The Matter of Things: A Material Turn in Cuban Scholarship

Abstract

This introductory article briefly surveys the most recent approaches to material culture in Cuban studies.

Keywords:

• Cuban studies
• Cuban materiality
• material culture

When the twentieth century came to an end, the methodological, theoretical, and multidisciplinary “material turn” that had transformed the social sciences was a fait accompli (Achterhuis 2001; Bennet and Joyce 2010; Mukerji 2015). New fields of study (Verbeek 2005), theories (Latour 2005), and paradigms (Harman 2018; Bryant, Srnicek, and Harman 2011) had emerged, with philosophers, historians, and sociologists joining anthropologists and archaeologists in pursuing research agendas that examine – and speculate about – the impact on collective life of “material culture”, a category that encompasses microbes, vaccines, door knobs, high passes, gardens, fashion, technology, global warming. That is, non-human actants (Cerulo 2009).

Although social scientists had long thought about how material conditions affect social dynamics, The material turn brought a renewed attention to the impact of material mediations – and their representations – on social life (Dant 1999; Lubar and Kingery 1993; Miller 1987; Tilley et al. 2006; Woodward 2007). In other words, material culture became a variable of analysis instead of a background. As sociologist Chandra Mukerji puts it, material culture studies took

as subject matter for social science not only people but also the physical environments they create and the creatures with whom they coinhabit social worlds. Social life is no longer imagined to be a human drama taking place against the background of an independent and static natural world, but is understood as activity within shared ecologies of people and nonhumans: states armed with weapons, corporations located in skyscrapers, furniture makers working with wood, laborers getting dressed for a job, or families socializing with pets. (2015, 2)

As part of this material turn, new studies have emerged that pay attention to both the ways in which non-human actants “act on people” and the mechanisms through which such actants are also “acted upon by people, for the purposes of carrying out social functions, regulating social relations and giving symbolic meaning to human activity”, as the editors of the Journal of Material Culture Studies outline in the journal’s inaugural issue (Editorial 1996). These analyses of materiality as an independent and dependent variable, an explanatory cause and explanandum, yielded broader, and on occasion new, understandings of social processes and outcomes.

However, in spite of the boom in material culture studies during the last decades of the twentieth century, it was not until more recently that Cubanists, especially those focusing on the period of state socialism in the country during the Cold War years – 1960s through the 1980s – began to pay attention to materiality as a determinant, sometimes dependent variable in their analyses. In the early 2000s, historian Ismael Sarmiento Ramírez noted “the scarce interest that historians have given to [… material culture] studies for years” (2004b, 275), acknowledging, of course, a few outstanding exceptions (e.g. Moreno Fraginals [1978] 2008; Pérez de la Riva 1975, 1978). According to Sarmiento Ramírez (2004b), even anthropologists – in his view, the only scholars who had thoroughly studied aboriginal, colonial, and republican material practices, including Afro-Cuban religions – have lacked for the most part a historical perspective, failing to grasp the relationship between ethnographic elements and Cuba’s economic, social, and technological history.

However, the panorama had already begun to change, thanks to a new cohort of historians – Sarmiento Ramírez among them – who began to study not only the material culture of the colonial era and slave society (Funes Monzote 2008; Lucero 2011, 2019; Piqueras 2016; Rood 2016, 2017, 2019; Sarmiento Ramírez 2000a, 2000b, 2004a, 2006), the early postcolonial years (Iglesias Utset 2003; Lucero 2015; Quiza Moreno 2010), and the twentieth-century republic (Alonso González 2016b; Funes Monzote 2014; Hartman 2019a, 2019b; Horst 2014; Hyde 2013; Iglesias Utset 2011, Pérez 2019), but also that of the post-Soviet years (Alonso González 2014; Yaffe 2019).¹ They surveyed the meanings of land and agricultural transformations, architecture and urban design, technology, domestic and public spaces, symbols and monuments, clothing, and the biotechnology industry.

By the same time, anthropologists also began to broaden their research agendas. In addition to the material practices of the Cuban past that they had largely studied, mainly focusing on rural and folkloric traditions, the turn of the century expanded their interest to also include post-Soviet years. Contemporary anthropologists have analysed material rituals in Afro-Cuban religions (Holbraad 2007; Ochoa 2010; Palmié 2018; Wirtz, 2014), as well as modern practices of material exchanges and consumption (Cearns 2019; Garth 2013a, 2013b, 2014, 2016, 2017, 2019a, 2019b, 2020; Del Real and Pertierra 2008; Harkonen 2011, 2015, 2016, 2019; Lee Dawdy 2002; Pertierra 2008, 2011, 2012a, 2012b, 2015a, 2015b; Premat 2003, 2004, 2009, 2012, 2017; Ryer 2017; Wilson 2009, 2011, 2012, 2014a, 2014b, 2016a, 2016b). To a certain extent, they have been accompanied in their endeavour by sociologists interested in studying post-Soviet fashion discourses (e.g. Ferrer Zulueta 2006).

Last but not least, the arrival of the twenty-first century also witnessed the emergence of studies on the visual and literary representations of post-Soviet urban, commercial, and domestic material environments. Mostly coming from the field of literary and cultural criticism (Granados 2014; Hoyos 2016, 2019; Lawless 2011; Loss 2003, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2018; Price 2011, 2014, 2015; Puñales-Alpízar 2008, 2012a, 2012b, 2012c; Quesada Gómez 2016; Quiroga 2005; Redruello 2011; Rubio 2005, 2006, 2010, 2013; Sklodowska 2010a, 2010b, 2012, 2016; Unruh 2009; Whitfield 2008a, 2008b) – and to a lesser extent history (Rojas 2008, 2011), urban studies (Del Real and Scarpaci 2011), visual studies (Bruno 2003), and sociology (Bobes 2011; Dilla 2014; Fernandes 2011) –, these scholars have paid attention to the architecture, urban design, and interiors of the city of Havana, including its ruins, as well as the literary and artistic representations of the Cuban currencies, the traces of the former Soviet presence, and the material imaginaries of childhood and modernity.

This profuse academic production of the past two decades was circumscribed, though, to the colonial era, the US occupation, the liberal republic, and the post-Soviet years. As a result, the materiality of the state socialist period – the Soviet era (1961–1989) – has remained, until recently, practically unexplored. Ten years after the turn of the century, little had been written about the material culture of Cuban socialism, setting the scholarship on Cuba apart from the studies of its former allies from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union – not least due to the lack of access to state archives and other primary sources (see Macle Cruz 2019).

In the past decade, however, scholars from disciplines as diverse as history, anthropology, sociology, and literary criticism began to show interest in the meanings of materiality in the post-1959 years. Change arrived either within research agendas that also included former or subsequent epochs (Alonso González 2015, 2016a, 2017; Funes Monzote 2019) or other regions (Gonçalves 2013), or as a result of academic interests specifically purporting to grasp sociopolitical dynamics mediated by or embedded in the state socialist material culture (Cabrera Arús 2015, 2017, 2019a, 2019b, 2019c, 2019d; Cabrera Arús and Suquet 2019; Hernández-Reguant 2012; Lambe 2017).² This new research covers topics as diverse as the transformation of natural and urban landscapes, institutional and domestic material regimes, fashion and its literary and artistic representations, foreign exhibitions, and pharmaceutical regimens. In a 2019 symposium on the occasion of the Cuban Revolution’s sixtieth anniversary, perhaps for the first time several presenters delved into topics associated with the politics of Cuba’s postrevolutionary material culture, from state programmes to eradicate slums and build modern neighbourhoods to new programmes of immunisation and scientific cooperation with the Soviet Union.³

This special issue stems from the realisation of this late epistemological turn, and encompasses articles from diverse disciplines from both the social sciences and the humanities. The scholars featured explore the social and political impact of material practices and cultures in Cuba, spanning the colonial period to the post-Soviet present, including the postrevolutionary years.⁴ Their work expands previous understandings of Cuban society and history, examining seemingly non-political elements of materiality such as human remnants, publications, consumer goods, religious attire and symbols, elements of adornment, and representations of luxury and industrial ruins, which they recognise as vehicles of political communication and, in some cases, mechanisms of indoctrination or participation in the public sphere. In so doing, the authors gathered in this issue contribute to reframing the relationship between personal and political, national and transnational, state and society, the Island and the exile.

For the most part, the articles compiled are limited to empirical analyses of the meanings and sociopolitical impact of things, commodities, clothing, and buildings – and their commercial, artistic, and cinematic representations. Still, their contributions broaden the scholarship on Cuba, tapping into previously unexplored dynamics, such as transnational circuits of consumption (Bustamante, Pertierra), and working with uncharted data from lesser-known or never-accessed archives, such as those of the Catholic Church (Kuivala), advertisements in exile newspapers (Bustamante), and provincial television stations (Pertierra) and repositories (Lucero).

Historian Bonnie Lucero delves into the meanings of the items and body remnants discussed in legal cases of infanticide in the nineteenth century, which she argues favoured public intervention in women’s reproductive lives and family planning, and empowered the predominantly foreign-educated physicians who examined this evidence in court. Religion scholar Petra Kuivala, on her part, discusses the meanings of the buildings, symbols, and clothing of the Catholic liturgy and faith, focusing on the postrevolutionary era that began in 1959, whereas historians Alexis Baldacci and Michael Bustamante analyse the ideological underpinnings of, respectively, postrevolutionary cookbooks and packages sent from the United States.

Framing her article in the post-Soviet years, anthropologist Anna C. Pertierra discusses Cuba’s participation within transnational circuits of consumption of leisure and popular culture, underscoring the role of local television stations as precursors to Cuba’s Special Period’s entrepreneurial, consumer-oriented socialism – here, material culture is not an epistemological focus but a historical background. From a different disciplinary perspective, literary scholars Jacqueline Loss and Elzbieta Sklodowska reflect respectively on the meanings of two opposites: luxurious excess and ruination, analysing their representations in contemporary art and cinema, in the case of Loss’s contribution produced in both the Island and the exile. Also included in this issue is a dossier featuring visual artist Jairo Alfonso’s “archaeological archive” of material culture, built through accumulations and deconstructions that problematise the plural meanings, history, and symbolism of objects in contemporary Cuba.

Material culture is thus portrayed in this dossier as an element that connects – either bridging or separating – groups as diverse as intraprofessional cliques (Lucero), Cuban residents and exiles (Bustamante, Loss), nationals and foreigners (Pertierra), the Church and the state (Kuivala), consumers and cultural/political gatekeepers (Baldacci, Bustamante, Loss, Pertierra, Sklodowska). The articles compiled also demonstrate that, in doing so, material culture helps to construct political, professional, religious, and consumer identities that respond to both general political demands that are historically grounded, and specific group interests, such as those of elite, minority, oppositional, and even marginalised groups. Material culture is, furthermore, examined as a means of professional legitimation (Baldacci, Loss, Lucero, Pertierra), socialisation (Baldacci, Kuivala), accommodation with (Bustamante, Kuivala) or resistance to (Kuivala) the state, and sociopolitical critique (Loss, Sklodowska). Most of these dynamics are also symbolically conveyed through Alfonso’s work.

By connecting Cuba with Caribbean, trans-Atlantic, and North-South circuits of consumption and representation, some of the articles compiled in this issue also contest the notion of Cuba’s isolation, outlining the articulation of both formal and informal networks of material exchange that put into question narratives of exceptionalism. The articles exploring postrevolutionary material practices and symbols of resistance furthermore problematise the limits and extent of state power, especially during periods of severe repression and state intervention in the private sphere, adding more nuanced understandings to the totalitarian grip that the Cuban postrevolutionary regime had on society. All in all, the authors gathered in this dossier approach materiality as a component, a symbol, and a conveyor of individual and social identities and ideologies, as an instrument of state cooption and indoctrination, and as a vehicle of citizens’ resistance and protest.

Because of space and time constraints, this first compilation of Cuban material culture studies is far from comprehensive or representative of the field. However, judging by Cubanists’ recent, burgeoning interest in materiality, other dossiers, special issues, and anthologies will certainly follow, which would hopefully allow not only for more detailed analyses of particular areas – such as, for instance, domestic space, automobiles, informal exchanges and circulation of goods – but also comparisons across different spheres and periods in Cuban history, as well as between Cuba and Latin America, the Caribbean, and the state socialist bloc.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

María A. Cabrera Arús

María A. Cabrera Arús has a PhD in sociology (New School for Social Research) and studies the impact of fashion and domestic material culture on regime stability and legitimation, with a geographical focus on the Caribbean region during the Cold War. Her research has been published in peer-reviewed journals such as Theory & Society, Visual Studies, and Cuban Studies, and book anthologies, including in The Oxford Handbook of Communist Visual Cultures (2020) and The Revolution from Within (Duke University Press, 2019). She is the author of the award-winning project Cuba Material, a virtual archive of Cuban material culture from the Cold War era, and curator or co-curator of several exhibitions, including Pioneros: Building Cuba’s Socialist Childhood at Parsons School of Design (2015) and Cuban Revolutionary Fashion, at Brown University (2019). She is an adjunct professor at New York University.

Notes

1 For a comprehensive bibliography of historiographical analyses shaped by material culture approaches, see Dacal Moure (2005).

2 Analyses of postrevolutionary material dynamics can also be found in broader historical accounts of the early postrevolutionary years (e.g. Chase 2015; Guerra 2010, 2012; Pérez 1999). The blog/digital archive and collection I created in 2012, Cuba Material, is another testimony of the boom that material culture approaches have had in scholarship on Cuba during the last decade.

3 The Cuban Revolution at 60: New Directions in History and Historiography, March 7 and 8, 2019, at the King Juan Carlos I of Spain Center of New York University.

4 Editorial note: The contributors in this special issue use the terms “Cuban Revolution” and “revolution” in a variety of ways: at times, to refer to a historical event and marker and, at times, to a period and how it was experienced or to the regime to which the historical event gave place. Most authors use “Cuban Revolution” or “the Revolution” to refer to the revolutionary regime, which in this introduction I designate as “postrevolutionary regime”. Similarly, what I refer to as the postrevolutionary years or period in this introduction is designated in most of the special issue's articles as “the revolution”.