Diana Espírito Santo
Biographic Data
| ID | 8745748 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Diana Espírito Santo |
| GIVEN NAMES | Diana Espírito |
| FAMILY NAME | Santo |
| SIGNATURE | SANTO D E |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 32 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 123 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 3 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2009 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Not-Knowing: An Anthropological Account
Ethnographers of socio-cultural phenomena routinely face moments in the field that evoke no answers for our interlocutors, or in which answers come in entirely different forms from those anthropologists and other scholars expect. The over-emphasis on structure and meaning in social science, and anthropology in particular, has inhibited the study of a-conceptual or 'darker' spaces of cultural phenomena. In this book, Diana Espírito Santo and Sergi…
The land of forgetting: Silence and resonance in Chile’s histories of political violence
In this paper I explore two approaches to what lies ‘unearthed’ in Chile’s recent violent histories. In the first instance, I explore the effort towards the obfuscation or intertitialization of knowledge by the Chilean state, regarding the Pinochet dictatorship years. The argument in the first half of the paper underlines the need to understand recent Chilean history in relation to explicit efforts at ‘disappearing’ history – at the purposeful ob…
Other Worlds, Other Bodies: Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing
Articulate Necrographies: Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead
Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and their interactions with the living. Traditional anthropology has tended to dichotomize societies where death “speaks” from those where death is “silent” – the latter is deemed “scientific” and the former “religious” or “magical”. The collection introduces the concept of “necrography” to describe the way death and t…
The route of Orion: Towards a deconstructive history of alien contact in Chile
In this paper, I analyze a Chilean mining geoanalyst's narrative about large unrecognized geoglyphs he has charted in the Atacama Desert. The turns of this narrative take us through the Ancient Aliens hypothesis, but also an alterative pre-Inca migration route between the Atlantic and the Pacific thousands of years old, and in contravention to normative Andean archaeology. I argue that we need to look at alternative forms of history making that a…
Moebius Anthropology: Essays on the Forming of Form
Moebius Anthropology: Essays on the Forming of Form." Ethnos, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Residues of History, Affect, and the Resonance of Revolutionary Spirits in Two Cuban Forms of Spiritism
The figure of the Revolutionary or independence fighter, or indeed the Afro-Cuban maroon, is a fundamental trope of efficacy in Cuban Spiritism. But the question of the vestiges, or residues of resistance and ruin in bodies is an interesting one to ask in the light of Cuba's socialist Revolution and its obvious traces of trauma in people's bodies. I will look at two cases, in different historical periods, that understand Revolution as a material …
New media and the digitized paranormal: Instrumentation, affective atmospheres, and the production of history in Chile
In the last decade in Chile, an increasing amount of paranormal investigation companies have carried out ghost tours in patrimonial and historical places, using diverse technologies to penetrate into the history of sites. We ethnographically and analytically explore two related questions. First, we ask what paranormal instrumentation does to collective memory and to history. We argue that these 'registers' of the paranormal create 'affective atmo…
The Possible and the Impossible: Reflections on Evidence in Chilean Ufology
This article is based on a year of fieldwork with ufologists, contactees, abductees, and skeptics in Chile, using methods including ethnography, media and website analysis, and in-depth interviews. Our argument is that the “UFO” serves as, what Galison would call, a theory machine, a multiplicity generating not simply heterogeneous interpretive frameworks through which to understand anomalous flying phenomena, in different ideological spheres, bu…
Articulate Necrographies: Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead
Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and their interactions with the living. Traditional anthropology has tended to dichotomize societies where death “speaks” from those where death is “silent” – the latter is deemed “scientific” and the former “religious” or “magical”. The collection introduces the concept of “necrography” to describe the way death and t…
Divination
Divination is a widespread cultural practice that takes varied forms worldwide. It can be diagnostic, forecasting, and interventionist, in the sense of changing the receptor’s destiny. The classic distinction is that of Cicero’s inspirational divination versus that which requires some form of trained skill. Oracles, seers, and prophets in Ancient Greece would be part of the first category, while African basket diviners, Yoruba priests of divinati…
Assemblage Making, Materiality, and Self in Cuban Palo Monte
In this article I use my ethnographic data on an Afro-Cuban religion called Palo Monte to argue that ontologically discrepant ‘bits’ of the cosmos can become stuck together for particular purposes, at times producing ‘synchronicities’. I argue that the practitioners of this religion, Paleros, can be trained into producing synchronicities in the form of witchcraft. This coheres with a concept of self that can be seen as an assemblage rather than a…
Cosmos, Gods and Madmen: Frameworks in the Anthropologies of Medicine
Possession consciousness, religious individualism, and subjectivity in Brazilian Umbanda
This article explores perceived changes in patterns of consciousness in relation to possession phenomena among a sector of urban practitioners of the Brazilian religion of Umbanda, and argues that these perceptions have been accompanied by the emergence of a more individualist approach to religious selfhood which aims to lay claim to a particular vision of Umbanda. These Umbandists understand their spirit universe in ontologically plastic terms, …
Entrevista a Tim Ingold: Jueves 14 de abril de 2016
Social Anthropology at the
Recursivity and the Self-Reflexive Cosmos: Tricksters in Cuban and Brazilian Spirit Mediumship Practices
In this article, I explore how the cosmologies of two popular spirit possession cults-Espiritismo in Cuba and Umbanda in Brazil-exhibit forms of recursivity and self-reflexivity. Taking my cue from Don Handelman's notion that the cosmos often contains its own logic of self-becoming, I argue that in these ethnographic cases, recursivity results from the interplay between, on the one hand, the spirits' expression of their autonomy from living being…
Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions ed. by Paul Christopher Johnson (review)
Reviewed by: Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions ed. by Paul Christopher Johnson Diana Espírito Santo Key Words Paul Christopher Johnson, Vodou, Candomble, possession, Afro-Atlantic Religion, slave religion, spirit medium Paul Christopher Johnson, ed. Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. 2014. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pp. 344. Joan Dayan, well-known ethnographer of…
Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo
Diana Espírito Santo's "Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo" explores the dynamic interplay between mediumship, selfhood, and Cuban Espiritismo (a form of Afro-Cuban spirit possession). Through extensive ethnographic research in Havana, Cuba, the book examines how practitioners navigate the complexities of incorporating spirit entities into their sense of self. Espírito Santo argues that mediumship, rather than being…
Desagregando o espiritual: A Fabricação De Pessoas E De Complexos Espírito-Matéria Em Práticas Mediúnicas Afro-Cubanas
Na prática religiosa afro-cubana de Palo Monte, falar de espíritos ou entidades é frequentemente referenciar compósitos, conjuntos de materiais, substâncias e forças que não são nem redutíveis a noções cristãs de uma alma integrante e individual, nem a um conceito dualista da matéria. Como uma tecnologia de montagem e desmontagem, Palo Monte aniquila qualquer formulação simples de pessoalidade social, produzindo formas espirituais cujos contornos…
Turning Outside In: Infolded Selves in Cuban CreoleEspiritismo
Practitioners of Cuban Creoleespiritismoconceive of the spirits they work with as parts of their extended Selves: paradoxically both present from birth, manifest as aptitudes and personality traits and as needing to be "made" through their development as mediums. In continuity with other practices of the Afro-Cuban religious environment in which it is immersed, espiritismo sustains a spiritual cosmos that is porous and capable of absorbing and tr…
Liquid sight, thing-like words, and the precipitation of knowledge substances in Cuban espiritismo
This article argues that in Cuban Creole espiritismo practices, ritually generated 'knowledge' has ontological, rather than just epistemological, effects, independent of the role of cognition. I will show that knowledge is experienced as a fluid, moving 'substance' external to the body that can accumulate, weigh down, hang suspended, and dissipate; it is also responsive to mediums' descriptive speech, becoming an object of vision-knowledge at the…
Plasticidade e pessoalidade no espiritismo crioulo cubano
Neste artigo defendo que as formas crioulas do espiritismo cubano propõem uma sofisticada cosmologia do Self, na qual a psique humana e seu universo circundante de espíritos protetores são incorporados em uma só relação de produção mútua. Estas teorizações subvertem leituras lineares de identidades (entidades) espirituais como fragmentos de imaginários nacionais, sugerindo em seu lugar a importância de um cosmos fluido, plástico, onde as formas e…
Making Spirits: Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religions
Human substances and ontological transformations in the African-inspired ritual complex of Palo Monte in Cuba
This article brings together three distinct, yet articulating, ethnographic perspectives on the effects and affordances of material things, in particular human substances, in the Afro-Cuban religious practice of Palo Monte, a complex of Bantu-Congo inspired traditions. The authors argue that Palo Monte engenders ontological forms that are irreducible to either 'matter' or 'spirit' and thing or idea, but instead predicate their agency on a hybridi…
The Social Life of Spirits
Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else - symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more divers…
The Social Life of Spirits
Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else - symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more divers…
Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo
Diana Espírito Santo's "Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo" explores the dynamic interplay between mediumship, selfhood, and Cuban Espiritismo (a form of Afro-Cuban spirit possession). Through extensive ethnographic research in Havana, Cuba, the book examines how practitioners navigate the complexities of incorporating spirit entities into their sense of self. Espírito Santo argues that mediumship, rather than being…
Spiritist Boundary-Work and the Morality of Materiality in Afro-Cuban Religion
This article explores the significance of notions of materiality in the practice of Cuban espiritismo and in the Afro-Cuban religious cults of santería and palo monte. In particular, it pursues an understanding of the kinds of relations that are seen to emerge between the practitioners of these cults and the spirits of the dead - relations produced through their varying interpretations and uses of 'matter', in which corresponding moral implicatio…
Human substances and ontological transformations in the African-inspired ritual complex of Palo Monte in Cuba
This article brings together three distinct, yet articulating, ethnographic perspectives on the effects and affordances of material things, in particular human substances, in the Afro-Cuban religious practice of Palo Monte, a complex of Bantu-Congo inspired traditions. The authors argue that Palo Monte engenders ontological forms that are irreducible to either 'matter' or 'spirit' and thing or idea, but instead predicate their agency on a hybridi…
Imagination, Sensation and the Education of Attention Among Cuban Spirit Mediums
This article attempts to come to terms with the phenomenology of learning in the popular Cuban spirit mediumship practice of espiritismo. Espiritistas' talents derive from the unique relationships they construct with their muertos (the protective dead), allowing them to receive, discern, and interpret valuable information for others. Learning here does not result from explicit knowledge transmission but from a guided expansion of consciousness, w…
Who else is in the drawer?' Trauma, personhood and prophylaxis among Cuban scientific spiritists
In this paper the author explores notions of illness and health among a particular group of spirit mediums in Havana: the Sociedad de Estudios Psicologicos Amor y Caridad Universal. For its members and leaders, the development of mediumship is not just therapeutic but prophylactic. And traumas (of spirits and persons) must not simply be acknowledged but metabolised through the execution of good mediumship. More importantly, people's existences ar…
Moebius Anthropology: Essays on the Forming of Form
Moebius Anthropology: Essays on the Forming of Form." Ethnos, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Liquid sight, thing-like words, and the precipitation of knowledge substances in Cuban espiritismo
This article argues that in Cuban Creole espiritismo practices, ritually generated 'knowledge' has ontological, rather than just epistemological, effects, independent of the role of cognition. I will show that knowledge is experienced as a fluid, moving 'substance' external to the body that can accumulate, weigh down, hang suspended, and dissipate; it is also responsive to mediums' descriptive speech, becoming an object of vision-knowledge at the…
Possession consciousness, religious individualism, and subjectivity in Brazilian Umbanda
This article explores perceived changes in patterns of consciousness in relation to possession phenomena among a sector of urban practitioners of the Brazilian religion of Umbanda, and argues that these perceptions have been accompanied by the emergence of a more individualist approach to religious selfhood which aims to lay claim to a particular vision of Umbanda. These Umbandists understand their spirit universe in ontologically plastic terms, …
Desagregando o espiritual: A Fabricação De Pessoas E De Complexos Espírito-Matéria Em Práticas Mediúnicas Afro-Cubanas
Na prática religiosa afro-cubana de Palo Monte, falar de espíritos ou entidades é frequentemente referenciar compósitos, conjuntos de materiais, substâncias e forças que não são nem redutíveis a noções cristãs de uma alma integrante e individual, nem a um conceito dualista da matéria. Como uma tecnologia de montagem e desmontagem, Palo Monte aniquila qualquer formulação simples de pessoalidade social, produzindo formas espirituais cujos contornos…
Turning Outside In: Infolded Selves in Cuban CreoleEspiritismo
Practitioners of Cuban Creoleespiritismoconceive of the spirits they work with as parts of their extended Selves: paradoxically both present from birth, manifest as aptitudes and personality traits and as needing to be "made" through their development as mediums. In continuity with other practices of the Afro-Cuban religious environment in which it is immersed, espiritismo sustains a spiritual cosmos that is porous and capable of absorbing and tr…
Fluid Divination: Movement, Chaos, and the Generation of "Noise" in Afro-Cuban Spiritist Oracular Production
An examination of oracles in popular forms of Cuban espiritismo invites a rethinking of the role of "randomness" and "context" in the anthropology of divination. Through an analysis of the ways by which spirit mediums develop as persons, and their implications for the mechanics of divination, I argue that among espiritistas the meaning of particular configurations cannot be separated from the event that brings them about. Relatively simple in the…
Divination
Divination is a widespread cultural practice that takes varied forms worldwide. It can be diagnostic, forecasting, and interventionist, in the sense of changing the receptor’s destiny. The classic distinction is that of Cicero’s inspirational divination versus that which requires some form of trained skill. Oracles, seers, and prophets in Ancient Greece would be part of the first category, while African basket diviners, Yoruba priests of divinati…
Recursivity and the Self-Reflexive Cosmos: Tricksters in Cuban and Brazilian Spirit Mediumship Practices
In this article, I explore how the cosmologies of two popular spirit possession cults-Espiritismo in Cuba and Umbanda in Brazil-exhibit forms of recursivity and self-reflexivity. Taking my cue from Don Handelman's notion that the cosmos often contains its own logic of self-becoming, I argue that in these ethnographic cases, recursivity results from the interplay between, on the one hand, the spirits' expression of their autonomy from living being…
Plasticidade e pessoalidade no espiritismo crioulo cubano
Neste artigo defendo que as formas crioulas do espiritismo cubano propõem uma sofisticada cosmologia do Self, na qual a psique humana e seu universo circundante de espíritos protetores são incorporados em uma só relação de produção mútua. Estas teorizações subvertem leituras lineares de identidades (entidades) espirituais como fragmentos de imaginários nacionais, sugerindo em seu lugar a importância de um cosmos fluido, plástico, onde as formas e…
Making Dreams: Spirits, vision and the ontological effects of dream knowledge in Cuban espiritismo
In this paper the significance of dreaming and dream communication in Cuba is explored, principally from the point of view of mediums in the Afro-Cuban religious practice of espiritismo in Havana. I suggest that dreams are both continuous with, and epitomize, the experience of mediumship and prophecy,where 'vision' is a fundamental trope, and are thus important sources of insight and extended spiritual perspective. In a cosmos where knowledge is …
New media and the digitized paranormal: Instrumentation, affective atmospheres, and the production of history in Chile
In the last decade in Chile, an increasing amount of paranormal investigation companies have carried out ghost tours in patrimonial and historical places, using diverse technologies to penetrate into the history of sites. We ethnographically and analytically explore two related questions. First, we ask what paranormal instrumentation does to collective memory and to history. We argue that these 'registers' of the paranormal create 'affective atmo…
The Possible and the Impossible: Reflections on Evidence in Chilean Ufology
This article is based on a year of fieldwork with ufologists, contactees, abductees, and skeptics in Chile, using methods including ethnography, media and website analysis, and in-depth interviews. Our argument is that the “UFO” serves as, what Galison would call, a theory machine, a multiplicity generating not simply heterogeneous interpretive frameworks through which to understand anomalous flying phenomena, in different ideological spheres, bu…
Making Dreams: Spirits, vision and the ontological effects of dream knowledge in Cuban espiritismo
In this paper the significance of dreaming and dream communication in Cuba is explored, principally from the point of view of mediums in the Afro-Cuban religious practice of espiritismo in Havana. I suggest that dreams are both continuous with, and epitomize, the experience of mediumship and prophecy,where 'vision' is a fundamental trope, and are thus important sources of insight and extended spiritual perspective. In a cosmos where knowledge is …
Spiritist Boundary-Work and the Morality of Materiality in Afro-Cuban Religion
This article explores the significance of notions of materiality in the practice of Cuban espiritismo and in the Afro-Cuban religious cults of santería and palo monte. In particular, it pursues an understanding of the kinds of relations that are seen to emerge between the practitioners of these cults and the spirits of the dead - relations produced through their varying interpretations and uses of 'matter', in which corresponding moral implicatio…
Crossing the water: A photographic path to the Afro-Cuban spirit world - By Garoutte, Claire & Anneke Wambaugh
Who else is in the drawer?' Trauma, personhood and prophylaxis among Cuban scientific spiritists
In this paper the author explores notions of illness and health among a particular group of spirit mediums in Havana: the Sociedad de Estudios Psicologicos Amor y Caridad Universal. For its members and leaders, the development of mediumship is not just therapeutic but prophylactic. And traumas (of spirits and persons) must not simply be acknowledged but metabolised through the execution of good mediumship. More importantly, people's existences ar…
Imagination, Sensation and the Education of Attention Among Cuban Spirit Mediums
This article attempts to come to terms with the phenomenology of learning in the popular Cuban spirit mediumship practice of espiritismo. Espiritistas' talents derive from the unique relationships they construct with their muertos (the protective dead), allowing them to receive, discern, and interpret valuable information for others. Learning here does not result from explicit knowledge transmission but from a guided expansion of consciousness, w…
Making Spirits: Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religions
Human substances and ontological transformations in the African-inspired ritual complex of Palo Monte in Cuba
This article brings together three distinct, yet articulating, ethnographic perspectives on the effects and affordances of material things, in particular human substances, in the Afro-Cuban religious practice of Palo Monte, a complex of Bantu-Congo inspired traditions. The authors argue that Palo Monte engenders ontological forms that are irreducible to either 'matter' or 'spirit' and thing or idea, but instead predicate their agency on a hybridi…
The Social Life of Spirits
Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else - symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more divers…
Social Life of Spirits
Fluid Divination: Movement, Chaos, and the Generation of "Noise" in Afro-Cuban Spiritist Oracular Production
An examination of oracles in popular forms of Cuban espiritismo invites a rethinking of the role of "randomness" and "context" in the anthropology of divination. Through an analysis of the ways by which spirit mediums develop as persons, and their implications for the mechanics of divination, I argue that among espiritistas the meaning of particular configurations cannot be separated from the event that brings them about. Relatively simple in the…
Plasticidade e pessoalidade no espiritismo crioulo cubano
Neste artigo defendo que as formas crioulas do espiritismo cubano propõem uma sofisticada cosmologia do Self, na qual a psique humana e seu universo circundante de espíritos protetores são incorporados em uma só relação de produção mútua. Estas teorizações subvertem leituras lineares de identidades (entidades) espirituais como fragmentos de imaginários nacionais, sugerindo em seu lugar a importância de um cosmos fluido, plástico, onde as formas e…
Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions ed. by Paul Christopher Johnson (review)
Reviewed by: Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions ed. by Paul Christopher Johnson Diana Espírito Santo Key Words Paul Christopher Johnson, Vodou, Candomble, possession, Afro-Atlantic Religion, slave religion, spirit medium Paul Christopher Johnson, ed. Spirited Things: The Work of “Possession” in Afro-Atlantic Religions. 2014. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Pp. 344. Joan Dayan, well-known ethnographer of…
Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo
Diana Espírito Santo's "Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo" explores the dynamic interplay between mediumship, selfhood, and Cuban Espiritismo (a form of Afro-Cuban spirit possession). Through extensive ethnographic research in Havana, Cuba, the book examines how practitioners navigate the complexities of incorporating spirit entities into their sense of self. Espírito Santo argues that mediumship, rather than being…
Desagregando o espiritual: A Fabricação De Pessoas E De Complexos Espírito-Matéria Em Práticas Mediúnicas Afro-Cubanas
Na prática religiosa afro-cubana de Palo Monte, falar de espíritos ou entidades é frequentemente referenciar compósitos, conjuntos de materiais, substâncias e forças que não são nem redutíveis a noções cristãs de uma alma integrante e individual, nem a um conceito dualista da matéria. Como uma tecnologia de montagem e desmontagem, Palo Monte aniquila qualquer formulação simples de pessoalidade social, produzindo formas espirituais cujos contornos…
Turning Outside In: Infolded Selves in Cuban CreoleEspiritismo
Practitioners of Cuban Creoleespiritismoconceive of the spirits they work with as parts of their extended Selves: paradoxically both present from birth, manifest as aptitudes and personality traits and as needing to be "made" through their development as mediums. In continuity with other practices of the Afro-Cuban religious environment in which it is immersed, espiritismo sustains a spiritual cosmos that is porous and capable of absorbing and tr…
Liquid sight, thing-like words, and the precipitation of knowledge substances in Cuban espiritismo
This article argues that in Cuban Creole espiritismo practices, ritually generated 'knowledge' has ontological, rather than just epistemological, effects, independent of the role of cognition. I will show that knowledge is experienced as a fluid, moving 'substance' external to the body that can accumulate, weigh down, hang suspended, and dissipate; it is also responsive to mediums' descriptive speech, becoming an object of vision-knowledge at the…
Entrevista a Tim Ingold: Jueves 14 de abril de 2016
Social Anthropology at the
Recursivity and the Self-Reflexive Cosmos: Tricksters in Cuban and Brazilian Spirit Mediumship Practices
In this article, I explore how the cosmologies of two popular spirit possession cults-Espiritismo in Cuba and Umbanda in Brazil-exhibit forms of recursivity and self-reflexivity. Taking my cue from Don Handelman's notion that the cosmos often contains its own logic of self-becoming, I argue that in these ethnographic cases, recursivity results from the interplay between, on the one hand, the spirits' expression of their autonomy from living being…
Cosmos, Gods and Madmen: Frameworks in the Anthropologies of Medicine
Possession consciousness, religious individualism, and subjectivity in Brazilian Umbanda
This article explores perceived changes in patterns of consciousness in relation to possession phenomena among a sector of urban practitioners of the Brazilian religion of Umbanda, and argues that these perceptions have been accompanied by the emergence of a more individualist approach to religious selfhood which aims to lay claim to a particular vision of Umbanda. These Umbandists understand their spirit universe in ontologically plastic terms, …
Assemblage Making, Materiality, and Self in Cuban Palo Monte
In this article I use my ethnographic data on an Afro-Cuban religion called Palo Monte to argue that ontologically discrepant ‘bits’ of the cosmos can become stuck together for particular purposes, at times producing ‘synchronicities’. I argue that the practitioners of this religion, Paleros, can be trained into producing synchronicities in the form of witchcraft. This coheres with a concept of self that can be seen as an assemblage rather than a…
Articulate Necrographies: Comparative Perspectives on the Voices and Silences of the Dead
Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and their interactions with the living. Traditional anthropology has tended to dichotomize societies where death “speaks” from those where death is “silent” – the latter is deemed “scientific” and the former “religious” or “magical”. The collection introduces the concept of “necrography” to describe the way death and t…
Divination
Divination is a widespread cultural practice that takes varied forms worldwide. It can be diagnostic, forecasting, and interventionist, in the sense of changing the receptor’s destiny. The classic distinction is that of Cicero’s inspirational divination versus that which requires some form of trained skill. Oracles, seers, and prophets in Ancient Greece would be part of the first category, while African basket diviners, Yoruba priests of divinati…
The Possible and the Impossible: Reflections on Evidence in Chilean Ufology
This article is based on a year of fieldwork with ufologists, contactees, abductees, and skeptics in Chile, using methods including ethnography, media and website analysis, and in-depth interviews. Our argument is that the “UFO” serves as, what Galison would call, a theory machine, a multiplicity generating not simply heterogeneous interpretive frameworks through which to understand anomalous flying phenomena, in different ideological spheres, bu…
Moebius Anthropology: Essays on the Forming of Form
Moebius Anthropology: Essays on the Forming of Form." Ethnos, ahead-of-print(ahead-of-print), pp. 1–2
Philosophy (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Art (13 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Cuban History and Society (12 works) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (11 works) · History (11 works) · Aesthetics (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Anthropology (8 works)