| Abstract
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This is a sociohistorical study of the ascendancy of bàtá drumming within the complex of òrìsà worship in Cuba. Òrìsà worship on the island nation is a religious tradition originating from the contemporary geographical regions of southwestern Nigeria and the southeastern portion of the Republic of Benin (formerly Dahomey), locales inhabited by the cultural-linguistic group known today as the Yorùbá. As a result of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and enabled by various other historical contingencies that began during the last decades of the eighteenth century, large numbers of òrìsà worshippers began arriving in the Americas, eventually leading to the establishment of significant communities of òrìsà religious practitioners---most notably in Cuba, Brazil, and Trinidad and Tobago---which continue to thrive today. The òrìsà, the spiritual forces worshipped by devotees, are perceived in the world through a variety of materials, domains, and phenomena. Historically, devotees came to situate themselves within localised networks dedicated to the worship of particular òrìsà and, quite often, a sacrosocial trade associated with the object of their devotion (e.g., divination, ironworking, medicinal remedies). Though the pervasive European social structures in Cuba have greatly reduced these traditional connections between òrìsà devotion and the vocation of the devotee, sacred drumming in Cuba and the worship of the drumming òrìsà named Àyàn, by and large, remain a comparatively stable connection. Nonetheless, the constitution of the drumming community in Cuba exhibits marked differences from its Yorùbáland cognate owing, in no small part, to a variety of shared and unrelated challenges to the socioreligious character of sacred drumming in both locales since the nineteenth century. In terms of linear and non-linear developments since the Trans-Atlantic separation, the study examines the ways in which bàtá drumming, in part through its regulation of the Àyàn cult, came to be established in Cuba as the pre-eminent òrìsà drumming institution.
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