| Abstract | In December 2014, I traveled to Cuba to observe how descendants of the Arará, a religious and cultural group practiced by the Ewe-Fon in West Africa, develop a "symbolic literacy." A symbolic literacy is the ability to understand the shifting meanings of sign systems depending on the situated meanings of cultural parameters. For practitioners in Perico and Agramonte, Cuba, symbolic literacy often takes the form of social memory, oral history, and embodied narratives. There is a special emphasis on the latter. What emerges from my design is a methodology of lived experience based in memoir. The following essay combines scholarship and story, paralleling the performative processes of the Arará. Within the story of my learning the diverse sign systems used to perform ritual ceremonies, it appears the sharing of and participation in the syncretizing of diverse cultural traditions contributed to the development of a symbolic literacy. This insight is relevant to the discussion of literacy development in Western education, which often favors a singular approach to literacy and identity rather than a multi/symbolic approach.
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