Santeria

Santeria PDF Author: Miguel A. De La Torre
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 146743177X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
This book by Miguel De La Torre offers a fascinating guide to the history, beliefs, rituals, and culture of Santería — a religious tradition that, despite persecution, suppression, and its own secretive nature, has close to a million adherents in the United States alone. Santería is a religion with Afro-Cuban roots, rising out of the cultural clash between the Yoruba people of West Africa and the Spanish Catholics who brought them to the Americas as slaves. As a faith of the marginalized and persecuted, it gave oppressed men and women strength and the will to survive. With the exile of thousands of Cubans in the wake of Castro's revolution in 1959, Santería came to the United States, where it is gradually coming to be recognized as a legitimate faith tradition. Apart from vague suspicions that Santería's rituals include animal sacrifice and notions that it is a “syncretistic” form of Catholicism, most people in America's cultural and religious mainstream know very little about this rich faith tradition — in fact, many have never heard of it at all. De La Torre, who was reared in Santería, sets out in this book to provide a basic understanding of its inner workings. He clearly explains the particular worldview, myths, rituals, and practices of Santería, and he discusses what role the religion typically plays in the life of its practitioners as well as the cultural influence it continues to exert in Latin American communities today. In offering a balanced, informed survey of Santería from his unique “insider-outsider” perspective, De La Torre also provides insight into how Christianity and Santería can enter into dialogue — a dialogue that will challenge Christians to consider what this emerging faith tradition can teach them about their own. Enhanced with illustrations, tables, and a glossary, De La Torre's Santería sheds light on a religion all too often shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding.

Santeria

Santeria PDF Author: Miguel A. De La Torre
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 146743177X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 266

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book by Miguel De La Torre offers a fascinating guide to the history, beliefs, rituals, and culture of Santería — a religious tradition that, despite persecution, suppression, and its own secretive nature, has close to a million adherents in the United States alone. Santería is a religion with Afro-Cuban roots, rising out of the cultural clash between the Yoruba people of West Africa and the Spanish Catholics who brought them to the Americas as slaves. As a faith of the marginalized and persecuted, it gave oppressed men and women strength and the will to survive. With the exile of thousands of Cubans in the wake of Castro's revolution in 1959, Santería came to the United States, where it is gradually coming to be recognized as a legitimate faith tradition. Apart from vague suspicions that Santería's rituals include animal sacrifice and notions that it is a “syncretistic” form of Catholicism, most people in America's cultural and religious mainstream know very little about this rich faith tradition — in fact, many have never heard of it at all. De La Torre, who was reared in Santería, sets out in this book to provide a basic understanding of its inner workings. He clearly explains the particular worldview, myths, rituals, and practices of Santería, and he discusses what role the religion typically plays in the life of its practitioners as well as the cultural influence it continues to exert in Latin American communities today. In offering a balanced, informed survey of Santería from his unique “insider-outsider” perspective, De La Torre also provides insight into how Christianity and Santería can enter into dialogue — a dialogue that will challenge Christians to consider what this emerging faith tradition can teach them about their own. Enhanced with illustrations, tables, and a glossary, De La Torre's Santería sheds light on a religion all too often shrouded in mystery and misunderstanding.

Electric Santería

Electric Santería PDF Author: Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231539916
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
Santería is an African-inspired, Cuban diaspora religion long stigmatized as witchcraft and often dismissed as superstition, yet its spirit- and possession-based practices are rapidly winning adherents across the world. Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús introduces the term "copresence" to capture the current transnational experience of Santería, in which racialized and gendered spirits, deities, priests, and religious travelers remake local, national, and political boundaries and reconfigure notions of technology and transnationalism. Drawing on eight years of ethnographic research in Havana and Matanzas, Cuba, and in New York City, Miami, Los Angeles, and the San Francisco Bay area, Beliso-De Jesús traces the phenomenon of copresence in the lives of Santería practitioners, mapping its emergence in transnational places and historical moments and its ritual negotiation of race, imperialism, gender, sexuality, and religious travel. Santería's spirits, deities, and practitioners allow digital technologies to be used in new ways, inciting unique encounters through video and other media. Doing away with traditional perceptions of Santería as a static, localized practice or as part of a mythologized "past," this book emphasizes the religion's dynamic circulations and calls for nontranscendental understandings of religious transnationalisms.

Santeria from Africa to the New World

Santeria from Africa to the New World PDF Author: George Brandon
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 9780253211149
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
"On his own terms, Brandon more than fulfills his promise to take the reader on the transatlantic journey of the orisha and to explore the complexities of African memory in the diaspora." —American Historical Review "He adeptly addresses broader issues, such as power relations within Caribbean slavery, multiculturalism, and the forms of religious accommodation to cultural change. In addition, he offers a fresh and cogent assessment of the production and reproduction of African beliefs and practices in new contexts. Brandon's exemplary archival research is supplemented by skillful participant observation." —Choice The Yoruba religious tradition arose in West Africa, but its influence has spread beyond Africa to millions of adherents in the Americas as well. Santeria from Africa to the New World retraces one path taken by this tradition—a path from Africa to Cuba and to New York City. George Brandon examines the religion's transatlantic route through Cuban Santeria, Puerto Rican Espiritismo, and Black Nationalism. In following the historical and anthropological evolution of the Yoruba religion, Brandon discusses broader questions of power, multiculturalism, cultural change, and the production and reproduction of African retentions.

Santería Enthroned

Santería Enthroned PDF Author: David H. Brown
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000124371
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 913

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Book Description
Ever since its emergence in colonial-era Cuba, Afro-Cuban Santería (or Lucumí) has displayed a complex dynamic of continuity and change in its institutions, rituals, and iconography. Originally published in 2003 Santería Enthroned combines art, history, cultural anthropology, and ethnohistory to show how Africans and their descendants have developed novel forms of religious practice in the face of relentless oppression. Focusing on the royal throne as a potent metaphor in Santería belief and practice it shows how negotiations among ideologically competing interests have shaped the religion’s symbols, rituals, and institutions from the nineteenth century to the present. Rich case studies of change in Cuba and the United States, including a New Jersey temple and South Carolina’s Oyotunji Village, reveal patterns of innovation similar to those found among rival Yoruba kingdoms in Nigeria. Throughout, the book argues for a theoretical perspective on culture as a field of potential strategies and "usuable pasts" that actors draw upon to craft new forms and identities – a perspective that will be invaluable to all students of the African Diaspora.

Santeria

Santeria PDF Author: Miguel A. De La Torre
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 9780802849731
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
A guide to the history, beliefs, rituals, and culture of a religious tradition that, despite persecution, suppression, and its own secretive nature, has close to a million adherents in the United States alone. Santería is a religion with Afro-Cuban roots, rising out of the cultural clash between the Yoruba people of West Africa and the Spanish Catholics who brought them to the Americas as slaves. With the exile of thousands of Cubans after Castro's revolution in 1959, Santería came to the United States, where it is gradually coming to be recognized as a legitimate faith tradition, one about which most people in America's mainstream know very little. De La Torre explains the worldview, myths, rituals, and history of Santería, and discusses what role the religion typically plays in the life of its practitioners as well as the cultural influence it continues to exert in Latin American communities today.--From publisher description.

A Year in White

A Year in White PDF Author: C. Lynn Carr
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813572665
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 159

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Book Description
In the Afro-Cuban Lukumi religious tradition—more commonly known in the United States as Santería—entrants into the priesthood undergo an extraordinary fifty-three-week initiation period. During this time, these novices—called iyawo—endure a host of prohibitions, including most notably wearing exclusively white clothing. In A Year in White, sociologist C. Lynn Carr, who underwent this initiation herself, opens a window on this remarkable year-long religious transformation. In her intimate investigation of the “year in white,” Carr draws on fifty-two in-depth interviews with other participants, an online survey of nearly two hundred others, and almost a decade of her own ethnographic fieldwork, gathering stories that allow us to see how cultural newcomers and natives thought, felt, and acted with regard to their initiation. She documents how, during the iyawo year, the ritual slowly transforms the initiate’s identity. For the first three months, for instance, the iyawo may not use a mirror, even to shave, and must eat all meals while seated on a mat on the floor using only a spoon and their own set of dishes. During the entire year, the iyawo loses their name and is simply addressed as “iyawo” by family and friends. Carr also shows that this year-long religious ritual—which is carried out even as the iyawo goes about daily life—offers new insight into religion in general, suggesting that the sacred is not separable from the profane and indeed that religion shares an ongoing dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life. Religious expression happens at home, on the streets, at work and school. Offering insight not only into Santería but also into religion more generally, A Year in White makes an important contribution to our understanding of complex, dynamic religious landscapes in multicultural, pluralist societies and how they inhabit our daily lives.

Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria

Assimilated Cuban's Guide to Quantum Santeria PDF Author: Carlos Hernandez
Publisher: Rosarium Publishing
ISBN: 1495607429
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description
A quirky collection of short sci-fi stories for fans of Kij Johnson and Kelly Link Assimilation is founded on surrender and being broken; this collection of short stories features people who have assimilated, but are actively trying to reclaim their lives. There is a concert pianist who defies death by uploading his soul into his piano. There is the person who draws his mother's ghost out of the bullet hole in the wall near where she was executed. Another character has a horn growing out of the center of his forehead—punishment for an affair. But he is too weak to end it, too much in love to be moral. Another story recounts a panda breeder looking for tips. And then there's a border patrol agent trying to figure out how to process undocumented visitors from another galaxy. Poignant by way of funny, and philosophical by way of grotesque, Hernandez's stories are prayers for self-sovereignty.

Legends of Santería

Legends of Santería PDF Author: Migene González-Wippler
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Over 100 million people are estimated to be involved in the cult of the orishas, or Santeria. Here are the authentic patakis (legends) about the creation of the world on which the religious structure of Santeria is based. These archetypal stories about the interrelationship of Santerian deities play out the universal themes of creation, life, conflict and destruction, demonstrating rich spiritual insights into the human condition.

Afro-Cuban Religious Arts

Afro-Cuban Religious Arts PDF Author: Kristine Juncker
Publisher: University Press of Florida
ISBN: 0813055024
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 217

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Book Description
This book profiles four generations of women from one Afro-Cuban religious family. From a plantation in Havana Province in the 1890s to a religious center in Spanish Harlem in the 1960s, these women were connected by their prominent roles as leaders in the religions they practiced and the dramatic ritual artwork they created. Each woman was a medium in Espiritismo—communicating with dead ancestors for guidance or insight—and also a santera, or priest of Santería, who could intervene with the oricha pantheon. Kristine Juncker argues that, by creating art for more than one religion, these women shatter the popular assumption that Afro-Caribbean religions are exclusive organizations. Most remarkably, the portraiture, sculptures, and photographs in Afro-Cuban Religious Arts offer rare glimpses into the rituals and iconography of these religions. Santería altars are closely guarded, limited to initiates, and typically destroyed upon the death of the santera, while Espiritismo artifacts are rarely considered valuable enough to pass on. The unique and protean cultural legacy detailed here reveals insights into how ritual art became popular imagery, sparked a wider dialogue about culture inheritance, attracted new practitioners, and enabled the movement to explode internationally.

Rituals and Spells of Santería

Rituals and Spells of Santería PDF Author: Migene González-Wippler
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780942272079
Category : Magic
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
Santeria is an earth religion. That is, it is a magico-religious system that has its roots in nature and natural forces. Each orisha or saint is identified with a force of nature and with a human interest or endeavor. Chango, for instance, is the god of fire, thunder and lightning, but he is, also the symbol of justice and protects his followers against enemies. He also symbolizes passion and virility and is often invoked in works of seduction. Oshun, on the other hand, symbolizes river waters, love and marriage. She is essentially the archetype of joy and pleasure. Yemaya is identified with the seven seas, but is also the symbol of Motherhood and protects women in their endeavors. Eleggua symbolizes the crossroads, and is the orisha of change and destiny, the one who makes things possible or impossible. He symbolizes the balance things. Obatala is the father, the symbol of peace and purity. Oya symbolizes the winds and is the owner of the cemetery, the watcher of the doorway between life and death. She is not death, but the awareness of its existence. Oggun is the patron of all metals, and protects farmers, carpenters, butchers, surgeons, mechanics, and all who work with or near metals. He also rules over accidents, which he often causes.