Uploaded September 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.
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.
