Content area
Full Text
Two common assumptions about Lydia Cabrera's ethnographic work are that it is exclusively the result of fieldwork and that Afro-Cuban religions are based on oral tradition. Evidence is provided in this paper to show that 1) Cabrera also made use of early religious texts as a primary source, and 2) that her work has served as an influence on the texts used in modern Afro-Cuban religious practices, such as the anonymous book Manual del Santero (1990). An analysis is provided of the way in which Cabrera included vernacular written sources in her work, and how her work in turn has become a main source for Santeria "hierography"-the writing about sacred things.
THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN Lydia Cabrera's works and Afro-Cuban culture has been studied from two different perspectives. Literary critics have focused on the link between her tales and Cuban folklore. Cabrera suggested that her Cuentos Negros de Cuba-first published in French in 1936-included "simply" folktales she had collected in the Afro-Cuban community.1 Fernando Ortiz, a famous Cuban historian and cultural anthropologist of the time, fostered this point of view.2 But Cabrera later revealed that some of the tales in her book were pure creations (Cabrera 1994:61), "Afro-Cuban style" short stories, while other tales were grounded in an authentic popular tradition. Yet even in the latter case, Cabrera transformed oral narrations into tales written in a personal style, which differed from Cuban popular conversation and were actually closer in form to the European tradition of Perrault, Grimm, or Andersen.
Cabrera is also praised by cultural anthropologists for her groundbreaking fieldwork on Afro-Cuban religions. In addition, she was the first to publish a general ethnography of African-derived religions in Cuba, based on lengthy neldwork in the 1940s. Her book, El Monte (1954), remains a reference for all anthropologists interested in this topic. In 1906, Fernando Ortiz published the first study on this field of research (Los Negros Brujos), but it was deeply ethnocentric, with a criminologist perspective, and was based mainly on police reports and newspaper articles.3 There are other researchers influenced by Cabrera's works, scholars who specifically cite El Monte as a resource. Migene Gonzalez Wippler was the first to attempt to write about the Santeria tradition in English; in her book on Santeria, Gonzalez...