In Santería priesthoods, practitioners are “made” into African diaspora bodies in what is called “making santo.” These embodied epistemologies reveal not only the complex historical practices that have emerged through processes of racialization and enslavement but also how a body logic resituates the formations of diasporic feeling and sensing. I argue that practitioners’ everyday acts redefine the capacities of and for action as part of a spiritual habitus. The various rituals, works, and spiritual acts in Santería thus culminate in a different form of bodily engagement with the world, operating in racial space. This article examines Santería body logics, showing how what I call copresences are activated in somatic racial ontologies. I suggest that these diasporic sensings resituate anthropological universalisms, arguing for a disruption in the debate between mediation and practice in the anthropology of religion. Rather than assuming notions of presence, copresence allows for an intervention that hails Santería’s embodied epistemology as a form of diasporic sensing.
Santería religious travel and media circulations between Cuba and the United States have created new multilateral transnational linkages since the mid‐1990s. U.S.‐based Santería travelers and the Cuban priests who engage with them draw on global–local theoretical models in their interactions, in which video recording of rituals, a putatively prohibited practice in Santería, is becoming increasingly common. I suggest that ontological formations are shifting understandings and uses of religious media. Videos are used as sources of ritual knowledge and as part of rituals themselves and are thought of as ways to virtually and spiritually “travel.” I show how U.S. and Cuban practitioners draw on shared but uneven “religious cosmopolitanisms,” whereby they reconfigure notions of “mobility” through travel‐by‐video and infuse transnational experiences with new spiritual–religious meanings.
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