Anthropology's Epiphanies: Some Things I Learned from James Fernandez

Abstract

During the course of this decade, I have been traveling incessantly to Cuba, the place of my birth and earliest childhood. One truth that stays with me is the belief, enunciated frequently by babalawos, leaders of the Afro‐Cuban Santeria religion, that nothing in this world happens by chance. I believe it is not by chance, but rather by the ineffable wisdom that guides us on our life's journey that I have had the good fortune to be associated with James Fernandez for the past 22 years. I know that after I received my Ph.D. and became an anthropologist in my own right, Jim and I became colleagues, but I will always be his student and always his ahijada, a goddaughter to this quite powerful babalawo of anthropology, who initiated me into the rituals of our profession. It is impossible for me to speak of Jim impersonally, as James Fernandez, or even simply textually, by citing his work, because the things I have learned from him have come to me from knowing the man and knowing the work, and the two are as inseparable as fingernail and flesh, "como una y carne," to use a popular Spanish metaphor. I consider my article a quest to understand the meaning of mentorship—of how it is that we learn from our teachers and are given the tools to become teachers ourselves.