Lengua ritual y sincretismo: Dinamicas de hibridez en el discurso magico-religioso Palo Monte-Mayombe

Due to its affiliation to cultural hybridity, syncretism has been a highly contentious term from different perspectives about culture. Purist canons have often taken the term to imply impure and inauthentic forms of mixed culture. Other models, such as the transculturation paradigm of the Cuban ethnologist Fernando Ortiz, refer to syncretism as legitimated hybrid forms of making culture through the incorporation and convergence of symbolic material from two or more different cultural codes as what characterizes Cuban African-based religious systems. Yet Ortiz's model lacks an operational formula to study syncretic practices resulting in the fact that some scholars continue analyzing syncretism as purely mixture. In the search for that working formula, this dissertation examines the applicability of Ortiz's syncretism on the ceremonial discourse of the Palo Monte-Mayombe cult, a magical-religious group within the Afro-Cuban Diaspora. Well documented by its hybrid language of Cuban-Spanish and an extended conceptual apparatus of Kikongo lexicon, this research focuses on how tatas and madres nganga (Palo Monte priests) manipulate symbolic material from Spanish and Kikongo to converge into a local and unique form of ritual speech: The Congo language. Linguistic and cultural data was collected in Holguin, La Habana, and Matanzas, Cuba, during the year 2004. The method of speech event to describe the selection of ethnographies of Congo ritual speech and the method of intertextual discourse to analyze the symbolic meaning of hybrid utterances were used as study methodology. Findings show that syncretism is not a static fixed cultural mixture, but a strategy that makes possible the interpretation of codes of different origins in favor of ideological consistencies. For paleros (Palo Monte practitioners), the negotiation of the etymological provenance of words is a fundamental syncretic dynamics in the formation of an "African" ritual language spoken in Cuba. Therefore, this research suggests that language syncretism is the study of the suppression of a linguistic utterance in opposition to another under certain conditions in which the speaker faces meaningful cultural definitions. Thus, Congo language hybridity has much more to do with a discourse of ideological relations between its codes than purely grammatical ones.