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Mercedes Cros Sandoval, Worldview, the Orichas, and Santería: Africa to Cuba and Beyond. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007. 417 pp.
The study of the role and contributions of particular African civilizations toward the creation of regional cultures in the New World is still in its infancy. As an academic pursuit, there are numerous complexities and obstacles to be dealt with, especially for historians. Unlike other immigrants, until the latter half of the nineteenth century, Africans were forcibly brought to the New World as slaves, bringing with them their decisive influence on the development of New World cultures and societies.
Mercedes Cros Sandoval's recently published Worldview, the Orichas, and Santería: Africa to Cuba and Beyond, is an important contribution to the growing body of serious literature on the influence of the Yoruba in the Americas. This almost-encyclopedic book consists of twenty-four chapters, divided into three parts. Sandoval wrote that in the past, she and other scholars had given primary emphasis to syncretic processes and less consideration to the worldview assumptions underlying those processes. She stresses mat, on the basis of her current analysis, worldview approaches "better explain transculturative processes that support cultural continuities in the face of change." In her opinion, "they better explain those ideas of meaning that allow people to continue on an identifiable sociostructural path that also allows variations while preserving a fundamental meaning-system" (xxxiv).
Furthermore, Sandoval confronts me theories of other scholars who have maintained that Lukumi religion in Cuba, and by extension all African religions in the New World, were religions of resistance. She emphasizes that the process tìiat gave birth to the new courses taken by Lukumi religion in Cuba did not result from cultural resistance. Instead, its vitality depended on its ability to find meaning in alien cultural and religious environments, and subsequently apply these in a manner that would appeal to the new cultures it encountered on the island. Most influential in the process were the numerous similarities that existed in terms of the worldviews and religious...