Cooking for the gods: sensuous ethnography, sensory knowledge, and the kitchen in Lucumí tradition

Abstract

This article considers the ways "sensuous ethnography" can illuminate the dynamism of embodied religious perception and behavior. It discusses the author's ethnographic research in an African-American community of Lucumí/Santería practitioners on the South Side of Chicago, and explores the sensorily attentive methodological approach adopted to engage with this house of worship, Ilé Laroye. The kitchen of Ilé Laroye became the author's main fieldwork site, and this article historicizes the kitchen in Lucumí tradition as a woman-centered space that has privileged complex forms of labor defined as generative of virtue and ritual competence. It is argued that post-sacrificial food preparation in particular has served to prepare the uninitiated for the rigors of Lucumí priesthood, and proven necessary for the internalization of dispositions and sensibilities that lead to initiation. The author contends that kitchen work has played a key role in transmitting somatic knowledge indispensable for the practice of this Afro-Cuban tradition.KEY WORDS anthropology; ethnography/fieldwork; ritual/performance; current situation of religious studies; material culture (architecture, artefacts etc.); method and methodology; gender; Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean religionsThe good historian is like the giant of the fairy tale. He knows that wherever he catches the scent of human flesh, there his quarry lies.-Marc Bloch 1 2 Bourdieu (1977:93-94) writes: 'Bodily hexis is political mythology realized, em-bodied, turned into a permanent disposition, a durable manner of standing, speaking, and thereby of feeling and thinking'; this definition exists in fruitful tension with such analyses as Starrett (1995). 3 The standard for analysis of Lucumí from the perspective of the experiencing subject, as opposed to the convert, has been set by Mason (2002), whose scholarship has contributed significantly to the ethnographic literature on religious identity and the embodiment of cosmology in ritual contexts, particularly with reference to virtuosicin the Weberian sense of the term -Yorùbá-based theological discourse. 4 See, most notably, Stoller (1989). E. PérezDownloaded by [York University Libraries] at 01:39 03 January 2015 5 My terminology throughout is derived largely from Asad (2003), writing on 'moral potentialities' as inculcated through bodily training, and the treatment of 'virtue' in Mahmood (2005). 6 Nilaja Campbell is a pseudonym. I have also changed the name of her ilé, and the names of its members, for reasons of confidentiality. 7 If the rituals were of an expiatory nature, sacrificed animals were usually deposited somewhere prescribed in advance by divination, such as near a railroad track, in the forest, or beside the river. In Latino communities, ashés are often called ashéses, although some elders believe this should be discouraged because the correct term is iñalés. 8 In fact, practitioners are somewhat divided on the question of whether aché is immanent within blood in a particularly concentrated form, or if it is sacrif...