Caribbean and Mediterranean counterpoints and transculturations

Abstract

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 network-building, the globalization of Spiritist thought in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the phenomenology of the US-Haitian water border, patterns of intersectarian coexistence and exclusion at Mediterranean shrines and walled border zones, Ortiz's changing views of Afro-Cuban cultural forms, his lexicographical contributions and their afterlife in Afro-Cuban ritual praxis, as well as ethnographies probing the promise of Ortiz's contrapuntal approach and concept of transculturation in relation to the conjunction between the global aluminum industry and Ndyuka Maroon ritual praxis in Suriname, the transformation of northern Portugal's Alto Minho region in light of theories of cultural emergence, and the proliferation of images of the deity María Lionza in Venezuela, Barcelona and on the web. The overarching argument is that a return to Ortiz's signature contributions to rethinking ethnoracial difference, and nonhierarchical conceptions of cultural heterogeneity may serve us well in our contemporary endeavors to understand not just the Caribbean and Mediterranean regions, but global processes, such as the turn towards vocabularies of cultural incompatibility that serve as novel, seemingly "post-racial" technologies of exclusion.

To make a difference: Responding to migration and its (im)possible demands in returns to Cuba

“…Some of the forms, possibilities, and challenges of such inclusion, in the case of returnees, have been addressed in this article. They suggest that in the Cuban ajiaco -the typical stew mixing several elements that Ortiz (2014) used as metaphor to describe the processual, historical formation of Cuba and Cubanness, featuring number of migratory flows among its constituents (Gonçalves 2014;Palmié 2021) -Cuban migrants returning from abroad still remain a rather 'raw' and ambivalent ingredient, whose cooking into a national 'pot' of belonging is fraught with potential estrangement and recalcitrant separation, and conditioned by their responses to migration's demands.…”

“…To answer this, we must start thinking of international migration as seen from Cuba, and the expectations such migration tends to engenders. My interlocutors all left Cuba in the late 1990s and 2000s, at a time in which a peculiar Cuban expressiontener feheld much currency in local parlance (see de la Fuente 2008;Palmié 2021;Weinreb 2009;Wig 2020). Literally meaning 'to have faith', the word fe was used as an acronym for familia en el extranjero, suggesting that the key to a good life in Cuba was to have 'family living abroad' who could send money, bring gifts, and so on (da la Fuente 2008: 714-15).…”