La Regla De Ocha and Gendered Medicine

Part of my contribution to a final project for GWSS 3003 Politics of Sex at the University of Minnesota, taught by Pashmina Murthy, Fall Semester 2008. The project was a “zine” on the intersections of gender issues and medicine. :

La Regla De Ocha and Gendered Medicine

Although it is difficult enough to negotiate the intersections of religion, biomedicine, and gender on a nationalized scale to provide policies and advocate for reforms that can accommodate the inherent inequalities in the provider-patient relationship, one must also be careful to help advocate for those people who do not have the same access to biomedical care as might be presumed in activism at the center of society such as simply advocating for the right to birth control services. To make biomedicine a privileged etiology in its construction of treatment and prevention of disease or illness, and then extend that conceit as something that is accepted by the patient, threatens a marginalization of people and social groups with different approaches to overcoming the state of being unwell. To further assume that the ways that the inevitable negotiation of alternative, religious and gendered etiologies on the part of the medical practitioner will be accepted by the patient aggravates the situation.

One case of how certain influential discourses, that of the disciplinary police force of the United States and the sensationalist daily media, belittle and seek to limit the negotiation of etiologies by patients who wish to empower themselves in an epistemology that extends beyond the cause of illness to a religious worldview itself, comes from the practice of La Regla de Ocha, or Santería. An Afro-Cuban religion that has made its way stateside through Cuban immigration into the United States but extends beyond Cuban immigrant populations, La Regla de Ocha has a hybrid identity as being Afro-Cuban and Roman Catholic. This originally led anthropologists to describe the religion as a syncretic combination of the religion of the Yoruba people of Western Africa who were forcibly taken to Cuba as slaves and the Roman Catholicism of the colonizers, associating the religion with what they deemed to be other Afro-American “syncretizations” like Vodou.

Yet the term “syncretism” to describe the formation of the religion was misleading despite its continued usage. Forced by the Cuban colonizers to participate in cabildos or social groups created to enforce Roman Catholicism, the slaves negotiated their religious beliefs with Catholic symbolism by adopting some of the signs of Roman Catholicism—the images of Saints—as masking representations of their religion’s orisás, or deities. By adapting to the social situation and “signifying on” Roman Catholicism, the slaves undermined the symbology of the dominant culture by using its symbols for religious and ritualistic purposes unintended in the dominant culture.

Signifying (or signifyin’) is a term used by African-American studies researchers to explain slaves’ and black Americans’ slang use of English phrases, words, or phonemes to create new meanings outside of normative language. It has been proposed by some researchers as an alternative way to understand the use of Roman Catholic symbology by followers of La Regla de Ocha that is apart from the idea of syncretism. The idea of signifying better stresses that the intentions were to keep the concerns and practices of the Yoruba religion as the basis for La Regla de Ocha, and that in signifying on Roman Catholicism, its practitioners maintained their religion as a challenge to Catholic beliefs, not as a hegemonic acceptance and fusion of those beliefs into the religion.
Both the beliefs and the organization of La Regla de Ocha exist as a challenge to colonial Cuban culture and, moving across the border into the United States, certain hegemonic principles of the country into which the religion is displaced. The most obvious norms from which the religion deviates are that of Roman Catholicism or in general, Christianity, but there is also a challenge on the level of the language of the religion itself and its gender formations. La Regla de Ocha has no central organization, instead functioning as diffuse groups of devotees, santer(os/as) or priests, and babalaos or high priests. While gender- restrictive in only males can serve as babalaos, in La Regla de Ocha women and other-gendered individuals can serve as santeros, and their presence within this organizational structure helps maintain the religion as accessible to people who might be alienated by the construction of gender in other religious frames.

The idea of gender itself is more complex in Cuba than even male/female, straight/gay dichotomies can account for, and these terms often placed upon individuals by anthropological researchers from the north. Furthermore, La Regla de Ocha suggests a fluidity to gender constructions, since some masculine orisás became associated with female saints (and vice versa), and more importantly practitioners who take on orisás in possession trance rituals can cross masculine/feminine dichotomies such that female practitioners can take on masculine orisás (and vice versa). While this admittedly upholds a border between binaries of male and female that is passed through in such instances, the acceptance of such a passing by practitioners speaks to a less rigid gender construction and is more accommodating to queer identities. It is also difficult to know exactly the extent of gender fluidity in the religion from an outsider perspective—as will be discussed in more detail later, some of the strength of La Regla de Ocha comes from its inaccessibility by a larger colonial discourse—and researchers have had to remind each other in the past of their own heteronormative, North American assumptions when speaking of gender constructions within La Regla de Ocha.

In addition to the challenges that La Regla de Ocha presents to gender formations, the rituals performed by practitioners of La Regla de Ocha often serve to provide a different empirical methodology set apart from biomedicine. This alternative etiology can provide the meaning to illness or the state of being unwell for Cuban citizens without access to biomedical services and/or pharmaceutical care. While empirical in the sense that the religion tries to make sense of observed symptoms of illness, the methodology for which the religion produces etiological meaning and proscribes cure and preventative measure relies on some constructions of the self and produces meaning in ways that often put it at odds with biomedical thought.

In Cuba, La Regla de Ocha, the ontology of a self as a human experiencing life is constructed not simply on the individual level of a body but as a less obvious self encompassing a quotidian or non-ritualistic self that extends somewhat into ones social environment and never stands apart from social processes, as well as a divine self during possession rituals, another social self encompassing the practitioner and their interaction with the orisás. This dual selfhood stands in contrast to western medical thought as not a pathological condition but as a normative and sought- after ontology or state of being within La Regla de Ocha. As a consequence of the dual social selfhood, La Regla de Ocha often proscribes healing, curing and preventative measures that must account for a healing of social interactions between one individual and other human individuals as well as the human individual and the orisás.

In Cuba, anthropological research suggests that La Regla de Ocha exists in a more balanced equilibrium between the many fields that its practitioners negotiate, religious, gendered, and etiological. It is not uncommon for an initiate into La Regla de Ocha who has themselves recognized a symptom of illness or being unwell to seek out explanations and etiologies from various sources such as a santero, the Roman Catholic Church, and a biomedical doctor. While individuals may privilege one form of meaning over another, it is difficult to reduce and generalize as to which explanation will be most valued by those who seek out these multiple sources.

Instead of simply undermining and challenging the authority of each other in their various use of symbols and construction of the self or reasons for illness, La Regla de Ocha, Roman Catholicism, and biomedicine provide material for the individual to synthesize and thus create meaning from hybridizations of their prescriptive outcomes. This can be especially empowering for people when economic factors restrict access to biomedical services. When one cannot afford biomedical procedures or cures, such as the purchase of medication from pharmacies, La Regla de Ocha’s ritualistic practices and divination procedures often increase in importance in a practitioner’s etiological perspective.

At face value, even a cursory examination of how La Regla de Ocha functions in Cuba seems to frame it as a powerful religious and social practice that empowered disenfranchised slaves or has even worked its way into a normative religion accessible to much of Cuba’s population. A serious problem exists, however, in the way many people outside of Cuba, and specifically the United States, receive and construct information about the religion. The religion gained power and preserved itself partially through a skillful maintenance of its inaccessibility to colonial and Roman Catholic discourses. Thus there is a great danger that when one speaks or writes about members of the religion and its practices from an outsider perspective that one will produce meaning that maintains the large divide that the religion sought to preserve between an illusory understanding of the religion and its healing practices ontologically, or as they exist, versus a colonial understanding of the religion within a particular epistemology, or as an outsider method of knowing the religion tells itself what the religion is.

In the United States particularly, certain disciplinary and regulatory forces purposely enlarge this divide, and in the process discursively recolonize practitioners of La Regla de Ocha. Part of this comes from a normative construction of self from the police force. As part of a pragmatic approach to protection of citizens, the police force seeks incarceration as a cure to civil unwell by removing individual bodies from society. Thus, the police force seeks to regulate against and prohibit the function of a religion or religious practices that exist in opposition to a self as a recognizable and discrete unit definable outside of social interaction. Special cult task forces within police departments seek out and produce information about new and non-normative religious practices that places them in alterity from the legitimate citizens whom the police seek to protect, authorizing police action to disrupt the religious practices.

Often this is targeted at “saving” people within these religious practices who are seen as especially prone to exploitation because they cannot construct and maintain themselves as agents apart from or within cultural practices—usually women and children. Instead of truly advocating for these people, however, police action and discourse often reinforces normative constructions which many feminist, queer, Marxist, or any other oppositional thinkers and advocates are compelled to dexterously disrupt. They often rely on the idea of a charismatic leader, on whom the rest of the cult wholly depends, thus limiting their ability to perceive the political action members take within the group.

Furthermore, because the idea of a charismatic leader often searches for a man to focus on as the head of the cult, police reduce their ability to protect subjects within the group to efforts to simply subjects on the other side of a heteronormative binary. Even to those who do not identify with these oppositional groups, for instance the police force itself, such uncritical action undermines the intentions to help those that they intend to serve and instead functions to create and preserve a discipline that maintains the position of these groups as low and illegitimate.

Often the police force works in tandem with popular media in a sensationalization of individuals within alternative religious practices such as La Regla de Ocha, or Santería as reports on the religion in the United States typically name the practices. To sensationalize the religion serves an easy way to create news without discussing the complexities of social interaction in our cities, and it adds to enforcement and discipline    of    national    normative constructions of social interaction and meanings. This reinforces the legitimacy of discourses such as biomedicine, and can make it thus much more difficult for practitioners of Santería to negotiate etiologies between intersecting systems of meaning in their lives.

Thus, it is important for one to challenge any sensationalized stories about “Santería,” and other religious practices outside of those accepted by media sources, such as news articles that exoticize a practitioner’s use of animal sacrifice in ritual practice, in an effort to force a renegotiation of how we understand these religions and to build dialogues between communities to help preserve agency and the ability to negotiate between religion, gender, and biomedical practice. The word “cult,” which is often applied to practice of La Regla de Ocha in the United States, should be fought against as a useful short-hand for understanding religious practices, or work should be done to remove some of the stigma and generalizations that its use provokes.

This is true even when the results of religious practice seem horrific, as in the case of the People’s Temple in Jonestown, Guyana an event which sparked much of the interest in and usage of the term “cult.” For while it can be agreed that the deaths that arose in part as a consequence of attempts made by a religious group to organize, outsider understanding and subsequent action against those who support these practices can often be just as damning to the desire to “help” them. It allows outsiders to operate under the pretense of magnanimity without sharing in the responsibility for the results of actions taken against or on behalf of these groups.

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[Bibliography and Suggested Reading about] La Regla De Ocha
Arguelles, Lourdes, and B. Ruby Rich. “Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward and Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience. Part I.” Signs 9(1984): 683-699.
Birn, Anne-Emmanuelle. “Healers, Healing and Child Well-Being: Ideologies, Institutions and Health in Latin America and the Caribbean.” Latin American Research Review 40(2005): 176-192.
Cardoza-Orlandi, Carlos F. “Vodou, Spiritism, and Santería: Hybridity and Identity in Caribbean Religions.”Encyclopedia of Women and Religion in North America. Indiana University Press, 2006.
Lancaster, Roger N. “Comment on Arguelles and Rich’s ‘Homosexuality, Homophobia, and Revolution: Notes toward and Understanding of the Cuban Lesbian and Gay Male Experience. Part II.” Signs 12(1986): 188-192.
Lefever, Harry G. “When the Saints Go Riding in: Santería in Cuba and the United States.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 35(1996): 318-330.
Maaga, Mary McCormick. Hearing the voices of Jonestown. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1998. (not on La Regla de Ocha, but an interesting look into the gendered political dynamics of the People’s Temple)
Olesesn, Virginia. “Confluences in Social Change: Cuban Women and Health Care.” Journal of interamerican Studies and World Affairs 17(1975): 398-410.
Pérez Y Mena, Andrés I. “Cuban Santería, Haitian Vodun, Puerto Rican Spiritualism: A Multiculturalist Inquiry into Syncretism.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 37 (1998): 15-27.
Somerville, Erica. Santeria. <http://science.gcc.edu/reli/kemeny/> (Recommended for those interested in further inquiry into the subject; an exhaustive bibliography, extending beyond our own research, prepared for her course at Grove City College, PA).
Wedel, Johan. Santería Healing: A Journey into the Afro-Cuban World of Divinities, Spirits, and Sorcery. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003.
Wirtz, Kristina. “How diasporic religious communities remember: Learning to speak the “tongue of the oricha” in Cuban Santería.” American Ethnologist 34(2007): 108-126.
Wirtz, Kristina. Ritual, Discourse, and Community in Cuban Santería. Florida: University Press of Florida, 2007.
Young, Serenity. Encyclopedia of Women and World Religion. Macmillan Library Reference, 1999.

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