuba, de aquí de la parte Oriental.
Who was the senior santero of Cuba, of here in the eastern part.
K Entonces-
So
E De ahí él fue diciendo todos los demás santeros.
From there he went along saying all the other santeros
K Hmm. Entonces ‘maferefun de’ es decir ‘danos permiso’, o ‘denos permiso’.
Hmm. So maferefun de means give (familiar) us permission, or give (formal) us
permission.
E Maferefun cuando se dice ‘Maferefun iyalodde’, con el permiso de esa santa, hm (palmada)
es permiso. Maferefun Changó, o sea que ese es, quiere decir ‘que por delante de de cualquier
cosa está Changó’. Por delante de cualquier cosa está Ochún, por delante de cualquier cosa
está Olofi. ¿Entiende? Ese es el sentido global que se le quiere dar a la palabra.
Maferefun when one says Maferefun iyalodde, with the permission of that saint,
hm (clap) it is permission. Maferefun Changó, or that is that that is, it means to
say that before anything there is Changó. Before anything there is Ochún, before
anything there is Olofi. Do you understand? That is the global sense that the
word conveys.
Emilio resists my attempts to pin down a simple translation for maferefun like ‘give us
permission’. He elaborates by trying to explain the ‘global sense’ of the word through exam-
ples of how it gets used in context, where it is usually directed to a particular oricha. He
responds similarly when I next ask what the word moforibale means, first relating the word
to a particular oricha, then singing a line of a song to that oricha that includes the word:
E Maferefun es permiso. Moforibale es una palabra que utiliza Changó.
Maferefun is permission. Moforibale is a word that Changó uses.
K Ah.
E (singing) Moforibale mi Changó, Oba eré
K ¿Y qué significa?
And what does it mean?
E Es moforibale es como tener un poder.
It is moforibale is like to have a power.
K Y entonces es manera de de pedir por él o solo es-
And so it is a way of of asking for him or is it only—
E Es una manera de elogiar.
It is a way of praising.
K Anja.
Uh-hmm
E Yo digo moforibale Changó, es un elogio que le estoy dando. Que poderoso eres.
¿Entiendes? Y cuando digo maf- maferefun iyalodde, permiso a esa santa, eh, primero
esa santa. O sea, que es el sentido que se le quiere dar a esas dos palabras.
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I say moforibale Changó, it is a eulogy that I am giving him. How powerful you
are. Do you understand? And when I say maf maferefun iyalodde, permission from
this saint, ah, first that saint. That is, that it is the sense that one means to convey
with those two words.6
His reluctance to commit to one clear gloss of either word, despite my insis-
tence and despite many hours of providing me with glossary-style Lucumí
word lists, illustrates how santeros tend to focus on the performative and prag-
matic values of many Lucumí expressions, rather than relying on purely deno-
tational meanings, of which they may not be sure. In many cases, santeros
responded to my questions about what Lucumí words meant by similarly giv-
ing me examples of usage, a tendency that also is evident in the two most
comprehensive and widely admired published Lucumí glossaries, by Cuban
folklorist Lydia Cabrera (1986) and santero Nicolás Angarica (n.d.(a)). Cabrera
gives four entries for maferefun: first, ma fe re fún, ‘para siempre sea concedido
lo que se implora. (Es fórmula que se repite al comienzo de un odú . . .)’. That
is: ‘may what is implored be granted forever (It is a formula that is repeated at
the beginning of a divination sign . . .)’. The next two entries are Mafere fún
Olofi, ‘I commend myself to Olofi’; and maferefún Yemayá (u Obatalá o Changó,
etc.), ‘Thank you, may you be blessed or praised’ (205). Finally, for the alter-
nate spelling mo fé ré fún Obatalá she gives the translation, ‘I adore you and I
pray to you, Obatalá’ (212). Here too there are several glosses and information
about usage, and all revolve around a particular kind of performative utter-
ance, one that can be characterized as invoking a deity’s goodwill. Moforibale,
in turn, appears in entries for two phrases that also salute and invoke a deity,
Changó, in one case. A meaning for moforibale that resembles its putative
Yoruba origin phrase (Mo fi orí bálé, ‘I bow my head to the ground’) appears
only at the end of the second entry: ‘I prostrate before you’ (212).7 Angarica’s
glossary in Lucumí al alcance de todo (Angarica n.d.(a)) follows the same pat-
tern, providing more contextual and usage information than semantic defini-
tion for these two words.
The similarities across Cabrera’s (and Angarica’s) and my consultant’s expla-
nations suggest a broader pattern of understanding some Lucumí words con-
textually and functionally, rather than strictly denotationally. Across half a
century from Cabrera’s consultants to mine, there is evident stability in how
the terms are to be used along with impreciseness (or call it flexibility) in their
denotation. But Cabrera and I shared the goal of eliciting clear Spanish trans-
lations for the Lucumí we heard and recording the actual words our consult-
ants gave. It may well be our elicitation strategy that conveys the sense that
there is some insufficiency in how santeros understand Lucumí, which rein-
forces the scholarly conception of Lucumí as simply degenerated, ossified and
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almost obsolescent Yoruba. My evidence suggests that santeros are sometimes,

but not always, concerned with the denotational content of Lucumí words,
and even when they are, they do not always cleave to notions that each word
must have a single, decontextualizable gloss. As I realized during the course of
my fieldwork, the pragmatics of knowing how and when to use a word or
phrase usually trump knowing its purely semantic content, which in fact can
shift to fit the context. Indeed, in interviews, it often happened that a santero
would fumble over a Lucumí word or phrase, then apologize by explaining
that it was difficult to remember the words outside a ritual context.
When santeros shared longer Lucumí texts such as songs and prayers with
me, their focus on pragmatic rather than denotational meanings was even
more striking. Most were unwilling or unable to tell me what songs meant in
a strictly semantic sense, although they could tell me how the song should
be used and which orichas the song concerned. While older santeros, in
particular, sometimes relegated even Lucumí words to the realm of secret reli-
gious knowledge, and thus were reticent in discussing such matters with a
non-initiate, most santeros I talked to were eager to demonstrate their religious
expertise and willingly recited vocabulary, songs, prayers and invocations for
me. They would often give examples of when a text might be used and even
launch into full performance of a song or invocation. Their unwillingness to go
‘on record’ with a direct translation, then, suggests that they were not with-
holding ‘secret’ information from an outsider but rather were truly unable to
give semantic glosses for longer texts.
When I persisted in asking what the words of a Lucumí song meant, the
typical response I received from santeros and specialist ritual singers was to
identify a few familiar words in the text and provide a gloss based on those
words and on their contextual knowledge of usage. For example, one young
singer who performed in religious rituals as well as in a folkloric ensemble
responded to my repeated questions about what the songs meant by singing
me a line he often incorporated into a tratado (specialized song sequence) to
the oricha Yemayá:
(sings) Ago Yemayá ago, ago ile, o ile laumo

(speaks) Allí está Yemayá, bailando, pero está fuera de la casa. Entonces, ‘ago Yemayá’ esto
es diciendo ‘permiso, Yemayá’. ‘Ilé’ que es ‘en la casa’, y ‘umo’ es que venga, que entra en la
fiesta.
(speaks) There is Yemayá, dancing, but she is outside the house. So, ‘ago Yemayá’, this
is saying ‘permission, Yemayá’. ‘Ilé’ which is ‘in the house’, and ‘umo’ is that she come,
that she enter into the party [ceremony].
(sings) Ago Yemayá ago, ago ile, o ile laumo
(speaks) ‘Yemayá, venga para la casa’.(speaks) ‘Yemayá, come into the house’.8
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The singer’s performance and explanation of the song reference a specific ritual
context in which someone has been possessed by Yemayá and is dancing out-
side the house where the ceremony is being held. He demonstrates how the
song can be used to coax the possessed person back inside. He identifies and
glosses the individual words of the song: ago is ‘permission’, ilé is ‘house’ and
umo is ‘come’. Without any reference to syntax, he strings these translated
words together into a gloss for the entire phrase, to produce a respectful sung
request to the oricha: ‘come into the house’. His method of interpreting the
song’s meaning, a widespread strategy among santeros, relates to his more
general approach to learning Lucumí: on the one hand, he learns by attending
closely to the performances of more experienced and knowledgeable singers in
ritual contexts, settings in which no one will stop to explain what they are
doing or why. This singer, like other new santeros, learns by attending to con-
textual clues—what drum rhythms are playing, what oricha is being sung to,
and what effect a particular line has on the audience or oricha. He also admit-
ted, chuckling, to carrying a pencil and paper so that he could dash out of a
ceremony and surreptitiously write down what he had heard, an inscription
process that reinforces the secrecy and potency of the information and that
may be quite widespread among santeros (Stephan Palmié, personal commu-
nication; see also Johnson (2002) on ‘secretism’). His other method for learn-
ing Lucumí has been to seek out and study Lucumí or Yoruba glossaries; in
fact, he told me that he had located a Yoruba dictionary in the library of a local
cultural research institute in which he would look up the meaning of Lucumí
words. Younger, often well-educated santeros seamlessly combine knowledge
gained from ritual practice and from books, further blurring the lines between
scholarly and ‘local’ religious expertise. Another young, up-and-coming ritual
singer, when I asked him about how he learned what a song meant, brought
out a couple of books on Santería to show me how he looked up words he
encountered in their glossaries. These interpretive strategies, thus, combine a
search for etymological clues in the few words they may recognize with prag-
matic knowledge about how the songs are used.
In this two-pronged approach to interpreting Lucumí, younger santeros are
largely imitating the performances of the most experienced and venerated
santeros, who may or may not profess much interest in books and glossaries,
but who nonetheless draw upon their knowledge of individual Lucumí words
and can weave these together with longer, more formulaic texts like songs,
such that they contextualize one another. In the following example, a highly
regarded senior santero, Arturo (a pseudonym), had agreed to allow me to
interview him about his knowledge of Lucumí, and had answered my first
question by telling a series of legends about the orichas called patakines, which
are usually associated with divinations. Each divination sign has one or more
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patakines that the diviner may choose to share with the client in order to give
context to the problem identified in the divination. Each patakí conveys a
moral that should shape the client’s response to the problem, as well as convey-
ing a wealth of religious information that justifies the course of action and the
proper offerings to be given to one or another oricha or rituals to be under-
taken. Arturo told the following story and several others during the course of
our interview, as we sat in his living room surrounded by his godchildren, who
were assembling to take part in a ceremony later in the afternoon. Each time,
he would dramatically perform the story, incorporating substantial Lucumí
vocabulary and even songs connected to the story’s events. In this particular
story, which is well known, the masculine oricha Changó encounters his
mother Yemayá but does not recognize her. He gravely insults her by ‘touching
her’, as Arturo delicately puts it, and is almost drowned as a result. Duly chas-
tened about his behavior toward women, he learns how to properly call on and
sacrifice to Yemayá. Lucumí is in bold type.
And Shango, he himself is a very vain saint, a very proud saint who . . . presumed that
all women had to render him moforibale. And so it was when, on the Spice Coast,
walking, he met Yemayá, whom he did not remember, because Yemayá did not give
birth to him, but raised him. And so he [had] left Yemayá and made his life. And so
when he then saw Yemayá he was king, coming from war, he was a vain king and full
of himself. And so he asked Yemayá, he said to her, ‘Kinche?’, which means, ah, ‘Who,
who are you?’
‘Kinche?’ ‘Who are you?’
And so Yemayá said to him, ‘Emi ni Yemayá’
He said, ‘Kilonche?’ ‘Ko loku ani su ile?’ ‘Where do you live?’
She said, ‘Emi en olodumare’ ‘me, in the ocean’,
And ‘Kilonche bobo teniyen?’ ‘What did she eat?’
Yemayá said, ‘Emi abbo’, which is sheep, ayakua, turtle, akuekue, duck, akiko,
rooster.
Shango said, Shango looks like this, surprised. He said, ‘what did she eat?’ or that is ‘Bobo
teniyen?’ They liked all the same things, that she ate what he ate. Then Yemayá said
to him that if he wanted she would demonstrate her boat, if he wants to go to her house,
to her ile. That is how it is called in the religion. Ile is house. So he said to her that he
knew nothing to give her so that she would demonstrate the boat. But in the boat Shango
tried to to touch her, I don’t know, that which I know, the [?]. And Yemayá pushed him
with the violence of the boat, and Shango fell into the water. And then he begins to plead,
‘Afiedenu’, which means fiedenu, fiedenu, fiedenu, fiedenu. And so when Obatal
á Yembo came out of the clouds, he said, ‘Fiedenu Yemayá, olufina son tomode’. Shango
is not drowning, but he looks like this, so that he began to see Yemayá.
She says, ‘Kilonche, de kinche laroya. Son loya de obini, son loya of four women
and of my own mother’.
Then Yembo says, ‘I brought you into the world, and Yemayá raised you’.
Then Shango says ‘Fiedenu iya mi, fiedenu iya mi. Iya mi, emi did not know that
you were my own iya. Forgive me, my mother, because I did not know that you were
my mother also’.
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And then Yemayá said to him, ‘Demi make you ona, so that you will always know that
when there is an obini in ara, that it is necessary to respect her. Demi says to you that
Laye is a little rascal so that you know that in the world, in the land whenever there is
a woman she must be respected’. That not all [women] were the same. And then Yem-
ayá would come to make trouble for him. She said, ‘Ok when you want me, you call
me in a, by an echo’.
So when Shango wanted to see his mother, he stopped. He went to a, it looks like a
cart, he put down plantains, fruits, ah, the animals, and oil and everything. He says
that word was bad, he said:
(sings) Yemayá le so owo
Yemayá ye ile aloto
Akere ya aluma
Oite niwe olo kota la kueleseo
Yale omi yale, iya mi o
(speaks) Listen my mother, mistress and lady of the ocean
Between the solidity of rock, of the foam,
Fresh water and white water
Yeinle listen to me
That here is your child, who brings you a gift
(sings) Olo yenao omisaide awa omi
(speaks) The entire world I bring to you, my mother
And then Yemayá begins to make in the, in the whirlpool for her child, and calls, she
returned to hide again, and says:
(sings) Yeinle aluma omo, sawade olu
Sawade Olodumare
Lawa lawa lawa
(speaks) The sound of the ocean, the transformation, so that einle olodo.9
Arturo’s performance relies upon his strategic use of fluid Lucumí speech and
glosses of it to convey his extensive religious knowledge. He authoritatively
incorporates Lucumí utterances to serve as quoted speech of the orichas in the
story, in each case providing a gloss of the Lucumí words for the audience’s
benefit. His performance thus reinforces santeros’ characterization of Lucumí
as a divine language. An analysis of the Lucumí he uses elaborates on patterns
in earlier examples: he incorporates well-known Lucumí words and short
formulaic phrases while telling the story. These are inserted into a Spanish
matrix to convey a certain chronotopic flavor that reinforces his placement of
the story in a distant, mythic past in Africa (specifically, the ‘Spice Coast’).
Some of the phrases, and in particular the question sequence that structures
the first part of the story, utilize Lucumí constructions whose meanings
are ambiguous. Expressions like kinché and kilonché are used in rituals as all-
purpose question markers among santeros, so that the same term can be used
to ask ‘who?’ ‘what?’ ‘where?’ ‘how?’ or ‘why?’ as the situation requires. Resort-
ing to a Yoruba backtranslation (to kí ní ße, meaning ‘why?’ and kí ni ó ń ße,
JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 254 4/19/07 2:40:27 PM

meaning ‘what is s/he doing?’ or perhaps kí ni o ń ße, meaning ‘what are

you doing?’ or more generally ‘what is happening?’) does nothing to capture
the polysemy and ambiguity that are so important to how Lucumí is used
in Cuba.
Arturo’s story culminates with a song of praise to Yemayá, which the story
contextualizes as Changó’s appeasement of his mother after gravely insulting
her. He intersperses sung lines with spoken glosses of the song that at first
glance appear to be a precise line-by-line translation, but that in fact are at
most a very loose and broad interpretation, albeit one that intimately relates
to the story he has told and to people’s common knowledge about the orichas.
For example, Arturo glosses the song to Yemayá as calling out to ‘my mother,
mistress and lady of the ocean’. While the phrase iyá mi ‘my mother’, does
appear in the final line of the song, it appears that he is generalizing from this
term of respect and from Yemayá’s association with the ocean rather than
translating a precise Lucumí equivalent for ‘mother, mistress and lady of the
ocean’. In the final sung line, he seems to use the name Olodumare, which
santeros in Santiago usually associate with an oricha of the rainbow or sky, to
mean ‘ocean’, an idiosyncratic, almost punning use of this word that makes
sense only because the Spanish word for ocean, mar, seems to echo in the
Lucumí word (although this accidental sound coincidence is unrelated to
Olodumare’s accepted meaning and associations). These interpretive moves
rely upon occasional words or even sounds to serve as keys for highly elabo-
rated and polished ‘translations’. While santeros are impressed by authorita-
tive performances like Arturo’s, they do not regard such translations and
exegeses as the only possible ones for a given text, nor do they seem troubled
by inconsistencies, gaps or, to my ears, somewhat ad hoc glosses (such as asso-
ciating Sp. mar ‘ocean’ with Olodumare). What makes a particular interpreta-
tion of a Lucumí text good, in santeros’ eyes, is not necessarily its etymological
soundness (which most would have no tools to investigate) but its ability to
reveal previously hidden knowledge and make it relevant to the situation, just
as santeros do when interpreting divination messages.
Table 1 lists the Lucumí words Arturo used, lined up with any gloss he gave.
The words and phrases from the spoken part of the story, especially in the first
part of the story, neatly line up with their ‘meaning’, although some phrases
go untranslated. ‘Abbo’ is ‘sheep’, ‘kinché’ is ‘who are you’, and so forth. The
Lucumí songs he sings at the end also receive glosses that are correspondingly
more elaborate, but that also come across as if they were as precise as ilé is
‘house’. Table 1 looks like the beginning of a glossary, with the pairings of
Lucumí expression and gloss neatly excised from their context and ready to be
reinserted to produce or translate new Lucumí utterances. Table 1 would also
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lend itself to a comparison to modern Yoruba, and I am hardly the only per-
son, whether scholar or practitioner, to try looking up Lucumí words in
Yoruba dictionaries. Doing so would result in a great deal of success for indi-
vidual words: Lucumí emi, ayakua and ilé clearly correspond to Yoruba èmi ‘I’,
ajapa ‘turtle’ and ilé ‘house’, and some longer phrases, like moforibale above,
can be segmented into Yoruba with ease. However, many longer phrases and
lines of songs are much less readily segmented, un-garbled, and converted into
a single definitive Yoruba ‘original’ (see Wirtz 2005).10
Table 1: Lucumí words and glosses given in Arturo’s performance
Lucumí Arturo’s gloss (my translation)

Moforibale –
Kinché? who are you?
emi ni –
Kilonche? Ko loku ani su ile? where do you live?
Emi en olodumare me, in the ocean
Kilonche bobo teniyen? What did she eat?
abbo sheep
ayakua turtle
akuekue duck
akiko rooster
Bobo teniyen? what did she eat?
Ilé house
afiedenu, fiedenu fiedenu
olufina son tomode –
Kilonche, de kinche laroya –
son loya de obini, son loya of four women
demi –
ona –
obini –
ara –
Yemayá le so owo Listen my mother, mistress
Yemayá ye ile aloto and lady of the ocean
Akere ya aluma Between the solidity of rock, of the foam,
Oite niwe olo kota la kueleseo fresh water and white water
Yale omi yale, iya mi o Yeinle listen to me, that here is your child,
who brings you a gift
Olo yenao omisaide awa omi The entire world I bring to you, my mother
Yeinle aluma omo, sawade olu The sound of the ocean, the transformation,
Sawade Olodumare, lawa lawa lawa so that einle olodo
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Authoritative performance and invented tradition

More to my point, to extract only this kind of decontextualized lexical informa-
tion from Arturo’s performance is to ignore most of what such performances
accomplish, which is to creatively regenerate Lucumí as a dynamic register of
speech that conveys a particular kind of religious authority based on knowledge
of ‘tradition’. My scare quotes around ‘tradition’ serve as a reminder that tradi-
tion is defined (i.e., ‘invented’) precisely through the metapragmatic effects of
activites such as claiming religious authority and revealing occult knowledge
locked in esoteric texts. Palmié (1995), in his comparison of Cuban versus
African American notions of authentic Yoruba ‘tradition’ in Santería and North
American Orisha-Vodou, makes the related point that designating certain prac-
tices or beliefs as traditional requires a particular kind of semiotic reflexiveness,
one that usually arises in reaction to or in tandem with outside objectifications,
including those produced by scholars. In Arturo’s case, my presence triggered a
performance that highlights santeros’ conceptions of la tradición as ‘an original
body of sacred [African] knowledge’, exemplified by patakines, sacred songs,
divination texts and the esoteric language in which these ideally appear (Palmié
1995: 86). Santeros’ widely held sense that this transcendent, sacred knowledge
is slowly eroding and in constant danger of being forgotten creates a productive
tension between their urge to secrecy and a certain necessity to preserve what
is left and probe it for hidden and half-forgotten esoterica.
Overall, Arturo’s use of Lucumí illustrates the strategies with which santeros
learn, perform and interpret Lucumí and the ways in which these strategies
actively shape Lucumí as a register. Santeros deal with the ambiguities and
polysemies of Lucumí words and texts (and, in fact, reinforce these character-
istics) by treating them as multilayered and highly contextual in their mean-
ings, as well as potent in their performative effects. Performances like Arturo’s
emphasize these qualities and convey the sense that deep religious meanings
are coded by Lucumí, not least because the orichas themselves are depicted as
the originators of Lucumí utterances that santeros merely seem to quote.
Arturo’s performance combines story and song so as to divine deeper mean-
ings out of their connections, meanings that may come into play during pos-
session rituals (as when the song might be used to provoke Changó or Yemayá
to possess someone precisely because it refers to this unflattering story involv-
ing both of them) and divinations (as when the story might apply to a client’s
own situation, perhaps directly in how the client treats women, or perhaps in
some deeper, more metaphorical way). That is, the telling of legends of the
orichas, whether in divinations or in performances like Arturo’s, serves to link
past with present in a way that shows the relevance of past events for under-
standing and solving current problems.
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Arturo’s use of Lucumí activates connections between the mythic past and
the present by putting Lucumí into the mouths of the orichas in his story. By
associating particular utterances—songs in particular—to particular events
and personae, and by more generally reinforcing the notion of Lucumí as a
divine language, such performances charge the register with this chronoto-
pic value. That is, Lucumí conveys a particular configuration of space-time-
subjectivity (Bakhtin 1981), in which, like ancient Sanskrit or Church Latin
in other contexts, its utterance imbues ritual proceedings with gravity and
sacredness, although in the case of Lucumí, the sacred has a distinctly esoteric
and African flavor. When Arturo and other santeros then use Lucumí in ritu-
als, they in effect telescope the mythic past and the sacred plane into the
present, ritual moment. They communicate with the deities in the divine lan-
guage and in doing so attract the deities to the ritual. During rituals, orichas
manifest themselves as co-participants, whether through divinations in which
they speak through the oracles or in possessing the body of a ritual participant
to take tangible human form. Santeros speak and sing in Lucumí to trigger
both kinds of co-presence and in turn expect Lucumí to be produced by the
orichas, such that Lucumí serves as a conduit of divine-human communica-
tion and a marker of the ritual immanence of the sacred and mythic.
Parallels with divination

I would like to argue that the interpretive strategies santeros apply to Lucumí
texts parallel ritual interpretation practices: in divinations, santeros rely upon
a few clues produced by the throwing of the cowry shells and encapsulated
into a divination sign or letra (Luc. odú) to tap into a repository of knowledge
about the associations of that sign.11 Each sign is associated with particular
orichas and with a vast corpus of legends, proverbs, ailments, body parts,
conflicts, personality types, medicinal plants and other information particular
to that divination sign, much of which circulates in Spanish orally and through
libretas, or private notebooks of religious information that many santeros
keep, although there are also many written texts on the odunes. Their final
interpretive step is then to investigate the sign and selectively apply that gen-
eral knowledge to the specific situation of their client so as to provide relevant
advice to identify and solve their problem. To illustrate, consider a cowry shell
divination I received from a santero I had just met and asked to interview.
Alberto invited me to his home, where he instead offered me a divination
consultation.12 He began by throwing the sixteen cowries a few times, and
counting how many landed ‘mouth up’, as santeros say. The first throw of the
cowries landed with six mouths up, and the second with eight, producing the
reading 6-8, which is called Obara Unle in Lucumí. He then threw the cowries
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several more times to further elaborate my sign. As we proceeded, I had to

hide different pairs of objects called ibó (in this case including a pebble, shell
and a bone) in my hands, one of which would be revealed when I opened the
hand (left or right) indicated by the cowry throw. At each step, Alberto’s wife,
who was assisting him, wrote down the result in a notebook:
Kristina Wirtz
6-8
Obara Unle
4, 7-6, 11-7, 5-6
con Iré arikú yale
The second series of numbers determined the Lucumí summary in the final
line, which means that my sign, Obara Unle, came with good fortune (Iré )
from the dead (arikú yale). Although not recorded in the notebook, each of
the second string of numbers also has a Lucumí name, so that the numbers 4,
7-6, 11-7, 5-6 could be read as Iroso, Oddí-Obara, Ojuani-Oddí, Oche-Obara.
Indeed, the santero uses these Lucumí names in his interpretation. After com-
pleting the sign, the santero then looked up at me and began a lengthy inter-
pretation, of which I provide only the first portion here (See complete analysis
in Wirtz 2003: 165-177).
Eleggua says that (he) brings iré with Iroso, and arikú he brings with Oddí Obara, and
moyare Ojuani Oddí. Eleggua says that you were born to be the head. That you were
born to be an intellectual, an intelligent person, a person capable of deepening what-
ever knowledge, or desires for knowledge, isn’t it true?
Alberto first gives the Lucumí names of the divination numbers that produced
my result. He specifies which oricha is speaking to me (Eleggua) and para-
phrases a proverb associated with my sign: ‘born to be the head’, whose mean-
ing he then elaborates on.13 Although we had only met once before, he knew
that I was in Cuba doing research on Santería, which undoubtedly affected
how he interpreted ‘born to be the head’. He continued elaborating his inter-
pretation for several more minutes, giving me more and more specific infor-
mation, advice and warnings that culminated in the suggestion that the
knowledge I was gaining would prepare me well to be a santera and to realize
financial success by bringing other foreigners from my country to Cuba to
learn about Santería. As in every other divination I witnessed, the santero
applied his often considerable knowledge of the signs by building his interpre-
tation around a few lexical and contextual cues. I have argued that santeros
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apply these same interpretive practices of using associative meanings, contex-

tual knowledge, and a few clues from recognizable Lucumí words to find
meaning in other types of Lucumí texts, as well. That is, there are more than
coincidental parallels between the interpretive strategy Alberto used to move
from the cowry shell patterns to his general knowledge of the sign, and then
to my specific situation as he saw it and Arturo’s interpretation of Lucumí pas-
sages in his storytelling performance. Just as they do in divinations, santeros
use denotational clues (and the rich associated knowledge they trigger), plus
whatever contextual information they can glean, to produce interpretations of
what Lucumí texts like songs mean.
Three major points emerge out of my discussion of santeros’ practices for
imbuing their ritual register with meaning. Each of these has repercussions for
the activities of linguists and other scholars who wish to study diasporic linguis-
tic phenomena like Lucumí. First, the interpretive activities of santeros shape
the register itself through processes of enregisterment. As Agha (2003: 232)
points out, ‘cultural value is not a static property of things or people, but a
precipitate of sociohistorically locatable practices’. Lucumí’s historicity—its
location in space-time—is one important product of enregisterment. I have
suggested that santeros handle Lucumí in ways that charge it—and all their
ritual practices—with a transcendent mythic chronotope. Santeros recognize,
and even emphasize, Lucumí’s African origins, but the ‘Africa’ they refer to is on
a sacred plane that continues to intersect with the present. Their uses of Lucumí
show both its divineness and its ongoing relevance as the preferred mode of
communication with the divine. That is, they use Lucumí utterances and songs
to temporally telescope the sacred and mythic into the ritual moment. In the
next section I will explore how scholars, too, treat diasporic registers like Lucumí
in ways that allow temporal telescoping between Africa-past and the diaspora.
My second major point is that, despite seeing Lucumí texts as transcendent,
santeros treat those texts in ways that give them fluid and open-ended mean-
ings. They reconcile Lucumí’s timelessness on the one hand and adaptability
on the other by emphasizing that Lucumí has ever-deeper layers of occult
meaning. Its very esotericness conceals religious secrets and deep knowledge.
Third, I have suggested that we should see the ever-deeper levels of meaning
not as simply inherent in Lucumí words, but rather as a product of an inter-
pretive strategy I have likened to divination. Lucumí’s fundamental ambiguity
and fluidity—and the ways in which santeros’ strategies of divining meaning
produce these characteristics—are easily lost when scholars focus too much on
etymological reconstruction. Ironically, when we (and I include myself in this
criticism) focus too much on the African origins of Lucumí words and texts,
our practices take on the same kind of divinatory logic that I have described
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for santeros. That is, we scholars ourselves engage in an interpretive process of

using a few clues to excavate ever-deeper meanings that I call ‘divining his-
tory’. We, too, in our eagerness to establish authoritative African origins, are
engaged in inventing tradition.
Divining the past through linguistic reconstruction

In this section I will suggest that Cuban religious practitioners’ efforts to
recover and activate the mythic past through their use of Lucumí can illumi-
nate the efforts of linguists and other scholars of the African diaspora, who are
also often engaged in ‘divining’ the past to ‘discover’ the African roots of Afri-
can diasporic speech practices. These practices include recovering ‘lost’ or hid-
den histories and meanings and applying modes of ‘temporal telescoping’ to
show the relevance of those histories in the present. Doing so involves setting
up contrasting chronotopes of a transcendent ‘Africa-past’ alongside a tumul-
tuous ‘New World-present’ and then, in ways reminiscent of divination and
possession trance rituals, creating chronotopic alignments that telescope the
past into the present, such that the past ‘possesses’ certain speech genres and
allows them—the Lucumí songs and other distinctive speech in African
diasporic religions—to serve as signs of a particular, embodied historical con-
sciousness (see Wirtz, in press).
Recall my earlier account of my rather humble attempts to make sense of
the Lucumí I learned in Cuba by resorting to Yoruba sources. I was not alone
in thinking that if I could just find the etymological connections that allowed
me to decipher them, the Lucumí utterances would transparently reveal their
meanings to me. Scholar and santero John Mason has taken this kind of
project the furthest for Cuban Lucumí, and for overtly religious (and political)
reasons. He describes the inspiration for his project as follows:
For twenty-five years I have followed Orisa and for all of that time I have been intrigued
by the fact that Cubans, Afro-Americans, and Puerto Ricans were moved to dance and
sing by hundreds of songs they had memorized but didn’t understand the words to. A
culture that has been deprived of its language or made to feel that it is inconsequential,
in the end must look to other cultures’ languages to identify and expound on those
sacred truths that are particular and important to it (Mason 1992: iii).
His goals of cultural reclamation are aligned with the presumably secular-
humanist impulses of scholars since Herskovits to tell a redemptive and
affirmative ‘narrative of continuities’ about African diasporic history (Scott
1991: 262). But as Scott goes on to point out, when such narratives focus
on authenticating particular historical visions, they reinscribe the sense that
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African diasporic historical visions require verification (or correction) of a cer-

tain sort, even as they run the risk of essentializing African and diasporic iden-
tities. Verificationist research—establishing the particular linguistic ‘roots’ and
transcendent ‘original’ meanings of diasporic speech, in my example—also
misses any number of interesting questions about the role of tradition and
narratives of continuity in ‘the local [and broader] network of power and
knowledge in which they are employed, and the kinds of identities they serve
to fashion’ (Scott 1991: 280).14
Mason explains that he recorded the songs he presents exactly as given to
him by religious practitioners in Matanzas, Cuba. However, he presents the
songs in an approximation of modern Yoruba orthography, with English
translations for everything, and with little comment about how he and his
Yoruba language consultants handled ambiguities and multiple possibilities
that arose in transliterating Lucumí utterances into Yoruba. He justifies his
interpretations by pointing out that the Yoruba themselves engage in word
play and use words with homonyms or near-homonyms that add flavor to
their connotations, concluding:
Since we do not have the original authors of these songs to confer with, there is every
possibility that we have not translated their words true to their initial aims. But we are
reassured by the improvisational and ambiguous nature of Yoruba poetry that the
apple (our translation) hasn’t fallen far from the tree (Mason 1992: 41-42).
This statement presupposes a deep aesthetic continuity between Yoruba poetry

and Cuban Lucumí, and it exemplifies how he moves between Cuban and
Yoruba sources in ways that blur the differences. He does say that others are
free to be dissatisfied and write their own volumes. That said, the virtuosic and
seemingly fluent Yoruba transliterations he provides would be hard for most
santeros (or, indeed, anyone without considerable Yoruba linguistic chops) to
challenge, especially if they accept the premise that etymological analysis is the
key to deep and transcendent meaning.15
To illustrate his approach, we can examine his treatment of a song to the
oricha Ochún that I often heard during my field research. In Table 2 below,
the first column presents the chorus of the song as my field consultant had me
write it, the second column presents Mason’s version (Mason 1992: 337, 340),
and the third column gives the version in a book of oricha song translations
into Spanish by Cuban santero Lázaro Pedroso (1995: 46-47). When I asked
the santero who wrote down this song for me what the song said, he identified
six Lucumí words he recognized, although he was not sure precisely how they
syntactically combined in the song’s lines. He would only go as far as saying
that the song referred to Ochún as the mistress of the river and called her
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‘mother’ to show respect for her power. Mason goes so far as to provide two
versions of this chorus in Yoruba, based on alternative transliterations of sound
variations like odo versus oro in line 1, and sala versus sara and wo versus wo in
line 3. Pedroso provides a Spanish translation of his version of the song that
differs substantially from either of Mason’s versions, even when (as in lines 1
and 2) they largely agree on the words themselves. For example, Mason’s song
is about Ochún, but Pedroso’s song is directed to Ochún, reflecting santeros’
pragmatic understanding that these songs are sung to get the attention of the
oricha. Keeping in mind that such efforts at translation are enthusiastically
consumed by santeros, I propose that, instead of asking which version is most
correct on the basis of etymological reconstruction, we instead focus on why
these santero-scholars resort to such efforts at translation and transliterations
to make sense of the songs. I suggest that they are motivated by notions about
the deep and esoteric meanings hidden in religious texts like songs, and that
excavating those meanings is a way of demonstrating one’s religious authority.
Where the santero Arturo gave a virtuostic oral performance of Lucumí in his
story-telling, Mason and Pedroso are virtuosic in providing translations that,
in the absence of evidence about their analytical processes, cannot be chal-
lenged by other santeros.
Table 2: Three versions of a Lucumí song to Ochún and its interpretation

KW consultant John Mason Lázaro Pedroso
1 Iya mi ilé odo Iyá mi ilé odò Iyá mi ilé odo
Iyá mi=my mother My mother’s house is the river My mother, your
Ilé=house house is the river
Odo=river Ìyá mí ilé orò
My Mother, house of tradition
2 Odo aché Gbogbo àßπe Gbogbo ashe ishe
Aché=power All Powerful, You have all the
grace to work
3 Yeye mi saramawó e Obí ni sálà máa wò πe Iyá orisha alá iwó e
Yeye mi=my mother Women that flee for safety Holy mother, cover
habitually visit her me with your shawl
Ìße mi sàráà máa wπo πe
My deeds of charity habitually
pull you
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Mason’s interpretive strategy, in particular, relies upon a particular chrono-

topic vision of Yoruba as a transcendent language, in which modern, standard-
ized Yoruba (a relatively recent product of early twentieth-century ethnogenesis
and state consolidation that postdated Lucumí’s presumed transplantation to
Cuba) is collapsed with its archaic precursors, such that the imaginative act of
translation into Yoruba from Lucumí comes to seem like etymological recon-
struction, or recovery of original meanings. In effect, Mason’s Yoruba song
reconstructions parallel ritual forms of temporal telescoping through which
the past becomes transcendent and mythic and therefore highly relevant to the
present. Where diviners employ Lucumí utterances attributable to divine
speakers and Spanish-language patakines recognized as ancient wisdom, Mason
almost magically converts largely unintelligible, unsegmentable and highly
variable Cuban songs that are learned as formulae into fully realized, semanti-
cally transparent (if otherwise highly problematic) Yoruba texts. In doing so,
Mason is in fact creating a broad, transcendent notion of a pan-Yoruba world
that encompasses sites in Africa and the Americas. The tradition to which he
is appealing (and which he is contributing to the creation of ) closely conforms
to Cuban santeros’ notions of a transcendent, sacred font of knowledge, espe-
cially as embodied in Lucumí and divination texts that are simultaneously
ancestral and ever-relevant.
Although completely secular scholarship on Lucumí and other African
diasporic ritual registers has a different agenda than the scholarship of reli-
gious practitioners like Mason and Pedroso, some of these projects too can be
read as achieving similar kinds of temporal telescoping between African
‘source’ languages and African diasporic derivatives whose true meaning can
be revealed through etymological analysis. To accomplish this, scholars turn to
living speakers or dictionaries of modern African languages to seek out possi-
ble cognates of diasporic forms, even though these modern sources represent
how the languages have been standardized and codified during the past cen-
tury. In doing so, the modern languages are often collapsed with their preco-
lonial and colonial-era precursors as timeless icons of African ‘traditions’ (the
salient ones in Cuba are grouped as Lucumí/Yoruba, Congo/Bantú/KiKongo,
Carabalí/Efik/Ibibio, Arará/Fon/Ewe). That is, in their role as etymological
sources, these modern African languages stand for ancestral origins of diasporic
word-forms, which in turn are metonyms for entire cultural ‘survivals’. The
meanings of African words identified as etymological roots are projected for-
ward so as to also carry broad and weighty semantic fields that supposedly tell
us (and the locals) what their traditions and practices really mean. In a sense,
then, this temporal telescoping via a chronotope of timeless, transcendent
‘Africa-past’ creates the weight of ‘tradition’ in the African diasporic culture
being studied.
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Consider the similarities between Mason’s religiously-motivated translations

and the otherwise much more properly scholarly work by Maureen Warner-
Lewis on Yoruba in Trinidad (Warner-Lewis 1984, 1990). Like him, she
describes a process of collecting oral texts from Caribbean sources (elderly
Trinidadians of Yoruba descent), then working with Yoruba scholars to submit
those texts to a process of transliteration into modern Yoruba that permits a
clear and poetic English translation to reveal the song’s meaning (which may
not always be known by the Trinidadian singers). Where ambiguities or alter-
nate translations exist, she, like Mason, appeals to the poetics and punning of
Yoruba oral literature, thereby making an implicit claim about a second-order
‘survival’ of an African aesthetic (once again in keeping with Mintz and Price’s
(1992/1976: 5) call for attention to deep ‘grammatical principles’). While many
of her examples are songs that pertain to the Orisha religion, she also analyzes
songs from other spheres of life, such as this lament (one of three versions)
(Warner-Lewis 1984: 144-145):
Mo gbédèrè I have come to understand the language of strangers

Mo gbé àrè o I live in exile
Agbe ló láró, ló láró (Just as) the agbe bird wears indigo, wears indigo
Àlùkò ló kósùn, ló kósùn (And) the aluko bird gathers camwood
Baba, ‘yinbó ló kó a wá o Father, the Europeans captured us and brought us here
πolóπorun okè ló ní wa o (But) it is God above who owns us
Her description of the song’s poetics—for example, in the association of the

blue-feathered agbe with indigo and the magenta-feather aluko with glistening
camwood and in double entendres such as aró meaning ‘indigo’ and arò mean-
ing ‘sorrow’—is compelling, but what do they mean to the elderly singers,
who in many cases, it seems, have learned the songs by rote? Warner-Lewis’s
choice to provide these texts only in Yoruba orthography helps us understand
what her goals are: she explains that she made this choice to best meet the
needs of those literate in Yoruba, which fits with the project’s overall motiva-
tion to present oral texts collected in Trinidad as oral literature that is part of
a greater corpus of (transcendent) Yoruba culture: ‘This is the first published
collection of Yoruba poems, folksongs, and sacred chants from the island of
Trinidad . . . and also the first time that an attempt has been made to translate
these texts and to examine their references and their literary quality’ (1). It
seems that she and Mason share a desire to recover and authenticate African
diasporic traditions by verifying the ancestral sources and literary quality of
their Caribbean consultants’ songs. In doing so, they rely upon a language
ideology of a transcendent source language that is always relevant. It is cer-
tainly telling that her most recent book, a veritable catalog of comparative
work on Central African cultural forms in the Caribbean and across Central
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Africa in the style of Herskovits, refers to cultural transcendence in its subtitle:

‘Transcending Time, Transforming Culture’ (Warner-Lewis 2003).
It bears repeating that there is historical and linguistic value in identifying
the etymologies of ‘African’ words used in African diasporic ritual registers and
songs. Such data can contribute to our understanding of particular time peri-
ods and our historical linguistic understanding of language change, especially
in situations of language contact, which is a point Warner-Lewis (1990) com-
pellingly argues. The best of such work (e.g., Vincent 2006) can even chal-
lenge the assumptions of debates over authenticity (such as that the most
archaic forms are always to be found in Africa) and the tendency to isolate
texts from musical contexts, in particular. Of course etymological research
requires careful methodologies and has its pitfalls: given the number of vari-
ants, interregional interactions, and other ambiguities on both sides of the
Atlantic and the degree of dialectal variation, borrowing, and divergence
among closely related African languages, it is not always possible to trace a
specific etymology to a particular language or dialect with certainty, let alone
to identify a single point-source text. In addition, I suggest that unwarranted
burdens are being placed on the meaning of findings that connect, say, par-
ticular lexical items from Cuban Palo Monte or Santería ritual practice to
particular putative source-words in KiKongo or Yoruba.
An additional example will illustrate how problematic it can be when ety-
mological analyses are fed back into revealing something about a word or text’s
current meaning in its diasporic context. Recent collaboration between Jesús
Fuentes and Armin Schwegler has resulted in a useful book on Cuban Palo
Monte Mayombe, in which (among other things) they investigate the origins
of the names of a number of this religion’s deities (Fuentes Guerra and Schwe-
gler 2005). Their overall thesis is that the linguistic origins of the names—and
indeed the entire ritual register—are KiKongo, although sometimes a name
can be segmented more than one way, producing more than one possible
KiKongo ‘original’. For example, they provide three alternate etymologies for
the deity Pungo Dibudi, based on whether the second part is segmented as
di+budi or dibu+di and whether the ‘b’ of Spanish phonology is assimilated to
KiKongo /b/ or /v/ (181-184):
1) KIK. Mpúngu ‘supreme, all-powerful’ + KIK. di ‘genitive prefix’ + KIK.

Mbuudi ‘fetish for curing stomach problems’
2) KIK. Mpúngu ‘supreme, all-powerful’ + KIK. díbu ‘small bell for hunt-
ing dogs’ + KIK. di ‘genitive prefix’ + (mbwá ‘dogs’)
3) KIK. Mpúngu ‘supreme, all-powerful’ + KIK. di ‘genitive prefix’ + KIK.
vùdu or vùdidi ‘gluttony and lasciviousness’.
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So the etymological derivation is either ‘all powerful fetish against stomach

problems’, ‘all powerful fetish of hunting bells for dogs’, or ‘all powerful fetish
of gluttony and lasciviousness’. Fuentes and Schwegler discuss the merits of
each possibility primarily by seeking additional clues in Pungo Dibudi’s asso-
ciation with the oricha Ogún of Santería. Ogún, they tell us, has a divination
sign that warns of stomach ailments, and he is also the deity of metal, includ-
ing the metal of surgical instruments, which would justify etymology (1). He
is also associated with dogs and hunting (although they point out that these
are domains of other orichas as well), which could confirm etymology (2).
Finally, Ogún is well known for his rapacious appetites, which would fit with
etymology (3). Whatever the merits of these proposed etymologies, note that
Fuentes and Schwegler utilize clues to excavate deeper meanings according to
the same divinatory logic shown above—a logic that religious practitioners
largely accept as a method for elucidating hidden knowledge and deeper levels
of truth. Such clues are open-ended, even taking the sleuths across the divide
Cubans usually envision between Congo and Yoruba traditions.
In another typical entry, Fuentes and Schwegler suggest that the deity name
Mama Kengue may derive from the KiKongo words maama (an honorific title
meaning ‘mother’) plus the verb kangá (‘to tie, bind’) in its preterite form of
kèngè. They explain the name as a reference to an important ritual form of
power in which the practitioner can magically ‘bind’ or ‘tie’ someone up,
which leads them to investigate whether this deity lives up to her name’s new-
found meaning as ‘the Mother that has magically tied’. Most of their palero
field consultants agreed that she does have this capacity, although at least one
disagreed, saying that this deity does not have the secret component called
‘Four Winds’ that would give her this power (Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler
2005: 147-149). Their discussion raises the question of what is being claimed
when an ‘original’ meaning hidden in a name’s etymology is ‘revealed’. Are
some practitioners now demonstrably correct in claiming magical binding pow-
ers for Mama Kengue, while others are wrong? The notion of a transcendent
Kongo culture, encapsulated and transmitted in words of KiKongo origin, here
allows the scholars to make claims about authoritative religious knowledge,
claims that will almost certainly be taken up by practitioners themselves to
authenticate or delegitimize their own and others’ practices (cf. Palmié 1995).
Not only would I caution against reading etymological derivations as evi-
dence to support or refute current practices, I would also suggest that such
derivations are not a robust basis for working backward, metonymically, from
a word (or even an entire lexicon) to a general cultural tradition (as in the
simplistic if oft-repeated assertions that Santería is Yoruba and Palo Monte
is Kongo). Ultimately, Fuentes and Schwegler’s etymological analyses, even
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taken at face value, tell us precious little about the origins of the Palo deity
Mama Kengue or who, in African ethnic terms, is responsible for her creation
and transmission. Nor do etymologies make a clear case for Herskovitsian
versus Frazierian judgments about how ‘purely’ Bantú or how ‘syncretized and
invented’ Palo Monte is. The etymology posits a linguistic lineage connecting
a proper name in Palo Monte and two modern KiKongo words to some com-
mon (likely Congo) antecedents, whether recent or remote, but it cannot tell
us how or why or by whose efforts those lexical items came into their current
circulation in contemporary Cuba.
Instead, such etymological detective work tells us a great deal about the col-
laborative work of religious meaning-making in the dialogue between scholars
and practitioners, in which each consume the others’ texts and put them to
use to further their own interpretations. Not only is the line between academic
and religious research blurred (witness the legions of scholar-practitioners and
practitioner-scholars and the borrowings across camps), but there are also con-
vergences in the kinds of interpretive strategies used. Historical linguists and
religious practitioners are engaged in meaning-making through a divinatory
process of using clues to ‘reveal’ deep, hidden meanings that collapse past and
present into a transcendent ‘tradition’ that is always relevant in the present
moment, and that can therefore stake out precedence over other, competing
interpretations and practices unsanctioned by etymological claims.
Both scholars’ and practitioners’ interpretive strategies are based on, and
thus presuppose, language ideologies involving some notion of a transcendent
language. However, the language ideologies differ in other important respects.
I have described how religious practitioners employ notions of religious lan-
guage as existing on and tapping into a timeless, sacred plane—Africa as the
transcendent realm of the gods, by analogy to the ancient Greeks’ Mount
Olympus, and Lucumí/Yoruba as their divine language. Their ways of creating
meaning through etymological and other divinatory analyses are intimately
tied to the ways in which they make a transcendent sacred Africa ritually
immanent and therefore continually relevant to the present. In contrast, schol-
ars using etymological analyses to seek connections between Africa and its
diaspora are relying upon an ideology of linguistic and cultural transcendence
that, rather than mobilizing notions of the transformative power of the sacred,
imprisons Africa in a shell of unchanging pastness at the same time that it
blinds them to the ways in which they are creating (rather than discovering)
history. Rather than revealing connections, I suggest that such analyses actively
create connections and, in doing so, their most important contribution is to
reproduce a particular and distinctive historical subjectivity.
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Conclusion
Insofar as I have focused on deconstructing the interpretive activities of my

respected academic colleagues and expert field consultants, I am conscious of
how my analysis, too, is implicated in what Charles Briggs (1996) calls the
‘politics of discursive authority’. Briggs describes the ways in which research
‘exposing’ the inventedness of tradition does violence to local perspectives and
political agendas, especially when the group being exposed is already margin-
alized. In his meta-analysis of his own fieldwork situation among Warao peo-
ple in Venezuela, he explores how differently positioned social actors, including
privileged first-world researchers, their colleagues who are based in nations
with less socioeconomic clout, local ‘cultural brokers’, and their neighbors and
compatriots who have even less access to the international information econ-
omy, engage in metadiscursive (what I have called ‘interpretive’) practices to
bridge the ‘intertextual gaps’ between past and present. All of these social cat-
egories and some intermediate ones have also been relevant in my analysis.
What is novel about the state of affairs in what I have loosely referred to as
studies of African diasporic ritual speech is that people positioned along the
entire spectrum of social categories, from local cultural brokers and those who
would be local cultural brokers among religious practitioners, to international
researchers, are engaged in remarkably similar ways of ‘divining’ a transcend-
ent African past and ‘telescoping’ it into the present. This is true despite
otherwise different (if sometimes converging) agendas among these actors.
Whereas Afro-Cuban practitioners and Cuban scholars are variously engaged
in constructing Afro-Cuban (or thoroughly hybridized ‘Cuban’) presents and
futures, whether religious or not, international researchers are more con-
sciously engaged in constructing diasporic sensibilities. While Cubans have
remained somewhat outside the current trends toward pan-Yorubaism and
other manifestations of diasporic subjectivities (despite considerable transna-
tional dialogue and movement of religious practitioners and scholars), there
may be greater accord between the visions of the scholars and other actors in
the Trinidad-Yoruba connections explored by Warner-Lewis. In these cases,
diasporic desires to pinpoint an African homeland and heritage seem to con-
verge between scholars and practitioners.
Whatever the underlying motivations and ideologies of the parties involved,
all contribute to the interpretive strategies through which a few linguistic and
contextual clues permit transatlantic connections to be discovered and deep,
forgotten meanings to be revealed. In my examples of this sort of etymological
reconstruction I have discussed the difficulties and emphasized the trans-
formative work that is accomplished through ‘discovery’ of a diasporic text’s
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‘original’ African language and ‘revelation’ of its (original and transcendent)

meaning.
In any event, the ‘discovery’ of specific African sources for Cuban Palo or
Trinidadian Yoruba words and songs, or the ‘reconstruction’ of ‘original’
Yoruba meanings for Cuban Santería songs, because they metapragmatically
frame the diasporic cultural forms as (usually eroded or partly forgotten) cop-
ies of a timeless African original, make certain claims on what the meanings of
the diasporic cultural forms should be. The etymologies may be intended to be
exclusively correct (as in the secular reconstructions) or not (as in the religious
reconstructions, like Mason’s). In either case, they are implicated in claims and
counterclaims to religious authority among practitioners and lineages, and for
current efforts at codifying and institutionalizing religious forms, especially
among santeros.
In this way, too, emblematically ‘African’ words and songs become metonyms
for entire cultural lineages, as if Palo can be explained in whole or in part through
its KiKongo origins or Santería through its Yoruba heritage. That is, an entire
diasporic history through which these modern religious entities emerged risks
being collapsed into a single, unbroken chain from transcendent Africa-of-the-
past to the diasporic present. To the extent that practitioners themselves accept
the authority of such scholary revisions, scholars risk transforming local prac-
tices and notions of tradition without even being aware of the dynamics of
tradition and authority and the modes of historical consciousness among those
they study. We thus run the risk of overlooking significant data about the ways
in which the African diaspora is a product of memory and historical subjectiv-
ity—in which memories, through the divinatory efforts of linguistic sleuths,
are never truly lost, but only hidden.
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Acknowledgements
Many thanks to Stephan Palmié for the invitation and much helpful feedback along the
way. Thanks also to Amanda Vincent, Armin Schwegler and an anonymous reviewer for
encouragement and stimulating critique on this paper and the larger project, and to many
other supportive colleagues at Western Michigan University and beyond. Yiwolaπ Awoyale’s
Yoruba lingui patience and support none of my work would be possible. This research was
funded by a Brody-Foley Grant for fieldwork, an International Pre-Dissertation Training
Fellowship from the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned
Societies, with funds provided by the Ford Foundation, and several Foreign Language and
Area Studies Fellowships.
Notes
1. Sincere thanks to Dr. Yiwola π Awoyale, Yoruba linguist and lexicographer at Penn
Linguistic Data Consortium, for noting the parallels between the Yoruba oriki and the
Cuban song. In sessions extending over a year, he listened to and provided lexical analyses
of my Cuban field recordings.
2. Amanda Vincent has brought to my attention two other Yoruba texts, a song and
another oriki, that the Yoruba religious experts she worked with linked to a recording of this
Cuban song. I thank her for the reminder that melodies also provide comparative informa-
tion.
3. During my fieldwork on Santería in Cuba, I attended ceremonies, conducted inter-
views, elicited information on Lucumí, received formal tutoring and less formal mentoring
from a few key field consultants, and engaged in the long-term, often low-key hanging
around religious practitioners, listening and chatting that constitute so much of partici-
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pant-observation. Wherever possible and permitted, I recorded ceremonies and other inter-
actions. Field research was supplemented with linguistic and textual analyses of published
and unpublished texts, especially religious notebooks (libretas) in which many santeros
record their religious knowledge, including Lucumí vocabulary lists, texts of prayers and
songs, ritual procedures, and information pertaining to divination signs.
4. But see Amanda Vincent’s excellent dissertation (2006), which pursues such transat-
lantic comparisons to make an argument against this chronotope of transcendent Africa.
5. Throughout this article, I write Lucumí words according to the slightly modified
Spanish orthography used by my Cuban field consultants. The choice of orthographic rep-
resentation, as I discuss below, is never neutral (Schieffelin and Doucet 1994).
6. Recorded conversation with Emilio (Tape 2), October 11, 1999, Santiago de Cuba.
7. Yoruba backtranslations are courtesy of Dr. Yiwola Awoyale, Penn Linguistic Data
Consortium, but I take responsibility for any errors.
8. Recorded conversation with Rey (Tape 46), March 25, 2000, Santiago de Cuba.
9. Recorded conversation with Arturo (Tapes 45-46), March 23, 2000, Santiago de
Cuba. Original Spanish: Y Changó, él mismo es un santo muy vanidoso, un santo muy
orgulloso que . . . presumió que todas las mujeres tenían que rendirle moforibale. Y enton-
ces fue cuando el conoció en la Costa Aromática, paseando, conocía a Yemayá, que no se
acordaba, porque Yemayá no lo parió pero lo crió. Y entonces se le fue de Yemayá y hizo
su vida. Y entonces cuando ya vió a Yemayá era rey de la guerra, era rey vanidoso y lleno
de todo. Y entonces le pregunta a Yemayá, le dice ‘Kinché’ que quiere decir, eh ‘¿Quien,
quien es?’
‘¿Kinché?’ ‘¿Quien eres tú?’
Y entonces Yemayá lo dice ‘Emi ni Yemayá’
Dice ‘¿Kilonché?’ ‘¿Ko loku ani su ile?’ ‘¿Donde Ud. vive?’
Dice ‘Emi en Olodumare’ ‘Yo en el mar’.
Y ‘¿Kilonché bobo teniyen?’ ‘¿Que comía?’
Dice Yemayá, ‘Emi abbo’, que es carnero, ayakua, jicotea, akuekue, el pato, akiko,
gallo.
Dice Changó, Changó mira así sorprendido. Dice’, ¿qué comía?’ o sea se ‘bobo teniyen’.
Todo lo que le gustaba que era lo mismo, que comía ella como comía él.
Entonces Yemayá le dice que si quería demuestre su bote, que como si quiere ir a su casa,
a su ilé, que es como se llama en la religión. Ilé es casa. Entonces le dijo que no sabía nada
darle para que demuestra en bote. Pero en el bote Changó intentó de de tocarle, no sé, lo
qué sé yo, lo [?], y Yemayá lo puso para la violencia del bote, y Changó cayó en el agua. Y
entonces empieza a pedir, ‘Afiedenu’, que quiere decir fiedenu, fiedenu, fiedenu, fiedenu.
Y entonces cuando salió Obatalá Yembo de las nubes, dice, ‘Fieddenu Yemayá. Olufina
son tomodé’. Changó no se está ahogando, pero mira para si bien él iba a ver a Yemayá.
Ella dice, ‘Kilonché, de kinché laroyá. Son loya de obini, son loya de cuatro mujeres
y de la madre mía’.
Entonces, Yembo dice, ‘Yo te traje al mundo, y Yemayá te crió’.
Entonces, Changó dice, ‘Fiedenu iya mi, fiedenu iya mi. Iya mi, emi no sabía que era
iya mia. Perdóname madre mia, que yo no sabía que Ud. era mi madre también’.
Y entonces Yemayá le dijo, ‘Demi te hace ona, para que sepa siempre que hay un obini
en ara, que hay que respetarla. Demi te dice que laye es el pillico para que supiera que en
el mundo en la tierra siempre que hay una mujer que hay que respetar. Que todos no eran
igual’. Y entonces Yemayá se vaya a hacer pato con él, dice, ‘Bueno cuando tú me quieras,
tú me llamas en, por eco’.
JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 273 4/19/07 2:40:30 PM

Entonces, cuando Changó quería ver a su madre, se para, iba un, parece una carreta, le
ponía plátanos, frutas, ah los animales, y aceite y todo. Dice esa palabra era mala decía él:
(canta) Yemayá le so owo
Yemayá ye ile aloto
Akere ya aluma
Oite niwe olo kota, la kueleseo
Yale omi yale, iya mi o
(habla) Oiga madre mía, dueña y señora del mar, entre la solidez de la piedra, de la
espuma, agua dulce y agua blanca, Yeinle oígame, que aquí su hijo, le trae un regalo.
(canta) Olo yenao omisaide awa omi
(habla) El mundo entero te lo traigo, madre mía. Y entonces Yemayá empece a hacer en
la, en la el remolino para su hijo, y convoca, se volvía a esconder de nuevo, y dice:
(canta) Yeinle aluma omo, sawade olu
Sawade Olodumare
Lawa lawa lawa
(habla) El sonido del mar, la transtendencia, ya que einle olodo.
10. Although melody and associated rhythms can help make Lucumí songs recognizable
to Yoruba speakers (Amanda Vincent, personal communication).
11. There are three divination systems associated with Santería, which are, in order of
increasing elaboration: throwing coconut shell pieces, throwing sixteen cowries, or divining
Ifá, with either a chain or with ikin (palm nuts). Despite their considerable differences, all
of these methods follow a similar logic that requires priests to apply a finite set of timeless,
transcendent signs to the myriad situations in which divine messages are sought. Cowry
shell divination and Ifá divination also both utilize corpora of texts, with particular texts
linked to each divination sign. While the two corpora are historically related and have some
overlap, they remain distinct. See Brown (2003) for more information.
12. Recorded consultation with Alberto (Tape 40), March 4, 2000, Santiago de Cuba.
13. In other contexts, including divinations for other people, I have heard santeros dis-
cuss the proverb’s meaning as referring more to leadership or ambition than to intellect.
14. See Palmié (1995) for an example of the approach Scott advocates.
15. Although considerable problems with Mason’s Yoruba, in particular diacritics, have
been pointed out to me, I choose to let his orthography stand, as the authority of even
imperfectly fluent Yoruba has the same effect on all but linguists and fluent Yoruba speak-
ers. Indeed, the unintelligibility of the ‘Yoruba’ and its English translation heightens the
sense of esoteric mystery.
JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 274 4/19/07 2:40:30 PM

Divining The Past

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Journal of Religion in Africa 37 (2007) 242-274 www.brill.

Divining the Past:

Itowele wele ita Ochún Idπe wπerπewπerπe ni tπoßun

© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2007 DOI: 10.1163/157006607X166645

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JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 243 4/19/07 2:40:25 PM

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 244 4/19/07 2:40:25 PM

historical consciousness in our research and in our lives more generally. It is

Imagining Africa in the diaspora: chronotopes of survival

The emphasis on cultural transcendence over time and space, common to

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 245 4/19/07 2:40:25 PM

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 246 4/19/07 2:40:25 PM

Interpretive strategies and historical subjectivity in Cuban Santería

Background on Santería and Lucumí

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Recuperative strategies of santeros

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JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 250 4/19/07 2:40:26 PM

almost obsolescent Yoruba. My evidence suggests that santeros are sometimes,

(sings) Ago Yemayá ago, ago ile, o ile laumo

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 251 4/19/07 2:40:26 PM

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 252 4/19/07 2:40:26 PM

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 253 4/19/07 2:40:26 PM

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 254 4/19/07 2:40:27 PM

meaning ‘what is s/he doing?’ or perhaps kí ni o ń ße, meaning ‘what are

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 255 4/19/07 2:40:27 PM

Table 1: Lucumí words and glosses given in Arturo’s performance

Lucumí Arturo’s gloss (my translation)

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Authoritative performance and invented tradition

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Parallels with divination

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several more times to further elaborate my sign. As we proceeded, I had to

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 259 4/19/07 2:40:27 PM

apply these same interpretive practices of using associative meanings, contex-

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 260 4/19/07 2:40:27 PM

for santeros. That is, we scholars ourselves engage in an interpretive process of

Divining the past through linguistic reconstruction

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 261 4/19/07 2:40:28 PM

African diasporic historical visions require veriﬁcation (or correction) of a cer-

This statement presupposes a deep aesthetic continuity between Yoruba poetry

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 262 4/19/07 2:40:28 PM

Table 2: Three versions of a Lucumí song to Ochún and its interpretation

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Mason’s interpretive strategy, in particular, relies upon a particular chrono-

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Consider the similarities between Mason’s religiously-motivated translations

Mo gbédèrè I have come to understand the language of strangers

Her description of the song’s poetics—for example, in the association of the

JRA 37,2_f5_242-274.indd 265 4/19/07 2:40:28 PM

Africa in the style of Herskovits, refers to cultural transcendence in its subtitle:

1) KIK. Mpúngu ‘supreme, all-powerful’ + KIK. di ‘genitive preﬁx’ + KIK.

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So the etymological derivation is either ‘all powerful fetish against stomach

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Insofar as I have focused on deconstructing the interpretive activities of my