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Alessandra Basso Ortíz PERFORMING ETHICS UCL ANTHROPOLOGY Working Paper No. 19/2017 UCL Anthropology Working Papers Series Alessandra Basso Ortíz PERFORMING ETHICS: WILL, PERSPECTIVE AND ACTION IN AFRO-CUBAN RELIGIONS UCL Anthropology University College London, 14 Taviton Street, London WC1H 0BW PERFORMING ETHICS ALESSANDRA BASSO ORTÍZ 1 Contents Foreword ...................................................................................................................................4 Introduction .............................................................................................................................8 1. Overall aims......................................................................................................................8 2. Religious and everyday contexts ...................................................................................9 3. Aims and premises of research .................................................................................... 14 Chapter One. The Afro-Cuban Religious Landscape ..........................................................21 1. Religion in the ‘Período Especial’...................................................................................21 2. El muerto y el santo (the dead and the saints) ........................................................... 25 3. El creyente y el religioso (the ‘believer’ and the ‘religious’) ...................................... 30 4. Routes to the Afro-Cuban Religious World ................................................................ 34 4.i. Misladis. The path of an artist ................................................................................... 34 4.ii. Jamaica. The path of the dead .................................................................................. 43 4.iii. Papo Angarica. A path from suspicion ...................................................................50 Chapter Two. The Others ..................................................................................................... 55 1. The sorcerer, the saint and all that............................................................................... 55 2. The muerto sano (healthy dead) .................................................................................. 55 3. El brujo ............................................................................................................................59 3.i. The prenda / nganga / cazuela ................................................................................. 60 3.ii. El tratado (the pact)................................................................................................... 63 3.iii. El tratado del esclavo y el verdugo (the pact of slave and executioner)............ 68 3.iv. The will of the brujo................................................................................................. 69 Chapter Three: The Saint. (El Santo)...................................................................................74 1. Making saint, making initiate. ......................................................................................74 2. The existence and ways of the saints ........................................................................... 77 2.i. Qualifying syncretism................................................................................................. 77 2.ii. Jesus Christ and the formation of the saints...........................................................79 2.iii. Routes from human to saint. .................................................................................. 80 2.iv. ‘Leaping’ between caminos. .....................................................................................82 2.v. Being (entities) or becoming (movement) ............................................................. 84 2.vi. Transcendence and immanence..............................................................................85 3. Establishing conversations........................................................................................... 89 4. Stopping the conversation ............................................................................................92 5. Acting without ‘being made’.........................................................................................95 6. The will as individual action........................................................................................ 98 Chapter Four: Initiation as Forging the (Individual) Will ............................................... 99 1. Introducing ‘the will’ ..................................................................................................... 99 1.i. Nietzsche and ‘the will’ .............................................................................................. 101 1.ii. Initiatory processes through the lens of Goldman, Deleuze, and Guattari ....... 107 2. Initiation into Palo........................................................................................................ 110 2.1. The first initiation in Palo: the scratching (el rayamiento) ...................................113 2.ii. Strengthening the will .............................................................................................. 115 2.iii. Becoming a brujero.................................................................................................. 119 2.iv. Giving knowledge, receiving power ....................................................................... 121 2 2.v. The shading (dar sombre) ....................................................................................... 126 3. Initiation and ‘the Will’ in Religions that Work with the Saints (Orichas) ............131 3.i. Forging identity or becoming individual................................................................. 133 3.ii. Setting the process in motion..................................................................................136 3.iii. From suspicion to inspiration ................................................................................143 3.iv. Dealing with inspiration......................................................................................... 150 3.v. Discerning the will’s threads ....................................................................................152 Chapter Five: Attaining a Perspective ............................................................................... 159 1. El brujo: the good and the evil .................................................................................... 162 2. Taking an oath to the Devil (jurar diablo) ................................................................ 166 3. The saint (el santo) ...................................................................................................... 169 4. Divine conversations, human perspectives .............................................................. 174 4.1. The drunk thinks one thing and the wine-seller another. .................................. 179 Bibliography ......................................................................................................................... 182 3 FOREWORD Alessandra Basso Ortíz registered at UCL’s Department of Anthropology, for a PhD on the performance of ethics in Afro-Cuban religious practice, in 2006. Of dual Colombian-Italian nationality, and having also lived and studied in Germany in the 1990s, Basso gained an undergraduate degree in history at the University of Havana, followed by postgraduate studies in Performing Arts and, subsequently, Musicology at the Cuban National Centre for Art Education. By the time she came to the UK to do a Masters’ degree in Social Anthropology at SOAS, she had already written a monograph (2005) on the Afro-Cuban religious traditions of the Gangá Longobá community in Perico Matanzas, as well as a series of other publications in journals in Cuba and Colombia, including sleeve notes for a number of CDs of Cuban music. Having worked on Afro-Cuban religions myself since the late 1990s, and in view of Basso’s excellent supporting reference from the late Professor John Peel, her Masters’ tutor at SOAS, I became her primary PhD supervisor at UCL, and my colleague Charles Stewart, expert on the anthropology of syncretism and creolization, became her 2nd supervisor. With the support of an AHRC studentship, Basso left for fieldwork in Cuba in 2008. Based at the city of Matanzas, she conducted ethnographic research there and in surrounding towns of Matanzas Province until 2010. After a period of writing up in London, she relocated first to the Canary Islands and then Madrid, where her Cuban husband, Ivan Suarez Santana, was better able to secure work. In the summer of 2013 Alessandra was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. Following a difficult period of deteriorating health and struggle with the effects of chemotherapy, Alessandra died in Madrid on the 4th of June 2014. When she became unwell Basso was two chapters short of finishing the first draft of her PhD. In between chemotherapy treatments she was able to work intensively on finishing one of them, while also doing her best to tie loose ends in the five already drafted. The Introduction and Conclusion of the thesis were also pending, although, 4 given the circumstances, her plan was to write only a brief Conclusion and, for the Introduction, to draw heavily on her original ‘Upgrading proposal’—a document presented to our Department at UCL prior to departure for fieldwork—presenting her research project and fieldwork plans in the round. When we met in
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