Raquel Romberg
Biographic Data
| ID | 197441 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Raquel Romberg |
| GIVEN NAMES | Raquel |
| FAMILY NAME | Romberg |
| SIGNATURE | ROMBERG R |
| AFFILIATIONS | Tel Aviv University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-6563-7385 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 13 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 19 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 13 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Spirited Diasporas: Personal Narratives and Global Futures of Afro-Atlantic Religions, by Martin Tsang (ed.)
Enlightened Cosmic Verdicts: Human-Made Laws vs. Spiritual Laws in Brujería Practices
This article illuminates the tension between particularist moral cultural systems and the universal ethics of positivist laws through a detailed ethnography of Puerto Rican brujería (witchcraft-healing) practices. As an Afro-Latino religious practice that combines folk Catholicism, African-based religions, and the moral teachings of Kardecean Spiritism, contemporary Puerto Rican offers a moral compass and sense of justice aligned with its ‘spirit…
The Location of Suicide: Cultural Parameters of a Public Health Territory
The impetus driving this article is the uncritical uses of ‘culture’ as an explanatory variable in public health research of ‘suicide’, regarding its conceptualization and operationalization as a mentally riddled phenomenon clamped in nomothetic and epidemiological nomenclature. This reduction of suicide to its presumed ‘evidence based’ figures and graphs under the guise of the lingo of culture requires and yields not only ‘thin’ understandings b…
Ritual Life of an Altar-Home: A Photographic Essay on Transformational Places and Technologies
This photographic essay brings evidence of the visible material and invisible spectral changes altar-homes, altar-rooms, and altars undergo, as interactions with them are experienced by ritual participants. Focusing on the visual documentation I gathered while working at the altar-home of Haydée, a Puerto Rican espiritista bruja, I explore the matter-of-fact, almost banal technologies by means of which healers may initiate transformational proces…
Shimmering Magic: Cross-cultural Explorations of the Aesthetic, Moral, and Mystical Significance of Reflecting and Deflecting Shine
This introduction lays basic theoretical groundwork that helps tie together these different articles on ritual uses of shimmer. Contributors examine not only how contemporary technologies of mass production (tinfoil, plastic sequins) and reproduction (photographs) have entered both iconoclast and iconophile ritual and popular culture spheres; they also illustrate how metaphoric and metonymic forms of agency and presence are attributed to shimmeri…
Gestures that do: Spiritist manifestations and the technologies of religious subjectivation and affect
This article explores theoretically and ethnographically how gestures 'do' within Spiritist religious practices. According to the emic Spiritist notion of 'manifestations', certain gestures can bridge between material and spiritual realms and the various dimensions of the self. Embodying the moral economy and dispositions of Spiritism, such gestures are thereby investigated as affective and practical technologies for constituting the religious su…
Magic in the Postcolonial Americas
Colonial magic refers to the hybrid formations resulting from efforts to extend familiar concepts to novel situations involving clashes about what counts as real. Historians long represented the Netherlands as a place that achieved cosmopolitan tolerance early and served as a refuge for dissenters from elsewhere. Colonial magic speaks to efforts to make sense that alter what they touch, both for colonized and for colonizer populations. This chapt…
Turning the Pot Upside Down: What About the Cooking of Religion
Turning the Pot Upside DownWhat About the Cooking of Religion? Raquel Romberg KEYWORDS Stephan Palmié, Raquel Romberg, The Cooking of History, Afro-Cuban religion, Africa, Cuba, Yoruba, Santéria The Coking of History presents a complex, erudite portrait of the making of "Afro-Cuban religion" over the last three centuries as an object of study and a religious "tradition" by a host of social agents-religious experts, anthropologists, journalists, s…
The Moral Economy of Brujería under the Modern Colony: A Pirated Modernity?
Spiritual Capital: On the Materiality and Immateriality of Blessings in Puerto Rican Brujería
This essay situates the significance of “spiritual capital” within Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing) in relation to re-enchantment theories of modernity. It argues that the merging of spiritual and economic values has engendered a form of “spiritualized materialism” that has turned sheer economic prosperity into spiritually wrought rewards. Within this moral economy, matter does not simply function as a conduit for the sacred; it actually con…
Ritual Piracy or Creolization with an Attitude
Discusses a renewed view on "creolization", in relation to the Caribbean's social and cultural history. Author first points at the different creolization theories, noting a recurrence in these of the concepts of "mixture", "creative mixture", or "dialogue" between cultures, and describes how such "harmonious mix" views of creolization influenced forms of nationalism and nation building in the Caribbean, thereby blurring inequalities. She, however…
Society for Latin American Anthropology: Puerto Rican 6 ̃#jerf8
Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole
Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole. By Sabina Magliocco. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Pp. xii + 76, preface, notes, bibliography, photographs. $40.00 cloth, $18.00 paper) Sabina Magliocco's empathic narrative discloses the secretive and often misunderstood world of through a close look at its material culture-its shrines, masks, and body adornments. She shows ways in which practitioners and ascribe personal m…
Ritual Piracy or Creolization with an Attitude
Discusses a renewed view on "creolization", in relation to the Caribbean's social and cultural history. Author first points at the different creolization theories, noting a recurrence in these of the concepts of "mixture", "creative mixture", or "dialogue" between cultures, and describes how such "harmonious mix" views of creolization influenced forms of nationalism and nation building in the Caribbean, thereby blurring inequalities. She, however…
Gestures that do: Spiritist manifestations and the technologies of religious subjectivation and affect
This article explores theoretically and ethnographically how gestures 'do' within Spiritist religious practices. According to the emic Spiritist notion of 'manifestations', certain gestures can bridge between material and spiritual realms and the various dimensions of the self. Embodying the moral economy and dispositions of Spiritism, such gestures are thereby investigated as affective and practical technologies for constituting the religious su…
Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole
Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole. By Sabina Magliocco. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Pp. xii + 76, preface, notes, bibliography, photographs. $40.00 cloth, $18.00 paper) Sabina Magliocco's empathic narrative discloses the secretive and often misunderstood world of through a close look at its material culture-its shrines, masks, and body adornments. She shows ways in which practitioners and ascribe personal m…
Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole
Neo-Pagan Sacred Art and Altars: Making Things Whole. By Sabina Magliocco. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2001. Pp. xii + 76, preface, notes, bibliography, photographs. $40.00 cloth, $18.00 paper) Sabina Magliocco's empathic narrative discloses the secretive and often misunderstood world of through a close look at its material culture-its shrines, masks, and body adornments. She shows ways in which practitioners and ascribe personal m…
Society for Latin American Anthropology: Puerto Rican 6 ̃#jerf8
Ritual Piracy or Creolization with an Attitude
Discusses a renewed view on "creolization", in relation to the Caribbean's social and cultural history. Author first points at the different creolization theories, noting a recurrence in these of the concepts of "mixture", "creative mixture", or "dialogue" between cultures, and describes how such "harmonious mix" views of creolization influenced forms of nationalism and nation building in the Caribbean, thereby blurring inequalities. She, however…
Spiritual Capital: On the Materiality and Immateriality of Blessings in Puerto Rican Brujería
This essay situates the significance of “spiritual capital” within Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing) in relation to re-enchantment theories of modernity. It argues that the merging of spiritual and economic values has engendered a form of “spiritualized materialism” that has turned sheer economic prosperity into spiritually wrought rewards. Within this moral economy, matter does not simply function as a conduit for the sacred; it actually con…
The Moral Economy of Brujería under the Modern Colony: A Pirated Modernity?
Magic in the Postcolonial Americas
Colonial magic refers to the hybrid formations resulting from efforts to extend familiar concepts to novel situations involving clashes about what counts as real. Historians long represented the Netherlands as a place that achieved cosmopolitan tolerance early and served as a refuge for dissenters from elsewhere. Colonial magic speaks to efforts to make sense that alter what they touch, both for colonized and for colonizer populations. This chapt…
Turning the Pot Upside Down: What About the Cooking of Religion
Turning the Pot Upside DownWhat About the Cooking of Religion? Raquel Romberg KEYWORDS Stephan Palmié, Raquel Romberg, The Cooking of History, Afro-Cuban religion, Africa, Cuba, Yoruba, Santéria The Coking of History presents a complex, erudite portrait of the making of "Afro-Cuban religion" over the last three centuries as an object of study and a religious "tradition" by a host of social agents-religious experts, anthropologists, journalists, s…
Shimmering Magic: Cross-cultural Explorations of the Aesthetic, Moral, and Mystical Significance of Reflecting and Deflecting Shine
This introduction lays basic theoretical groundwork that helps tie together these different articles on ritual uses of shimmer. Contributors examine not only how contemporary technologies of mass production (tinfoil, plastic sequins) and reproduction (photographs) have entered both iconoclast and iconophile ritual and popular culture spheres; they also illustrate how metaphoric and metonymic forms of agency and presence are attributed to shimmeri…
Gestures that do: Spiritist manifestations and the technologies of religious subjectivation and affect
This article explores theoretically and ethnographically how gestures 'do' within Spiritist religious practices. According to the emic Spiritist notion of 'manifestations', certain gestures can bridge between material and spiritual realms and the various dimensions of the self. Embodying the moral economy and dispositions of Spiritism, such gestures are thereby investigated as affective and practical technologies for constituting the religious su…
Ritual Life of an Altar-Home: A Photographic Essay on Transformational Places and Technologies
This photographic essay brings evidence of the visible material and invisible spectral changes altar-homes, altar-rooms, and altars undergo, as interactions with them are experienced by ritual participants. Focusing on the visual documentation I gathered while working at the altar-home of Haydée, a Puerto Rican espiritista bruja, I explore the matter-of-fact, almost banal technologies by means of which healers may initiate transformational proces…
The Location of Suicide: Cultural Parameters of a Public Health Territory
The impetus driving this article is the uncritical uses of ‘culture’ as an explanatory variable in public health research of ‘suicide’, regarding its conceptualization and operationalization as a mentally riddled phenomenon clamped in nomothetic and epidemiological nomenclature. This reduction of suicide to its presumed ‘evidence based’ figures and graphs under the guise of the lingo of culture requires and yields not only ‘thin’ understandings b…
Spirited Diasporas: Personal Narratives and Global Futures of Afro-Atlantic Religions, by Martin Tsang (ed.)
Enlightened Cosmic Verdicts: Human-Made Laws vs. Spiritual Laws in Brujería Practices
This article illuminates the tension between particularist moral cultural systems and the universal ethics of positivist laws through a detailed ethnography of Puerto Rican brujería (witchcraft-healing) practices. As an Afro-Latino religious practice that combines folk Catholicism, African-based religions, and the moral teachings of Kardecean Spiritism, contemporary Puerto Rican offers a moral compass and sense of justice aligned with its ‘spirit…
Anthropological Studies and Insights (6 works) · Art (5 works) · Sociology (5 works) · Philosophy (4 works) · Aesthetics (3 works) · Caribbean history, culture, and politics (3 works) · Colonialism, slavery, and trade (3 works) · Epistemology (3 works) · History (3 works) · Literature (3 works)