The Gut

In The Gut: A Black Atlantic Alimentary Tract, Elizabeth Pérez provides a thorough account of the place of the digestive tract in Afro-diasporic religions, with particular attention to Lucumí, Candomble, Vodou, and Palo Monte. Drawing on a variety of sources, but especially ethnographies and the accounts of scholar-practitioners, she crafts a compelling argument for the gut as a locus not only of feeling, but also of embodied knowledge, thus making a strong case for her goal of “relativizing – or, better yet, provincializing – the brain as the sole locus of reason” (7). Beyond the specific subject of the digestive tract, The Gut is an important contribution to the literature on religion, race, and rationality. Whereas the head is associated with the supposedly superior intellectual abilities of dominant groups, the gut is racialized and othered. “Gut feelings,” and by extension embodied knowledge, are denigrated in Protestant-centric western discourses on religion, and their association with Black religions is used to exclude these traditions from the category of “religion” and instead classify them as “magic,” a similarly dismissive distinction that Pérez argues has “little heuristic value” (7). As Pérez puts it succinctly: “If the head is religion, the gut is magic” (3), and she demonstrates that scholars of religion ignore both gut feelings and traditions deemed “magic” at their peril.

The text is divided into eight sections, each devoted to a different way in which the digestive system figures into Black Atlantic religious thought and practice. Pérez pays careful attention to figures of speech involving the gut, and a number of sections look closely at an idiom involving some part of the gut: “gut feelings” (9), “strong stomach” (37), “intestinal fortitude” (46), “busting a gut” (56). All of these are in English, but Pérez states early on that the words used to talk about “gut feelings,” while they have striking similarities, are not identical between languages and are often difficult to translate. Accordingly, she also examines sayings and idioms from languages spoken by practitioners of Black Atlantic religions, namely Spanish, Portuguese, Yoruba, and Haitian Creole. The inclusion of these different languages is one example of the comprehensiveness of this study.

Pérez makes a distinction between metaphorical and literal “gut feelings,” and it is the latter that she takes up in the third section, entitled “Gut Beings,” perhaps the strongest for illustrating the gut’s centrality to Afro-diasporic religions. In this section, Pérez explains how in Lucumí, different orishas (deities) govern different parts of the body and use symptoms or sensations affecting them “as both signs of favor and exasperated bids for attention” (17). Thus, gut ailments can be read as signals from the orisha (or another being, depending on the tradition), and as such often figure into the “unchosen choice” narratives that practitioners tell about their initiations. For example, Pérez cites the experience of Joseph Murphy, who was told by an Ifá diviner that “an upset stomach means that Oshun, the orisha of abdominal organs, is speaking to [him]” (Joseph Murphy, Santería: An African Religion in America, Beacon Press, 1993, quoted by Pérez on pages 17-8). Stomach ailments are also a focus of ethnomedical healing and especially of divination; Pérez provides a number of examples from the odu (verses) of the Yoruba-derived Afro-Cuban Diloggun divination system.

Pérez is careful in stating the scope and limits of her project. She writes early on that she does not seek to “dethrone” the head, symbolically and ritually central in Afro-diasporic religions, but rather to demonstrate that the gut is another “place in the body where thought takes shape” (2). This care is further apparent in the fourth section, in which she explores possible West and central African precedents for the “gut-brain axis” in Afro-diasporic religions (27). Pérez deliberately avoids drawing a straight line between emphases on the gut in African and diasporic religious rituals, or ways of speaking about various organs in African languages and the ways in which those same organs are conceptualized in diasporic religions. Acknowledging the complexity of exchange and religious formation in the Black Atlantic and the limitations of the available literature, Pérez writes that these commonalities may have come about at a number of different times, and indeed may be coincidental. Nevertheless, the inclusion of Kongo, Ewe-Fon, and Yoruba religions, all of which undoubtedly influence the diasporic traditions that are Pérez’s focus, enriches her thorough account of the meanings of the gut in Black Atlantic religions.

The Gut is a well-theorized and richly illustrated account of the place of the digestive tract in Black Atlantic religions, sure to be of interest to scholars of these traditions, particularly those with interests in embodiment and ways of knowing. A focus on interoceptive sensation and engagement with the “thinking gut” concept from the sciences (2) also makes this text a unique contribution to the wider religious studies discourse on emotion, knowledge, and the body that should not be overlooked by scholars outside of the subfield of Afro-diasporic religions.

Alana Dickey is a master’s student in religion at Florida State University.

Alana Dickey

Date Of Review:

February 29, 2024