From the margins in: what an Afro-Cuban/Neopagan religious group can tell us about spiritual seeking in the United States

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article analyzes a religious space at the intersection of Afro-Cuban and Neopagan religions. It uses current methodological tools to study ‘spirituality’ – genealogy, sites of production, and effect on selfhood in modern life – to analyse an Afro-Cuban/Neopagan religious group on the northside of Chicago in the late twentieth century. I argue that in the practice of Afro-Cuban religion, what motivates Cuban Americans in south Florida overlaps with what motivates Anglo ‘Americans’ in Chicago in one significant aspect, ‘ontological reconstruction’. Two things are distinct about this analysis: the intersection of a historically established religion, Lucumí (aka Santería), with that of the epistemologically elusive Neopagan movement; and the significant parallels between an unmarked white religious context and that of Black Nationalists occurring roughly a decade earlier. This article reveals a common interest in ontological reconstruction in the multiethnic US.