ABSTRACT
This chapter asserts the centrality of Black women in disseminating and maintaining Afro-Diasporic religions throughout the Americas in the twentieth century. It defines kitchenspaces as privileged locations for the transmission of sacred knowledges, arguing that food preparation has furnished opportunities for the acquisition of corporeal disciplines integral to the survival of such traditions as Haitian Vodou and Brazilian Candomblé. This chapter outlines a distinctive religious pedagogy elaborated by – and largely for – women of African descent, emphasizing the bodily enskillment that takes place as intimate practices of care and deference dovetail with educational processes. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork in a predominantly African American community devoted to Afro-Cuban Lucumí, Palo Monte, and Espiritismo, this chapter pays homage to Black women’s ability to engage in both discursive and gestural modes of communication while butchering, plucking, skinning, and cooking for West and Central African deities and ancestors. While recognizing the roles that Black women have played as praise singers, dancers, diviners, healers, altar-builders, and other types of religious virtuosi, this chapter centers on food preparation to highlight an undervalued form of racialized and gendered religious labor and to open up an infrequently examined domestic site as a zone of highly valorized ritual interventions.
