“Where obscurity is a virtue”: The mystique of unintelligibility in Santería ritual

Anthropologists since Malinowski have noted the unintelligibility of many types of ritual and magical speech. What has not been sufficiently explored are the links between how unintelligibility is actually produced and how unintelligibility contributes to meaningfulness in ritual performances. Examining these links can deepen our understanding of what makes rituals efficacious and accounts for their impact on social life. This paper compares two genres of Lucumí ritual speech in Cuban Santería, songs and possession trance speech, to argue that unintelligibility is produced through different semiotic and metasemiotic processes in each case. Even within the same ritual register, unintelligibility can be performed differently, and its consequences can correspondingly differ.