Authors: Michael Atwood Mason, Ma Mason
ISBN-13: 9781588340771, ISBN-10: 1588340775
Format: Paperback
Publisher: Smithsonian Institution Press
Date Published: August 2002
Edition: 1st Edition
Michael Atwood Mason is an anthropologist and exhibit developer at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History, where he was a co-curator of the permanent African Voices exhibition.
In 1992 Smithsonian anthropologist Michael Atwood Mason traveled to Cuba for initiation as a priest into the Santería religion. Since then he has created an active oricha “house” and has initiated five others as priests. He is a rare combination: a scholar-practitioner who is equally fluent in his profession and his religion. Interweaving his roles as researcher and priest, Mason explores Santería as a contemporary phenomenon and offers an understanding of its complexity through his own experiences and those of its many practitioners. Balancing deftly between a devotee's account of participation and an anthropologist's theoretical analysis, Living Santería offers an original and insightful understanding of this growing religious tradition.
Acknowledgments | ||
Note on Language and Orthography | ||
Introduction: Living Santeria | 1 | |
1 | "The Blood That Runs Through the Veins": Defining Identity and Experience in Dilogun Divination | 15 |
2 | "I Bow My Head to the Ground": Creating Bodily Experience through Initiation | 27 |
3 | "My Pants are Bloody": Negotiating Identity in American Santeria | 43 |
4 | Living with the Orichas: Ritual and the Social Construction of the Deities | 57 |
5 | Imagining Power: The Aesthetics of Ache in Santeria | 85 |
6 | Santeria and the Social Construction of Subjectivity | 113 |
Glossary | 123 | |
Notes | 137 | |
References | 149 | |
Index | 161 |