Efficacy of Sound: Power, Potency, and Promise in the Translocal Ritual Music of Cuban Ifa-Orisa (Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology)

The first book-length ethnographic study on music and Ifa divination in Cuba and Nigeria. Hailing from Cuba, Nigeria, and various sites across Latin America and the Caribbean, Ifa missionary-practitioners are transforming the landscape of Ifa divination and deity (orisa/oricha) worship through transatlantic travel and reconnection. In Cuba, where Ifa and Santeria emerged as an interrelated, Yoruba-inspired ritual complex, worshippers are driven to “African traditionalism” by its promise of efficacy: they find Yoruba approaches more powerful, potent, and efficacious. In the first book-length study on music and Ifa, Ruthie Meadows draws on extensive, multisited fieldwork in Cuba and Yorubaland, Nigeria, to examine the controversial “Nigerian-style” ritual movement in Cuban Ifa divination. Meadows uses feminist and queer of color theory along with critical studies of Africanity to excavate the relation between utility and affect within translocal ritual music circulations. Meadows traces how translocal Ifa priestesses (iyanifa), female bata drummers (bataleras), and priests (babalawo) harness Yoruba-centric approaches to ritual music and sound to heighten efficacy, achieve desired ritual outcomes, and reshape the conditions of their lives. Within a contentious religious landscape marked by the idiosyncrasies of revolutionary state policy, Nigerian-style Ifa-Orisa is leveraged to transform femininity and masculinity, state religious policy, and transatlantic ritual authority on the island.