The title and subtitle of this lively, informative book insightfully summarizes its core conceit: history is an unfinished stew with too many cooks. As in the multiple transforming permutations of a dish like ackee and saltfish or ajiaco, Stephan Palmié approaches Afro-Cuban “religion” as the invention of endlessly political, historically contingent encounters between ingredients. In keeping with the negative in the title, and after some very consequential historical and ethnographic engagements with the volatility of what has come to be called Santeria, Regla de Ocha, or La religón, the book extends beyond Afro-Cuban religion to the vexed question of “what and how do scholars know.” The book thus represents a culmination of Palmié's ruminations on the project of Caribbean anthropology and its master concepts of race, ethnicity, creolization, and hybridity.

The book begins with a reflection on the swelling number of books to be found under the library call number for Afro-Cuban Religion. In the space of his own career, Palmié has seen the rabid expansion of scholarly treatments by both Euro-American academics and practitioners themselves (often in the same person). Moving beyond the “ethnographic interface,” Palmié details the complex ways in which scholarly attempts to create positive knowledge about a coherent tradition of “Afro-Cuban Religion” leads to continual reassessments of what kind of object this is. Deploying arguments developed from science and technology studies and linguistic anthropology, Palmié demonstrates the “looping effects” of the circulation of cultural “meta-languages” to show the inherent epistemic confusion entailed by any project of categorical objectification and purification.

In his first chapter, Palmié considers this problem as one of long durée, beginning with the quixotic logics of the “verficationist agenda” as pursued by Melville Herskovits and his successors. Pointing out that the first “Africans” to know themselves as such were almost certainly African Americans, Palmié reveals the trouble with assigning to the vague ethnonym Lukumí (the sacerdotal language of contemporary Ocha ritual) the meaning of Yoruba. Palmié uncovers the trans-Atlantic exchanges that connected Yoruba Christian intellectuals to the founders of the scholarly study of Afro-Atlantic religions, and shows that current controversies around authenticity emerged from endless earlier attempts by practitioners, administrators, missionaries, and scholars to affix positive identities in the midst of the violent uncertainties of slavery, colonialism, and revolution.

In chapter 2, Palmié validates the importance of culinary metaphor by detailing the changing values of the most influential Cuban founder of the study of Afro-Cuban Religion, Fernando Ortiz. Arguing for the transitive concepts advocated in Ortiz's later work—exemplified by likening Cuba to an ajiaco, a chunky, improvisatory stew—Palmié contends that such metaphors doubly disclose the kaleidoscopic, recombinant logic of history and the human sciences. Each positive fact isolated about “pure” human phenomenon is in fact a boiling synthesis. Over the next three chapters Palmié explores the often-confusing encounters between the initiatory, divinatory logics of Ocha, North American dogmas of race, and anthropological scholarship. The divergent ways Ocha and other “Afro-Cuban Religions” have become simultaneously racialized and de-racialized as iconically Black and generically Cuban and in diaspora expose the socially situated incoherencies defining North American racial ideologies.

Perhaps the most compelling chapter is 5, which details Internet conflicts waged between “Yorubanizing” and “Cubanizing” ritual experts/intellectuals. Palmié describes how academic discourses about historical contingency are martialed by contemporary Santero-scholars in tandem with divinatory proclamations to render initiatory controversies into multiple registers of meaning, emphasizing both historical exigency and divine agency in often confoundingly hybrid ways. As the rhetoric intensifies and the gods proliferate, practitioners themselves are made aware of the power of even “illegitimate” ritual practices and quasi-gods to overwhelm and transform their certainties about divine action, becoming ever more beholden to the purifying impulses of the scholarship they wield.

The final chapter reflects on the power of American racial discourses that collapse blackness and Africa to annex any degree of historical complexity to simple stories about cutaneous identity. Considering the encompassing claims about Africans in the formation of such seemingly European fare as French haute cuisine, Palmié adeptly shows the dizzying power of logics of race and notions of origins to rework almost any account of history. Palmié’s book, while exhilarating in its lexical mastery and driving prose, does sometimes wander into patches of epistemic murk, where the total play of contingency, however accurate, seems to threaten any understanding of the complex ways practitioners make the gods present to guide their lives. Despite this epistemological preference, Palmié does imperative scholarly work, clearing the ground for a responsible, nuanced Caribbeanist anthropology that can begin to take these practices seriously. No longer merely templates of timeless tradition or racial essences, Palmié animates these practices as endlessly inventive engagements with history in all its dizzying uncertainty and creative potential.