Abstract

HOLBRAAD, Martin. Cosmogony and Second Nature in the Cuban Revolution. Cuicuilco. Rev. cienc. antropol. [online]. 2017, vol.24, n.70, pp.11-30. ISSN 2448-8488.

A point of departure for getting an anthropological handle on revolutions is to treat them as cosmogonic events. Big Bang-like, the characteristically violent effervescence of revolution is meant to bring about a new world of sorts. Revolutions that are successful in gaining the reins of state power, however, are soon confronted with the problem of ‘routinization’, as Weber called it: the initial act of total change is institutionalised as a totalizing condition - an near-permanent ‘regime’ of state-power that can only be endured as a kind of political ‘second nature’. In this article I draw on my own ethnographic material from Cuba to argue that, far from contradictory, this duality of action vs condition marks out the coordinates within which lives in such state-socialist revolutionary societies are lived, and use anthropological discussions of the relationship between culture and nature as a way of understanding the shape of their mutual relationship.

Keywords : Cuba; revolution; routinization; cosmogony; political ontology.

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