Can objects of inquiry ontologically precede inquiry into their existence? In a provocative analysis of the making of his own object of knowledge, Stephan Palmié brilliantly shows how ‘Afro-Cuban religion’ and its anthropology emerged simultaneously at the dawn of the twentieth century and have since then been embedded in orders of valuation that have continued to actively bring them into being. Focusing on the forms of knowledge and theoretical languages that have enabled the emergence and transformation of such objects as ‘Afro-Cuban religion’, Palmié undertakes a self-reflexive journey into the ‘seasoning’ of anthropological objects, demonstrating how knowledge, as well as anthropology, is subject to the ‘cooking of history’.

Assembling articles published in journals and edited collections over the past twenty years, Palmié displays an overview of his work, from his first research on Santería in the United States in the 1980s through his most recent work on the ‘War of Oriatés’ in the Miami of the twenty-first century. Palmié sees ‘Afro-Cuban religion’ as a Bakhtinian organic hybrid that is the product of a ‘long and exceedingly heteroglossic Atlantic “conversation”’ (p. 113) in which anthropologists as well as practitioners have taken part. In doing so, Palmié brings a fresh contribution to a critical trend in Afro-Atlantic anthropology that has shown how anthropologists have been part of the making and remaking of their objects, especially through their ‘long conversations’ with Candomblé's elites. Afro-American religions are then ‘moving targets’ that ‘react to whatever representations of them are set into social circulation’ (p. 10), including anthropological interpretations.

In the never-ending search for origins, ‘Africa’ in the Americas proves to be a chronotope that shifts around in space and time. The trope of ‘origins’ can then encompass a variety of projects, as does the idea of ‘syncretism’, harnessed to practitioners' local agendas and deployed in a segmented religious universe that challenges the very idea of a ‘community of believers’. In what we could call a ‘metacultural politics of tradition’, a Miami controversy of 2010 over the status of ‘Yoruba Traditional Religion’ (YTR) vividly exemplifies the ‘fractal pattern’ of the orisha religion and ‘the final dissolution’ of the ethnographic interface in an incessant code switching from theology to anthropology. Why the appropriation of anthropological knowledge by our ‘objects of study’ has to be taken as problematic is surely a question that remains to be answered. At the end, as Palmié reminds us, ‘there is nothing inherently wrong with an anthropology locked in mutually referential relationships with native discourse’ (p. 144).

Conjugating the works of Fernando Ortiz and Sidney Mintz, Palmié takes up the metaphor of ‘cooking’ to understand the processes that bring into being the very idea of ‘Afro-Cuban religion’. As for the Cuban ajiaco, Afro-Cuban religion is not a finished stew, but a constant process of cooking, in which the original ingredients can barely be distinguished. This generates a potentially infinite series of possible perceptions of difference that perfectly illustrates the fractal pattern of orisha religion, torn between different and often antagonist models of tradition. But, if the ‘War of Oriatés’ he discusses displays Santería as ‘a sectarian branch of an emergent world religion’, the development of a highly schismogenetic religious formation can hardly be thought of as a novel ‘structure of the conjuncture’. Orisha religion, in its different actualizations in the Americas, has always been in flux. That's why it seems problematic to speak of ‘Afro-Cuban religion’, erasing its internal complexity and multiplicity. The ‘cooking recipes’ of regla de ocha or palo monte are surely not the same and should be examined taking into account their own singularities and historicities.

Likewise, the emergence of an incipient world religion centered on the worship of the orishas has made of regla de ocha just one of the multiple models of tradition available to practitioners. If we are witnessing the emergence of a global ‘orisha-scape’, we also have to accept that our object is no longer an ‘Afro-Cuban religion’, but something different that is the product of the initiate's agency, instead of the orishas' strategy ‘to enlarge their pool of worshippers’. Being an ‘ajiaco of wider Atlantic, if not global, scale’ or ‘a multiuser domain’, constantly transformed by users' input, what we see today is a novel configuration that deeply challenges the previous interpretations of religious practices as stable and discrete. Hence when speaking of Atlantic diasporic formations that go beyond the limits of Lucumí ritual practices, any reference to local and historical limited fields, such as the Caribbean or the Afro-Cuban, should also take into consideration those meta-cultural stances that make thinkable this new object of knowledge. Palmié's outstanding work engages us to deeply rethink our practice, in order to fully understand these new configurations of our objects of study.