Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The ajiaco in Cuba and beyond

2014; HAU-N.E.T; Volume: 4; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.14318/hau4.3.031a

2575-1433

João Felipe Gonçalves,

Latin American and Latino Studies

Previous articleNext article FreeThe ajiaco in Cuba and beyond Preface to "The human factors of cubanidad" by Fernando OrtizJoão Felipe GONÇALVESJoão Felipe GONÇALVESTulane University Search for more articles by this author Tulane UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull TextEPUBMOBI Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreLatin American anthropology, in its early developments, had a clear nationalist mission. Instead of focusing on faraway cultures and societies, as did their Western European and North American counterparts, nineteenth- and twentieth-century Latin American anthropologists concentrated their efforts on interpreting their own nations. Although the degree to which this happened varied in different countries, Latin American anthropologists played a key role in articulating national(ist) imaginaries, and their ideas have been disseminated through textbooks, rituals, museums, monuments, and popular culture. It is revealing that the discipline obtained its largest and most robust infrastructure precisely in those two countries—Mexico and Brazil—where it has been most influential in the production of nationhood. Although this situation has changed considerably in the last few decades—again, in different degrees across the region—Latin America has long produced what Claudio Lomnitz (2001: 228) has called "national anthropologies," that is, "anthropological traditions that have been fostered by educational and cultural institutions for the development of studies of their own nation."One could thus think that, while Euro-American anthropologies traditionally have been concerned with "the other," Latin American anthropologists have been mostly interested in "the self "—that is, the self of that imagined community that they helped construct. But the recursive character of the distinction between the other and the self is no secret, and much of classic Latin American anthropology has studied those domestic others—the oppressed and marginalized ethnic and racial groups that today we like to call subaltern—that were supposed to best represent the authentic national self. This has earned Latin American anthropologists some criticism, according to which these mostly white middle- or upper-class urban intellectuals contributed to the exoticization and exploitation of the groups they studied (e.g. Golte 1980). This indictment, however, is unfairly one-sided. As public intellectuals, anthropologists in the region have been active participants in the struggle for social justice and for the rights of indigenous peoples, Afro-descendants, and lower classes. They have been doing this not only in their scholarly texts, but also in the public sphere and in the political arena: in social movements and governmental organizations, in newspapers and television shows, in law courts and constitutional assemblies (see Poole 2008).Throughout the twentieth century, the public mission of Latin American anthropologists has led to a complex relationship between their scholarship and the ideologies of racial and cultural hybridity that have characterized many national imaginations in the region (see de la Cadena 2000; Miller 2004). Such ideologies envision national cultures as the result of racial and cultural admixture between European, African, Amerindian and, to a lesser extent, Asian elements. This process is often referred to by the Spanish term mestizaje, derived from mestizo, whose original meaning refers to a person of mixed race, but is also applied as an adjective to things of mixed cultural background. Since the 1950s, many Latin American anthropologists have simply avoided or harshly criticized such ideologies, denouncing their empirical and political limitations. However, like other intellectuals—historians, pedagogues, journalists, visual artists, novelists, and poets—anthropologists have sometimes participated in the formulation of mestizaje nationalisms. The two most influential cases were those of Gilberto Freyre (1900–87) in Brazil and Fernando Ortiz (1881–1969) in Cuba, the founders of modern sociocultural anthropology in those countries.1The text that follows is a translation of one of the most original and sophisticated conceptualizations of mestizaje by a Latin American anthropologist and public intellectual. Fernando Ortiz first delivered "Los factores humanos de la cubanidad" as a lecture at the University of Havana in 1939, and published it in the following year in the journal he edited, Revista Bimestre Cubana. He was given the topic of the talk—"the human factors of Cubanness"—by the fraternity that invited him to speak, which indicates the public interest in an anthropologist's expertise in characterizing national culture. But his very words in the lecture, as well as his larger trajectory, show that defining Cuban culture was for Ortiz himself an existential mission, a life-long project with clear political concerns. The lecture that Hau is now publishing also summarizes Ortiz's view that one could only understand Cuban culture by seeing it as a "mestizaje of races, mestizaje of cultures" and by examining the various cultural elements that composed it. The text is thus a classic example of a Latin American anthropologist participating in the public imagination of nationhood based on a view of mestizaje.This context is critical to understanding "The human factors of cubanidad." But we have not chosen to translate it into English only as a historical example of a style of "peripheral" anthropology. For most non-specialists, the relevance of this text may lie in the extent to which it escapes its original nationalist goals and offers a unique understanding of mestizaje radically different from other views that are better known in the English-speaking world. By using the culinary metaphor of the ajiaco (a typical Cuban stew made of several elements), by defining Cubanness as a process rather than an essence, and by distinguishing between Cuban culture and identity, Ortiz's conceptualization of cultural mixture may shed new light on processes occurring elsewhere, as demonstrated in a recent work by Stephan Palmié (2013). Before explaining this in more detail, I will offer a brief overview of Fernando Ortiz's life and work.It is often observed that many nationalist Latin American intellectuals and artists were educated in Western Europe and the United States and used the knowledge acquired there to interpret their own nations. This typically refers to their higher education, but the case of Fernando Ortiz was more extreme: born in Havana in 1881, he was mainly raised in the Spanish island of Minorca, where his family moved the following year. After a short period in Havana in his adolescence, Ortiz went back to Spain, this time to Madrid and then Barcelona, where he obtained respectively a bachelor's and a doctor's degree in Law. The years of his youth were politically turbulent in Cuba. As a teenager in Havana, Ortiz saw the country's last war of independence, which ended in 1898 with the American intervention in what became known outside the island as the Spanish-American War. After four years of American occupation, Cuba was granted formal independence in 1902. That same year, a recently graduated Ortiz became a diplomat of the new nation, representing it in Spain, France, and Italy.2Fernando Ortiz only settled permanently in Cuba in 1905, at the age of twenty-four. He then launched an extremely productive career as a writer, lawyer, public prosecutor, criminologist, and politician. It was Ortiz's criminological interests that first led him to anthropological research. The racist notions that prevailed in Cuba at that time linked several criminal activities to witchcraft of supposed African origin, and this was the topic of his first book, Los negros brujos, published in 1906. Under the influence of Cesare Lombroso—with whom he had presumably taken classes during his diplomatic stay in Genoa and who wrote the preface to the book—Ortiz attributed crime and witchcraft to biological factors. During the following ten years he wrote several monographs on what he called "Afro-Cuban" topics: folklore, religion, slavery, rebellions, and language. In these books, partly influenced by the work of Oswald Spengler, he gradually abandoned his initial racialist perspective and adopted a more sociological and cultural approach, and by the 1920s he had become an outspoken opponent of Cuban racism.In the first three decades of the century, Ortiz also wrote articles and delivered speeches on Cuban politics, in which he denounced several problems of the early republic and proposed solutions, especially to the economic dependency on sugar and to the endemic corruption that made political office-holding one of the most profitable activities in the country. He also criticized the control the United States exerted over Cuba's economy and politics, and he called for a reform of the terms of Cuba's relations with its northern neighbor. Already a prominent public intellectual and a professor of public law at the University of Havana, Ortiz also engaged in formal politics as a member of the Liberal Party. He was elected to the House of Representatives in 1917 and stayed there until he resigned ten years later.The presidency of Gerardo Machado (1925–1933) marked the end of Ortiz's involvement in formal politics. Running on a reformist platform that included the diversification of the Cuban economy and the end of the Platt Amendment (a provision that permitted American intervention in Cuban politics), Machado not only fell short on his promises, but also became a ruthless dictator who violently repressed any opposition and protected American interests in the island. Like most liberal intellectuals, Ortiz had strongly supported Machado at first, but he joined the opposition in 1927. Eventually forced into exile in 1931, he continued to attack Machado from Washington, DC, until the fall of the dictator in 1933. Although he advised the short-lived revolutionary government that was then established, he soon became disillusioned and skeptical about formal politics and from then on dedicated all his efforts to intellectual pursuits.Between 1934 and 1940 Fernando Ortiz published no book-length monographs, but, as fascism grew in Europe, he intensified his attacks on racism in Cuba through public lectures and articles in the press. In this period Ortiz was involved in intense research and in the rethinking of Cuban culture, which in 1940 resulted in the publication of what would become his most influential work: Cuban counterpoint: Tobacco and sugar (the first English translation published in 1947). This book used baroque prose to interpret Cuba's history and culture by comparing the island's two most important agricultural products, considering everything from their physical aspects as plants to the different forms of their consumption and their effects on human bodies. Against an intellectual tradition that, since the late eighteenth century, had linked Cuban pride to the production and export of sugar, Ortiz praised the tobacco industry for having fostered the most progressive—even revolutionary—factors in Cuban politics and for being based traditionally on small properties, national land ownership, and free labor. He contrasted this to the sugar economy, which he depicted as having a lasting conservative effect on the country due to its association with large estates, foreign capital, slavery, and the intense exploitation of labor.1940 was a turning point in Ortiz's career. The two main pieces that he published that year—Cuban counterpoint and "The human factors of cubanidad"—exemplify how his political concerns for Cuba from then on were expressed through anthropological writing rather than in formal political involvement. That year was a turning point for Cuban history as well. It saw the promulgation of a new Constitution, widely celebrated for its social-democratic character and the hopes it brought to different social groups. But the experience with representative democracy that followed was plagued with corruption scandals and political violence, and ended with Fulgencio Batista's coup d'état in 1952. Fernando Ortiz's relative silence about formal politics—except for brief statements in interviews and press articles— remained during Batista's dictatorship (1952–58) and the ten years of Fidel Castro's government that he lived to see.It was clear that Ortiz's political battles had shifted to the field of cultural production, in which he worked ceaselessly during the last three decades of his life. In this period he published several long volumes on Cuban history and Afro-Cuban issues (especially music and dance), besides a book and several articles analyzing and attacking the continued existence of racism in the country. What is more, he left a vast collection of research notes and incomplete manuscripts, which are still being edited and published by the indefatigable staff of the Fundación Fernando Ortiz, Cuba's main institution of anthropological research. Created in 1995 by the writer Miguel Barnet, the Foundation most recently published Ortiz's (2008) manuscript about the cult of Cuba's patron saint, remarkably edited by José Matos Arévalos. I was in Havana at the time of the release of this book, which was widely publicized in mass media. I was impressed by the impact the new book had on the city's non-specialist reading public, who enthusiastically bought all available copies and avidly read and discussed it in the following months.This should come as no surprise, given Fernando Ortiz's impact on Cuban intellectual life throughout the twentieth century. Besides his activities as a researcher and public intellectual, Ortiz was a real institution builder. In 1907 he joined the Sociedad Económica de Amigos del País, a learned society that since the late eighteenth century had dedicated itself to the mission of promoting the study of Cuba's economy, society, and culture. As its president between 1923 and 1959 (when it was closed by the revolutionary government), Ortiz gave the Sociedad a new impetus as a sort of national modernist think-tank. During those years he also edited the institution's Revista Bimestre Cubana, a journal that he turned into one of the main forums for twentieth-century Cuban intelligentsia. Among the important institutions he created were the Sociedad de Folklore Cubano, an association of folklore studies (1923); the Institución Hispanocubana de Cultura, a cultural association of exchange with the Spanish modernist vanguards (1926); the Panamerican Institute of Geography (1928); and the Alianza Cubana por un Mundo Libre (1941), an anti-fascist organization.But it was mainly in the field of Afro-Cuban studies—a field of his own founding—that Ortiz left his indelible mark on Cuban intellectual life. Having coined and disseminated the term "Afro-Cuban," in 1937 he created the Sociedad de Estudios Afrocubanos, a scholarly association dedicated to the field (see Bronfman 2004). The several journals he founded and edited along his life were also important venues for the publication of Afro-Cuban studies. Ortiz was also closely related to Cuba's most important visual artists and writers, and had a strong impact on the artistic milieu of his time. His work was especially influential on afronegrismo, an artistic movement of the 1920s and 1930s that celebrated Cuba's mestizo heritage and used Afro-Cuban motifs in poetry, novels, music, dance, and visual arts (see Kutzinski 1993, de la Fuente 2001). For all these reasons, Cuban intellectual Juan Marinello called Ortiz, following his death, "the third discoverer of Cuba"—after Christopher Columbus and Alexander von Humboldt (who visited and wrote about the country in the nineteenth century)—an epithet by which he is still widely known in Cuba today.Outside his native island, Fernando Ortiz became better known for creating the concept of "transculturation," which he introduced in Cuban counterpoint. He proposed it as an alternative to the idea of acculturation, which he criticized for supposing that in the encounter between two societies one of them would simply lose its culture and adopt that of the other. This was fundamentally wrong, according to Ortiz, because the process of cultural contact and change never moves in one direction only. Rather, all cultures in contact transform each other and create a new culture, different from the original ones. He gave this process a central role in the interpretation of his own country: "the real history of Cuba is the history of its intermeshed transculturations" (1995: 98). Nowhere else, he claimed, did transculturations happen so quickly and powerfully, and nowhere else did they bring so many diverse traditions together. From this angle, then, this concept can be read as a particular instantiation of the visions of cultural hybridity that for so many Latin American intellectuals defined their nations.However, unlike other Latin American thinkers who saw hybridity as something specific to their nations only, that which made them unique, Ortiz also attributed a theoretical value to the concept of transculturation. He first introduced it to "suggest that it might be adopted in sociological terminology" (1995: 97), and not only in the study of Cuba. He defended it in general terms: "the word 'transculturation' better expresses the different phases of the process of transition from one culture to another because this does not consist merely in acquiring another culture" (ibid.: 102). Although it was most radical and evident in Cuba, Ortiz argued, transculturation happens "among all peoples" (ibid.: 98). That he saw a potential for his concept beyond Cuba is also suggested by the fact that it was at the center of the exchange he entertained with Bronislaw Malinowski, both in person and by correspondence (see Coronil 1995, 2005, and Santí 2002). At Ortiz's invitation, Malinowski wrote the preface to the original edition of Cuban counterpoint, giving his endorsement to the idea of transculturation. And Ortiz (1995: 103) himself reminded the reader, in the body of the book, of this "eminent sponsorship" of his concept! What is more, according to Enrico Mario Santí (2002: 52–53), Ortiz had an English translation in mind and modified the structure of his book following Malinowski's comments on the expectations of an English-reading public. All this points to the fact that Ortiz gave a properly theoretical value to "transculturation." This concept, for him, both defined Cubanness and had a general validity for all cultures—a form of ethnographic theory. It was the element of human history that Cuba revealed to the world, or, to play with the title of the lecture translated here, it was one of the Cuban factors of humanity.The generalizing ambition of the concept of transculturation contrasts starkly to the nationalist goals and content of "The human factors of cubanidad," published in the same year as Cuban counterpoint. In this lecture, Fernando Ortiz talks to a young Cuban audience whom he addresses as compatriots and among whom he wants to instill a sense of urgency to understand national culture—"your lives depend on it" are his concluding words. Nationalistic deictics—like "we" to designate Cubans and "here" to designate Cuba—abound in the piece, whereas the word transculturation does not appear at all. The contrast between the book and the lecture is even more evident if one considers that Ortiz uses several sentences in both texts, word for word, in the passages that describe the traumatic uprooting of the groups that came to Cuba and their violent contacts on the island. In the lecture, his concern is to define cubanidad—"the specific quality of a culture, the culture of Cuba"—and distinguish it from cubanía, a neologism by which he means "a cubanidad that is full, felt, conscious, and desired." Although both terms could be translated as "Cubanness," the distinction—analogous to that between "culture" and "identity"—is fundamental to Ortiz's argument. In his view, one could have cubanidad without having cubanía, that is, one could be Cuban without identifying oneself with the nation.He also argues that this identification emerged first among the most oppressed and marginalized Cubans, that is, among Blacks and poor Whites. In his words, "cubanía did not rain from above; it sprouted from below." At first this might remind one of the idea, common in many national(ist) imaginaries in Latin America and beyond, that the authentic essence of nationhood is to be found among the subaltern—peasants, women, indigenous peoples, etc. However, Ortiz is not arguing that underprivileged Cubans are more authentically Cuban than others, but only that they have felt themselves Cuban earlier than others. That is, his point is not about culture and synchronic essence, but about identification and diachronic precedence. If populist nationalisms tend to silence those who are represented as the heart of nationhood (Chatterjee 1993, Lomnitz 2001), Ortiz stresses the consciousness and agency of the oppressed in the emergence of a national identification.But the centerpiece of "The human factors of cubanidad" lies in the culinary metaphor it uses to describe cubanidad—the ajiaco. This dish, Ortiz says, is "our most typical and most complex stew, made of various sorts of legumes, which here we call viandas, and of pieces of assorted meats. All of this is cooked with boiling water until it gives off a very thick and succulent broth." Likewise, he argues, Cuban mestizo culture is composed of multifarious cultural ingredients—mainly European and African, but also Asian, North American, and Amerindian—that blend to different degrees. These cultural ingredients are found in a myriad of gradations between the initial state in which they entered Cuba and the state of total dissolution into that thick broth. To quote the author again, Cuban culture is "a heterogeneous conglomerate of diverse races and cultures, of many meats and crops, that stir up, mix with each other, and disintegrate into one single social bubbling."The ajiaco metaphor powerfully subverts an image that is found in several nationalistic discourses across the globe: that of "roots." Nationalists often describe their purported ethnic origins as "roots" and claim that the "roots" of their imagined communities connect them to their territories. Ortiz in this lecture is doing precisely the opposite. He emphasizes that no one can claim roots in Cuba—not even indigenous peoples, who also came from somewhere else (no one has ever found the Garden of Eden, he reminds us!) and are mostly vanished anyway. This lack of roots is the message of the various vegetable metaphors that Ortiz uses throughout the text: Spaniards can aspire at most to be Cuba's "cultural trunk"; but, like Africans and everyone else, they were "uprooted and transplanted," "but never well-sowed in the island." The only roots that Cubans can claim are real roots are the delicious roots that go into the ajiaco. Literary critic Gustavo Pérez Firmat (1994: 16) incisively comments on the consequences of Ortiz's images: We Cubans have a peculiar relation to our roots: we eat them. What is the ajiaco if not a root roast, a kind of funeral pyrex? You take your favorite aboriginal roots—malanga, ñame, yuca, boniato—and you cook them until they are soft and savory. In keeping with your roots' roots, you might even cook them in a hole in the ground. But then you consume them. You don't freeze them. You don't preserve them. You don't put them in a root museum.This passage points out that, by replacing metaphorical roots by real ones that are mixed in a stew, Fernando Ortiz creates a de-essentialized view of culture and hybridity. If Cuban culture is an ajiaco, it cannot be ossified into exhibitions or petrified in landmarks; it is to be consumed in its constant flow. This is perhaps why—in contrast to the telluric preferences of other nationalists—Ortiz uses plenty of hydraulic metaphors. In his text, people come to Cuba in "exogenous streams" and "abundant migratory flows"; "the torrent of the slave trade" was replaced by "rivulets of immigrant labor"; American civilization is a "very powerful Niagara" that brings "streams that drag us but also elevate us to their froth"; and Cuban history is full of "waves, whirlpools, bends, rapids, and quagmires." In sum, cubanidad is a "vital concept of constant flow." After all, it is into water that Cuban roots are thrown in order to be cooked and eaten. If a real ajiaco is full of roots, "The human factors of cubanidad" reads as a textual ajiaco of metaphoric uprooting and water.Of course, the water held by a pot could also become a problem for a conception of a culture in flow. When the ajiaco's water dissolves all the ingredients that are thrown into it, it risks becoming a placid homogenous broth. Fernando Ortiz recognizes this tendency towards cultural homogenization, but he insists that people keep getting in and out of Cuba and therefore new cultural ingredients never stop entering the stew. The ajiaco serves as a good metaphor precisely because it is constantly cooking and is never ready: yesterday's ajiaco always takes whatever new ingredients are available today, and the boiling and mixture never stops. This is important because Ortiz locates cubanidad both in the temporary end-results and in the process of mixture: "One might think that it is necessary to search for cubanidad in this sauce of new and synthetic succulence, formed by the fusion of the human lineages dissolved in Cuba. But no. Cubanidad is not only in the result, but also in the complex process of its very formation, disintegrative and integrative." That is, in Ortiz's lecture cultural mixture appears as an endless process of transformation. The image of cultural cooking recovers the idea of process that the term "mestizaje" originally expressed and that had been lost somewhere in the long history of its repeated use.But Ortiz denied the ajiaco the theoretical value that he gave to "transculturation." "The human factors of cubanidad" frames that metaphor only as a tool to interpret Cuba and does not suggest that it could help understand other contexts. Accordingly, whereas the first English translation of Cuban counterpoint came out in 1947, it is only now, in 2014, that an English translation of the lecture is being published. Perhaps Ortiz thought that a sociological concept was more apt for generalizations than a culinary metaphor. But fortunately, the anthropologist Stephan Palmié has recently done for the ajiaco metaphor what Ortiz failed to do—to show its theoretical value far beyond the nationalist goals of the text in which it first appeared. Palmié (2013: 101) tells us: Once we choose the ajiaco as a metaphor circumscribing our perspective, the world of clearcut units is lost to us. Inside the olla cubana [Cuban pot] Africa, America and Europe can no longer be disentangled. There are, at best, unstable gradations by which one mutates into the other, and this process of refraction, decomposition, and its corresponding movement of recomposition and autopoiesis generates a potentially infinite series of possible perceptions of difference. What we face is nothing short of a meltdown of the pluralistic epistemic infrastructure guaranteeing a good deal of the anthropological project, as traditionally conceived. The ethnographic interface has expanded into a total, and thoroughly totalizing, social phenomenon, with little, if anything, clearly discernible on either side. The ajiaco, in other words, circumscribes a fractal pattern. History cooks us all.Thus, if decades ago a Polish anthropologist awkwardly tried to fit Ortiz's concept of transculturation in his own functionalist framework, today a German anthropologist successfully establishes a fruitful connection between Ortiz's ajiaco metaphor and recent anthropological theorizations. Palmié makes it clear that Ortiz's ajiaco can not only help us understand Cuba and the Afro-Americas, but also points to a rich way out of anthropology's old vision of discrete cultural entities. I don't want to suggest that the ajiaco metaphor is another "gift that Cuba gave to universal culture," another Cuban factor of humanity—as Ortiz thought of hammocks, tobacco, and transculturation—but I do hope that, like Palmié, the readers of this translation find the ajiaco useful to think when considering cultural processes the world over. Indeed, ethnographic theory can sometimes serve us best when it is real food for thought.ReferencesJossianna Arroyo. 2003. Travestismos culturales: Literatura y etnografía en Cuba y Brasil. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarAlejandra Bronfman. 2004. Social science, citizenship, and race in Cuba, 1902–1940. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarPartha Chatterjee. 1993. The nation and its fragments: Colonial and postcolonial histories. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFernando Coronil. 1995. "Introduction to the Duke University Press edition. Transcul turation and the politics of theory: Countering the center." In Cuban counterpoint, by Fernando Ortiz, ix–lvi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFernando Coronil. 2005. "Transcultural anthropology in the Américas (with an accent): The uses of Fernando Ortiz." In Cuban counterpoints, edited by Mauricio Font, Alfonso Quiroz. 139–156. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMarisol de la Cadena. 2000. Indigenous mestizos: The politics of race and culture in Cuzco, Peru, 1919–1991. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarAlejandro de la Fuente. 2001. A nation for all: Race, inequality, and politics in twentieth-century Cuba. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMauricio Font, Quiroz Alfonso 2005. Cuban counterpoints: The legacy of Fernando Ortiz. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarAriceli García-Carranza, Suárez Suárez Norma, Alberto Quesada Morales. 1998. Cronología Fernando Ortiz. Havana: Fundación Fernando Ortiz.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarJürgen Golte. 1980. "Latin America: The anthropology of conquest." In Anthropology: Ancestors and Heirs, edited by Stanley Diamond, 377–394. New York: Moulton Publishers.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarVera Kutzinski. 1993. Sugar secrets: Race and the erotics of Cuban nationalism. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarClaudio Lomnitz. 2001. Deep Mexico, silent Mexico: An anthropology of nationalism. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarJosé Matos Arévalos. 1999. La historia en Fernando Ortiz. Havana: Fundación Fernando Ortiz.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarAlfredo César Melo. 2007. "A face de Janus no ensaísmo latino-americano." Chasqui 36:1, 121–132.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarMarilyn Miller. 2004. Rise and fall of the cosmic race: The cult of mestizaje in Latin America. Austin: University of Texas Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFernando Ortiz. 1940. "Los factores humanos de la cubanidad." Revista Bimestre Cubana XLV, 161–186.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFernando Ortiz. (1940) 1995. Cuban counterpoint: Tobacco and sugar. Translated by Harriet de Onís. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFernando Ortiz. (1940) 2002. Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y el azúcar. Edited by Enrico Mario Santí. Madrid: Letras Hispánicas.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarFernando Ortiz. 2008. La Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre: Historia y etnografía. Edited by José Matos Arévalos. Havana: Fundación Fernando Ortiz.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarStephan Palmié. 2013. The cooking of history: How not to study Afro-Cuban religion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarGustavo Pérez Firmat. 1994. Life on the hyphen: The Cuban-American way. Austin: University of Texas Press.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarDeborah Poole 2008. A companion to Latin American anthropology. Oxford: Blackwell.First citation in articleGoogle ScholarEnrico Mario Santí. 2002. "Introducción. Fernando Ortiz: Contrapunteo y transculturación," in Contrapunteo cubano del tabaco y al azúcar, by Fernando Ortiz, 23–119. Madrid: Letras Hispánicas.First citation in articleGoogle Scholar Notes 1. Arroyo (2003) and Melo (2007) offer excellent comparisons between these two authors. That Arroyo and Melo are literary scholars indicates that the writings of both Freyre and Ortiz have a major literary value, and both are widely acknowledged as important and innovative writers in their languages.2. This brief biographical sketch of Fernando Ortiz is based on several secondary sources: Coronil 1995; García-Carranza, Suárez Suárez, and Quesada Morales 1998; Matos Arévalos 1999; Santí 2002; Font and Quiroz 2005.João Felipe Gonçalves received his PhD in anthropology from the University of Chicago and is currently an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University and a Research Fellow at the University of São Paulo. His work focuses on Cuba and its diaspora, nationalism, urban space and place, and the production of history.Gregory Duff Morton is a graduate student in anthropology and social work at the University of Chicago. He studies labor, the external quality of value, and welfare money in rural Northeastern Brazil.João Felipe GONÇALVES Department of Anthropology101 Dinwiddie Hall Tulane University6823 St. Charles Avenue New Orleans, LA 70118[email protected]edu Department of Anthropology University of Chicago1126 E 59th Street Chicago, IL 60637[email protected]edu Previous articleNext article DetailsFiguresReferencesCited by HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory Volume 4, Number 3Winter 2014 Published on behalf of the Society for Ethnographic Theory Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.14318/hau4.3.031a This work is licensed under the Creative Commons | © João Felipe Gonçalves. 2014.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Jeffrey S. Kahn Border dialectics and the border multiple: A view from the northern Caribbean, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11, no.11 (Jun 2021): 67–84.https://doi.org/10.1086/713630Stephan Palmié Caribbean and Mediterranean counterpoints and transculturations, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11, no.11 (Jun 2021): 7–32.https://doi.org/10.1086/714237Luiz Costa, Raminder Kaur, Andrew B. Kipnis, and Mariane C. Ferme Ethnographic stews: Decennial reflections, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory 11, no.11 (Jun 2021): 1–6.https://doi.org/10.1086/714382