 Wel, rydyn ni'n gwybod i'r ffordd yw'r lefwyr cymdeithasol, sy'n gweithio i'r ffordd o'r ddweud ym Mhwygratio a Dysgrifolau, ymlaen i'r ddweud o'r ddweud o antropoligau a'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Dwi'n ddweud i'r colleg John Parker ar hyn o gwneud hynny, ac rydyn ni'n gweithio i'r ddweud o'r ddweud i'r ddweud, rydyn ni'n gweithio i'r ddweud o'r ddweud o'r 2007. Rydy'n gweld o'r ddweud i'w gweithio, a rydyn ni'n ei chael ei fod o facilities byddys goingonol, ac mae'n gwneud i'ch ddechrau pe ysgolio. Rydyn ni'n gweithio i'r ddweud i'w gweithio. Rydyn ni'n gweithio i'w gweithio. Rydyn ni'n gweithio i'w ddweud i'w gweithio. Rydyn ni'n gweithio i'w ddweud o antropoligau o'r ddweud i'w Shikago, ac mae'n ddigon rôl i'r cymdeithasol o'r ddweud o'r cael eu cymyserau', cyfrifio Mundod o Gwerth ddullion, a what really strikes you are the courses he's taught. Which range from jazz to anthropological theory to the connection between history and anthropology. Where obviously that's one of the reasons he's doing this particular lecture. So if we look for key themes in his work we'll probably find religion's spirituality, its interplay with science, ideas of hybridity and also constructions of history. I have to say it's been a real pleasure to go back and remind myself of some of his earlier work. mae'r cyflawni'r cyflawni'n gweithio. Mae'r rhaid i'r ffwrdd yn gwneud o'r ffwrdd ystafell sy'n gweithio'r ffwrdd yw'r ffwrdd afro-afro-afro-fwrdd sy'n gweithio hirscwyd, Sydney Mint, CLR James a'r sannirau Llywodraeth, Llywodraeth Gwladysgwyr, a George Clinton. Mae'r ffwrdd yn gwneud ymddiad. Mae'r ffwrdd yn gwneud o'r ffwrdd afro-Cuban a mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'r ffwrdd o'r dialogue a'r ffordd o'r ideaeth afro-americanaeth o'r concept of African Atlantic religions sydd yn gwneud o'r ideaeth atlantic world. Felly, yn y traddogieth Sydney Mint bod yna'r Llywodraeth yn gyffredig sy'n gyffredig o'r llun yna'r 2007. Mae'n cael eu gweithio'r rhannu i'r hynny yn gwneud o'r hystafell ac yn y cwm yn gweld y gweithio cyfnodol yn gweithio'r gwybod, er bydd yn gweithio'r cyfrifiadau yn ddod yn amser yn ei wneud. Y cwm yn y cwm, a'r cwm yn yr ysgolwyddoedd ac syniadol, pan yw'r amser yn ystodio'r cyfrifiadau historiogol yn Cybus, ac mae'n amser yn y gwybod yw mae'r cyfrifiadau yn ei rhoi am ddegwyd ar gyfer nodio am y traddysgafafaniaeth a'r cyfrifiadau ac mae'n dod yn y tarod of a historical construction of Cuban and Atlantic modernity, which is mutually constituted. So he provides us with a study of Cuban religions and social science in relation to civil and state societies. And what that does is really to illustrate the emergence of modernity and its constitutive hybrid forms. And I would include in that its epistemologies. So it's a very powerful argument of how Afro-Cuban religions are hybrid products of modernity. And, you know, Stefan's, he's edited many volumes as well. But I think slave cultures and the cultures of slavery being one of, I think, one of the most important, which signal the shift really to looking at the lives of slaves at ground level in their relationships with their masters. And that really sort of signaled a new way of looking at the history of slavery, which is quite significant. But I think what Stefan's work does is to go beyond that balancing act. He brings to the fore the subjectivities of individuals. We don't always fit into the neat categories with which we understand wider historical questions. Quite often the subjectivities are sort of an uncomfortable fit. They can't easily be contained. They're neither pure victims nor undiluted heroes. So the other important thing, just to sort of round up now, I think that Stefan does is to raise questions of how we look at the debates around an African past and how it relates to the present. Because he uses his wonderful example of the fly whisk. And what he points to is that if things look similar, if they look similar in the present moment and the past, we then think, well, they must be the same. And what that does is then help us frame a narrative in a certain way that gives a sort of chronological explanation of how that came to be. But we have to ask ourselves, is it quite so simple? He raises tensions about ideas of continuity and discontinuity, which have dominated much recent writing on slavery. And I think what that does is to reveal a wider anxiety about a commitment to or a betrayal of origins, where origins really also help shape these ideas of subjectivity. So the questions of, did slavery destroy the vestiges of African culture which survived the Middle Passage? Or were there relations of continuity which illustrate resilience, resistance, and survival? That always sort of seems to be the question. The trouble was, as Stefan points out, these concepts required relating an African past to a new world present. And the search for an African essence rests on the construction of an African other who is also understood as authentic. So I think what he very rightly suggests is that that conjures up a picture of our desire to consume the other, if you like, necessitating a sort of separation between subject and object. And also this translation of space into time in order to construct a suitable African past, one we think is sort of appropriate for our story, if you like. So Stefan's work suggests that in place of this past and authentic subjectivity is what we need to do is put to the fore ideas of hybrid Atlantic space, containing things which belong to the modern world. So in this particular form, neither Africa nor slavery is placed on the past, but is part of a much more interesting and emergent present. So instead, we have a sort of contemporaneous African Atlantic space instead of a past and a present. So I was thinking about all this, and my thoughts turned back to Kit. And your comments about Django Unchained. Because I thought metaphorically, we in fact could see Stefan riding alongside his spectral African Atlantic subjects, a bit like in Django. And what he's doing is helping give voice to very different kinds of subjectivities, ones not constrained by normalized ways of seeing. He too is accompanying his subjects on a journey which seeks to overturn the tropes, which normally binds us to a certain way of understanding African American history. And that is surely very similar to what to Dr. King Shultz was doing in Django Unchained. So thank you, Kit. So I'd like to introduce Stefan. One word, actually, I didn't realize this week, that quite a few of my colleagues misread your abstract. So if you've come here today thinking you're going to hear a paper about pornography and its relationship to the spirit world, I'm afraid you're going to be disappointed. The word is phonography. Oh, that's an interesting paper. Yes, yes. So I give you, Stefan, the genre of North Thamont Avenue, the Wizard of Manlow Park, and the dialectics of insonement, an episode in the history of an acoustic mask. Stefan. Well, thank you very much, Paro, for beautifully nuanced and actually, to me, an introduction that I find now hard to live up to, but I'll try my best. And well, actually, secondly, of course, thanks to Kit for making this all happen. And everybody else involved. And thanks for coming. So let me start with a few apologies, because my talk today is based on a very long essay of which I can really only share bits and pieces with you today. I also realized that since few of you will likely have more than a faint acquaintance with the ethnographic subject of my talk, which is a male esoteric sodality known in Cuba as Abacoa, I realized that a bit more mise en scène might be called for than I can actually provide you with here, but I'd be glad to answer any questions that you might have after the talk. I started working on matters often lost. And I'm not quite sure rightly so by the term Afro-Cuban religion in the mid-1980s. And I've actually just finished a book, a little bit of shameless self-promotion, which is going to be out in probably June or July. And that book tries to question what it might mean to do something like study Afro-Cuban religion with all three terms in quotation marks. Now, I did my first ethnographic field work in Miami among practitioners of regla de orcia, more popularly known as Santaria, and started to work in Cuba itself in 1991 that is just about at the time when the really bad times of what the government declared a special period in times of peace were beginning to kick in. There are several African-derived ritual traditions in Cuba today, and most of them, conveniently for me, happened to converge in Havana. And there are historical reasons for that. All of them have been traced to some, oftentimes highly specific African antecedents. But that's not what I'm particularly interested in, and I think Paro said it better than I could right now. Personally, I think that origins are interesting. But really only if one cares about the kind of cultural and political work performed by them within historically and ethnographically specifiable social settings, not as an end in itself. Now, the question of what kind of work they do, that's certainly something that I'm very interested in, but it's not what I will talk about much today. So instead, let me turn to the topic that I would like to elaborate on. I began to work on these matters in the late 1990s, and it concerns, as I already said, a male esoteric sodality known as abaqua. And here, and almost misspoke, a note of clarification is immediately in order, because abaqua is often written about as a secret society, and an African one at that. It is nothing of the sort. One would have to qualify this, but what I would like to say is that it is a male initiatory cult that revolves around a mystery whose secrets only members and not even all of them are privy to. In other words, there is no secrecy about membership in the town of Regla, formerly industrial part of the larger Havana harbour complex on the eastern side of the Bay of Havana. In that town of Regla, where I do my fieldwork, everybody knows who is a member of abaquan who is not. No mystery here. Little boys playfully enact fake versions of its ritual, and many of them aspire to become what is called an acobio, that is brother in their late teens. No mystery either about the Andrews centrism. To be sure, only ombudys and real ombudys, not effeminados, can become acobios. But does that exclude women? Well, yes and no. As in practically all ethnographically known cases of male esotericism, women know perfectly well what the guys are up to when they do their thing. I mean, I repeatedly learned just that such as when sitting with men who told me stuff so esoteric that it made their flesh crawl, all the while female partners or daughters were walking through the crammed quarters, serving as coffee, borrowing our cigarette lighter, and so on and so forth. So, you know, that question needs qualification, that issue needs qualification, and final qualification a few words at least about the, you know, African derivation of abaqua. Let me get a sip of water here. Both oral history and documentary evidence indicate that the first chapter of abaqua was founded in regla in 1836 by members of a voluntary association of Africans, based on some idea of ethnic commonality, legally condoned by the Spanish colonial state, and known as the Carildo de los Carabalí, Bricamo apapa efi. And here you might want to know that dozens and dozens of such Carildos de Nacion voluntary associations of Africans exist in Havana at the time. Though it took scholars until well into the 20th century to figure it out, the very terms Carabalí and efi in the name of this particular Carildo, nowadays tend to be understood as reference to the ethic of old Calabar in the cross river region on the borders between Nigeria and the Cameroons. This onomastic connection and other formal similarities have led to by no means unreasonable speculations about the relationship between Cuba and abaqua and similar sorts of male sodalities, variously known in the cross river region on the names such as ekepe or nebe. Like these African counterparts, abaqua has eminently law-giving functions, and its career in Cuba can indeed be explained by them to a certain degree. For just as this type of association rose to prominence in old Calabar by organizing the slave and later palm oil trade, so was it spread in Cuba, immediately connected to its political and economic functions. Beginning in the 1840s, rapidly multiplying chapters of abaqua known as potensias began to maneuver their title holders into positions as gatekeepers for access to labour at the dockside, in tobacco factories, slaughterhouses, the centralized market and other economic complexes. By the 1930s, they were practically in control of all dockside labour, directly contracting for stevedore and warehousing jobs with international shipping lines, sometimes collaborating with labour unions, sometimes breaking their strikes, and often clashing quite violently with the police. Now for this and other reasons, not a few scholars have argued that we are dealing here with an Atlantically Transplanted Diasporic version of Ekbe. Precisely, this logic has sent one of them, the American art historian Ivor Miller, on a historical mission to reunite members of abaqua, Cuban members of abaqua, exiled in the United States with their epic brethren in Africa. Now I have some sympathy with Miller's project, but apart from the fact that few of the Ocobius that I know in Cuba seem to care much about such homecomings, the project itself strikes me as already mistaken on historical grounds. For not only did the supposedly African version of abaqua arise near simultaneously with its supposed new world offshoot, rather the Cuban version soon after returned to Africa when members, Cuban members of the association who were deported during Cuba's two 19th century wars of independence, carried the association to Spanish penal colonies such as Ciuta, but also Fernando Poe, nowadays Bioco, from where, as the Spanish ethnomusicologist Israela de Aransadi has recently shown, Cuban ritual forms diffused back to their supposed places of origins in present-day Nigeria. But let me now bring these preliminaries to an end and show you a few pictures. And here I must say this is the second time in my life that I've given a PowerPoint presentation, so bear with me. So let me show you a few pictures before I launch into the subject proper. And in case you would like to know about abaqua's current economic activities, I'll be glad to answer such questions at the end of the talk. So let me see how it goes. This is where, according to oral history and some archival documentation, newly landed slaves in that cavildo de los caravalli bericamo apapa efi implanted the mystery of equae in Cuban soil, that's the embarcadero of regla in 1836. Here's another view, that's the old embankment, and there's a hydroelectric plant on the side where a massive slave market used to be barracks and all that. Now this is a plaque which, in 1997, members of abaqua managed to actually get the government to install for them at that place, reads to the Africans who, in 1836, founded in this town the secret society of abaqua. Here you see members of the bourreau provinciale de abaqua of regla, local dignitaries in the society, most of them higher title holders, celebrating that precise anniversary on January 6, 1836, in, I think, that was probably 1999. But let me now get into the substance of the paper. It has quite a long history actually, the paper began sometime in the 1990s when I was working in Fernando Ortiz, the preeminent 20th century Cuban social scientist, really a polymath in many ways. When I was working in Ortiz's vast and sprawling archive in Havana's Instituto de Literatura Linguistica, because there I found a clipping from a Cuban newspaper summarizing a report in a 1908 issue of the Philadelphia North American concerning two black Cuban brothers named Leal who had set up a kind of storefront operation on Philadelphia's North Fairmount Avenue that seemed to combine Edisonian sound technology with what Don Fernando, I think rightly, surmised where elements of the ritual repertoire of abaqua. I think it was in the New York public library that I eventually tracked down what in fact turned out a quite substantial article on the Leals and their curious sound system technology by which they broadcast spirit voices from their temple of the ancient grace onto North Fairmount Avenue in Philadelphia. Much like Fernando Ortiz, who stuck the clipping into a folder entitled Negros Nyanigus, which is now a term for abaqua, which contemporary Korea Nyanig Abaqua that is men born over the drum skin regard as derogatory. But much like Ortiz, who filed this away under category that referred to abaqua, I too filed those Xeroxes of the Philadelphia North American away. At the time, I had just begun my own research on abaqua and the Xeroxes literally sat in my filing cabinet for more than a decade. I always wanted to do something with them, but I now realized that it was really only on the background of years of doing intermittent ethnographic work on abaqua in regla that I was able to see the theoretical challenge posed by the simple snippet of information on the rather peculiar practices of two Afro-Cuban migrants in Philadelphia more than 100 years ago. But let me give you a taste of the repertoire to show you what I mean. Here's what Timotheo Leal, who calls himself a yamba, the leader, that is y yamba, which is nowadays the highest title in abaqua. Here's what Leal is said to have told the journalist. I talk to the spirits and they talk with me. See my echo? See my echo? Now Leal seems to be quite proud of his echo and the reporter seems impressed as well. Here's the description he gives. It starts in the middle of the room in a sort of pagoda filled with water. Things that look like painted spools float around gaily. A tiny bell is suspended from the roof of the pagoda and when the spirits happen to be around, they always notify a yamba Leal by ringing this bell. From under the water, a speaking tube stretches across the room to a converter. It is filled with wheels, has a glass front and a bit of stove pipe sticks out on the top. Leading into the converter from the western end of the room is another speaking tube. Still another tube finds its way into the converter from a kettle drum in the east. This kettle drum is made of a china wash bowl covered with skin. A final tube is carried out into Fairmount Avenue. This has a megaphone exit and it is from this megaphone that the people in the neighborhood get notice that the spirits are busy. Now, what in the world is that? And why call it the echo? I must confess that it took me forever to figure it out. But apart from the fact that the article features dozens of other pointers towards Abacoir, plume staff, roosters, jute masks, drums, et cetera, it really only dawned upon me when I reread what a woman present in the temple had to say about the phonetic qualities of what she and Leal called the echo. Do the spirits really talk? asks the journalist. Why? answers she. I have been in there alone and the drums started beating on their own accord and the echo made a noise like this. Woo, woo, woo! And then I got away. At this point, the scales fell from my eyes. The journalist had simply misheard. Leal and the woman weren't talking about an echo at all. They were talking about el eque which is a super esoteric friction drum at the center of Abacoir ritual which are known as barocos o plantis. And guess what? It sounds like mm, mm, mm, mm. Or if you like woo, woo. And so to, you know, to write rough shot over my own argument, what it does is to sacralize everything within its sonic reach. You have to have heard it at an Abacoir ritual to understand what exactly a yamba leal meant when he proudly showed the journalist his ingenious combination of early analog sound technology with the much older acoustic mask known to contemporary ecoreaniene Abacoir as el eque. Now let me postpone explaining what I mean by acoustic mask and point to the irony that the woman says to have fled the scene after hearing eque's mysterious voice. For that's precisely what the mythical woman, Sican, failed to do when she first heard the voice of Tanze, an ancestral presence in the shape of a fish that she accidentally scooped up in her calabash when drawing water at the mythical embankment of Usagare from the River Oldan that bisects the territory of Becura Mendo in the Efo region of Abacoir's mythical homeland in Yenyson. And here you see the whole scene about which I will now be talking. Here comes the story. It is the end of a starry night. In Kiko, the rooster sings on top of the hill where Equinyon, the hunter, waits for a spray, bow, and arrow poised for the kill. A caiman initially blocks Sican's path to the river, but the man, soon to experience transformation into the ireme, which is a spirit from the bush, basically, into the ireme Eribangandau, clears her way with a ritual brush. She bows down, scoops up a calabash of water, but when she hoists it on her head, a tremendous roar issues forth from the container. It is Owon Tanze, a numynous presence in the shape of a fish who speaks to her in his otherworldly voice. Having been the first to hear Tanze's awesome bloggers, Sican is variously said to have confided her terror to her father Mokongo or her husband Isonecwe. Either or both, betray her to the supreme chief Iamba and the sorcerer Nassako, who had been tracing Tanze's movements and vocalizations, Cama Ororo, as they say, speaking in the center, in the lagoon for days. Equinon, whose name is glossed as slave to Eque, is now ordered to kill her. However, even before Sican meets her violent end, Tanze is dead as well. His voice has fallen silent. Horrified, Nassako Iamba and the other Obonnes, founding figures soon to become titles, try to revive and recuperate its awesome law-giving sonic capacities. What ensues is a strangely phonocentric version of the search for a male social contract. Sican is seated on three stones, awaiting her immolation when she begins to menstruate, thus foreshadowing the feeding of the three-footed friction drum, Eleque, around which the ritual technos enabling men to cause other men to be born over the drum skin will soon congeal. Following Sican's execution, Nassako ffuses her skin to that of Tanze, to no avail. He and the other Obonnes will sacrifice the snake, Nyangabion, that had coiled itself around the palm tree that night. You'll see the snake around the palm tree. They'll sacrifice Erombe, the Congo slave, captured by the sound of the voice. They'll sacrifice Eronne, the ram, Yebengoo, the tiger. Nothing works. Much blood if you shed in vain in their frantic experiments. It is only when they resort to sacrifice in Bori, the goat, that El Parche, the drum skin, eventually takes shape. And once fused to Ocanco, the hollowed-out trunk of the sabre tree becomes operative, and this is a key term as namberee, the flesh of the voice. Let me show you this. You know, this is like a, yeah, now we've got photos of meeting houses. You know what a sabre looks like, I'm sure. What results is a technology capable of transmitting lavos, the voice, across time materializing its sound onward from baroco ceremony to baroco other ceremony. And this is the moment from whence, as contemporary Cuban Obonec was envisioned it, an unbroken chain of what they call transmissions, transmissiones of the voice, links the inner sanctum, the quarto fam bar, of their temples in the ritual exterior spaces called Isaroco, which are often times simple alleyways, to the primal embankments of Usagari, where the sound approximated by the phrase El Uyo, that's how they would call it, was first materialized in, and mediated by an esoteric biotechnological device, El Ekwe. And here, you can show you some of the temples, so you can see, some of them are quite substantial. And here, finally, you see the sabre. Oh, we're not getting the pictures. Yeah, yeah. So here we are getting the temples. Here's the sabre tree. And right, so we'll stop here. But Ekwe itself is only an agent within a larger network that forms as soon as the original 13 title holders of the Tierra Efo now turned into ancestral personae with names designating their future offices, plasasas, transact the secret of the voice across the river to a group of men soon to constitute the first potencia of the chapter of the Tierra Efi, and these are two, I mean, there are three main branches. One is Efo, Efi, and Oru. So reviving the voice is only the first step in its reproduction. It now begins to spread in space and time. And here we can now omit much of the mythological detail and switch to the sequence in forming contemporary barocos in all of their multi-mediated splendor. Hours of pre-dawn work go into the fabricacion, the production or perhaps better assembly of the conditions under which Ekwe's voice can be transferred to a medium that will carry it forward in time space by enabling men born over the drum skin to perform assisted reproduction in bringing other such men into being. Even before midnight, the temple holders will assemble in the sanctum of the temple to conduct a rigorous schedule of ritual work. Nassaco begins to concoct lawemba and the basic ingredients of la mokuba. The former is a cleansing fluid, the latter a liquid conducer of Ekwe's extra sonic powers. Now the title holder named Empego will begin to write authorizing glyphs with yellow chalk on all major ritual implements as well as on the ground leading from the innermost sanctum towards the door of the temple, charting the path the voice will travel hours from then. In all of this, the physical temple is only a space through which Ekwe maintains its relationship to the world. The voice itself lives in the waters from where it has to be summoned and to which it eventually returns. To this end, a potencia activates a ritual infrastructure composed of an elaborate network of human, man-made and natural agents. A sacramental machinery designed to conduct or perhaps better, transduce a numynous energy into a variety of worldly forms available to the human sensorium. The altar's drums, staff, insignia, the hieroglyphic writing, even its ritual personnel, are mediators that need to be brought to a vanishing point of immediation that is reached when the plasas have once more become the ancestral presences who bring about the sounding of Ekwe's voice. Yn y bwya time, I mean, this of course circumscribes a very interesting vision of history in the sense. Now, once the fabrication nears its completion after hours of performing esoterical ritual works, obelas, Nasa Coel will trace a line of gunpowder along the elaborate diagrammatic phirma glyff that will mark the path for Ekwe to once more emerge and sonically transform the world within its acoustic range for those at least capable of heeding its call. By then, Ekwe'nion will step out into the first light of daybreak announcing the impending sonic incarnation to the profane world. Hei, hei, bariwa, ben kamma, meaning something like attention, admiration, it or I will speak now. So begins the lengthy chant he entones before Nasa Coel lights the gunpowder and the door of the sanctuary flings open in an explosive visual and auditory blast. What emerges from the temple's door is the first stage of la procession, the major blasa's title holders followed by a full drum orchestra guided by the irimi, Eri Bangando, who once more clears the path, and they go out in search of the voice. Only when they return will Iyamba, who has stayed behind in a corner of the fambas occluded by a curtain, begin to apply his fingers moistened with drops of mokuba to the yin, a plun piece of bamboo, poised on the resonant surface of a small, three-footed friction drum that is the source of Ekwe's vocalisation. Here you can actually see what that looks like. I mean, this should never be photographed, of course, but I didn't take them, so I can show you that. But just like the procession, that ritual march, is a mere effect of an as-of-yet-unrevealed cause, so is Iyamba himself, or better perhaps, the human body that has become his office, a mere instrumentality. Blindfolded, he himself only hears, but does not see how the yin that stick in his hand induces the vibrations on the drum skin that activate Ekwe's voice. His fingers merely carry Ekwe's luminous energy over into the phenomenal, that is auditory world, where it will pass through and bring into being further such chains of transduction. From the moment it begins to resonate from within the temple, the drone of Ekwe's vocalisations notionally both affects and directs every single of the twists and turns of the exoteric part of the ritual, that unfolds in the potencia's public space over the next six to eight hours. It takes forever. What ensues is a synesthetic riot that involves elaborate conversations, as they call it, between Ekwe and La Musica, the drum orchestra, between the Ekwe and the Iremes, these masked dancers, and you'll see one of them shortly, who though mute themselves, will react to modulations in Ekwe's volume in timbre in a gestural language of their own. And finally, it interacts with the officiating title holders, who will judge from the sound emerging from the inner sanctum whether or not the ritual steps they just executed were pleasing to the voice or badly executed. Transmitted, in other words, to Nambeeri, the drone skin by the flesh of the voice by the motions of the yn in the yamba's hands, Ekwe's power shifts from a luminous to auditory to kinetic, and not just aesthetic, but really ethical modalities. In a baroco yansaw that involves the initiation and swearing in of new or one Ekwe's or plazas into an existing potencia, it is Ekwe who calls the Iremes eribangandó and you know, here we can see him. No, actually, who calls the Iremes aberisun, this is now, to deal a deadly blow to the sacrificial goat in Bori, and it initially does so by deceiving the Iremes. Attracted to the scene, you can see sort of another one, attracted to the scene of the ritual by the voice, aberisun shrinks back in horror as he hears Ekwe's command and beholds in Bori, whose body has received the same chalk markings as the candidates for initiation. And just as Ekwe's voice will gain urgency, every time aberisun recoils until he finally strikes in Bori down with that cudgel, so will Ekwe rejoice when the goat's skin, called Tsukubakariongo, will finally be presented to the waning stars in the early morning hours as the banner of the association. Here you see that, this is a good friend of mine, presenting, and on the side you see the candidates for initiations, and on the bottom you see remnants of these sacred glyphs, and you will notice that the heads and the arms and shoulders of the initiates are also marked by these sacred writings. Yeah, this is another, this is when you just, this is holding it up to the stars. Ekwe jubilates when the indisime candidates for initiation are led into the sacred chamber and it will give birth to Nu Ekorya Nene Abakwa soon after, when in the course of a series of esoteric procedures, the head of a new initiate is placed on top of another drum called Ceci Eribo, which is never struck, and which only moments ago supported the severed head of the sacrificial victim. But now, of course, is crowned with the powerful, powerfully vibrating presence of Ekwe herself, and I'll show you those. So here you see the Ceci Eribo. You may notice that all of it has references to sound. The guy is holding the head of a rooster in his teeth. He's actually holding it by the rooster's tongue so there's transmission of a voice going on here as well. This is enveloping the Ceci in the skin of the goat. Here you see the Ceci crowned by a poor in body's head. You may notice that there are also ritual markings on his, and here the candidates are entering back into the, these are the initiates carrying their various implements that they have to contribute back into the sacred chamber. And here you have an ireme, another photo approaching with a rooster, and doing just what you saw on the announcement, namely cleansing the author with the rooster. So Ekwe, in other words, has intentionality. It has sensory powers. It takes notice of its surroundings, and it is capable of expressing effect, all the while affecting ritual actors within its phonic reach, sacralising and directing their actions. It is, in some, a mask. Just not a visual one that subsumes the body of its wearer under its power, but an acoustic one who's sacralising capacities extend to all who know how to experience and heed its call. In this sense, the acoustic mask that is Ekwe is a complex assemblage of human and non-human agencies. And I think I'm cleaving rather close to the views of contemporary albacoir members when I qualify it as a biotechnology. One, that while capable of exerting powerful agency of its own, needs to enlist human actors not only to compose its material instrumentalities, but to transduce its mystical energy from the numerous to the phenomenal realm, thereby, of course, reproducing its own agency across secular space and time as well. But enough of that. Let me now return to 1908 and the world of analog sound technology that was dawning at the time. Remember the story of poor Sikhan? We might say, good thing that Philadelphia woman hit the road when she heard of Ekwe. But while all of this gave me a wonderful opportunity to write up my ethnographic data on albacoir ritual, I now need to shift gears and try to give you at least a thumbnail sketch of my larger argument. And if anybody wanted to read the larger paper, I'd be happy to share it. In a nutshell, there are two issues that I'm after. The first one is that the Leal Brothers, technologically enhanced echo, can, I think, be fruitfully analyzed as a site of what appears to have been a remarkable convergence between the phonic and auditory ideologies underwriting the mediation of the divine in albacoir, on the one hand, and the technologies of acoustic transmission across space and time, particularly telephony and phonography, that had begun to reconfigure western auditory worlds since the second half of the 19th century. Secondly, I try to argue in the paper that just as contemporary albacoirs, sacramental technologies of sound transmission, activating the disembodied voice of the mystery, generates numerous sound envelopes that defy the precisely those space-time coordinates in which the whole thing takes place, so did the rational technologies of sound propagation and acoustic disembodiment of the mundane human voice that began to flourish in the second half of the 19th century engender their own numinous penumbra and sacramental logics. A process nicely subsumed under the concept of a dialectic of insonament that I have borrowed from Jonathan Stern, in mind its splendid resonances with Horkheimer and Adorno. Now I really don't have the time to go into the latter part of my story today, but let me just note here that both Bell's invention of the telephone and Edison's invention of the phonograph involved episodes at least as strange and macabre as NASA calls tinkering with the blood and skins of sacrificial victims. In fact, Bell's first functioning sound recording device, the so-called ear phonograph, was composed of the surgically extracted middle ears of paupers who had died at Harvard Medical Center and were mounted on a microphone stand and then fitted with a stylus that transduced the sonic vibrations registered by an eardrum no longer connected to a human being into mechanical energy. Here you have the famous ear phonograph. Bell actually had an autologist's friend at Harvard and he supplied Bell with these inner ears and Bell took them in glycerine up to his summer vacation home in Maine and you can imagine. Anyway, it worked apparently. Edison's subsequent, and why shouldn't it have worked, of course, Edison's subsequent discovery of phonography has often been described as involving a similar logic of human sacrifice, this time not of the ears of cadaveric organ donors, but of his own blood. As the story goes, Edison was tinkering with the version of Bell's telephone. Holding a finger to the stylus attached to the diaphragm when the vibrations caused by his own voice made the stylus prick his finger and draw blood. Now the reason he had put his finger there in the first place was because Edison's own partial deafness forced him to analogize between different sensory modalities and their receptivity to sound waves as a form of energy. A 1913 advertisement quotes the Wizard of Menlo Park saying, and I quote, I hear through my teeth and through my skull. Ordinarily, I merely place my head against the phonograph, but if there is some faint sound that I don't quite catch this way, I bite my teeth into the wood and then I get it good and strong. Now there are photographs of Edison's personal disc phonograph with highly visible bite marks. Excellent evidence of the principle of acoustic transduction across several sensory modalities that lies at the core of modern analog sound technology. Needless to say, the uncanny nature of such merging of body and machine, wetware and hardware, into the transductive conduit of an absent presence, previously recorded sound, was not lost on Edison's contemporaries, many of whom experienced the awesome novelty of disembodied voices as both technological fascinans and necromantic tremendome. As Edison himself repeatedly wanted, the voices of the dead could now be heard on tap. Bells, I should add, Bell's assistant Watson was actually an ardent spiritist who thought that the spirits had actually invented the telephone and put it at his and Watson's disposal. But anyway, surrounded by, as we are nowadays, by things that speak to us, think of the cell phones in your pocket or chatbots, if you want to book a ticket anywhere, we have completely forgotten the fascination from antiquity in the Renaissance onward with speaking statues or other such makine. Just remember Descartes, Locques and Voltaires, obsession with speaking parrots and the limits of humanity. But while I cannot go into the fascinating history of late 19th and early 20th century analog audio technology, you will want to know that ghosts came rushing into bells and Edison's machines almost as soon as their existence became public knowledge. Contrary to Max Weber, there is a genuine acceleration of enchantment on the way in the second half of the 19th century. If it had taken a spiritist almost 30 years to incorporate photography into their repertoire of media for spirit manifestation, the spirits at the Heidsville wrappings in 1847 began to communicate in Morse code within less than a decade of Sam Morse's invention in nearby Rochester. Eagly, of course, availed themselves of the necromantic potential of telephony and phonography in so-called direct voice manifestations right from the start. After all, the very possibility of rationalizing the hearing of disembodied voices that these technologies seem to provide so much resonated with key concerns about transcendence and immediacy that had occupied Western thinkers since the time of Plato, Aristotle and St. Augustine that it is not surprising that record companies adorned their logos with recording angels or dogs listening to their dead master's voice. Or, on the other hand, it's also not surprising that ethnographers who introduced the phonograph to people whose, shall we say, ideologies encompass dreams, possession, transes, and vision quests as genuine forms of communication between the living and the dead, human and non-human agents. This introduction of the phonograph to those people rarely elicited more than responses of polite boredom. So perhaps it was in the Leal Brothers case who, of course, would not at all have been phased by the notion of a technology productive of a disembodied voice. That's, of course, what Abacoir ritual is all about, namely creating the conditions for transducing equest voice from one ontological domain to another. And contemporary Cuban Abacoir members go about this in a highly methodological fashion, methodical fashion which they themselves refer to as the process of fabrication and process de la fabrication. Again, I can't really go into ethnographic detail here, but let me note two issues that I personally find quite fascinating in that regard. The first is that el-eque is decidedly not just a drum, nor even just an object. In fact, as I already said, the term really refers to a complex biotechnological assemblage that includes human actors, animal substances, ritual implements and spirits that are mobilized in order to enable emanations of pure, timeless sonic presence. Second, it is equa itself who enlists humans as instrumentalities of its sonic manifestation, not the other way around. I mean this is quite scandal-y abbreviated and may sound rather cryptic and I'll be happy to talk about it some more afterwards, but if the mystery that is equa allows men born over the drum skin to give birth to other such men, then it does so in order to ensure its own reproduction over time. Remains, and I'm now coming to the end, one fundamental issue to be discussed if only in passing and it pertains to both Abacoir and the turn of the 20th century audio technologies I discussed at some more length in the paper. And it is perhaps best encompassed by the phrase high fidelity, which so obviously and really rather painfully speaks to the flaws in a western metaphysics of presence and so expresses a semiotic ideology that mourns the human predicament of having to rely on socially-rutanized forms of indexical mediation. The mandatory fidelity in the sense is all about the sadness of a world in which the copy invariably must indicate the absence of the original. Unless that is, then non-identity can be made subject to socially pervasive processes of forgetting. RCA's old image of faithful nipper listening to his master's voice emanating from a phonograph horn speaks to just this problem. As does, of course, the resurgence of, or arguably I should say, of analog vinyl records among contemporary audio files. But are our old scratchy Jimi Hendrix records really any closer to the events in the Electric Ladyland studios in the late 1960s than a digitally remastered CD bought over the internet and we really cannot agree with Friedrich Kittler on that score. I mean, sure we might say, but only if we buy into a specific type of sonic ideology. One that allows you the luxury of imagining the vanishing of the medium into the message. And that is all but a technological outcome. It is a thoroughly social one. The problem is, of course, germane to Abacoir just as well. It is one that the Leal Brothers would have faced as well. Electrifying what contemporary members of Abacoir call the mechanism of la transmision of the voice from its numinous habitat to the world of men, and here of course the gender pronoun is appropriate, by sticking phonograph tubes out of your window is one thing. Creating a sonic envelope that sacralises everything within its acoustic reach for those who actually know how to heed Equus' call is another thing altogether. Just like Bell and his assistant Watson really only knew what they had heard when they belatedly told each other what Bell had yelled over the first functioning telephone, Watson, come here, I need you. So even the best recording of Equus' voice might sound like nothing but a weird drone to all of us as we sit here. As far as I know, the Leal Brothers remarkable experiment, conceivable as it really only became within the structure of the conjuncture of two originally distinct sonic and auditory ideologies, that experiment eventually came to nothing. But what the scant record of it does seem to tell us is that the very technologies that seemed so awe-inspiring, even mystical to a European and American listeners, were hardly more than means to an already agreed upon end for early Cuban members of Abacoir. For them the mystery lay where it always had lain since enslaved Africans had founded the first chapter of Abacoir in 1836 to bridge their bodies to the sounding of the voice. It lay in Equus' own agency across time and space. And I think I might have, you know, I don't have, I had a little bit of, you know, could be, you know, could be somewhere else on another, another memory stick, but you know I had a little recording and you can actually easily Google it at the first ever sound recording like Clare de Lune from 1860 and there's a kind of, you know, you're led through a successive cleaning up of the thing where in the beginning you just hear scratches, you know, nothing. I mean it's like completely incomprehensible and then it filter out more and more and more of the noise and finally you get something that you can actually recognize as a human voice. But this kind of technological outcome is not determined by technology as such. It is also determined by the kind of, you know, sort of sonic ideology that we apply to acoustic, you know, emanations that we take as indexical of something that in a sense stands behind them. And this of course is where the two, you know, where Edison, where the wizard of Menlo Park actually met the Yamba of North Fairmount Avenue in a kind of a, as my colleague, Marshal Sons would have said, you know, peculiar structure of the conjuncture that unfolded in Philadelphia in 1908. Thanks.