Kristina Wirtz

Western Michigan University | WMU · Department of Spanish

In celebration of the 15th anniversary of this journal's name change, I situate recent linguistic anthropological scholarship in the Caribbean in a broader, interdisciplinary context. Caribbean ways of speaking—and especially contact languages such as creoles—have often been exceptionalised and subject to stereotypes. Taking Derek Walcott's “sea of...

Ritual and communication have been studied both through communicative rituals and in approaches to what is communicated through ritual as a key domain of social action. First, some of the defining debates about what ritual is are described, including what ritual means and what it does, and how these issues can be approached semiotically. Then appro...

In this essay I explore how oricha (deities') voice is produced in and through Cuban Santería practices that render oricha speech audible, meaningful, and quotable. In the semiotic order governing Cuban popular religious practice, human bodies and other objects can be "activated" as instruments of oricha speech. Divination objects such as cowry she...

I offer a model of racialization, the ongoing process of making race meaningful, by proposing the concept of micro-mobilities: people's movements through immediate lived space. I examine how qualities of movement in an annual carnival procession normalize racialized bodies and places. In Santiago de Cuba's carnival, neighborhood-based conga societi...

This chapter investigates the relationship between monologue and dialogue in Cuban revolutionary discourse. It proposes to attend to the “mono-logic”-the semiotic and ideological forces designed to compel alignments toward unity, coherence, and continuity, that are, asymptotically, never quite reached. Cuba’s political leaders have for decades insi...

Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, or “time-space,” contributes to a theoretically robust anthropology of history by highlighting how our experience and thus subjective feel for history and place emerge through semiotic processes that can generate different kinds of historicity. In rendering Bakhtin’s suggestive concept of chronotope more precise...

Comment on Palmié, Stephan. 2013. The cooking of history: How not to study Afro-Cuban religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

According to a Haitian proverb, lwa toujou genyen yon zatrap ladan—“law always has a trap inside of it.” So argues Kate Ramsey in this excellent and long-awaited historical treatment of the “construction and contestation of Vodou as an object of the law” in Haiti (p. 14). Indeed the most extraordinary “trickery” of Haitian law has been its contribu...

In tracing a discourse history for the emergence and enregisterment of Bozal, a Cuban speech style that robustly indexes the historical persona of the African slave, this paper proposes that such discourse “genealogies” are more accurately reconstructed not through a linear, teleological metaphor of “speech chains” but through a more reticulated, m...

“Congo” spirits, “black witches,” African slaves, and maroons are ubiquitous historical figures in religious and folklore performances of eastern Cuba, where they are represented through collocations of Bozal speech register, stereotypical “African” vocal and bodily mannerisms and dance forms, and distinctive uses of deictics that present first-per...

Using a semiotic framework to examine different categorizations of ritually produced 'hazardous waste' in Cuban popular religions, I argue that the ways in which waste is produced and treated generate its social indexical value and its potential to act on people. I suggest a focus on the interactions between the materiality of ritual waste and its...

RESUMENEste ensayo describe como en la Cuba contemporánea, la religión llamada Santería, ha sido constituida como resultado de la interacción de multiples conceptos, como una práctica sacra, una forma del folklore, o una superstición. Estas interpretaciones opues tas surgen de distintas posiciones metaculturales o evaluaciones que se basan en conce...

In this article, I probe the relationship between historical consciousness and cultural transmission. In contrast to scholars' focus on language loss in African-language ritual registers in the Americas, I examine how Cuban Santería's ritual register, called “Lucumí,” is actively regimented through the ways in which Santería's practitioners learn,...

Afro-Cuban Theology: Religion, Race, Culture, and Identity. Michelle A. Gonzalez. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006. 191 pp.

In this article I consider how registers of speech can index distinct chronotopes by indexing historical ‘voices’. Practitioners of Cuban Santería can temporally inflect their ritual speech by deploying two marked registers that contrast with standard Cuban Spanish and each other. These registers, called ‘Lucumí’ and ‘Bozal’, are associated with pa...

I examine the assumptions underlying scholars' use of etymological reconstruction to connect ritual registers in African diasporic religions with African 'sources', and to thereby reclaim African diasporic history by recovering 'lost' or hidden meanings. I compare these efforts to the interpretive practices of practitioners of Cuban Santería, who e...

A high level of unintelligibility in ritual utterances would seem to inhibit their meaningfulness to participants, but I argue that the opposite is the case when deities called oricha descend to possess and speak to humans in Santeria ceremonies. My analysis of how an oricha's message to a ritual participant is delivered, interpreted, and received...

Anthropologists since Malinowski have noted the unintelligibility of many types of ritual and magical speech. What has not been sufficiently explored are the links between how unintelligibility is actually produced and how unintelligibility contributes to meaningfulness in ritual performances. Examining these links can deepen our understanding of w...

This ethnography of a local Santería community in Santiago de Cuba shows how practitioners' ritual and reflective practices produce a common set of religious experiences and a distinct moral community. Religious life is marked by a series of "telling moments" or noteworthy events that practitioners retell as they reflect upon the meaning of potenti...

Extracts of 39 species of Caribbean gorgonians were tested for antimicrobial activity against 15 strains of marine bacteria. The bacteria consisted of three opportunistic pathogens, Vibrio parahaemolyticus, Leucothrix mucor, and Aerococcus viridans, and 12 strains isolated from either healthy or decayed gorgonians. Overall, only 15% (79 out of 544)...

Thesis (M.S.)--Cornell University, May, 1993. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 135-138).

My concern in this paper is to explore how religious practitioners' approaches to learning, using, and interpreting Santería's esoteric ritual language, Lucumí, impact Lucumí's ritual efficacy as the sacred speech of the deities and ancestors. In particular, I wish to argue that distinct interpretive practices, situated in different contexts or dep...