“Walking Sciences”

As a historian and ethnographer, I specialize in the study of the West African-inspired tradition of Lucumí (popularly called Santería) and the Central African traditions collectively termed reglas de congo in Cuba. But it was primarily as a practitioner that I learned about the Afro-Cuban convention of calling religious elders ciencias (sciences) after their deaths. During an informal chat within a Spanish-speaking house of worship, I first heard the adulatory formulation “era una ciencia”—they “were a science”—to eulogize an erudite, long-active, and dynamic elder. Elders are those ordained into the priesthoods of Black Atlantic traditions, usually with more than two decades of experience administering and assisting in elaborate rites of passage.²

Most Lucumí practitioners will probably have encountered the term ciencia while listening to the prayer called moyuba. Elders recite a moyuba prior to all ceremonial “macropractices” praising the supreme sources of sacred energy, locating ritual participants temporally and spatially within the frame of the cardinal directions, and activating the presence of religious ancestors (or egún) (Pérez 2016, 123). I have previously explored the moyuba as a model of ethical citationality, since it specifies the birth names, nicknames, and priestly titles of those within practitioners’ initiatory lineages to honor them (Pérez 2024). Since the moyuba is spoken in the ritual language of Lucumí—an atonal, liturgical form of Yorùbá—ciencia stands out as a Spanish word, especially when modified by the Spanish adjective todo (all) or the equivalent Lucumí qualifier bobo (gbogbo in Yorùbá). A “highly respected and acknowledged elder,” living or dead, is also called alagba or alawa, from the Yorùbá term for “revered elder”; more senior or deceased elders are called algbalagba or agbalagba (or any number of orthographic variations thereof) (Eyiogbe 2015). Such eminences are sometimes extolled as gran ciencias (great sciences) to underscore their lofty stature.

Although these terms have seldom appeared in publications, they have come to be used with some regularity on social media. I have documented over one hundred posts—and many more comments— that contain ciencia in a Facebook group created only four years ago (whose Spanish name roughly translates to “The Departed Afro-Cuban Ancestors”), and they indicate the prevalence of this epithet in everyday parlance.³ Sometimes, ciencia and alagba are combined in phrases plucked from moyubas, particularly in posts commemorating the achievement of religious milestones, as in a 2023 Instagram post paying homage to “toda esa ciencia alagba” (all of those elder sciences) and another from 2024 in which the author praises “toda esa ciencia alagualagua que descansa al pie de araonu” (all of those elder sciences who rest at the feet of [the residents of] heaven).⁴ These expressions signal the adoption of an elevated oratorical register to communicate users’ involvement in Afro-Cuban religions, even to outsiders unaware of their denotative meaning.

Practitioners of the reglas de congo, such Palo Monte Mayombe and Kimbisa, also refer to their elders as ciencias. I have always found it curious that ciencias are not extolled as científicos (scientists) instead, given that several areas of expertise in which practitioners aspire to develop proficiency—like herbalism, divination, Spiritism, and the execution of the Kongo cosmograms (or firmas)—have been described as “sciences” in popular instructional manuals, religious tracts, and polemics (Cabrera [1974] 1980, 181; Davis 1987; Agbaomola 2016; Àṣàbí 2023; Almanza Tojeiro, Pérez Linares, and Marín-Gutiérrez 2012; Camara 2010). In Critical Approaches, Eli Nelson (2024, 292) writes of “native science” as “a mode of epistemic production that is so structured by being a scientific object in an occupied state while simultaneously making space for—and cultivating elements of—Indigenous knowledge, relations, and history.” While this concept is specific to Indigenous peoples, it bears a family resemblance to ciencia in the Othered and objectified traditions of the African diaspora.

This similarity notwithstanding, the normative usage of ciencia emphasizes practitioners’ focus on the human body as the main site of knowledge production. Their epistemic orientation is utterly at odds with dominant constructions of knowledge as “out there,” awaiting discovery; elders themselves are the facts worth knowing and the phenomena to be observed empirically. Elders are those for whom the sacred power they received in initiation has had time to settle—or, as practitioners say in Spanish, asentar, connoting “to consolidate” or “to be set down firmly”—in their bodies. Previous generations placed more emphasis on “oral apprenticeship” than practitioners do today, yet elders’ gestures and words (filled with auspicious primordial energies like the Lucumí aché) are to be memorized. Indeed, they remain the principal catalysts for the sensorial enskilment of newcomers.⁵ Erika Lorraine Milam’s (2024, 207) Critical Approaches chapter begins with an epigraph by Mary Oliver, “[a]ttention is the beginning of devotion,” and this sentiment is germane to my argument here. Even more so is the Simone Weil statement that might have inspired it: “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love” (quoted in Eggemeier 2014).

Dance scholar Yvonne Daniel (2005, 66) has referred to virtuosic dancers, singers, and musicians in Afro-diasporic traditions as “experiential librarians,” such that their deaths are like “the burning of a library.”⁶ Elders do not simply possess wisdom but actually incarnate it; they are the living, breathing archives of Afro-Cuban religions. Practitioners sometimes dub deceased elders ciencias caminantes, or “walking sciences,” a phrase that evokes the Muslim locution “walking Qu’rān” (Ware 2014).⁷ In ethnographic contexts, I have seen this understanding come to the fore in casual musings about eldership, as reflected in a 2005 online forum in which the moderator Eshu Tolu posed the question, “WHAT MAKES A ‘TRUE’ ELDER OR ALAGBA???”⁸ To kick off the discussion, they offered, “These people usually are quite visible. They have a certain presence. No one need ask how many years that they have crowned because they walk with power and authority . . . I personally, with twenty-one years crowned, am not worthy of the title of ‘Elder’ or ‘Alagba,’ yet. Although I am very wise, I have not yet EARNED such a title. Very few have . . . When I know that I have earned such a title, the world will know, when I walk the walk of respect, power, and authority!”

Ciencias in the Age of Modern Science

In Critical Approaches, Katharine Gerbner (2023) and J. Brent Crosson (2023) address the role secrecy has played in constructions of Caribbean obeah, and “science” as a synonym for it. Their chapters have convinced me that ciencia is evoked in Afro-Cuban commemorative contexts (like the moyuba) precisely because secrecy attends the incorporation of privileged information in rites of passage. The ancestral knowledges elders personify are not unlike the conocimientos identified by Chicana feminist writer and theorist Gloria Anzaldúa (1999): forms of consciousness, intuition, and perception that do not register as ways of knowing within hegemonic interpretive frameworks, even as they combat the colonial desconocimientos (lack of awareness or ignored knowledges) that foster ignorance and denial about the past.

Historically, however, the knowledges embodied by ciencias were not recognized as such beyond their religious milieus. In genres of blackface minstrelsy, Afro-Cubans were lampooned as incapable of pronouncing medical terms and incompetent in the language of science, which is acutely ironic in light of the important role enslaved healers played on colonial plantations and the battlefield during the Wars of Independence (Lane 2017, 68; Gómez 2017). Scientific discourses in Cuba emerged in tandem with those of witchcraft and fetishism (the two categories to which African-inspired religions were relegated in the colonial and early Republican periods). The dissected corpses of Black Cubans who were labeled brujos (witches), unjustly accused of kidnapping and sacrificing white women and children, were housed in anthropological museums to further the ends of racial criminology; thousands of sacred objects exhibited alongside them were confiscated in police raids (Bronfman 2004). As Stephan Palmié (2002, 30) writes, “to the extent that a self-consciously modernizing science focused its gaze on the bodies and practices of Cuba’s black lower-class citizenry, the indices of [their] wizardry began to multiply, calling forth ever more violent strategies of repression, celebrated in turn as triumphs of science and modernity.”

It was in this era that the arguably anti-science speech genre of “unchosen choice” crystallized (Pérez 2013). In it, practitioners narrate their ordination into Afro-diasporic priesthoods as something they did only to heal themselves after reaching the limits of medical science to understand the illnesses that afflicted them. This foundational narrative mode marks the ascendance of scientific discourses at odds with conocimientos informed by West and Central African precedents. In inhabiting the speech genre of “unchosen choice” today, initiates share interpretations of their corporeal experience that forcefully contest those offered by representatives of a rightfully mistrusted allopathic and technoscientific establishment.

Among my contemporary African American interlocutors, “modern science” has frequently been cast as a species of volt sorcery. In Ilé Laroye,⁹ the Lucumí community about which I have written most often, the kitchen was where practitioners sat or leaned against the wall to deliver pointed Afro-pessimistic critiques of white supremacist state terror. They also unspooled so-called conspiracy theories: histories of unauthorized medical experimentation—not only at Tuskegee but throughout the country—and the coordinated abduction and killing of Black people (Washington 2006). On one night in 2005, my interlocutor ‘Tunde was moved to recall his horrific childhood experiences at segregated hospitals and an incapacitating spinal surgery that left him—at twelve years old—with a permanent limp.¹⁰ His recollections gave way to a more far-reaching indictment of the medical, judicial, and military systems intertwined with the carceral state.

Later that evening, ‘Tunde reiterated claims that the military had tested a vaccine for poison gas on soldiers that made their semen black, and the serum infected their wives when they came into contact with their husbands’ sweat.¹¹ The United States military has conceded the testing of mustard gas, radiation, and LSD on soldiers—whom we may suppose were disproportionately Black and Latine—and ‘Tunde’s allegation conveyed his understanding that the military-capitalist complex turned the world upside down and inside out, corrupting the bodies of its victims and invading the innermost relations between intimate partners. For ‘Tunde, the Lucumí deities, called orishas, did the very opposite: they healed bodies through cooling white substances like coconut meat, eggshell chalk, and their own perspiration, secreted in the course of possession performances and then smeared on the faces and limbs of devotees (Matory 2001, Ochoa 2020, 23–24).

As several contributors to Critical Approaches note, settler colonial scientific narratives have relied on the dehumanization of Black and brown people and the corresponding degradation of their lifeworlds. It thus seems significant that the elders of Afro-Cuban religions are customarily acclaimed as ciencias after they are gone. This implies that conocimientos are not cumulative but perpetually in danger of existential loss. There is no telos, no march toward progress that positivist scientific discourses promote. There is only the continual extinction of prior knowledges. The absence of certain Yorùbá and Ewe-Fon deities in Cuba is sometimes blamed on elders who went to their graves without having handed down the procedures deemed necessary to consecrate them; this vividly illustrates practitioners’ view of human participation in ongoing cosmological processes that have profound social and ontological implications (Vélez 2000). It is possible that—as a means of resisting “life- denying” modalities of “Atlantic modernity”—they have chosen to sidestep the questions of evidentiality and rationality in their appropriation of ciencia (Keel 2023, 46). Then again, as Critical Approaches suggests, assuming this might betray our failure to envision radically alternative approaches to organizing the universe.

I would like to end on a pedagogical note. Since 2012, I have taught the undergraduate course “Religion, Healing, and Medicine” numerous times. It surveys a range of therapeutic methods drawn from United States-based religious communities and cultural groups, including the Navajo/Diné nation, Hmong immigrants, and African American rootworkers. The course regards biomedicine as an enterprise with its own high priests, taboos, and rituals. While compiling the syllabus, I looked to other such courses, like “Introduction to Medical Anthropology,” “Culture, Medicine, Body,” and “Biomedicalization: The Body as a Social Problem.” I can imagine profitably integrating Critical Approaches into all of these, especially given the editors’ decision to split the book into four approachable parts, “Values,” “Boundaries,” “Narratives,” and “Coherence.” It is a text that will have students eager to talk and even debate, so daring are its provocations and so timely are its meditations on what modern science has made of—and taken from—our world.