ABSTRACT
In the early 1980s, the altars, objects, and performances of the Abakua Society, along with those of the other Afro-Cuban ritual systems, decisively "graduated" to the status of "art" in the American academy and the international art world. By the 1980s in Cuba, they had reached unprecedented visibility as "national folklore," and, within emerging artistic movements in the Cuban academy, had become profound models of and models for artistic achievement, transnational identity and spiritual connection. An ahistorical comparative ethnography and art history, in its cinematographic cuts between West Africa and the Caribbean, leapfrogs historical processes, including changing discursive formations and modes of knowledge production that have constituted and differentially valued things Abakua. The public dissimulation tactics of Abakua members during crises, ineluding "syncretistic mimesis" and the creation of "false" attributes to deliver up to the police, evince their critical awareness of the different and contradictory values and meanings their objects could take on.
