The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santerìa and other religions related to Orisha worship-a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa-Stephan Palmié has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In *The Cooking of History* he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of the Afro-Atlantic World.

Understood largely through its rituals and ceremonies, Santerìa and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmié argues, precisely by relying on the notion of an aboriginal African past, and by claiming to authenticate these religions via their findings, anthropologists-some of whom have converted to these religions-have exerted considerable influence upon contemporary practices. Critiquing widespread and damaging simplifications that posit religious practices as stable and self-contained, Palmié calls for a drastic new approach that properly situates cultural origins within the complex social environments and scholarly fields in which they are investigated.