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A Record Made Under Pressure

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A Record Made Under Pressure

The written record of Lucumi practice was produced under conditions that shaped it. African religious practice in Cuba was restricted for long periods, first under Spanish colonial law and later under successive republican and revolutionary governments, and it was in places carried on partly out of sight.

That history is why the record looks the way it does. Knowledge was kept within houses and in handwritten notebooks rather than published. Practitioners had good reason to be selective with outsiders asking questions. Ethnographers arrived late and worked with elderly informants whose own teachers had been closer to the crossing. What survives in print is what particular people judged safe and appropriate to say, at a moment when neither of those was obvious.

A reference page should read the resulting gaps accordingly. A sign about which little has been published is not a sign about which little is known; it is a sign about which little was said to an outsider.

Eyeunle, the eight-mouth throw, is well attested as one of the sixteen parent signs and carries unusual standing in the literature. What is said of it in practice remains within initiated transmission, and this entry does not attempt to supply it.

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