This paper deals with the emergence and transformation of the categories "Yoruba" and "Yorubaness" as collectively salient predicates of social identities and religious practices on both sides of the Atlantic. Arguing against anachronistic scholarly attributions of origins, I detail how such origins, identities, and religions were actively fashioned in twentieth century Nigeria, Cuba and Brazil in the course of temporally staggered ethnogenetic and ecclesiogenetic processes that involved complex interactions between religious practitioners, ethnographers and state agents, as well as textual mediations and intertextualities between ethnographic and hierographic genres. I conclude by briefly surveying the latest phase in this process, marked as it is by the transformation of "orisha worship" into what arguably is an emergent universal religion.
Yoruba origins; identity; ecclesiogenesis; globalization; Cuba; Brazil