DISPLACING MAGIC: AF RO -CUBAN STUDIES AND THE PRODUCTION OF SANTERÍA, 1933 -1956 David Adam Shefferman A dissertation submitted to the faculty of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of Religious Studies. Chapel Hill 2006 Approved by Advisor: Ruel W. Tyson Reader: Alberto Moreiras Reader: James Peacock Reader: Randall Styers Reader: Thomas Tweed © 2006 David Adam Shefferman ALL RIGHTS RESERVED ii ABSTRACT DAVID ADAM SHEFFERMA N: Displacing Magic: Afro -Cuban Studies and the Production of Santería, 1933-1956 (Under the direction of Ruel W. Tyson) This study tracks magic as a recur ring and ambivalent figure in early -twentieth - century Cuban intellectual discourse. In the wake of Cuba’s formal political independence in 1902, magic surfaced as a major practical concern. Public debates swirled around questions about the place of ‘primit ive’ magical practices in Cuban society. In these collective discussions, African -inflected traditions in Cuba commonly stood as the embodiment of the primitive propensity to magic. The notion of “Afro -Cuban culture” emerged during the first years of indep endence and, in turn, the notion of “Afro -Cuban studies” as a field of social science also took shape. Thus, the title of the dissertation refers most immediately to the widespread call for the elimination, or displacement, of magic in general and of Afro -Cuban “witchcraft” [brujería ] in particular as means to Cuba’s realization as a truly independent and modern society. At the same time, magic also appeared in other ways in the public discussions on Cuba’s future. To many Cubans, modernity seemed to depend upon its own form of magic, namely, a process of commodification that transformed everything and everyone into inanimate entities for capitalist exchange. Cuban intellectuals responded by searching for critical strategies that would displace not only the magical endeavors of primitives but also what one critic identified as “the magic power of money” in modern life. The intellectuals iii typically framed the critical effort to displace different forms of magic as magical in its own right. In examining this re peated ironic gesture, the dissertation focuses especially on intellectual activity in the years after the 1933 fall of Gerardo Machado’s regime, a period of profound socio -political transition for Cubans. The study considers the intellectual production of the Afro -Cuban tradition “Santería” as an enduring and emblematic development of the times, when the island’s most prominent public figures formally inaugurated Afro -Cuban studies as field of inquiry and as an alternate forum for political action. Fernando Ortiz stands at the center of these events. The dissertation closely considers his efforts to pioneer Afro -Cuban studies as well as engagements with Ortiz’s work —both direct and indirect —by Alejo Carpentier, Nicolás Guillén, and Rómulo Lachatañeré. iv PROLOGUE “To win the energies of intoxication for the revolution . “ 1. In the following study, I consider the activities of Cuban intellectuals during the early twentieth century as they tried to define the new scholarly field of “Afro -Cuban studies.” The group involved in these efforts included many —if not most —of Cuba’s intelligentsia and undoubtedly revolved around the scholarship and personage of Fernando Ortiz. He was credited with pioneering Afro -Cuban studies during the early 1900s, and in the ensuing decades many writers, artists, historians, policy makers and others made use of and built on Ortiz’s ongoing efforts. In my discussion, I examine some of Ortiz’s forays into Afro -Cuban studies as well as contributions to the field by Alejo Carp entier, Nicolás Guillén, and Rómulo Lachatañeré. The latter three all drew on and engaged Ortiz’s work. Arguably, Ortiz, Carpentier, and Guillén stand as Cuba’s three most visible twentieth -century intellectuals. Lachatañeré, though little -known outside of circles of Cubanist scholarship, frequently earns critical recognition as one of the most important figures in the development of Afro -Cuban studies. The examples that I investigate by these four writers date from different moments between the mid -1930s a nd mid -1950s, but they continually refer back to the formation of Afro -Cuban studies around Ortiz at the beginning of the century. Curiously, in the course of trying to make sense of this material, the epigraph above continually resurfaced. I did not plan on the recurrence, but at a certain point I realized that v the phrase related to the history of Afro -Cuban studies in a fundamental, even if unexpected, way. The remark appears in an article by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin about the Paris -based Surrealist activities of the late 1920s. Benjamin presents his essay —written in 1929—as “the last snapshot of the European intelligentsia,” and his comment functions as a summary of “the project about which Surrealism circles in all of its books and enterprises.” As I moved deeper into my research, I increasingly recognized the relation of Benjamin’s characterization of Surrealist “enterprises” to the group of Cuban intellectuals I was considering. Most immediately, Ortiz and his partners in Afro -Cuban studies were direct contemporaries of “the European intelligentsia” that Benjamin discussed. But, more than mere contemporaneity, what especially struck me was how the Cubans also looked for ways “to win the energies of intoxication for the revolution.” Like the Surrealists, a self -constituted cluster of Cuban intellectuals endeavored to transform contemporary societies, beginning with Cuba itself. In pursuing social revolution, the Cubans frequently talked about—and searched for ways to generate —exuberant coll ective experiences. The intellectuals imagined such events, coursing with enthusiastic or “intoxicating energies,” as the means to revitalize social orders that had lost most of their vitality under the mechanizations of modern life. The oft -repeated idea was that if people ‘lost’ themselves during some shared event then they would find new, stronger social bonds in place of the rampant individualism and alienation that seemed to define the modern experience. From that standpoint, the members of the Cuban intelligentsia about whom I was learning paralleled their European contemporaries in developing modernist critiques of modernity. Both groups drew on ideas and techniques of the self -proclaimed “modernism” unfolding in the literary and plastic arts as well as in philosophy and social science. As an vi historian of discourses on religion and magic, I was particularly interested in how both the Surrealists and Cubans looked toward ritual in searching for socially transformative experiences. As each group saw it, the ceremonies of so -called ‘primitives’ created an enviable social interdependence, one that connected members of a community and made their lives richer and more meaningful. Not surprisingly, a problem remained for these self - identified “moderns”: how to recover the revitalizing energy of ‘primitive’ rituals without falling prey to the ignorance that defined ‘primitives’ as primitive and apparently drove them to ceremonial undertakings in the first place. For the Surrealists and Cubans alike nothing symb olized more than magic the paradoxes surrounding ritual. From their perspective, magic involved systematic efforts to intervene in the world through the establishment of material correspondences: an individual magician or a magically inclined group would create representations—images, effigies, chants, material composites, and the like—in order to generate effects related to, or literally embodied by, the propitiatory figures. The Cuban intellectuals admired the bombastic spirit of magic but decried its fal lacious pretenses; they identified with the impulse underlying magic —to transform lived conditions—but disparaged practitioners’ misguided convictions about the power to engender such change. The title of the dissertation—Displacing Magic —encapsulates this ambivalence. On one hand, the intellectuals targeted magical practices, with their roots in false notions of causality and power, as an impediment to the proper development of contemporary societies. On the other hand, modern intelligentsia also wanted to channel the revolutionary impulses behind magical endeavors into new forms of social transformation. My main argument follows from these points: according to their own terms, the intellectuals figured their vii enterprises, including efforts to displace ‘pri mitive’ magic, as magical. They developed their own, paradoxical form of displacing magic . And as modernist critique of modernity, that endeavor also pointed at a certain “magic” endemic to modern life, namely, commodification. 2. Still, my study —and its title —ultimately addresses Cuban intellectuals more than European Surrealists. So how does “displacing magic” separate from Surrealism and attach more exclusively to early -twentieth -century intellectuals engaged in Afro -Cuban studies? I discovered that, in this regard too, Benjamin served as an illuminating point of contact. As my research developed, I found that the contemporaneity of the revolutionary “enterprises” among the European and Cuban intelligentsia cut deeper. Benjamin had not simply exposed parallel endeavors. Rather, the two fields of activity bled together in particular, geographic places, such as Paris. In some cases, Cubans participated