Narrative, seasoning, song: Praxis, subjectivity, and transformation in an African-American Lucumi community

Afro-Cuban and Afro-Cuban-derived forms of religious practice have been spreading in North American urban environments for several decades, and have become the subject of a growing academic literature. To this day, however, there is a dearth of ethnographically fine-grained and sociologically contextualized studies of how the small face-to-face groups typical for these West and Central African-inspired religions produce forms of subjectivity and community that are centered on shared experiences of interaction with the divine. This dissertation aims to address this oversight by analyzing arenas of religious interaction as "theaters of conversion," in which individuals undergo a gradual habituation, or 'seasoning,' into the semiotic forms and signifying practices of the Lucumi/Santeria tradition. I approach the conversion process within a predominantly African-American community on Chicago's South Side as one of rhetorical and somatic implication, demonstrating that the transformative religious acts carried out in order to turn the home of its leader, Nilaja Campbell, into a house of worship, also altered the self-understandings and social identities of those performing them.;Each chapter of the dissertation endeavors to shed light on a different aspect of the interpellative process activated in three seemingly disparate contexts: the Spiritist seances of Puerto Rican origin called misas blancas; the careful preparation of foods for Lucumi/Santeria gods; and the dialogic situations created when initiates recount their conversion narratives. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, I argue that these theaters of conversion, operative within Lucumi/Santeria communities more generally, dramatize the spirits' reality and power, prompt sensori-motor and affective responses that furnish participants with a shared identity, and bind them together into an interpretive community. I contend that in these settings, practitioners come to acquire and inhabit a hermeneutic, or "intersubjective frame" of reference, within which their experience can be expressed as communication with the spirits and reproduced as Lucumi/Santeria tradition.;The focal question of this dissertation is, "How do individuals become religious subjects?" Since I investigate religious subject formation within a tradition of spirit mediumship and possession, the question can be rephrased: "How do people come to hear the call of the spirits, and learn to answer it in ways that reproduce their ritual and interpretive communities?" I use the auditory metaphor to gesture simultaneously towards the antiphonal idea of religious vocation elaborated by my interlocutors, and to the notion of 'interpellation' associated with Louis Althusser. Although his account of subject formation has been foundational for my study, I emphasize the social and pedagogical aspects of interpellation that came to the fore in the course of ethnographic research. Chief among these is socialization into a spirit idiom enabling individuals to apprehend and respond to their being 'hailed' by the gods. In analyzing the competent performance of this idiom as a crucial element of subject formation, I rely on the concept of "ideological becoming" as "the process of selectively assimilating the words of others." Since religious subjects are not constituted solely through language, I also pursue my focal question with reference to "modes of subjectivation" and the "techniques of the self" that undergird them, including everyday corporeal practices, the cultivation of such sentiments as sympathy, and the communal construction of memory through ritual performance.