La Habana Bruja. Urbananthropology, ritual interaction and ´Periodo Especial´ transformations in the San Isidro neighborhood of La habana Vieja, Cuba

My study in urban anthropology will focus on the Old Town of Havana and its transformations in the "perodo especial" (the exceptional peacetime conditions which have been the economic strategy of Cuba since 1991). My approach will be a "bottom up" analysis of transitional Cuban society on the basis of a "small-scale community-study" in the San Isidro neighborhood. I will pay particular attention to the special significance of social space, ritual interaction and witchcraft in this quarter. The San Isidro neighborhood is an exemplary intersection of tradition and change in today`s Cuba. It is a densely populated, historically and socially important quarter in the Old Town which is now the site of a large-scale renovation project by UNESCO. In addition, a large proportion of its inhabitants are practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions. The entire community is particularly affected by the processes of dissolution and renewal actively at work in late-Socialistic Cuba. Taking as my point of departure the materially given spatial configuration of the San Isidro quarter, I will deal with significant aspects of the organization of space and place. "Significant" here refers to indigenous categories of the perception and use of space common to practitioners of the Regla de Ocha (the predominant Afro-Cuban belief system, also known as Santera), who appropriate their urban environment through symbolic shaping and visible performance. Conceptions of sacred landscape and the ritual organization of space are an essential element of Afro-Cuban mythology and cosmology (Cabrera 1954, Thompson 1983, Brown 1989; cf. Verger 1978). At the center of Afro-Cuban social space and of a far-reaching ritual kinship system is the casa templo. It is both the real and metaphorical point of convergence for social and ritual interactions which serve the production of kinship and other relationships of alliance within and among social groups (Lévi-Strauss 1969, Carsten/Hugh-Jones 1995). Through the analysis of the stratified social organization of the casas, which finds its representation in the altars within each house (on the horizontal and vertical disposition of altars, see Bell 1992 and Fernandez 1982), I arrive at the genealogy and history of the house: every altar integrates and represents, in its iconography and hagiography, the visualized history of the house since the diaspora. History seems to be embodied in ritual as a marker for social change. I will study the social and religious institutions of followers of the Regla de Ocha as "civil" social groups (in the sense coined by Gramsci), that is, in terms of their functions in society as a whole. In doing so, I will pay special attention to those ritual practices that are designated as witchcraft (brujera), that is, that side of Afro-Cuban belief systems which is concerned with conflicts among its followers and offers solutions with relation to the community. (I use the term "witchcraft" as an ethnological working concept in the sense of Bohannan 1964, Turner 1967, 1968, et al.) Starting with the casa templo and then following its radius of social action out into the neighborhood as a whole, I will study the structural interrelationships of mythological, social and material conceptions of space. I will examine their social-political meaning and their contextual range within contemporary Cuban society.

This study in urban anthropology focused on the Old Town of Havana and its transformations in the "perodo especial" (the "exceptional peacetime conditions" which have been the economic strategy of Cuba since 1991). The central focus of this research was the polysemic significance which specific sites and places assume within the complex and contradictory interrelationships and interests of the city. The undertaking concentrated, in particular, on their symbolic economic and political pre-emption in an era of rapidly advancing globalization, as exemplified with the San Isidro neighborhood of the Old Town of Havana. Hardly any other Latin American city center has changed so much in appearance in the last decade as the one of Havana. The crumbling Old Town is in the process of being transformed into an "upscale" space for the consumption of a full range of high-priced goods and services. Particularly after the recognition of Havana`s Old Town as "cultural heritage of the world" by the UNESCO in 1982 there are controversies about empirical and symbolical sites of memory in the city. The ongoing appropriation of urban space was taken as a starting point for the analysis of the historically varying significances of and the symbolisms imposed on the urban landscape of Havana. The approach was a "bottom up" analysis of the transitional Cuban society on the basis of a "small-scale community-study" in the San Isidro neighborhood. This neighborhood is an exemplary intersection of tradition and change in today`s Cuba. It is a densely populated, historically and socially important quarter in the Old Town, and is now the site of a large-scale renovation project by UNESCO. It is particularly affected by the processes of dissolution and renewal actively at work in late-Socialistic Cuba. Special attention was paid to practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions, who are a large proportion of its inhabitants. The research focus shed light onto ritual performance and the social agency in the urban neigborhood. Within this specific multi layered levels of urban contexts, the research project aimed to link makro and mikro levels of urban contexts. The bridging theme is memory theory, questions on cultural heritage and urban landscapes. It offers a framework for reflection based on the main research areas of memory policies in the city (with references to Jan Assmann, Maurice Halbwachs, Eric Hirsch, Sabine Offe, et.al.). The study showed the simultanity of different themes, cultural practices and representations of memory on the example with the San Isidro neighborhood of Old Havanna. The investigation presents information on local images and cognitive maps of the urban landscape of Havana, including naming patterns for dwellings of spirits and houses of ancestors in in the city. Furthermore, the resercher made an effort to translate the symbolic meaning of these Afro-Cuban "geographies" for the social agency of practioners of Afro-Cuban religions. The notion of "urban landscapes" and memory-scapes could be realized in the framework of this project. Both methodological and material impulses toward further reflection on urban landscapes and memory-policies in the city have emerged from its analytical results.