El Monte au jour d’hui

Abstract

This review essay takes the publication of the first English translation of Lydia Cabrera’s magnum opus El Monte as an occasion to reflect on the perplexing nature of Cabrera’s text, both at the time of its original publication and in its English translation now. Without doubt, Cabrera was one of the most prolific ethnographers of the African-derived ritual traditions of Cuba that she observed between the 1930s and 1950s. Not unlike American salvage ethnography, El Monte thrives on the trope of vanishing traditional authenticity; the result was and still is a thoroughly undisciplined hybrid text, a multivoiced modernist literary experiment more akin to Joyce’s Finnegans Wake than Evans-Pritchard’s Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande. As such, El Monte has been a permanent source of frustration for anthropologists fighting an uphill battle against Cabrera’s language and authorial strategies in aiming to extract ethnographic data from it. In contrast, the book has received rather more attention from literary scholars who, in often equally reductive fashion, have tended to focus on Cabrera’s gender and sexual orientation. My argument is that Font-Navarrete’s careful translation and annotation of El Monte—a reappropriation for twenty-first-century audiences of both scholars and practitioners—should give us reason to rethink our own ethnographic and authorial practices.