WHO IS NATURE?: YORÙBÁ RELIGION AND ECOLOGY IN CUBA
By
Amanda D. Concha-Holmes
May 2010
Chair: Faye V. Harrison
Cochair: Michael J. Heckenberger
Major: Anthropology
Abstract of Dissertation Presented to the Graduate School
of the University of Florida in Partial Fulfillment of the
Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Scholars must find culturally appropriate methods to interpret African ecological
knowledges in order to improve our understanding of shifting, multisited, multivocal and
multisensorial landscapes especially concerning human-nature relationships. This research is in response to the general academic need to examine how black histories have been conceived and written. Instead of folklore, I look to the Osainistas (healers and herbalists initiated into the secrets of Osain) in Cuba as possible partners in a conversation in collaborative conservation.
My study of Lucumí (Yorùbá-derived) religion and Osain (deity of the sacred forests,
herbs and healings) reveals an embodied understanding of nature through which the boundaries of subject as well as material and spiritual become collapsed and traversed through specialized communication techniques. Ways of knowing through invocations, praise poetry, music and dance are essential to nearly all Yorùbá ritual in which spiritual forces are actualized–evoking and thus invoking spirit into physical form. Yorùbá employ these embodied techniques to transcend boundaries and open communication among spirit, material, temporal and spatial worlds, particularly to understand and work with natural resources. This embodied knowledge is, as Yvonne Daniel argues in her book Dancing Wisdom, “rich and viable and should be referenced among other kinds of knowledge” (2005:4).
This intermittently conducted 2003-06 ethnographic study, relies on what I am calling
evocative ethnography, which is organized around ethnography using visual and cognitive
techniques along with archival research to explore how Lucumí conceptualize nature and how I can translate these embodied perceptions. Additionally, since these Lucumí ways of
understanding nature encourage, according to the practitioners’, “respectful” environmental
behaviors, I hope that this research will aid future studies and more importantly improved
collaborations between Lucumí, scientists and policy-makers.
As one osainista explains, religious practitioners respect and care for the plants through
specifically outlined environmental practices such as only taking the branches and never the
roots of plants, and only taking what is needed for that day. This is a critical finding for
ecological anthropology because it is situated at the nexus of cosmology and conservation, and thereby noteworthy for understanding an important aspect of the African diaspora on a particular Caribbean landscape. In contemporary times of quickly disappearing neotropical forests, these results are significant not only to the current debate on the politics of conceptualizing and conserving nature, but also to collaborative, community-based conservation and development endeavors
PROLOGUE
In order to better communicate and understand diverse perspectives of the world using more locally relevant categories and expressions, I completed a Foreign Languages degree at New College, the Honor’s College of Florida. Although I had studied Russian, American Sign Language, French and Spanish since high school, and German in college, I mastered fluency only in French and Spanish—primarily through traveling and lived, experiential learning. To learn to speak French, I backpacked around France and West Africa for several months until the French would ask me if I were from the South of France—my accent was obviously not Parisian. Also, I hitchhiked, shared homes, stories, meals and sometimes just a bench with West Africans who instilled in me a recognition of dignity, strength and cultural individuality—very unlike most of the images that I had received of Africans through the media. To increase my Spanish fluency, I traveled and lived in Ecuador for almost a year. For the first two months, I volunteered at the Jatun Sacha Biological Reserve in the Amazon. There I learned about different ways of perceiving the environment when I would go on walks through the jungle with Quichua (local indigenous) guides. During that time, I lived at a nursery of Amazonian plants, and I helped create signs and structures to maintain indigenous ecological knowledge. Later, I moved to the town of Cuenca located in the Ecuadorian Andes. While teaching English to local high school students and adults, I conducted my research for the Bachelor’s thesis, Foreign Language Pedagogy, specifically examining the use of music and experiential education in learning a foreign language. My time in both the Andes and the Amazon made me realize the vast depth of indigenous ecological knowledge. Intrigued by indigenous voices of the landscape, those whose concern for earth are for her sentience, spirituality and ability to heal, I decided to obtain my Master’s in Latin American Studies 18 (MALAS) with a concentration in Tropical Conservation and Development (TCD) at the University of Florida. Through my graduate research and my work experience in the field of conservation and development in the tropics, I found that learning multiple perspectives is fundamental to understanding different cultures’ interpretations of nature and therein their distinct versions of development. Influenced by Marianne Schmink’s emphasis on multiple stakeholders and gender in ecosystem analysis, Taylor Stein’s in depth appraisal of ecotourism as a possible way to merge development and conservation, along with Sandra Russo’s Feminist Political Ecology books, I set out to study ecotourism at the renowned site of Pinal del Rio in Cuba. But, due to the political climate and United States legislation prohibiting travel to Cuba, I was not able to obtain the permission in time to conduct my master’s research. Instead, I followed Helen Safa and Jerry Murray’s advice and went to the neighboring Caribbean island of Hispaniola, and do research in the Dominican Republic, which holds a completely different political history from Cuba in relation to the United States. For my Master’s in Tropical Conservation and Development in Latin American Studies, I conducted an investigation that used locally relevant categories of development to evaluate an ecotourism venture, which I discuss in the master’s thesis: Resident Perspectives of Ecotourism as a Tool for Community-Based Development: a Case Study in Arroyo Surdido, Samaná, Dominican Republic. Thus, my concern with representing and accessing distinct ways of understanding nature comes through my graduate studies on Development, Conservation and Science Studies, and also from my work experience. I have been employed by the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), the World Conservation Union (IUCN) and the InterAmerican Institute for Global Change Research (IAI). For these organizations, I conducted ethnographic research, co-authored and 19 edited papers that dealt with the interplay of ecology and anthropology, including issues of climate change, livelihoods, gender, indigenous rights (legislation and land) and collaborative management of natural resources. These studies were made available to the World Bank, local and national nongovernmental organizations (NGO), published and presented at international venues. For instance, the study on the MesoAmerican Barrier Reef system in Central America was published in the international journal Policy Matters (2002). This study shaped my future research on ecological knowledge production, since the results demonstrated that what was called collaborative management had little to do with learning from the locals, and actually did little more than integrate residents into a one-sided conversation, which effectively told them they had to leave the soon-to-be-conservation area and thereby drastically alter their livelihood patterns. Conservationists comprising mainly international organization and nongovernmental organization personnel who interpreted conservation to mean protected areas without people were dominating the legislation and practice with value-laden agendas. Thus, my master’s education exposed me to texts and visions from Africa, the Americas and the Caribbean that challenge internationally dominant views of development and conservation, yet rarely become included in international policy. Cuba, however, is an exemplar of a country that has dedicated its national development and conservation policies toward an alternative to a hegemonic model of neoliberalism. Thus, I directed my doctoral scholarship in Ecological and Visual Anthropology with a concentration in Religion and Nature to that Caribbean island, and specifically the ecological knowledge of West African-derived religions, particularly Yoruba, which are prominent there. My dissertation, Who is Nature?: Yoruba Religion and Ecology in Cuba, focuses on improving methodological inquiry 20 to better understand and represent Lucumí or Yoruba-derived knowledge and ways of knowing nature in Cuba. This entails, as the title suggests, a strong element of understanding nature as subjects rather than objects. By this I mean that positivist science1 practitioners often gloss over nature as object or objects (including everything from climatological patterns, bears, oceans, mosquitoes, trees, and great whales, or that which is nonhuman). Whereas Yoruba practitioners conceptualize nature as very specific subjects, that include particular forms of agency, subjectivity, judgment, and attitude, which impact humans. In order to attempt to portray this comprehension of nature and human-nature relationships that rely not solely on human judgment but integrate different subjects of nature, particularly through very precise embodied communication techniques, I employ visual techniques (including cognitive methods [i.e., visually mapping conceptions], photography and video) to study the meanings of nature and human behaviors for the Yoruba diaspora and the people aligned with it in Cuba, and beyond. One of the best ways I have found to bring information, people, knowledge and skills together is through video. Video is a significant tool to document multisensory practices, and it has tremendous capacity for representing visceral sensations and diasporic epistemologies since it is characterized by experimental styles that can attempt to represent the experience of living between two or more cultural regimes of knowledge. Since scholars’ diligent mental and mindful work of separating, categorizing, and naming may not get them any closer to understanding what 1 I note here that I do not wish to convey that natural scientists or positivists were were a monolithic group. Instead science practitioners are myriad and each individual or subgroup will focus on very specific nodes of nature including conceptualizing ecological niches as habitats or systems, or focusing on specific groups of vertebrates, invertebrates, reptiles, or avian species. Indeed, as Tsing (2001) lucidly points out, science and scientists should not be collapsed into one monolithic, homogenous clump. Instead, each scientist and her discipline will conceptualize and focus on different aspects of “nature” in different ways according to her individual backgrounds: e.g., forester, wildlife ecologist, wetlands specialist, climatologist. Nevertheless, all of these scientists often are conceptually following a similar paradigmatic understanding of nature, which separates an “it” from a “she” or a “he,” who is human. This paradigm, oten referred to as “Western,” influences theoretical and methodological knowledge production in very concrete ways. 21 is meaningful to the people with whom they study, I integrate video as an embodied approach and an additional epistemological model critical to examine local knowledges and ways of knowing nature, particularly with Yoruba practitioners in Cuba. The result of my research is hopefully evoking an alternative way of knowing—not only accessing knowledge through categorizing, naming and sometimes othering—but also through evoking, feeling and sensing. This focus on experiential learning is not only the foundation of my life and my research, but also of my teaching. Whether I am teaching about environmental issues, indigenous rights, gender, the African diaspora, Latin American and Caribbean regions, visual anthropology, yoga, or dance, I employ pedagogical techniques that rely on engaged, active, locally, and personally relevant learning, à la Freire (1982[1970]). Thus, I embrace experiential learning (including music and movement) as integral to my own syllabi as well as in my discussions and workshops to diversify other teachers’ pedagogical techniques. Video, music and movement can be used for education, whether it is for students in a classroom, scientists in the field, scholars at conferences, or religious practitioners in their landscape.
