D E Santos
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 19260 |
|---|---|
| NOME | D E Santos |
| PRENOMES | D E |
| SOBRENOME | Santos |
| ASSINATURA | SANTOS D E |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4813-7455 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 44 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 142 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 44 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2009 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 7 |
The bending of space-time in anthropology
In this article I explore two very different ethnographies in search of a heuristic or heuristics to understand temporality in each one of them. The first is of a UFO contact group in Chile, who insist that we exist in a sort of separate temporal frame from the “real” time of the universe. In this parallel existence we are working to save ourselves from imminent destruction; in the “real” time we have already destroyed ourselves. The second is of…
Thinking with Ngangas
The Racial Lives of Chilean Aliens
This article is about two interlacing narratives: one is of race, mestizaje and hybridity in historical Chile, and the other is of the underlying assumptions and futurological racial projections in four Chilean abduction and contact ethnographic case studies. The two are at a contrapuntal stance to each other in that the second manifests a sort of forward-thinking "racecraft" (Palmié 2023) where race is not seen as a natural kind but an epistemol…
The land of forgetting
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…
Excesses, Resisting Interpretation, and the Negative in Three Latin American Imaginaries
This article will explore three ethnographies-of Brazilian Umbanda, Cuban espiritismo, and Chilean ufology-whose cosmoses are variably self-referential, paradoxical, and absurd. I follow their anti-logics and argue that they exhibit, firstly, an excess, and secondly, a resistance to interpretation. Taking my concept of excess from Marisol de la Cadena, and of resisting interpretation from Susan Sontag, I argue that a radical version of resisting …
Ways of Not-Knowing in Neoliberal Chile
Through two significantly distinct ethnographic case studies, both based in Santiago, Chile, we argue for the need to attend to experiences which are not conceptualised by our interlocutors, or that remain ‘dark’ in terms of their ontological and representational properties. We point out that anthropology has been ill-equipped to deal with these ineffable margins, and point to conceptual arches which could be used transversally in what we call a …
Playful aliens
Deceit is conceived by ufology theorists as intrinsic to the behavior of UFO phenomena, often experienced as slippery and theatrical. In abduction experiences, there is what has been described as a simulacrum of medicine and science, whose content can be absurd and whose purposes are largely obscure. If we begin from the humanist perspective, we could say that these experiences produce antipodal stances-contradictory statements and affective post…
The route of Orion
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…
Archives of Conjure
Solimar Otero's latest book is not an easy one to read, even for scholars of Cuba and Brazil like myself.It is dense, weaves ethnography with literary and queer theory, and proposes novel terms that echo with postcolonial, post-scholarship scholarship.But the term "archives of conjure" itself evokes something that all scholars who have worked in the Afro-Latin world will at once recognize: that materiality matters, be it an archive, or an etching…
Moebius Anthropology
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 …
Spectral technologies, sonic motility, and the paranormal in Chile
In this article I look at Chilean paranormal investigators in the capital-Santiago-and their apparatuses. I argue that these recording devices appear somehow as "vibrant" things, but they work in conjunction with others creating articulate living worlds. The first argument is that these articulations are made salient through sonic atmospheres-universes of sound that envelope a particular temporal moment, and that escape any single person's voliti…
New media and the digitized paranormal
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
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…
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 Ontogeny of Dolls
Objects are fundamental components of cosmology in Afro-Cuban religions; they serve to represent, pay homage to, and feed a constellation of covetous spirits. In a moral universe of practitioners materiality allures and potentially corrupts; it grounds personal and collective ritual agency; mediates thoughts-feelings; materializes the immaterial; and invariably transcends all these dichotomies and becomes gods, parts of people, concepts. In this …
Afro-Cuban Counterpoint
En este artículo proponemos entender la religiosidad afrocubana de una manera que no la ve como si fuese un epifenómeno de los regímenes políticos o como uno de resistencia en términos de sus dimensiones simbólicas. Argumentamos que la religión afrocubana produce personas como hiper-individualizadas, a través de cosmologias que, en gran medida, "abarcan" la vida cotidiana, incluyendo la política. La Revolución Socialista, por lo contrario, ha int…
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…
Telegraph Spirits and Muertos Chinos
As a technology for the production of historicized spirit forms, espiritismo continually forges its own cosmology from the raw materials of a Cuban syncretistic imagination, with permutations of figures such as the “Congo” and the “Indio” bringing its more visible agencies to the forefront. These yield extensive material forms—dolls, statues, photographs, altars, vessels, and consumables. In this article I ask whether understandings of the “subst…
Cosmos, Gods and Madmen
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, …
Clothes for spirits
In this article I argue for alternative models to understanding the relationship of spirit cosmologies to their social surround. In my ethnography, I show that fluidity and plasticity are central to a particular urban sector of the Brazilian spirit religion of Umbanda. Some contemporary Umbandists, particularly in the city of São Paulo, see that "culture," read as the Brazilian historical imaginary, becomes the stuff by which the spirits self-ref…
Entrevista a Tim Ingold
Social Anthropology at the
Recursivity and the Self-Reflexive Cosmos
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
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…
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
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…
Clothes for spirits
In this article I argue for alternative models to understanding the relationship of spirit cosmologies to their social surround. In my ethnography, I show that fluidity and plasticity are central to a particular urban sector of the Brazilian spirit religion of Umbanda. Some contemporary Umbandists, particularly in the city of São Paulo, see that "culture," read as the Brazilian historical imaginary, becomes the stuff by which the spirits self-ref…
Moebius Anthropology
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…
The Ontogeny of Dolls
Objects are fundamental components of cosmology in Afro-Cuban religions; they serve to represent, pay homage to, and feed a constellation of covetous spirits. In a moral universe of practitioners materiality allures and potentially corrupts; it grounds personal and collective ritual agency; mediates thoughts-feelings; materializes the immaterial; and invariably transcends all these dichotomies and becomes gods, parts of people, concepts. In this …
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
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
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
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…
Playful aliens
Deceit is conceived by ufology theorists as intrinsic to the behavior of UFO phenomena, often experienced as slippery and theatrical. In abduction experiences, there is what has been described as a simulacrum of medicine and science, whose content can be absurd and whose purposes are largely obscure. If we begin from the humanist perspective, we could say that these experiences produce antipodal stances-contradictory statements and affective post…
Spectral technologies, sonic motility, and the paranormal in Chile
In this article I look at Chilean paranormal investigators in the capital-Santiago-and their apparatuses. I argue that these recording devices appear somehow as "vibrant" things, but they work in conjunction with others creating articulate living worlds. The first argument is that these articulations are made salient through sonic atmospheres-universes of sound that envelope a particular temporal moment, and that escape any single person's voliti…
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…
Afro-Cuban Counterpoint
En este artículo proponemos entender la religiosidad afrocubana de una manera que no la ve como si fuese un epifenómeno de los regímenes políticos o como uno de resistencia en términos de sus dimensiones simbólicas. Argumentamos que la religión afrocubana produce personas como hiper-individualizadas, a través de cosmologias que, en gran medida, "abarcan" la vida cotidiana, incluyendo la política. La Revolución Socialista, por lo contrario, ha int…
Telegraph Spirits and Muertos Chinos
As a technology for the production of historicized spirit forms, espiritismo continually forges its own cosmology from the raw materials of a Cuban syncretistic imagination, with permutations of figures such as the “Congo” and the “Indio” bringing its more visible agencies to the forefront. These yield extensive material forms—dolls, statues, photographs, altars, vessels, and consumables. In this article I ask whether understandings of the “subst…
Recursivity and the Self-Reflexive Cosmos
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
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
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
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
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 …
Book and Film Reviews
BENTLEY, Alex (ed.), The Edge of Reason? Science and Religion in Modern Society, 222 pp., foreword. London: Continuum, 2008. Paperback, £13.99. ISBN: 9781847062185. BERGER, Peter, Grace DAVIE, and Effi e FOKAS, Religious America, Secular Europe? A Theme and Variations, 176 pp., bibliography, index. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008. Paperback, £16.99. ISBN: 978075466011. LEVEY, Geoffrey Brahm and Tariq MODOOD (eds.), Secularism, Religion and Multicultural…
Power of the Dead
This paper aims to conceptualize the relationship between the main Afro-Cuban religious practices and the experience of varied social and economic difficulties in Havana, and in particular, the role of the dead—the muertos—in its articulation. I argue that the dead are not just to be seen as socio-historical idioms or representations but as constitutive elements of a Cuban religious personhood, which must be discerned, acknowledged and objectifie…
An Author Meets Her Critics
“Why spirits?” asks Emma Cohen (97)—why are concepts of intentional and agentive supernatural beings such as spirits and gods so prevalent cross-culturally? What makes them appealing, contagious, and lasting? And what kinds of assumptions about the world and its workings do they entail and do they generate? In The Mind Possessed, Cohen offers us some answers; to some degree by appealing to her ethnography of the Afro-Brazilian practice of batuque…
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
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…
Stefania Capone, Searching for Africa in Brazil
Esta convincente traducao do livro La quete de l’Afrique dans le candomble: Pouvoir et tradition au Bresil (1999) finalmente disponibiliza a antropologos nao francofonos a trabalharem na area das religioes “afro” no Brasil a obra principal de Capone, cujos valor antropologico e riqueza etnografica sao incontestaveis. Capone e veterana neste contexto etnografico, comecando o seu percurso de investigacao no final dos anos 80 no Rio de Janeiro, nom…
Book and Film Reviews
published
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…
Observaciones sobre la relación entre la “cosmo-lógica” y la construcción de la persona en el espiritismo cubano
Hablar de síntesis o mezclas de tradiciones religiosas sin tomar en cuenta las ontologías que en ellas operan conlleva a equivocaciones. En este texto, propongo la idea según la cual el espiritismo popular cubano ofrece una verdadera “antropología”, o teoría indígena de la persona, que actúa como un motor dinámico hacia las demás prácticas religiosas: diversifica las prácticas a través de los requerimientos de los muertos con quienes se comunican…
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…
Fluid Divination
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
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
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
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
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…
Clothes for spirits
In this article I argue for alternative models to understanding the relationship of spirit cosmologies to their social surround. In my ethnography, I show that fluidity and plasticity are central to a particular urban sector of the Brazilian spirit religion of Umbanda. Some contemporary Umbandists, particularly in the city of São Paulo, see that "culture," read as the Brazilian historical imaginary, becomes the stuff by which the spirits self-ref…
Entrevista a Tim Ingold
Social Anthropology at the
Recursivity and the Self-Reflexive Cosmos
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
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, …
Philosophy (28 obras) · Sociology (25 obras) · Art (22 obras) · Epistemology (22 obras) · Cuban History and Society (18 obras) · Aesthetics (17 obras) · Philosophy (16 obras) · Anthropological Studies and Insights (15 obras) · History (14 obras) · Anthropology (13 obras)