Joseph M. Murphy
Black Music Research Journal,
Volume 32, Number 1, Spring 2012,
pp. 69-94
(Article)
Published by University of Illinois Press
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/487801/pdf
Over seventy years ago, Melville Herskovits ([1941] 1990, 8) argued that the African heritage of any people of the African diaspora could not be understood without reference to the others. He saw and documented cultural continuities from Dahomey to Suriname, Trinidad, Haiti, and the United States. What struck Herskovits, and many visitors and scholars since, is a remarkable similarity in what he called “emotional expression” in the religious life of communities of African descent (210). These “highly emotionalized religious and ecstatic” experiences, he argued, could be attributed to a shared African heritage in which music, dance, and trance were linked.
The focus of this essay is this spirituality of embodiment, where the divine being is “called” by percussion, singing, and dancing to become manifest in the body of an initiated medium and in the body of the congregation as whole. Our community is that of Afro-Cuban variously called Lucumi, Santería, or regla de ocha, where direct African provenance is apparent in nomenclature and the historical record. Yet, after a description of the batá drums that invoke the spirit, and the bembé ceremony that makes it manifest, we will ask whether the same isomorphism of music, body, and divine presence is the touchstone of religious experience and cultural memory throughout the African diaspora.
Over seventy years ago, Melville Herskovits ([1941] 1990, 8) argued that the African heritage of any people of the African diaspora could not be understood without reference to the others. He saw and documented cultural continuities from Dahomey to Suriname, Trinidad, Haiti, and the United States. What struck Herskovits, and many visitors and scholars since, is a remarkable similarity in what he called “emotional expression” in the religious life of communities of African descent (210). These “highly emotionalized religious and ecstatic” experiences, he argued, could be attributed to a shared African heritage in which music, dance, and trance were linked.
The focus of this essay is this spirituality of embodiment, where the divine being is “called” by percussion, singing, and dancing to become manifest in the body of an initiated medium and in the body of the congregation as whole. Our community is that of Afro-Cuban variously called Lucumi, Santería, or regla de ocha, where direct African provenance is apparent in nomenclature and the historical record. Yet, after a description of the batá drums that invoke the spirit, and the bembé ceremony that makes it manifest, we will ask whether the same isomorphism of music, body, and divine presence is the touchstone of religious experience and cultural memory throughout the African diaspora.
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