Uploaded August 2024 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
This lecture takes the 70th anniversary of the publication of Lydia Cabrera’s magnum opus El monte, and its first English translation as an occasion to reflect on the perplexing nature of Cabrera’s text. Cabrera was one of the most prolific ethnographers of the African derived ritual traditions of Cuba that she observed between the 1930s and 1950s. Not unlike American salvage ethnography at the time, El monte thrives on the trope of vanishing traditional authenticity. Yet the result was and still is a thoroughly undisciplined hybrid text, a multi-voiced modernist literary experiment. As such, El monte has been a permanent source of frustration for anthropologists fighting an uphill battle in aiming to extract ethnographic data from it. The book has received rather more attention from literary scholars who, in often equally reductive fashion, tend to focus on Cabrera’s gender and sexual orientation. Palmié's argument is that Font-Navarrete’s careful translation and annotation of El monte – a reappropriation for twenty-first century audiences of both scholars and practitioners – should give us reason to rethink our own ethnographic and authorial practices.
Stephan Palmié (Dr. Phil, University of Munich 1989; Habilitation, University of Munich 1999) is the Edna and Norman Freehling Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion (1991), Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002), The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion (2013), and Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Praxis – and Vice Versa (2023) as well as the editor of several volumes on Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic anthropology and history.
The Knight Foundation Art + Research Center (A+RC) is the museum’s research department and graduate-level initiative dedicated to fostering a more robust and critical dialogue in the South Florida region and beyond.
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This lecture takes the 70th anniversary of the publication of Lydia Cabrera’s magnum opus El monte, and its first English translation as an occasion to reflect on the perplexing nature of Cabrera’s text. Cabrera was one of the most prolific ethnographers of the African derived ritual traditions of Cuba that she observed between the 1930s and 1950s. Not unlike American salvage ethnography at the time, El monte thrives on the trope of vanishing traditional authenticity. Yet the result was and still is a thoroughly undisciplined hybrid text, a multi-voiced modernist literary experiment. As such, El monte has been a permanent source of frustration for anthropologists fighting an uphill battle in aiming to extract ethnographic data from it. The book has received rather more attention from literary scholars who, in often equally reductive fashion, tend to focus on Cabrera’s gender and sexual orientation. Palmié's argument is that Font-Navarrete’s careful translation and annotation of El monte – a reappropriation for twenty-first century audiences of both scholars and practitioners – should give us reason to rethink our own ethnographic and authorial practices.
Stephan Palmié (Dr. Phil, University of Munich 1989; Habilitation, University of Munich 1999) is the Edna and Norman Freehling Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago. He is the author of Das Exil der Götter: Geschichte und Vorstellungswelt einer afrokubanischen Religion (1991), Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition (2002), The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion (2013), and Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Praxis – and Vice Versa (2023) as well as the editor of several volumes on Caribbean and Afro-Atlantic anthropology and history.
The Knight Foundation Art + Research Center (A+RC) is the museum’s research department and graduate-level initiative dedicated to fostering a more robust and critical dialogue in the South Florida region and beyond.
Stay connected: icamia.org/subscribe
Plan your visit: icamia.org/visit
Watch more on ICA Channel: icamia.org/channel
Membership means more at ICA Miami. Join today for expanded access to a world of innovative art and ideas: icamia.org/support
#icamiami
