A few years back a package arrived at my front door. “Something from grandma?” the children chimed in, gathering around the small box. “Something for us?” In fact this was something for daddy. The return address cited a name I had to dust off in my memory. Deflated, the children dissipated back to bedrooms and couches. The package contained a DVD.
Later that evening my husband placed it in the DVD player, and he and I sat watching, transported back in time and space, from New Orleans to Chicago, to our padrino’s house, to a very magical event, a tambor. Our padrino was of the age of opulence and the ile for this tambor was no exception. There were yards of draped cloth, statues, dramatic lighting, and markets of fruit. The room was cramped with people, some were strangers, still others were not so much strangers, but strange: the teenagers we knew were just babies in the film, resting on the hips of women twenty odd years younger than when we last saw them in the flesh. I tensed, as the drummers began to play, calling down the oricha, and people began to dance. “It’s not much longer is it?” I turned to my husband. “He didn’t film the mount, did he?” For me, the video was a beautiful memory of a padrino I could no longer share a table with, but also it felt like a threat to the sacredness of my own religious experience.
With the DVD still on my mind, even years later, I sit down to read Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion. In this book, Aisha M. Beliso-De Jesús explores the question of what video and other elements of modern life mean to the practice of Santería. De Jesús does an extraordinary job of addressing the intricacies of the practice of la regla de ocha, commonly known as Santería, across national borders. She covers the issues of technology and religious travel, in addition to racial, sexual, and gender interactions. This book is very much geared toward religious studies scholars and anthropologists, yet as one of my mentors once put it, all good writing is always about something else. In this case that something else would be the ever challenging terrain of how an abstraction like religion can be explained on real world terms and applied to everyday challenges. Beliso-De Jesús introduces the term copresence to aid her discussion of how these align.
The term copresence refers to the “spirits, deities (oricha), priests, video technology, and religious travelers that operate in contemporary transnational networks as active spiritual agents” (Beliso-Jesus 2015, XIII). I must admit that, at times, I thought it may have been easier to refer more simply to energy: the energy that a practitioner works with in religious practice wherever he or she is located. Yet, Beliso-De Jesús tackles a deep-seated notion in the industrial world, and certainly in education, that because ideas, objects, or relationships can best be understood in isolation, that they exist in isolation. As such, the author drives home the point that these energies coexist with practitioners rather than simply outside of them. As one of her informant’s describes it, “‘When we are made lukumí [initiated as priests] we are united with our past and present…the egun [spirits of the dead] and oricha. So you know, wherever we go, wherever we are, they are here,’ touching his head” (Beliso-De Jesus 2015, 2).
The author also wants to do justice to the complexities of religious networks that span from L.A. to Sweden to Havana to New York to Matanzas, while at the same time existing as a unit. Noninstitutionalized religions like regla ocha, once understood to “spring” forth from the earth at a singular location, must be reexamined when they are practiced within transnational networks with the assistance of technology. The author notes that video was prohibited until the 1990s, and remains a source of debate for many. She goes on to discuss copresences as experienced through technology and their value for santeros who have religious family in one country and live in another.
As technology becomes more and more woven into daily life, it is no surprise that it also encroaches upon religious practice. The same technology that allows the sharing of video also enables extensive travel. The author couches her discussion of caminos, or life roads, in her account of how regla ocha families are bound together despite the fact that members may live in different countries (Chapters 1-2). Here she examines how divination assists individuals on their road in life and how copresences guide it, not overlooking that all the physical objects necessary to this practice in a transnational context are “tied to laws, governments, societies, nations, and structures of racialized, gendered, and sexed power” (Beliso-Jesus 2015, 81).
Throughout the book the author acknowledges the impact of race relations on a religion she describes as part of a “racial-historical matrix of blackened ontologies” (Beliso-De Jesus 2015, 7). Still, it is in chapter three that she digs into the subject through a discussion of how regla ocha is conceived of in Matanzas and how authenticity “involves making links between relations of spiritual cultivators dead and alive” (Beliso-De Jesus 2015, 116). Here the author introduces the concept of racialized queerness in relation to essentializing ideas about race, gender, and colonialism. The discussion of race bleeds into a discussion of nationality on the one hand, sexuality and gender on the other. Beliso-de Jesús approaches this first from the angle of smell maps, and later via an accounting of debates about the place of women and homosexuals in religious practice (Chapters 3-5).
Ultimately, Beliso-De Jesús is seeking to honor a deceased padrino, as she dedicates her book to her own Padrino Alfredo. No doubt this is the type of honor that an academic has to give, and it is fitting.
All sentiment aside, Electric Santería is a valuable discussion of what religious experience means as it changes and is encroached upon by everything from colonialism, to race relations, to gender and sexuality debates, to the internet and, as in my case, also to video. For a religion long relegated to marginalized communities and often approached from the angle of practice rather philosophically, this book is an important contribution to the study of African Diaspora religions and religious studies.
Aisha M Beliso-De Jesús
Electric Santeria: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion
Columbia University Press, New York
2015
ISBN: 9780231173179
304 pages