Santeria Edited for Publication

7/31/2019 Santeria Edited for Publication

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Transgressive Body : Constructing the Santera s Body in the Photography of Maria

Perez Bravo

Life in heaven cannot be pleasant, otherwise people could not live so long and come back so quickly.

Yoruba proverb

The body can be regarded as a kind of hinge or threshold: it is placed between the psychic of a lived interiority and a more sociopolitical exteriority that produces interiority though the inscription of the bodyouter surface.

Space, Time and Perversion, Elizabeth Grosz

Santera, as well as many other syncretic religions, had and continues to function

as a site of resistance against Eurocentric hegemonic discourses. Some ethnographers

have argued that Santera has its roots in African spiritual Yoruba traditions, which was

brought to the Caribbean by African slaves, and diversified in the Americans as Santera,

or Regla de Ocha, Ifa , and Candomble in Brazil, hence the similarity between Santera

and Catholicism relies almost solely on re-naming African deities with the names of

catholic saints. According to this definition of Santera proposes a parallel between both

religions, thus disregarding the trangressive power of discursive difference. The present

study will consider Santera , not a cultural fusion of two religious systems, but rather as

an site of organic resistance against the hegemony of catholic institutions thought the

reappropiation of a religious discourse in order to apply it to Afro-Caribbean lived

experience.

Through this notion of Santera , we'll look at a Mara Prez Bravos photographic

re-construction of the gendered body . Bravos mimetic construction of santeras body


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draw attention to two aspects of ritual performance in which: 1) the body is as a site of

enunciation, and thus of subjectivity; and 2) its sacrifice compromise multiple

subjectivities. Prez Bravos photography is a form of organic resistance since it emerges

from religious discourse of Santera, but at the same time transgresses it when fetishizing

the female body with the same imaginary support of Santera's discursive realm.

Mara Prez Bravo is originally from Havana, and is considered a notable

representative of the Latin American genre of fotografa construida or constructed

photography. This genre looks at the photograph as a carefully composed document. Luis

Camnitzer, in his book New Art of Cuba, describes Prez Bravos constructedphotography as a process of thought in which concepts and ideas are formalized within

the parameters of a photographic frame. (1994:103)

Prez Bravos works center on Santeras somatic imaginary an imaginary that

disrupts long established western divisions of corporeal/spiritual and of body/mind.

Furthermore, her works blur the gender binaries that are too often manipulated in order to

establish hierarchical distinctions in the Santeras discursive realm. The body as a

particular site of representation and subjectivity is a major concern in her work.

Nevertheless, this particular subjectivity is a creative rather than a fixed one. In Prez

Bravos constructed pho tography, she explores her female representation inside the

symbolic system of Santera, while expanding this recognition beyond her own

subjectivity, thought extended and unfinished images and excluding frames. The female

subject (Prez Bravo herself) floats in an undefined space that surrounds it and the

decapitation and missing limbs generate a sense of incompleteness. Furthermore, her


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unconstrained spatial location, as well as the mutilated body, point at the notion of a

decentered subjectivity.

The artists images work at two levels simultaneously: she seeks social and

political recognition of womens bodies that exist within a particular context (the

exterior, as my epigraph from Grosz suggests), and also rejects her position as a

complete self (as Groszs emphasis on interiority suggests). In Prez Bravos

photography, subjectivation can be seen as a process of ongoing production that relies on

its own transgression, thus the santera s subject is constituted somatically by means of

her social engravings.Prez Bravos work is grounded in a particular position: the female body and its

representation in this belief system. Nonetheless, in order to reappropiate ethnic and

gendered representations of the santera s body and transform then in sites of resistance,

Prez Bravo employs the symbolic language of Santera s rituality. Her photography

consists of images that reconstruct ritual performances, but during this mimetic process

traditional representations of female body are altered. Santera s imaginary allows Prez

Bravo to enunciate a particular subject position; however her own body becomes a space

of transgression. These representations of the female bodies confronts often oppressive

dichotomy between body and mind, unscripted on western bodies of knowledge,

including Santerias hierarchical system.

Santera and Gender: Challenging Mind/Body Binaries

In her book, Where Men are Wives and Mothers Rule, Mary Ann Clark explores

gender issues in the philosophy and practice of Orisha tradition in the Americas, and in


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particular Cuban Santera. Clark argues that gender roles in African Yoruba tradition are

flexibly signified through the imaginary of ambiguous deities, initiation practices where

devotees regardless of gender, sex or sexual identification are always subjected to

female roles during the performance of some rites. Clark carefully distinguishes between

the traditional Yoruba traditional representations of gender in Africa (Nigeria) and the

Yoruba religion in the Americas (Santera in Cuba) when addressing the history of the

colonial and postcolonial influences of western religious and philosophical thought.

Nevertheless, she maintains that Santera has preserved much of the Yoruba tradition

with regards to gender representations and continues to work on the philosophical andtheological bases that counter Judeo-Christian and Greek philosophy.

According to Clark, Santera counters the western nature of deity, the

anthropomorphous as well as omnipotent and unknowable god of some Enlightment

thinkers, such as Kant and Hegel. However, similar to western notions of God, Santerias

main god is also an abstraction, but lacking anthropomorphic identifications. Santerias

Ashe is described as a vital power, and it is underst ood as an energy that stimulates the

cosmos toward completeness. However, this god is manifested in the material world

through imperfect means. These manifestations are the Oricha , or deities that are present

in everyday life. Clark explains:

In Yoruba and Santera the cosmological view Ashe, the energy of theuniverse, is not homogeneous; it collects and forms into nodes of powerwe recognize as forces of nature (wind, the ocean, thunder), power sites(rivers, mountains), and aspects of human life (our roles as mothers kings,warriors) (12).

Although in Santera these forces have been anthropomorphized and

mythologized, most Orichas have ambiguous characters and personalities, thus diverging


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from the dualistic perception of the good/evil of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In Patakis

(stories in Lucumi), one can encounter dual but not radically opposed identities of

Orichas ; such is the case of Obatala , who is deemed as the creator, the possessor of light,

and the most moral of all Orichas . But it is also attributed to Obatala , the character of a

drunk and irresponsible deity. As the story recounts, Obatala gets drunk while creating

some human beings, hence explaining physical deformations.

With regards to gender differentiation, Santera still maintains to some degree the

western dichotomies of spirit/body, in the sense of the exclusion of the female body from

certain ontological positions that articulate social representations. When looking atfemale subjectivity in the religious context of Santera, it is useful to consider the ritual of

the Asiento (priest/priestess initiation ritual) in these initiations. The priest or priestess

becomes socially authorized to hold ritual performances. In Santera, while priestesses

are able to perform the majority of religious rituals such as singing songs to Osain (deity

of the herbs), participate on initiation rituals, consult the Orichas , divining with coconut

oracles or Cowrie shells and sacrificing animals, they are excluded almost entirely from

performing the Ifa , a kind of divination performed only by the priesthood of Orula , also

called Babalawos. In Living Santeria, Michel Atwood Manson describes Ifa as a

divination system used by Babalawos , employing either a divining chain of sixteen palm

nuts Ifa describ es the knowledge of the invisible and visible world (128). Ifa as a form

of higher divination holds authority in the interpretation of social reality . Ifa is a type of

exalted divination in the domain of Santera, where Babalawos are endowed with a status

that is denied to santera women. By being excluded from this kind of social recognition,

santeras are unable to create images of self-representation.


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Photography and Rituality: Constructed Modes of Enunciation

An aspect of Santera that counters the Western dualism of good and evil, and by

extension of mind and body, is the emphasis in Santera of praxis over doxa. Yorubas

conception of afterlife is grounded in the understanding that heaven is a place of

transition, to which a soul goes only for a short period of time in order to reincarnate in

the family line. The concept of transcending the material world in the Judeo-Christian

sense does not exist in the Yoruba tradition. The relationship between deities and humansis fundamentally a material one; Orichas are approached by means of body performances

or rituals, while at the same time Orichas act on the body of the devotee.

Considering Foucaults notion of power knowledge, these rituals are

performances of cultural representation, and hence that they embody a form of power

given by social recognition. In Santera, rituals are social performances through which

traditional images of cultural representations are maintained, thus ritual performances

provide religious knowledge. In this manner, Manson recounts the Guerreros initiation

ritual of George Caster, an Aleyo (in Lucumi language this signifies a serious religious

student), who, through the performing of initiation rites, transgresses his own conception

of the individual body as he connects his body with lived experiences grounded on

Sante as social knowledge.

When performing the body in unfamiliar gestures, dances and sounds, the Aleyo

enunciates his subjectivity as a student of ceremonies respected within this social realm.


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Manson, in the chapt er I Bow my Head to the Ground, in he which explores bodily

experiences in initiation rites, argues:

People do learn this religion through the exegesis of important concepts,

but they learn primarily through observation and enactment. Becauselearning centers on practice and entering actively into this tradition, thebody naturally emerges as central to any analysis of this kind of ritual.

The body exists in a complex relationship with social knowledge andinterpretation. The informal learning style of Santeria makes socialknowledge a kind of esoteric power. People who know certain ceremoniesexercise power in the community (31).

Even though Santera is a religious discourse that exists outside the normalizing

hegemony of judeo-christian, scientific and rationally based discourses, such asethnography (which from a position of authority consider Santer as body of ethnic

knowledge therefore inferior), one has to understand the relationship between Santeras

knowledge as a counter-hegemonic discourse.

The trangressive character of religious experiences lies on its self/representations

of the body. The openly recognized way in which knowledge social knowledge in

Santera is attained through the body counters western notions, which assume that

attaining identity through knowledge is disguised by the preeminence of mind over the

body. In Santera, the body itself is a site in which one attains subjectivity by means of

the inclusion, in socio-cultural terms, of religious knowledge. Among Santera

practitioners, the acquiring of religious knowledge transcends their location as colonized,

racialized and gendered others when pointing out the deceptive dichotomy between the

mind/body. Prez Bravos photographs point at the significance of ritual performanc es in

the representation of the Afro-Cuban/female body in order to attain not only a religious

cultural knowledge, but also a social one. In the photograph entitled Los Cantos


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Mandan, Perez Bravo explores her creative fixed in location but open to becoming

enunciatory subject when making the ritual tool an extension of her body.

In Santera , objects that are used in the rituals are infused with the power of the

Orichas (deities in Lucumi). In this picture, the empty bowls represent the ofrendas , the

offerings to the Orichas that connect the divine with the human. The artist squats and

claps to praise the Orichas, and her legs are covered with the same material of the bowls:

clay. The artists clay -covered legs can be seen as a physical extension of her body onto

the bowl; thus her body is embodied with the same power as the ritual tools. The artists

subject position is given by the social recognition of the bowls/body as tools of poweramong santeria s practicing community.

In santeria, ritualism places the individual in ceremonies that allow for subject

positions to form because they acquire social knowledge through didactic performances,

but at the same time the acquired social knowledge requires a subject position to be

modified. For example, during the rituals of divination, the priest or priestess evokes the

multiple subjectivity of the client in order to reconceptualize him/her by separating

them from internalized social performances.

In a sense, it is a kind of sacrifice in which

the client is devoid of their constructed

subjectivity. During the Cowrie ritual of

throwing and interpreting seashells, the client

has to submit to the Orichas desires in order

to receive blessings or good fortune.

Figure1. Los Cantos Mandan

Fraser Gallery


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Nevertheless, divination requires considering individual aspects of the client for

interpretation to take place. In a similar manner the diviner has to compromise his/her

identity with the one of the client, as well as with the Oricha s (Manson, 32). Thus, ritual

performances consist of the sacrifice or transformation of constituted subjectivities of

believers as well as priests/priestesses in order to enter Santerias social realm.

Ritual and Sacrifice: Compromising Multiple Subjectivities

Sacrifice is definitely a major concern in Prez Bravos work. In the photograph

Parallel Cults, the artist bends down and places her breasts inside sacrificial bowls,

where the blood of animals are poured for offerings to the Orichas . This photograph was

taken recently after the artist had twins. In this image the subjective location of the artist

as a woman, represented by the sexuality of her naked breasts, is given in sacrifice in

order to attain the blessings of motherhood, especially a mother of twins, considering that

ibeji (twins in Lucumi) in Santera tradition, are revered.

Figure 2. Cultos ParalelosFraser Gallery


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Here the artist sacrifices and/or negotiates her womanhood and her motherhood. In order

to receive the blessing of motherhood, one has to modify the socially fixed identification

with the female body as complete and individual. Motherhood expands the boundaries of

the constructed body to include an Other inside oneself, while womanhood remains the

material body of its own singularity through its sensuousness. Thus, sacrifice in Santera

is the transformation of given subjectivities into creative combinations that can

themselves be continuously transformed though

sacrificial negotiations.

In the photograph entitled Nunca Me Abandona I , the artist depicts hers elf offering part of

her body, her hair, to an Oricha. Considering Bravos

attention to the body as a location of subjectivity,

performances of mutilation could represent a sacrifice

of identity in a process of ritualistic becoming.

Clark delves into Santera initiation rituals with

gender issues in mind. She establishes that, at all levels of initiation, the devotee is

designated under the female role. According to the designation, the initiator is called

iyawo in Lucumi, meaning wife, younger than the speaker (35). The priest and

priestesses are crowned under a particular Oricha , with whom he or she shares a

character trait, regardless of gender designations. Furthermore, during possessions or

trances, the devotee acquires and performs characteristics and behaviors particular to

his/her Oricha , independent of gender differences.

Figure 3 . Nunca me abandona I

Fraser Gallery


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In the initiation called el cuchillo , in which women are entitled to sacrifice larger

animals, women embody the trangressive and aggressive position appointed in many

societies to males.

In this sacrificial ceremony, santera women transgress their female subject

position when performing socially constituted masculine aggressive behavior. In the

picture entitled Mbele, the sacrificial knife is an extension of Prez Bravos arm.

Figure 4. MbeleFraser Gallery

One could speculate that the social knowledge that sacrifice prescribes empowers her

with the possibility to sacrifice her own body. While the knife is part of her body, it is

also an external projection a deformation self-imposed on her female body as it

seeks to embody an otherwise understood male performance. Here female and male

subjectivities intertwine, provoking an imaginative paradox.


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Fetishizing the Female Body: Imagining Santeras Gender Bounderies

Clarks argument is founded on theological concepts present in Santera, but

which highly emphasize the materiality of this religious system. Ritual performances

become the main concern for Clark, enabling a reading based on the theory of

performativity according to which the boundaries of gender appear contingent and fluid

in Santera rituals. Clarks argument is compelling, as it has socio -political implications

in regard to gender construction in non-western ideological structures. Nevertheless, it is

crucial to consider to what extent one can fall into the seductive argument of idealizing

the other. In Clarks argument, Santeras gender transgressions could become, for thewestern reader, no more than another fetish. In the essay Subversive Body Acts, from

her book Gender Trouble, Judith Butler with a psychoanalytic twist understands

identification as an enacted fantasy (171) and argues that, although desire is historically

produced, it becomes embodied through enactments. These enactments are performative,

as they continuously repeat themselves as a means of establishing identity. Butler,

targeting heterosexual identification, explains:

...acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of the internal core orsubstance, but produce this on the surface of the body , through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principleof identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generallyconstructed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity thatthey otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured andsustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means. (173)

If one is to consider identity as the product of phantasmic desires, the ritualistic

performances of Santera are no more that the contingency of a particular group of people

distinguished by symbolic racial and ethnic social constructions and their desire to attain

subjective identification. From this perspective, Santera ritualistic performances are not


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far removed from heterosexual performances in western societies, as they are both an

effect of psychic yearning for and identification. As Miguel Barnet expresses:

The culture that the African constructed in Cuba was entirely a defensive

one The culture of th e African is revolutionary by nature; it is a methodof inward liberation and a way of seeking security. Prayer, revelation,spells, dance, rituals, are directed towards finding salvation (278)

When considering Santerias socio -historical location so violently in

correspondence with an ongoing tradition of slavery, colonial domination, and post-

colonial supremacy identity can be understood as more that a psychic desire; it can be

also understood as a tool for material, as well as symbolic, survival.Thus a certain imaginary or fetishistic identification is present in Santera, but it

ceases to be a perverse identification in western terms and becomes a site of resistance

that arises from a concrete colonized experience. The colonial other, a fetish in and of

itself, transgresses her or his position of otherness by attaining a subjectivity grounded

in a socially constructed material presence. Santera is more than a syncretic religion; it

is an organic, experientially grounded discourse that resists over-identification with a

Big Other, and which proceeds resiliently through performances to portray their

own identitary investments. Santeria is not less or more powerful, less ideal or demonic,

than the desire for heterosexual identification of a white male. However, Santer as

trangressive fetishism embraces a counter-hegemonic discourse which de-essentialzes the

rhetoric of colonizing powers.

From this perspective, the fascination with body we observe in Santera's rituals

is a form of organic resist ance. Organic resistance takes place when a subaltern other

utilizes the same objectifying discourse that places him/her in a certain position, and does


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so in order to attain a creative subjectivity. Given the locality of the other, this

appropriation of the dominant discourse is always a mis-appropriation that inevitably

generates a different one. In Prison Notebooks, Antonio Gramsci, speaks of counter-

hegemonic discourse as an enunciation that arises from a given material location. When

discussing the relation between conjectural and organic historical movements,

Gramsci argue:

Organic phenomenagive rise to socio -historical criticism, whose subjectis wider social groupings beyond the public figures and beyond the topleaders. When an historical period comes to be studied, the greatimportance of this distinction becomes clear. A crisis occurs, sometimes

lasting for decades. This exceptional duration means that incurablestructural contradictions have revealed themselves (reached maturity), andthat, despite this, the political forces which are struggling to conserve anddefend the existing structure itself are making every effort to cure them,within certain limits, and to overcome them. These incessant and

persistent effortsform the terrain of the conjectural, and it is upon thisterrain that the forces of opposition organize. (178).

Santera emerges from an Afro-Cuban subaltern location racialized and

gendered subjectivity due to colonial representation and the desire to uphold cultural

and ethnic hegemony through religious performance by means of collective

representation. This type of conjectural organic resistance is also found in the works of

the Cuban Lydia Cabrera. In her studies about Afro-Cuban traditions, Cabrera perverts

the order of things when comparing hegemonic anthropological discourses to fictional

accounts of Afro-Cuban cultural and religious life. Lydia Cabrera utilizes a scientific

premise that allows her to theorize the ethnic and racial other and expose the fragil ity

of such discourses when blurring the imaginary lines between scientific knowledge and

fiction. Another practice of organic resistance is shown in the works of the Cuban poet

Nancy Morejon. Defying racist representations of Afro-Cubans as well as machismo,


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Morejon establishes subjectivity through anti-racist and Afrocubanist representations of

blackness; her subject position enables her to speak of cultural images that construct her

black womans body, thus expanding race as well as gender boundaries.

Prez Bravos organic resistance takes place when she reappropriates Santer as

symbolism and its ideological associations to validate and strengthen the social position

of the body through rituals, but she also transgresses this system when she creates a

tension between images that are organic or conjectural that is, she affirms images that

are recognizable in the particular social context of Santera. The confluence of these

organic images is an unexpected and perverse distortion that opens up the possibility forrecreating particular images of subject positions. What Prez Bravo is doing is

reappropriating Santerias imaginary and creating a different metaphorical perspective for

the representation of women.

In the photograph entitled Esta en

Sus Manos II, Prez Bravo markedly

contrasts the images of the Orula, a wise

Lucumi divinity, often regarded as the

judge of all orichas , as well as the deity

of Ifa divination. In this photograph, the

artist unites her body with the orichas as

she embodies Orula s form as

traditionally shown in santeria altars.

However, the head of the Oricha is

contrasted with the female body of the artist.

Figure 4. Esta En Sus Manos II.Fraser Gallery


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In santerias system of knowledge, these two images, Ifa and women, are traditionally

opposed. In Perz Bravos works, th is knowledge is reconstructed within a photographic

frame.

In her book, Space, Time and Perversion, Elizabeth Grosz argues that bodies are

subjected to social inscriptions, and thus they are sites of representation. Hence, it is

through the knowledge of these inscriptions (the phallocentric text for Grosz and the

santera imaginary for Prez Bravo) that one can find a space for resistance. As Grosz

writes:

it is only through a careful reading of phallocentric texts andparadigms that the rifts, flaws, and cracks within them can beutilized to reveal spaces where these texts exceed themselves,where they say more than they mean, opening themselves up to afeminine (re) appropriation (38).

Organic resistance arises from a localized subjectivity, and it transgresses a

dominant discourse from the inside. One can consider Santera as a counter-hegemonic

discourse because it diverges from the catholic imagination and finds its own social space

of enunciation for Afro-Cuban communities, based on the ethnic and religious

inscriptions on the body of social knowledge. In the same vein, Prez Bravo fetishizes the

female body to subvert social inscription within Santera s realm. The artist uses her body

as s a text of social inscription to reinterpret her somatic experience, not only based on

ethnicity and religion, but also on gender. In her photographs, Prez Bravo transgresses

the symbolic boundaries between the corporeal and the spiritual when using the discourse

of Santera in ways that establish her subjective location as a Cuban practitioner of

Santera , and she expands this discursive space in order to address her location as a

woman. This transgression is important on the level of representation, as it demonstrates


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how the active power of Afro-Cuban self-enablement and resistance coextends with the

constitutive dimensions of language and imagery, and how such performances are

inscribed in the material becoming in its most organic modes.


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Cited works

Butler, Judith. Gender Trouble. Feminism and the Subversion of Identity . New York &

London: Routledge, 1999.

Camnitzer, Luis.. New Art of Cuba. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1994.

Clark, Mary Ann. Where Men are Wives and Mothers Rule . Santeria Ritual Practices and

their Gender Implications . Gainesville, Florida: University Press of Florida, 2005.

Gramsci Antonio . The Modern Prince. In Further Selections from Prison Notebooks .

Minneapolis: university of Minnesota Press, 1995.

Grosz, Elizabeth. Space, Time, and Perversion . New York & London: Routlegde, 1995.Manson, Michael. Living Santeria. Rituals and Experiences in an Afro-Cuban Religion .

Washington & London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 2002.

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