By Joanna Katharina Kiefer

On December 17, 2024, I had the pleasure of presenting my lecture “Practices of Multiple (Religious) Affiliations: Spatial and Practical Negotiations in Havana, Cuba“ at the Center for Advanced Studies in Erlangen (CAS-E). My research, based on participant observation and interviews conducted between 2021 and 2024, explores how religious plurality is negotiated and maintained in Havana. The focus of this lecture was the phenomenon of multiple religious affiliations or “multirreligiosidad” in Havana, Cuba. This term encompasses the coexistence and intersection of religious practices and identities, both within individuals and places, across identity and spatial dimensions.

Two perspectives formed the backbone of my presentation, both of which focused on the intersections between Cuban religions of African origin and Catholicism. On the one hand, I

looked at the spatial management of the celebrations of Catholic saints, who are equated with Yoruba deities in the Regla de Ocha/Ifá. In the celebration of the patron saint days of the Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre / the Orisha Oshún and the Orisha Babalú Ayé / San Lázaro, one can speak of a spatial management of religious multiple affiliations. On the other hand, I accompanied the religious practice of an actor who identifies herself as a member of both the Regal de Ocha/Ifá and Catholicism. She also manages her religious affiliations, individually and spontaneously, but always spatially, in the urban space. Through these examples, I have been able to highlight the dynamic negotiations of boundaries, intersections, and hierarchies that mediate Havana’s religious landscape. Therefore, I propose to analyze religious plurality through the dimension of delimitations, overlaps, hierarchies, and mediations.¹

When you are invited to speak in a context in which you don’t work, you try to relate your research to that context. I myself have called this exercise “Putting on CAS-E glasses“. CAS-E is asking about the resilience of esoteric or ‘alternative rational’ practices in a world where scientific and technical discourse is dominant and describes esoteric practices in the project-outline as “prediction of- and attempts to- control and manipulate contingent life events“². Esotericism or esoteric practices weren’t a concept with which I approached the field of my research. When I came into contact with CAS-E, I began to reflect on where I would locate or identify esoteric practices in my field of research, and it is very easy and quick to imagine what could be subsumed under esoteric practices: practices of Cuban religions of African origin and spiritism, as well as superstition and certain forms of “religiosidad popular“. In many cases of my fieldwork; the control of everyday life events would be one layer of the practices; I would have called them religious practices and not esoteric practices. Esoteric practices wasn’t a term used at all in the Cuban context in which I did my research. In the discussion that followed, it was pointed out that the term ‘esoteric practices’ is a second-order term, an etic definition. A stimulating conversation ensued, and I would like to conclude with some reflections on this aspect.

I began my research with another second-order term, namely ‘Religion’, but it quickly became blurry. On the one hand, because of the well-known criticism of inherent Eurocentrism and Christocentrism. And, on the other hand, because of what the sociologist Joachim Matthes has described as “Doppelkompetenz” (double competence).³ This term refers to the ability of people – especially, though not exclusively, in postcolonial or Global South contexts – to navigate both their own cultural-religious systems and the expectations or interpretive frameworks of Western researchers. In other words, they not only live their own religious practices – they are also acutely aware of how these might be perceived, categorized, or misunderstood through a Western academic lens. In my own fieldwork in Cuba, this became very tangible. The people I worked with often anticipated what I, as a Western researcher, was ‘looking for’. They could speak both ‘languages’ at once: their own, and the one they assumed I brought with me.

As a researcher, I therefore have to ask myself to what extent my concept of ‘religion’ – and the theories associated with it – reaches its limits in the specific research context. Much of what Western theory subsumes under this second-order term does not apply to the religious practices I encountered in Cuba – and often not even to those in the so-called ‘West’. Yet the concept continues to obscure our view again and again. This means, for example, that ‘religious’ practices cannot be clearly distinguished from everyday life or profane actions, nor are motives and affiliations clear or unambiguous. Furthermore, as a researcher, I must always question what is presented to me specifically as a ‘Western researcher’ – here I follow the concept of “double competence“ that Matthes points out. Not infrequently, I was confronted with the assumption that I would be particularly interested in what is colonially framed as ‘exotic’ or even ‘foreign’ religions, which was not the case. I was equally interested in Catholicism and Protestant Lutheranism. What I mean by that is that I had a label, ‘religion’, that everyone could relate to, but everyone understood it to mean something different. And I couldn’t and didn’t want to ignore that, but take it seriously. But how? I decided to analyze everything and ask what is really meant when we talk about ‘religion’ or related terms. I used ethnosemantic analysis to do this, and it quickly became clear that in my field of research – there often is religious ambiguity. Ethnosemantic analysis examines how members of a culture order their world through language and structures of meaning by analyzing concepts, categories, and terms within a specific social context and linguistic classification systems.⁴ In this way, for example, I have been able to show that, in my research context, talking about ‘being religious’ is strongly practice-oriented and has little to do with ‘believing’ or ‘belonging’.

‘Religion’ and ‘esoteric practices’ are concepts that exist both as first- and as second-order constructs. People understand and interpret certain aspects of their lives as ‘religious’ or ‘religion’ – as do sociologists, anthropologists, or scholars of religion. But because everyday life experience is culturally shaped and individually diverse, there is a multiplicity of experiences and semantics tied to the first-order concept, whereas the second-order term in its analytical function tends to cover a broader generalized (ideal-typical) understanding in relation to a theoretical framework. But where does the second-order term begin and end? What is included, what is not, and where do the assumptions come from? Academic terms – as we have learned painfully from postcolonial critiques – inherit power because by including or excluding certain empirical practices we shape a discourse that can be – and the past has easily shown this – a discourse of devaluation that establishes certain hegemonic orders of knowledge.⁵ The moment we decide to use a second-order term, we cannot ignore this truth and have to reflect on it critically. What is included, what isn’t, and what are the consequences. For me, the strategy of simply taking a big conceptual step back and analyzing this tension, i.e., how these terms are actually used in my field of research, what they are distinguished from, what they refer to, and making all of this part of my research question, has worked well. I think these tensions need to be taken seriously, and then we need to ask what the significance of these different semantics is. In my case, I have a preliminary thesis that the semantics in my field might relate to what I would describe as a weak concept of belonging versus a strong concept of practice. By this I mean that people may not strongly identify with a religious group or label (weak belonging), yet still engage in consistent, meaningful ritual actions and spiritual practices (strong practice). This is only a very tentative and cautious thesis, meant to illustrate why it is worthwhile to take the tensions of blurry labels seriously and explore them further.

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Joanna Katharina Kiefer is a research associate and teaches at the Institute of Sociology at the Friedrich Alexander University of Erlangen-Nuremberg. Her current research interests include plurality, postcolonial sociology of religion and qualitative methods of cultural sociology. As part of her dissertation project, she is conducting research on religious plurality in Havana, Cuba, from the perspectives of the sociology of knowledge, the sociology of space, and postcolonial studies.

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1. Kiefer, Joanna Katharina (2023): Delimitaciones, solapamientos y mediaciones. Propuesta de una estructura conceptual del pluralismo religioso. In: Colectivo de Autores (Hg.): Centro Habana. La iglesia católica y el campo religioso local. La Habana: Ediciones CIPS, p. 320–339. ↩︎
2. CAS-E (2023): Project Outline. Online at https://cas-e.de/about-us/project-outline/, zuletzt aktualisiert am 22.11.2024, accessed on February 2, 2025. ↩︎
3. Matthes, Joachim (1993): Was ist anders an anderen Religionen? Anmerkungen zur zentristischen Organisation religionssoziologischen Denkens. In: KZfSS Kölner Zeitschrift für Soziologie und Sozialpsychologie Sonderheft, p. 16–30. ↩︎
4. Maeder, Christoph; Brosziewski, Achim (1997): Ethnographische Semantik: Ein Weg zum Verstehen von Zugehörigkeit. In: Ronald Hitzler und Anne Honer (Hg.): Sozialwissenschaftliche Hermeneutik. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, p. 335–362. ↩︎
5. See, for example, Asad, Talal (1993): Genealogies of Religion. Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. In this work, Asad criticizes the Western construction of ‘religion’ and its colonial entanglements. For a broader perspective on the power of concepts, see also Edward W. Said (1978): Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books. ↩︎

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