Stephan Palmié
Biographic Data
| ID | 73200 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Stephan Palmié |
| GIVEN NAMES | Stephan |
| FAMILY NAME | Palmié |
| SIGNATURE | PALMIÉ S |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Chicago |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7820-3199 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 66 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 372 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 64 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 2 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1994 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 8 |
Excited Delirium
Collective Soma
Taking Maggi cubes as a case study, the article explores the aesthetics of mass consumption among populations whose choices are limited. Rather than being passive actors of biopolitical imposition or a capitalist ploy, consumers agentively appropriated global commodities into local ethics and aesthetics of mutual bodily care. In fact, collectivities experiencing a shift of habitus due to modernisation and the industrial commodities it brought co-…
El Monte au jour d’hui
This review essay takes the publication of the first English translation of Lydia Cabrera’s magnum opus El Monte as an occasion to reflect on the perplexing nature of Cabrera’s text, both at the time of its original publication and in its English translation now. Without doubt, Cabrera was one of the most prolific ethnographers of the African-derived ritual traditions of Cuba that she observed between the 1930s and 1950s. Not unlike American salv…
How newness enters the world
Thinking with Ngangas
Afrika–Atlantik–Amerika
Collingwood's Whale, Chakrabarty's Conundrum, and Braudel's Borrowed Time
As R. G. Collingwood noted toward the end of his life, the physiologically limited "time-phase" of human observational capacity cannot but deliver a fundamentally anthropocentric and temporally myopic conception of the world as eventful, destructive, and devoid of larger, perhaps cyclical, regularities. Developing at around the same time, Fernand Braudel's project of a history of the longue durée of human interactions with the environment aimed t…
Unhinged
English Abstract: Can we talk about what we cannot conceive of? How far can the ethnographic gesture guide us into worlds that call into question what Collingwood described as our own (historically mutable) 'absolute presuppositions' from which we must spin our ethnographic propositions? 'Witches, as the Azande conceive them, cannot exist', wrote Evans-Pritchard at the start of a monograph aiming to prove the eminent rationality of Zande witchcra…
Anthropologies of Our Caribbean Sea of (Is)lands
Caribbeanist Anthropology and Minerva's Owl
This essay presents a sketch of what a critical genealogy of the anthropology of the Caribbean might involve. After looking at the origins of anthropological interest in the region, I will focus on two case studies that, for better or worse, may be said to have had lasting diagnostic value for key epistemological orientations in Caribbeanist anthropology. I do so by examining M. G. Smith'sPlural Societymodel and Julian Stewart's Puerto Rico Proje…
Caribbean and Mediterranean counterpoints and transculturations
Probing the possibilities for transregional anthropological scholarship in light of the Cuban polymath Fernando Ortiz’s prolific work, this introduction surveys the development of Mediterraneanist and Caribbeanist anthropology, situates Ortiz’s intellectual trajectory within its Balearic and Cuban biographical contexts, and discusses the contributors’ attempts to harness Ortiz’s conceptual vocabulary to issues such as Hispanophone intellectual ne…
History and Anthropology
Introduction Most historians and anthropologists would likely agree that Herodotus’s (c. 484–c. 425 BCE) “inquiries” (“historiai”) can be regarded as the common ancestor to both of their intellectual pursuits, given that he explicitly included the “barbarians” in his geohistorical sweep of memorable
Afterword
Following the thematic arc of the essays in this collection, and adding the author’s own reminiscences about fieldwork in Cuba, this afterword reflects on what a material semiotic approach towards a world of things thrown into disarray can reveal about what Malinowski once called “the imponderabilia of actual life” in Cuba during the “Special Period in Times of Peace
The Varieties of Historical Experience
Africanisms
This essay attempts to chart the career of the concept of ‘Africanisms’ in the anthropology and history of the African Diaspora in the Americas. After surveying the origins of the concept, I focus on the role of Melville J. Herskovits’ highly influential mobilisation of the concept, its major mid-20th century critiques, and a highly influential late 20th century reaction to the terms of these debates. I will conclude by indicating how Africanist …
An Episode in the History of an Acoustic Mask
In 1908, two black Cuban brothers, held a temple on Philadelphia's North Fairmount Avenue, which appears to have combined Edinsonian sound technology with elements from the ritual repertoire of the Abakuá male esoteric brotherhood. I suggest that the technologically enriched "echo" of the Leal brothers can be analysed heuristically as the locus of a remarkable convergence between phonic and auditory ideologies underlying the mediation of the divi…
Estudios afrolatinoamericanos
Título original: Afro-Latin American Studies. 1a ed.: Cambridge : Cambridege Uhiversity Press, 2018. Este libro tiene el objetivo de introducir al lector en un campo dinámico y en expansión como es el de los estudios afrolatinoamericanos. Definimos este campo, en primer lugar, como un estudio de la población de ascendencia africana en América Latina y, en segundo lugar, como el estudio de las sociedades en las que vive dicha población. En relació…
The Experiential Caribbean
Reading Pablo F. Gómez's The Experiential Caribbean is a bit like stepping into a parallel universe, one where the “long seventeenth century” (circa 1580 to 1720) gave rise to medical empiricism not just in Gideon Harvey's and Thomas Sydenham's London, Marcello Malpighi's and Giovanni Alfonso Borelli's Pisa, Nicolas Malebranche's Paris, or René Descartes's Amsterdam but in places like Cartagena de Indias, Havana, Portobelo, and Caracas. The names…
When Is a Thing? Transduction and Immediacy in Afro-Cuban Ritual; or, ANT in Matanzas, Cuba, Summer of 1948
Revisiting William R. Bascom's 1948 ethnography of Afro-Cuban religious practices in Jovellanos (a semi-urban site in Cuba's Province of Matanzas) in light of current theoretical concerns in our discipline, this essay constitutes a thought experiment. As such it seeks to re-describe some of Bascom's data in terms of Actor-Network Theory, to see if his patent puzzlement over his interlocutors' statements concerning the liveliness and even personho…
Portrait
Sub-Saharan Africa is frequently, but unjustly, seen as the periphery of the Muslim world, in terms of both geography and religious influence.By contrast, North Africa is considered to be directly linked to the alleged center of the Muslim world, that is, the Arab Middle East.In fact, Islam has had a presence in sub-Saharan Africa since the earliest days of its history.This chapter tries to redress the periphery bias in the analysis of African Mu…
Saint Tupac
Widespread fascination with Tupac Shakur's 2012 holographic resurrection at the Coachella music festival provides the occasion for theorizing human possibility in the context of Afro‐diasporic religions. In considering Tupac's life and legacy, we refer to the spiritual power of his resurrection as an apotheosis, or divine ascendency toward sainthood. However, instead of restricting our discussion to the familiar context of Catholic sainthood, we …
Sidney W. Mintz (1922-2015)
Minerva Airlines
Minerva Airlines Stephan Palmié The Cooking of History, Afro-Cuban religion, Africa, Cuba, Mikhail Bahktin, Fernando Ortiz, Kenneth Burke, irony, historiography "Languages of heteroglossia, like mirrors that face each other, each reflecting in its own way a piece, a tiny corner of the world, force us to guess at and grasp for a world behind their mutually reflecting aspects that is broader, more multi-leveled, containing more and varied horizons …
The Cuban factors of humanity
Ostensibly a book written with a view towards publicly promulgating an anti-racist agenda by synthesizing a vast body of mid-20th-century biological and genetic science, Fernando Ortiz's El engaño de las razas (1946) remains one his least commented-upon works. Eclipsed in its scholarly reception (both nationally and internationally) by its immediate predecessor, El contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940) and its English translation (194…
The Cooking of History
Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santeria and other religions related to Orisha worship - a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa - Stephan Palmie has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In The Cooking of History he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on …
Creolization and Its Discontents
In the past two decades, analogies drawn from supposedly Caribbean processes of creolization have begun to command increasing interest in anthropology. Examining historical as well as contemporary social uses of this terminology in its region of origin, as well as linguistic, sociocultural, and archaeological extrapolations from such usages, this review argues that although, as an analytical metaphor, “creolization” may appear to remedy certain d…
The Cooking of History
In "The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion," Stephan Palmié critiques the prevailing scholarly approaches to understanding Afro-Cuban religions, particularly Santería. He argues against the tendency to interpret these religions through a lens of cultural "survival" or "retention," which frames them as static remnants of African traditions. Palmié proposes a more dynamic and processual approach, emphasizing the creative adapt…
"Genomics, divination, "racecraft
The new genomics has begun to play an increasing role in the arbitration of social identities. By facilitating the transcription of older notions that heritable substances determine identity and relatedness into a novel biotic idiom supposedly beyond social maneuver, this molecular-biological knowledge stakes out claims in the domain of the historical. Arguing from the highly publicized case of the genomic "resolution" of the question of Thomas J…
Thinking with Ngangas
As Marcel Mauss (1967: 46) famously remarked, western societies draw a "marked distinction... between real and personal law, between things and persons." Writing at the height of self-conscious early twentieth-century western modernism, Mauss was at pains to point out that it was "only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal" (ibid.: 74), and that such a distinction was, historically speaking, a contingent ela…
Fascinans' or 'tremendum'? Permutations of the state, the body, and the divine in late-twentieth-century Havana
Focuses on the introduction of capitalist elements, such as the use of the dollar as currency, in Cuba in the 1990s, and discusses survival strategies among the Cuban people, during the "special period" since 1989. Based on fieldwork and experiences in Havana, the author pays particular attention to the important role of (obtaining) dollars instead of the less valuable peso currency for Cubans in response to deprivations, and how this occurs thro…
Mixed Blessings and Sorrowful Mysteries
In recent decades, approaches championing conceptions of hybridity and the hybrid have proliferated in our discipline. This has been hailed as, and may well represent, a salutary reaction against earlier tendencies toward reificatory holism in the construction of units of ethnographic description and analysis. Yet both current anthropological deployments (and critiques) of hybridity have not superseded a fundamentally questionable logic that mist…
Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery
Africas of the Americas
The anthropology and history of African American religious formations has long been dominated by approaches aiming to recover and authenticate the historical transatlantic continuities linking such traditions to identifiable African source cultures. While not denying such continuities, the contributors to this volume seek to transcend this research agenda by bracketing "Africa" and "African pasts" as objective givens, and asking instead what role…
Empirical Futures
Since the 1950s, anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate the disciplines of anthropology and history. Author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and other ground-breaking works, he was one of the first scholars to anticipate and critique 'globalization studies.' However, a strong tradition of epistemologically sophisticated and theoretically informed empiricism of the sort advanced…
A view from itia ororó kande1
La confrerie esoterique cubaine abakua est interpretee depuis longtemps comme une version transatlantique deplacee du type de societe secrete connue sous le nom de ekpe ou ngbe dans la region du Cross River au sud-est du Nigeria et au sud-ouest du Cameroun. Cet essai ne conteste pas leurs origines africaines, mais essaie de retracer les contours d'une histoire alternative des abakua. Mon objectif est de confronter les recits «objectivistes» de l'…
Intangible Cultural Property, Semiotic Ideology, and the Vagaries of Ethnoculinary Recognition
December 01 2009 Intangible Cultural Property, Semiotic Ideology, and the Vagaries of Ethnoculinary Recognition Stephan Palmié Stephan Palmié Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Das Exil der Götter: Schichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion (1991), Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002), and editor of Slave Cultures and the Cultures of …
Introduction. Out Of Africa
This introductory essay focuses on the epistemological questions involved in qualifying religious phenomena as 'African', whether on the African continent itself or elsewhere. Taking its departure from the fact that the very term 'Africa' is heteronymic in origin, it argues for a perspective that treats 'Africa' and 'Africanness' not as ontological givens, but as problems to be empirically investigated in regard to both the historical forces and …
O trabalho cultural da globalização iorubá
Este artigo trata do surgimento e transformação das categorias "iorubá" e "iorubidade" como atributos de importância coletiva para identidades sociais e práticas religiosas nos dois lados do Atlântico. Argumentando contra anacrônicas atribuições de origem feitas por acadêmicos, o artigo detalha como tais origens, identidades e religiões foram ativamente construídas na Nigéria, em Cuba e no Brasil durante o século vinte, através de processos etnog…
History and Anthropology
Introduction Most historians and anthropologists would likely agree that Herodotus’s (c. 484–c. 425 BCE) “inquiries” (“historiai”) can be regarded as the common ancestor to both of their intellectual pursuits, given that he explicitly included the “barbarians” in his geohistorical sweep of memorable
When Is a Thing? Transduction and Immediacy in Afro-Cuban Ritual; or, ANT in Matanzas, Cuba, Summer of 1948
Revisiting William R. Bascom's 1948 ethnography of Afro-Cuban religious practices in Jovellanos (a semi-urban site in Cuba's Province of Matanzas) in light of current theoretical concerns in our discipline, this essay constitutes a thought experiment. As such it seeks to re-describe some of Bascom's data in terms of Actor-Network Theory, to see if his patent puzzlement over his interlocutors' statements concerning the liveliness and even personho…
The Trouble with History
This essay takes its departure from Michel-Rolph Trouillot's discussion of what he calls North Atlantic universalisms, that is, categories that took their origin in the particulars of the West's historical experience but have come to be extended and naturalized as quasi-normative standards of presumably universal human relevance. Trouillot's important intervention in Western conceptions of history and historiography in Silencing the Past notwiths…
Ecué's Atlantic
Arguing from an exposition of the principal epistemological and methodological problems that have plagued African-Americanist research since its inception as a properly disciplined anthropological pursuit, this essay focuses on an ostensibly 'clear' case of 'transatlantic continuities' to question linear construction of historical relations between 'African' and 'African-American' cultural forms. Detailing the social history of an African male in…
Ackee and saltfish vs. amalá con quimbombó? A note on Sidney Mintz’ contribution to the historical anthropology of African American cultures
Ackee and saltfish vs. amalá con quimbombó? A note on Sidney Mintz’ contribution to the historical anthropology of African American cultures. In the spirit of Sidney Mintz’ contribution to African American historical anthropology, this essay examines theories allocating differential explanatory weight to African cultural continuities and New World social conditions in the historical development of African American cultures through the lens of a s…
Of pharisees and snark-hunters
Examining some recent publications on Afro-Cuban religions in the US, this essay argues that some of the evident shortcomings of the literature on this subject may hold important epistemological and methodological lessons for the anthropology of religion in general. These concern the pervasive lack of critical attention to the criteria by which formations of religious knowledge and practice are constituted as objects of study; a failure to acknow…
Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery
Africanisms
This essay attempts to chart the career of the concept of ‘Africanisms’ in the anthropology and history of the African Diaspora in the Americas. After surveying the origins of the concept, I focus on the role of Melville J. Herskovits’ highly influential mobilisation of the concept, its major mid-20th century critiques, and a highly influential late 20th century reaction to the terms of these debates. I will conclude by indicating how Africanist …
Unhinged
English Abstract: Can we talk about what we cannot conceive of? How far can the ethnographic gesture guide us into worlds that call into question what Collingwood described as our own (historically mutable) 'absolute presuppositions' from which we must spin our ethnographic propositions? 'Witches, as the Azande conceive them, cannot exist', wrote Evans-Pritchard at the start of a monograph aiming to prove the eminent rationality of Zande witchcra…
How newness enters the world
Caribbeanist Anthropology and Minerva's Owl
This essay presents a sketch of what a critical genealogy of the anthropology of the Caribbean might involve. After looking at the origins of anthropological interest in the region, I will focus on two case studies that, for better or worse, may be said to have had lasting diagnostic value for key epistemological orientations in Caribbeanist anthropology. I do so by examining M. G. Smith'sPlural Societymodel and Julian Stewart's Puerto Rico Proje…
The Cuban factors of humanity
Ostensibly a book written with a view towards publicly promulgating an anti-racist agenda by synthesizing a vast body of mid-20th-century biological and genetic science, Fernando Ortiz's El engaño de las razas (1946) remains one his least commented-upon works. Eclipsed in its scholarly reception (both nationally and internationally) by its immediate predecessor, El contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar (1940) and its English translation (194…
Adjusting lenses
First paragraph]Schwarze Freiheit lm Dialog: Saint-Domingue 1791 - Haiti 1991. C. Herrmann Middelanis (ed.). Bielefeld: Hans Koek, 1992. 62 pp. (Paper n.p.)Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Karen McCarthy Brown. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. x + 405 pp. (Cloth US$ 24.00, Paper US$ 13.00)Caribbean New York: Black Immigrants and the Politics of Race. Philip Kasinitz. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992. xv + 280 pp. (Cl…
Das Exil der Gotter
Creoles-Afroamerikaner im karibischen Tiefland von Nicaragua
Making sense of Santería
First paragraph]Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Memories. GEORGE BRANDON. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. x + 206 pp. (Cloth US$31.50) Working the Spirit: Ceremonies of the African Diaspora. JOSEPH M. MURPHY. Boston: Beacon, 1994. xiii + 263 pp. (Cloth US$ 25.00)Walking with the Night: The Afro-Cuban World of Santeria. RAUL CANIZARES. Rochester VT: Destiny Books, 1993. xii + 148 pp. (Paper US$ 12.95)Since 1959, t…
Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery
Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery
Slave Cultures and the Cultures of Slavery
Featuring essays by historians and anthropologists, this volume focuses on the cultural dimensions of slavery in a wide variety of geographical and historical settings. The contributors examine the historical manifestations of slavery not only as legal, political, and economic institutions but as systems of human interaction and experience that are prone to conflicts and riddled with contradictions. Among the geographic areas covered in this coll…
Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem
Historie der Caribischen inseln Sanct Thomas, Sanct Crux und Sanct Jan. Kommentierte Edition Des Original Manuskriptes. Erster Teil, Vol. I
Of pharisees and snark-hunters
Examining some recent publications on Afro-Cuban religions in the US, this essay argues that some of the evident shortcomings of the literature on this subject may hold important epistemological and methodological lessons for the anthropology of religion in general. These concern the pervasive lack of critical attention to the criteria by which formations of religious knowledge and practice are constituted as objects of study; a failure to acknow…
Wizards and Scientists
In Wizards and Scientists Stephan Palmié offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from…
Fascinans' or 'tremendum'? Permutations of the state, the body, and the divine in late-twentieth-century Havana
Focuses on the introduction of capitalist elements, such as the use of the dollar as currency, in Cuba in the 1990s, and discusses survival strategies among the Cuban people, during the "special period" since 1989. Based on fieldwork and experiences in Havana, the author pays particular attention to the important role of (obtaining) dollars instead of the less valuable peso currency for Cubans in response to deprivations, and how this occurs thro…
Ackee and saltfish vs. amalá con quimbombó? A note on Sidney Mintz’ contribution to the historical anthropology of African American cultures
Ackee and saltfish vs. amalá con quimbombó? A note on Sidney Mintz’ contribution to the historical anthropology of African American cultures. In the spirit of Sidney Mintz’ contribution to African American historical anthropology, this essay examines theories allocating differential explanatory weight to African cultural continuities and New World social conditions in the historical development of African American cultures through the lens of a s…
Creolization and Its Discontents
In the past two decades, analogies drawn from supposedly Caribbean processes of creolization have begun to command increasing interest in anthropology. Examining historical as well as contemporary social uses of this terminology in its region of origin, as well as linguistic, sociocultural, and archaeological extrapolations from such usages, this review argues that although, as an analytical metaphor, “creolization” may appear to remedy certain d…
Thinking with Ngangas
As Marcel Mauss (1967: 46) famously remarked, western societies draw a "marked distinction... between real and personal law, between things and persons." Writing at the height of self-conscious early twentieth-century western modernism, Mauss was at pains to point out that it was "only our Western societies that quite recently turned man into an economic animal" (ibid.: 74), and that such a distinction was, historically speaking, a contingent ela…
Introduction Out Of Africa? 2
The introduction to this second special issue aims to probe the epistemological conditions of possibility of African Americanist anthropology. In particular, it highlights the problematic of definitions of units of analysis in the comparative logic on which this particular field of inquiry has long been based. Given the conceptual instability of the categories 'Africa' and 'America' discussed in the previous number of this special double issue, a…
Ecué's Atlantic
Arguing from an exposition of the principal epistemological and methodological problems that have plagued African-Americanist research since its inception as a properly disciplined anthropological pursuit, this essay focuses on an ostensibly 'clear' case of 'transatlantic continuities' to question linear construction of historical relations between 'African' and 'African-American' cultural forms. Detailing the social history of an African male in…
Introduction. Out Of Africa
This introductory essay focuses on the epistemological questions involved in qualifying religious phenomena as 'African', whether on the African continent itself or elsewhere. Taking its departure from the fact that the very term 'Africa' is heteronymic in origin, it argues for a perspective that treats 'Africa' and 'Africanness' not as ontological givens, but as problems to be empirically investigated in regard to both the historical forces and …
O trabalho cultural da globalização iorubá
Este artigo trata do surgimento e transformação das categorias "iorubá" e "iorubidade" como atributos de importância coletiva para identidades sociais e práticas religiosas nos dois lados do Atlântico. Argumentando contra anacrônicas atribuições de origem feitas por acadêmicos, o artigo detalha como tais origens, identidades e religiões foram ativamente construídas na Nigéria, em Cuba e no Brasil durante o século vinte, através de processos etnog…
"Genomics, divination, "racecraft
The new genomics has begun to play an increasing role in the arbitration of social identities. By facilitating the transcription of older notions that heritable substances determine identity and relatedness into a novel biotic idiom supposedly beyond social maneuver, this molecular-biological knowledge stakes out claims in the domain of the historical. Arguing from the highly publicized case of the genomic "resolution" of the question of Thomas J…
A view from itia ororó kande1
La confrerie esoterique cubaine abakua est interpretee depuis longtemps comme une version transatlantique deplacee du type de societe secrete connue sous le nom de ekpe ou ngbe dans la region du Cross River au sud-est du Nigeria et au sud-ouest du Cameroun. Cet essai ne conteste pas leurs origines africaines, mais essaie de retracer les contours d'une histoire alternative des abakua. Mon objectif est de confronter les recits «objectivistes» de l'…
Ecue’s Atlantic
Index
Preliminary Materials
Introduction
The Africa under discussion here does not refer to an entity that could be presumed to be given in any simple, self-evident fashion. It is not just a ?place' but a trope that encodes and evokes complex, historically sedimented, and contextually variable bodies of knowledge pertaining to the nature of human beings, social arrangements, and cultural forms that have variously entered into its semantic purview. The 'African Americanist field' came to…
Sociology (37 works) · History (33 works) · Philosophy (30 works) · Anthropology (26 works) · Political science (24 works) · Epistemology (18 works) · Law (18 works) · Cuban History and Society (17 works) · History (17 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (15 works)