Developing the dead: mediumship and selfhood in Cuban spiritism

Developing the Dead

Florida A&M University, TallahasseeFlorida Atlantic University, Boca RatonFlorida Gulf Coast University, Ft. MyersFlorida International University, MiamiFlorida State University, TallahasseeNew College of Florida, SarasotaUniversity of Central Florida, OrlandoUniversity of Florida, GainesvilleUniversity of North Florida, JacksonvilleUniversity of South Florida, TampaUniversity of West Florida, Pensacola

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Developing the DeadMediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo

Diana Espírito Santo

University Press of FloridaGainesville · Tallahassee · Tampa · Boca RatonPensacola · Orlando · Miami · Jacksonville · Ft. Myers · Sarasota

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Copyright by Diana Espírito SantoAll rights reservedPrinted in the United States of America on acid-free paper

4is book may be available in an electronic edition.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataISBN ----

4e University Press of Florida is the scholarly publishing agency for the State University System of Florida, comprising Florida A&M University, Florida Atlantic University, Florida Gulf Coast University, Florida International University, Florida State University, New College of Florida, University of Central Florida, University of Florida, University of North Florida, University of South Florida, and University of West Florida.

University Press of Florida Northwest th StreetGainesville, FL -http://www.upf.com

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Contents

Figures vii Preface ix Acknowledgments xv . Spirits at the Crossroads of Belief and Pragmatism . Spiritism and the Place of the Dead in Afro-Cuban Religion . On Good Mediumship: Science, Revolution, and Legitimacy . Encounter, Selfhood, and Multiplicity . Development as Cosmogony: Ritual and Materialization Epilogue: Biographical Intersections References Index

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Figures

. A stand in a market of religious items in Central Havana . A male iyawó in Central Havana . Example of ngangas . Example of ngangas . A misa espiritual at Eduardo and Olga’s house . Party for the gypsy spirits at Eduardo and Olga’s house . Gypsy spirit representation . Eduardo and the author . Bóveda espiritual . Bóveda espiritual . Statuette of San Lázaro . Representations of Congo spirits

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Preface

4e data described and analyzed in this book derive from ethnographic fieldwork carried out for the duration of twenty months between and , with the bulk executed consecutively between August and December , followed by month-long trips in , , , and . Having carried out neither a pilot project nor a field reconnaissance trip prior to my arrival, I was relatively “green” on the ground from the outset. Most of the sparse existing literature on Cu-ban espiritismo was in Spanish—and archived in Cuba, which made preparing the project a difficult, even speculative, affair. As a result of this gap, I read extensively on Brazilian and Puerto Rican spiritism and any literature I could find on Afro-Cuban religious practices and their history, searching for clues in this fascinating body of work that pointed to the role of espiritistas in Cuba’s religious complex. While I had initially applied to the doctoral program at University College London with a proposal to research Portuguese spiritist societies, a task I had already informally begun prior to my application, I had a change of heart early on, in great part due to my exposure to the en-grossing ethnographic descriptions and analytical insights of my co-supervisor, Martin Holbraad, on the Afro-Cuban divination cult of Ifá. Intriguingly, Martin insisted that espiritismo was everywhere in Cuba, that the muerto, the spirit of the dead, was an essential “grease” in the Afro-Cuban religious machinery, and that espiritistas wielded enormous, under-recognized influence, yet he could tell me very little further. However, the ethnographic vagueness which surrounded con-temporary espiritismo suggested that a challenge was at hand. I had read about Afro-Brazilian cults to the dead and had a good working knowledge of Candomblé, Brazil’s version of Santería, having spent some time in Bahia in my early twenties. In comparison to Brazil,

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x · Preface

Cuba seemed little explored, particularly relative to its conceptualiza-tion and treatment of the dead in the domains of African-inspired re-ligiosity. What was also captivating about Cuba was that, in contrast to Brazil, there was little stratification between popular religious do-mains; in fact, they seemed connected and fluid, interdependent even. I arrived in Havana with a set of open-ended research questions about concepts of health and illness and about the broader significance of the knowledge generated and transmitted through Cuban espiritismo. It wasn’t long before these initial research heuristics capitulated to what became a pressing need to deal first and foremost with concepts of “self” and “being” among espiritistas and their fellow religious practi-tioners, without which neither health nor knowledge could be framed at all. At first, this need took me with force to more institutionalized spiritists, the científicos or Kardecistas who espoused a complex, ide-ology-laden understanding of espiritismo that made clear to me just how strongly connected questions of Cuban politics, race, science, and medicine were to people’s notions of their body and its spirits. 4ere came a point during my initial field research, however, where I felt that I had to actively “disengage” from these groups in order to pursue es-piritismo’s more informal domains, the mediums that one of my friend calls de la calle [of the street]. 4is proved a rewarding decision, for without it I would not have gauged the full extent of the impact that espiritismo’s spiritual geographies and concepts of self have on their Afro-Cuban religious counterparts. I was well positioned to engage with these intersections since I lived, for the initial sixteen months of field research, with a practitioner of espiritismo and Santería and with his partner, both of whom provided me with numerous research avenues through their extensive contacts. Eventually I also met Edu-ardo and Olga, a middle-aged couple in whose house I was to spend much time and who became my friends, mentors, and informants, as well as godparents. As active santeros, paleros, and espiritistas, Edu-ardo and Olga did not simply nourish my research with their consider-able knowledge and experience; they also rallied a host of godchildren around them through regular activities, many of whom I was privi-leged to get to know. I had sat relatively on the margins of the activities of the científico groups I had studied, conducting participant observation from the au-

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Preface · xi

dience where I would furiously scribble pages of notes and interviewing leaders and developing mediums after mediumship sessions. Among the so-called espiritistas cruzados, the dynamics precluded such dis-tances. Espiritismo cruzado’s basic rites—misas espirituales—are all-engaging, interactive affairs whose logic makes the committed partici-pation of those who attend a necessary ontological requirement of their functioning. Note-taking was generally discouraged, being seen to take away from this personal, spiritual focus. I quickly learned to conduct myself in these ritual spaces, to cleanse myself appropriately, to pray and sing for the spirits, and to identify certain categories of muertos as they made their presence felt. I learned the somatic markers of this presence through attentiveness to the signs of my body, its chills, and its images—and its headaches—and made myself fully and respectfully available to engage with the information from the spirit world that very often came my way in these settings. When allergies and asthma se-verely incapacitated me halfway through my fieldwork, I submitted to a spiritist rite called a coronación espiritual in order to strengthen my physical and spiritual immune systems. Doing so involved having prior knowledge of my tutelary or protective spirits through exposure in misas and also augmented my understanding. I catered to my muertos by acquiring certain spirit representation dolls. And in later journeys to Cuba, I listened to the advice of my muertos and received some minor health-inducing initiations in Santería (I received the “warrior” gods and Olokún, a sea-related deity who is the “owner of my head”). 4rough these, my godfather told me then, I became presa, claimed irreversibly by the oricha-santos, Santería’s Cuban-Yoruba gods, and thus destined to full initiation (at some unspecified future date). 4e point of articulating my personal involvement with espiritismo during my research is to some extent to show how linked my theo-retical insights became to my methodology of participation. While, unlike some foreign anthropologists of African-inspired religion in Cuba and also Brazil, I did not “make” santo (become initiated), it was obvious to me that in order to apprehend the mechanisms underscor-ing some of the profound life reconfigurations experienced by espir-itistas, I would have to be able to generate sincere forms of empathy and, more importantly, a willingness to actually learn from the people I was documenting. 4is posture inevitably brought me closer to the interests of phenomenology-based approaches in the anthropology of

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xii · Preface

spirit possession and mediation, which prioritize bodily experience, and further away from those of cognitive or functionalist approaches that focus on mental constructs or ideologies. But it also led me to con-sider more closely the ontologically participative dimensions of things, substances, and objects. Indeed, spirits were not just of the body or mind but also of the world, revealed through subjective experiences such as dreaming or bodily sensation but proved through real-world occurrences and events, and materialized, made viable, tangible, more real, through their instantiation in the material universe. My fieldwork revealed that Cuban spiritist cosmology is not a dis-embodied volume of representations or beliefs that are instantiated and transmitted over time but a process that occurs in real time, in bodies, as bodies, as well as comprising bodily-based conceptual struc-tures that organize a sense of self and life-world. Spiritist-generated forms of selfhood begin not as a priori cultural models of being that are subsequently followed to completion in various ways but rather more as logics of “becoming” that are fleshed out in developmental processes over time as particular and unique extended persons. To learn to be-come a medium, I found, is essentially to acquire a body, to learn to be affected, as Latour says (, ), and to perceive and interpret in-formation through one’s bodily interface and its extensions. 4is does not mean that bodily experience eclipses other levels of description, such as abstraction, for the experiencer. As Johnson has argued, emo-tions and sensations are just as conceptual as concepts are embodied (, ): “thinking is not something humans ‘bring’ to their experi-ence from the outside; rather, it is in and of experience—an embod-ied dimension of those experiences in which abstraction is occurring” (ibid., ). Neither does it mean that we should ignore the centrality of environment and its affordances. Developing as an espiritista me-dium occurs in a social and material environment that is replete with cues and means of guidance for action as well as interpretation. When espiritistas talk of their muertos, they are not talking of disembedded aspects of some cosmological given or of bodiless or ephemeral beings. 4eir descriptions are grounded on an intersubjective experiential his-tory that has shaped their consciousness of themselves as the site for spirits that in turn participate in their thoughts, actions and destiny. Selves are extended through their spirits and also through the materials that reflect, aggrandize, and cater to those spirits.

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Preface · xiii

4e title of this book refers to cosmogony—the making or coming into existence of cosmos. In espiritismo, each person is a world, replete with his or her own seeds of existence and yet brought into existence only in and through his or her unfolding on a corporeal, social, and material plane, where these potentials become objects to themselves and others.

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Acknowledgments

4is book is based partly on data collected and analyzed while in Lon-don at University College and partly on further research conducted and written up in Lisbon, first, at the Instituto de Ciências Sociais (ICS-UL) and later at the Centro em Rede de Investigação em Antro-pologia (CRIA, FSCH-UNL). As such I have two sets of funders whose support I acknowledge and thank as being absolutely fundamental to the writing of this book. In the first set are the Economic and Social Research Council, the Royal Anthropological Institute, and UCL´s Graduate School Research Fund. On the Lisbon end, I am grateful to the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia, who have funded my re-search, both in Cuba and in Brazil, for the last five years. I would not have had the opportunity to write this book had it not been for the rare luxury of the large amounts of time and resources afforded by the FCT and its research schemes. I know that I am truly lucky for having this time, and I´ve tried to make the most of it. As such, I also thank the ICS and CRIA for hosting me during this process. I have people in three countries to thank for being a part of my work, in one way or another. For simplicity’s sake, I will follow the ge-ography of the order of events leading up to this book. And they start in London at UCL. I am very indebted first and foremost to the two very different people with whom I worked: Prof. Roland Littlewood and Dr. Martin Holbraad. I thank Roland for believing in my work and for generously sharing his experience and lucidity as an anthropologist and theoretician with me, and I thank Martin for his brilliant guidance and insight into my own material from the very beginning. Like many others, I have been contaminated by his enthusiasm for a new kind of anthropology, and I continue to be inspired by his great work on Cuba. And Martin, it was also through you that I met Leonardo and Dorka in

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xvi · Acknowledgments

Cuba, so thank you. At UCL I also wish to thank a host of colleagues and friends with whom I commented and debated my ideas on many occasions, especially Dafne Accoroni, Alessandra Basso-Ortiz, Fabio Gygi, Tomoko Hayakawa, Marjorie Murray, Jenny Roussou, Matan Shapiro, Nico Tassi, Joe Trapido, Constantinos Tsikkos, and Sergio González Varela. In Cuba, I was hosted by the Instituto Cubano de Antropología and was especially warmly received by the then-vice president, and now deceased, Rafael Robaina and the then-president, Godo Torres. I am very grateful for their support and hospitality. My initial stay in Cuba would not have been as smooth as it was had it not been for one per-son, Leonel Verdeja Orallo, who was effectively father, mother, brother, teacher, and friend to me with the kind of compassion and grace to which his many friends, godchildren, and students have become ac-customed. Leonel, his partner Elmer, and their amazing respective families made it so easy for me to feel at home, and I am very grateful. I include the late Teresita Fernandez in this category of family, as she certainly was. Another special thanks goes to Eduardo and Olga Silva for becoming my second parents, so to speak, as well as formidable interlocutors to Afro-Cuban religion and cosmology. I can’t thank them enough. Finally, without the countless espiritistas, santeros, and paleros that I spent time with in Havana, I would not have written this book. While many of these people will remain unnamed, I would not wish for a special few to go unmentioned, as my research would have been severely diminished without their help. Among these are the members of the Agramonte family and those of their Sociedad, Alfredo Durán, Pastor Iznaga, Diasmel, Aldama, Beba, Máximo and Eva, Pedro Hérnandez, Xiomara Brito de Armas, the late Enriquito Musachio and his “coronas,” Luis and Yvette, Plácidito, Marcelina, Ana Ruedas, Ana Rosa Aparício, and Mercedes from the Associación Cul-tural Yoruba de Cuba. 4ere were other anthropology fieldworkers in Cuba at the time I was there, and a few became great friends and intellectual compan-ions. Strangely enough, three of them ended up with me in Portugal despite their not being Portuguese: Valerio Simoni, Anastasios Pan-agiotopoulous, and Ana Stela Cunha. 4e last two in particular be-came very close collaborators both in the field and back home, and I’m very grateful for their continued presence in my life. In Portugal

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Acknowledgments · xvii

I would also like to express my appreciation for my two orientadores since : João Pina-Cabral and Clara Saraiva, who took me on so that I could continue to work on both new and old materials. Finally, I am grateful to my family—my parents especially—and to my partner, Gustavo, for so much unconditional support. However, it is to Avó Jacha that I dedicate this book. 4ank you for watching over me. Last, but certainly not least, I want to thank Kristina Wirtz, Re-inaldo Román, and two other anonymous reviewers for reading this manuscript so thoughtfully and providing me with so many useful comments, suggestions, and criticisms, which I used to (hopefully) make it better. One person in particular helped me turn a rough manu-script into a book, and I am very grateful to her: Marie-Louise Kart-tunen. And I am, of course, ultimately indebted to the editors at the University Press of Florida for taking on this book.

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1 Spirits at the Crossroads of Belief and Pragmatism

I. !e specter of the dead

Between belief and respect

“Do you believe in espiritismo?” I was asked the day after I arrived in Havana. Joaquin, a taxi driver with a university degree in cybernetics and an interest in the esoteric, hardly allowed me to answer before adding, rhetorically, “But you do know that espiritismo is real, don’t you, that it exists?” Making a passing reference to St. Augustine and Plato on the limits of knowledge as he dropped me off at my casa par-ticular [bed and breakfast] in Havana’s quiet Vedado neighborhood, Joaquin gave me a final warning: “Not everything is real espiritismo.” I was to hear this call for authenticity countless other times in Cuba, one that seemed to place the burden of both scientific and spiritual discernment on the researcher. A few days later, as I lugged my bags into another cab en route to my residence for the next fifteen months, a Soviet-bloc-type building in the neighborhood of El Cerro, I encountered another inquisitive driver. 4is one laughed when I told him I was in Cuba to “investi-gate espiritismo.” “How can you investigate that?” he asked. I muttered something about interviews and getting invited to rituals, and he sur-prised me by responding that his own mother was an espiritista and that he had often seen her possessed by spirits, illustrating by shaking

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· Developing the Dead

in his seat. “How does that work, the spirits thing?” he asked, peering intently at me in the rearview mirror. “What do you think actually happens?” Shifting between belief, curiosity, and nervous parody, this driver presented a vignette of the Cuban tendency to respect the intan-gible, even among those who do not consider themselves fully-fledged creyentes [believers]: “No creo en nada, pero lo respeto” [I don’t believe in anything, but I respect it (which in some cases can be read as “fear it”)]. Encounters like these were daily staples of my stay in Havana. Ordi-nary and to all appearances nonreligious Cubans were routinely atten-tive to the unpredictable world of the dead and to its spokespersons in the realm of the everyday—spirit mediums, known simply as espiritis-tas. Many Cubans with whom I casually struck up conversations were rich sources of stories of ghostly encounters: “I-met-an-espiritista-once”-type narratives of spiritual salvation and renewed faith in the existence el más allá, stories that reveal the intensity of “peripheral” forms of knowledge well beyond the confines of the religious “house.” Some had even won substantial sums in Havana’s underground lottery system [the bolita] as a result of acting on messages from the dead, received through visions, gut feelings, or dreams. Others warned of the perils of ignoring such metaphysical contacts, invoking images of sickness and bad luck. Indeed, moments of revelation seemed to play a key role in generating a peculiar kind of consciousness of the dead to which I was privy in my encounters. As one of my interviewees told me, “Until that moment I always knew something existed, but I didn’t believe.” According to my friend Dorka, in crisis (“cuando el zapato aprieta”), everyone believes, including an old atheist Marxist uncle of hers who pledged his devotion to the spirits and saints after his cancer was cured. But not all was drama. Among religious skeptics, experts, and be-lievers alike, all manner of relatives, friends, and acquaintances were mentioned during quotidian conversations about my research plans in the city. “My aunt Blanca from Las Tunas is a tremendous espiritista,” I was told after my arrival in El Cerro by Lourdes, a longstanding friend of the family with whom I lived. “You should speak to her.” Lourdes explained that spirit guides had urged Blanca to work as a medium, despite the trying circumstances that were to follow her decision to

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Spirits at the Crossroads of Belief and Pragmatism ·

embrace her calling. According to Lourdes, Fidel’s Communist Party was strongly against such “things” at the time, and as an active, militant member of this world, Blanca had found herself in a difficult position, as had others in similar predicaments. “But she had to help people,” Lourdes said, “because since a child, she’s had that gift” (vista larga, long vision). 4e unusual prevalence and natural feel of Cubans’ references to gifted, intuitive individuals in their midst was to make my job both more fluid, and thus to some extent easier, and less straightforward (and thus more ambitious), for espiritismo was so constitutive of popu-lar “spiritual” parlance that to distinguish it from what seemed to be more deep-rooted, or specific, expressions of religious faith was at first difficult. On the one hand, espiritismo and espiritistas were identified as separate, autonomous categories in the religious milieu, offering a specific spiritual service or demonstrating particular kinds of talents. On the other, they also seemed to blend infinitely into the broader the-matics of life itself, disappearing not just into biographies of spiritual awakening and initiation, but into talk of ancestors and deceased kin, of illnesses and recovery, of dreams and coincidences, of lucky num-bers and punctual blessings, all recounted as parts of normal, lucid existence. 4e muertos, as they say, seemed to be at the basis of most discussions that turned on the realms of the invisible: incipient and ever-present in the dissection of processes of cause and effect, at times more occult than others. But this recurrence, or immanence, of the dead, beautifully described by Ochoa (, ) and reflected in Cu-ban public commentary and conversation, continually transcended the specifics of religious traditions, precluding its objectification as any-thing other than organic and inclusive. “4is country is full of muer-tos!” a flower vendor exclaimed loudly as I made a purchase from her stall one afternoon. “We are all contaminated!” While I do not know what she meant by this, nor how to judge her condemnatory tone, it is with this image of an all-encompassing and inescapable Cuban preoccupation with the dead—more specifically, with the spirits of the dead—that I am concerned. A second focus lies with how espiritistas acquire awareness of their abilities and their role in the wider moral and spiritual ecology, and how they are perceived by others.

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Espiritismo: Making the self, developing the dead

4e process of self-constitution by espiritistas is reducible neither to knowledge-acquisition, passive or otherwise, nor to the embodiment of predesignated religious roles. It is most importantly a means of making a cosmos of spirits, which awakes from dormancy through the education of an espirista’s body and mind over time. As one promi-nent espiritista in Havana once told me, there are two societies: the spiritual and the material. In this book I am concerned with how they conflate via the development of a particular kind of self that is spatio-temporally extended and knows itself through the particularities of the spirits with whom relations are cultivated for life. 4e most popular forms of espiritismo—espiritismo cruzado [crossed spiritism]—offer neither formalized training paths nor official initiations. 4ey are unified only by discourses that approach idiosyn-crasies in similar ways, generating a niche of practice premised on a loose set of common assumptions regarding the realm of spirits and its influence on the living. Espiritismo turns on the recognition and exer-cise of mediumship, which is as unique to the person who possesses it as his or her spirits are. For some this has signaled doctrinal or ritual dispersion to the point of religious impoverishment or even annihila-tion (Calzadilla ; Córdova Martínez and Barzaga Sablón ); as I commenced fieldwork, I was told by a studious informant that I would end up with many case studies but no conclusions. 4is skepti-cism has offered me, however, a powerful invitation to examine the ontology of practices so embedded in and fundamental to the Afro-Cuban religious machinery that they are largely invisible as a “religion” proper; they are integrated and integrative, and perhaps for this rea-son, uninteresting to anthropologists over time. Yet it is precisely this tentacular dimension of espiritismo that makes it especially worthy of ethnographic attention; everywhere and nowhere, espiritistas are “like fish in water” (Bolívar and Orozco , ) or, better, like the water in which fish swim. 4e existing literature on Cuban spiritism is riddled with contradic-tions and inconsistencies concerning its variants, structure, and cos-mology. 4is is somewhat engendered by largely individual rather than collective mediumship practices, a practice that leads to a lack of an-thropological classificatory consensus on what “counts,” partly a result

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of the scarcity of ethnographic data on the topic. Cuban anthropolo-gists (to my knowledge no foreign researcher has dealt exclusively with espiritismo in Cuba) have tended to reproduce divisions and descrip-tions typical of pre- or early Revolution work, with little investment in in-depth ethnographic characterizations of contemporary phenom-ena and their relational vectors to other forms of religiosity. We know that European doctrinal Kardecist spiritism had a strong impact on mid-nineteenth-century Cuba, as did its North American counterpart, with the first espiritistas calling their centers “scientific,” versions of which still exist; we also know that espiritismo quickly acquired the “colors of its Creole environment” (Brandon , ), transforming its register according to existing cosmologies and local needs. But as Román () has argued, an understanding of the first as “pure” and the second as “syncretic” (synonymous with “African”) would be un-wise. Contemporary Havana presents us with a complex panorama of religious practitioners and groups all developing their respective spiritual traditions in constant and inevitable contact with each other, as well as with wider social and historical representations of “religion” or “science.” It is important to address these points of convergence and dissent, particularly in relation to the meaning of “good” mediumship, and to chart the processes by which spirit mediums catalogue themselves and their spirits within larger ideological flows. At the same time, the clas-sificatory trends of earlier works that obfuscate the ritual and con-ceptual mechanisms that produce certain kinds of persons should be countered. Focusing on the onto-logics of selfhood afforded by Cuban spiritist frames indicates that a sociological definition of espiritismo is less revealing than the view from the inside out of the ontogeny of spiritual development by which the various “syncretisms” anthropolo-gists have taken for granted are objectified a posteriori. Practitioners as much as scholars of the various branches (Reglas) of Afro-Cuban religion maintain that ritual practices in these spheres concern themselves less with the afterlife than with the dealings of this life. Santería and Palo Monte, for example, generally associated with Yoruba and Bantu-Congo historical religious configurations respec-tively, are known to “resolve” problems of the everyday sort (resolver—to make things happen through religious transactions and beyond [Hagedorn , ]). Santería, also known as Regla de Ocha or Regla

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Lucumí, is a popular syncretistic religious tradition based around the worship of powerful beings called orichas. Palo Monte, on the other hand, encompasses a series of practices whose main focus is the spirit of a deceased person with whom a pact is made, thereby making it the source of an expert’s magical efficacy. Both of these domains of practice provide the initiate and client alike with an effective means of expedi-tious problem solving; tutelary deities and spirits become generous, if demanding, protectors and providers once consecrations are achieved and pacts sealed. 4ere is a sense in which Santería and Palo Monte are believed to be “material” religions inasmuch as their purpose is the betterment of tangible human conditions, rather than the worship of abstract ideals or philosophies. Espiritismo does not fundamentally contradict this interpretation; it also “resolves.” Despite the fact that many espiritistas ground their practices on theological conceptualiza-tions of the universe, its inhabitants, and the laws that govern their relations—as do santeros and paleros—espiritismo is rarely specula-tive. As followers of Afro-Cuban religiosity will often say, la religión promotes health and wellbeing and, in the best of cases, the expansion of concrete life possibilities and other forms of prosperity. Mediums are testament to the critical crossways between crises of all sorts—es-pecially physical or mental torment—and religious encounter, often recounting the spiritually catapulting effects of distress: fissures in a sense of self and world. 4e muertos of one’s cordón espiritual [spiri-tual cord], the protective entities through whom mediums become mediums, are not thought to be distanced, imagined hypotheticals. 4ey are effective, if at times capricious, agents that safeguard the des-tinies of those they protect, ensuring their productive, albeit proces-sual and thus often unpredictable, unfolding. All Afro-Cuban forms of devotion are thought to imply a religious calling, whether it is “born” with the individual or manifested through the pragmatics of livelihood or life-threatening circumstances. Espir-itismo is no different in this regard. 4e development of mediumship, referred to as a process of desarrollo de los muertos [developing the dead], is an expansive, positive path designed to consolidate individu-als’ firmeza [grounding, standing, confidence] in their lives. In contrast to other forms of ritual engagement, however, this is achieved by a profound investment in the discovery and exteriorization of a particu-lar self, unique to each individual and, perhaps paradoxically, thought

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both to preexist lived experience and to be activated by it. While the term muerto encompasses an ontological diversity of spiritual speci-mens whose effects and requirements are often not confined to the espiritista’s expertise, including the spirits of deceased ritual kin and those assembled via the labor of witchcraft, it is the protective dead, the muertos seen to belong to each person—a collective perhaps best described along the lines of a personalized “map” or “blueprint”—that form the axis of each medium’s spiritual ontogeny. To become oneself, in espiritismo, is also to become them, through them, albeit for others, in the spirit of service, or mission. Espiritismo requires both talent and perseverance, but it is essentially a self-reconstructive technology. Developing the dead is a lengthy affair that entails the careful con-struction of intimate relationships with entities whose identity may at first be concealed or whose presence must be coaxed into existence. For religiosos of all areas of the Afro-Cuban religious spectrum, the cordón espiritual is often simultaneously the object of adoration and caution. One cannot simply choose one’s muertos in the same way as one chooses one’s social circle. But these spirits are far from perfect. While metaphors of “light,” “ascension,” and “evolution” dominate spir-itist descriptive and taxonomic discourse, one that arguably serves as the “euhemeristic glue” holding together the belief systems of practi-tioners of other religious cults in Cuba (Palmié , ), the muer-tos typically exhibit a sociality as flawed as that of their human coun-terparts. Each one has lived a life, engaged with certain knowledges, skills, and practices, had religious, amorous, and intellectual ventures, and been subject to illnesses, vices, traumas, and deaths. In turn, these facets create certain biases, affordances, and dispositions in the lives of those they “come with,” psychological and physical confluences that are less biographical overlaps than products of a systemic and rela-tional codevelopment of selves over time, reflected upon in real time. It is the espiritista’s task to forge productive and comprehensive links between the personalities and characteristics of her client’s muertos, both those from within the cordón and from without, and the quanda-ries of his or her own life path. As possessors of special gifts for seeing, hearing, feeling, or dreaming, mediums are themselves the epitome of such entanglements-made-conscious. Ultimately, espiritismo rallies this immanent connectivity for the sake of knowledge, insight, and, most importantly, the most central of greases to the cosmic flow of the

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dead: communication, transforming its spirits (and selves) into per-spectives that can render intelligible and manageable the rugged nooks and crannies of everyday existence. 4e anthropological notion (and corresponding baggage) of “spirit possession” applies less to Cuban espiritismo than does an active, total-izing concept of mediumship-as-being, which is irreducible to event-like intersections of spiritual contact. Rather, espiritistas materialize the dead in the domain of others because they are themselves the materialization of the history of their relations with the dead, which are mediated by their trajectories as persons in a particular sociohis-torical and material environment and may be read on several levels. On the one hand, the voices of the entities that the espiritista brings forth suggest an itinerary of personal trans-historicity, one that sub-jects the self to the dissolution of its previous two-dimensionality and its reconstitution through a multiplicity of “bits,” unconfined to fixed spatio-temporal coordinates; on the other, as Hastrup argues, aware-ness is “collectively premissed” (, ). Development is also a way of animating and coinhabiting a shared past whose stories remain un-finished and untold, even peripheral, and which is continuous in and with the present. For historians, or indeed anthropologists, “to access such systematically occluded levels of historical consciousness and experience,” as Stephan Palmié argues, “it may be necessary to take recourse to forms of expression—dreams, rumors, and ‘beliefs,’” that are normatively disqualified under dominant regimes of knowledge “as anomalous, irrational, unrealistic, or simply implausible” (, ). As a “technology” of producing persons and extended histories, espir-itismo arguably acts as both gauge and producer of modern and local forms of mythology and historical representation. Unraveling how this is significant to the broader spiritual ecology is another task of this book.

Penetrating the world of Cuban espiritismo

Methods employed during the course of my research consisted for the most part of extensive participant observation among espiritistas or other experts conducting work in misas espirituales, consultations, and other rites involving the dead in Santería and Palo Monte, as well as, more significantly, in collecting people’s spirit and mediumship bi-

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ographical narratives, which I did by spending time with them inside as well outside formal religious settings. Because my sixteen-month initial research period was simply too short to enable me to observe mediumship development processes that can take years, I took a cross-sectional approach to my data, collecting biographical information from a number of individuals at different stages of their development, as well as more encompassing, retrospective experiential accounts from active, developed mediums. Furthermore, misas espirituales [spiritual masses] are rarely events with a regular schedule; very few espiritistas work these rites full time on a daily, even weekly, basis, which meant that I participated in misas by different individuals or groups, navigating between them and seizing opportunities for contact and interviews as they arose. I had punctual or sporadic contact with countless espiritistas, often meeting them on the pretext of a private consultation, in which I was always careful to explain my project and thus my interest in asking certain questions, and I developed deeper relationships with a number of others who became friends, godpar-ents, and valued informants. I have also returned to Cuba subsequently, following up previous case studies. I spent time with both seasoned mediums and neophytes at the brink of developing powerful muertos, documenting medium-ship and oracular practices, forms of material homage, offerings, and representation, the relationship of mediums to their clients and pub-lic, and the discourses circulating among them. Beyond espiritismo, I interviewed santeros and paleros of a range of inclinations with re-gard to the conceptualization and treatment of the muertos, observing countless rituals and ceremonies, from tambores and toques de santo, to violínes and rayamiento sequences (Palo initiation rites). Archival and bibliographic research relative to the role of the dead in these cults was also an important source of data. Unlike novice scholars of Santería, for example, whose research pre-rogatives are often first informed by accounts that tend to normatize cosmology, ritual, and social structure (cf. Wirtz , xiii), I had few hopes of finding a single spiritist “community” in Havana to research for the duration of my field investigation. Rather, as I had expected, espiritista mediums were dispersed and heterogeneous. I found that they were often private, solitary even, working from their homes and coming together briefly for misas espirituales, for example. Knowledge

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of them was gained by word-of-mouth, chance encounters, and often through their association with priests of Santería and Palo Monte and their respective godchildren—sometimes also espiritistas in their own right—though they were not subordinate to them. Contrary to what I had heard through the grapevine via other (for-eign) researchers on Cuban religion, espiritistas were not just women or gay men, marginalized from more prestigious realms of initiation; they were adolescents and adults of all stripes who had often undergone difficult processes of spiritual awakening and development and who valued and loved their muertos intensely because of it. While arguably not as flamboyant as the priests and priestesses of Ocha (Santería) or Palo, the espiritistas I met were proud people assured of their impor-tance as mediators of a very special kind of knowledge and knowing in their cosmic ecology. All Afro-Cuban religions imply a transforma-tion, sometimes even reconstruction of self-identity (Hagedorn , ), enabled and indexed through the physical, emotional, and social trials of initiatory callings and rites. But there is a strong case to be made that espiritistas are alone amidst other categories of religiosos in effecting these transformations organically, informally, and some-times even individually, often as the result of the discovery of some “inner” dimension through illness or altered sensory experiences. An espiritista, most would say, is a person who possesses a specific inner quality; it is not a title incurred through formal recognition by either a designated community of officiants or by its spirits and gods. 4is leads to an ethos, particular to both espiritistas and their ritual spaces, that is characterized by a relative humility and openness; most of the time, mediums were happy to share with me their life stories, their muertos, and their activities, and if they held other ritual roles or titles, this enthusiasm curiously seemed to double. 4ere were methodological disadvantages to pursuing a study of per-sons defined by their “gifts,” rather than by their formal status within a defined community or tradition, notably the rather subjective question of who “counts” as an espiritista. While this was not a judgment I saw myself fit to make at any stage of my research, it is a contentious issue among practicing mediums themselves and generates deep-rooted and revealing debates. Among certain sectors of Havana’s spiritist circles, some mediums are not regarded as espiritistas at all but as animistic at best and, at worst, as fakes. I found that I had to particularly defend

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my work among so-called popular mediums of espiritismo cruzado to the more institutionalized and doctrinal spiritist groups I studied (es-piritismo científico or Kardecista), which understandably created some tension and awkwardness on both sides. It is difficult to generalize about anything when working with Afro-Cuban religions. Even in Santería, considered the bastion of tradi-tion, every house, every person, comprises a unique universe: it is not “selves” that espiritistas have in common, nor muertos, for each is as different as the next; it is the recognition that these differences are also those of potential, perspective, agency, and lives, which are both innate and learned over time. A person is not alone and not just herself. In her ethnography of dreams and dreamers in an Afro-Cuban com-munity, Diana Maitland Dean notes that the “spirits locate a person in the world—as an individual and as a member of society [and] the flesh and the body communicate this positioning” (, ). But I sustain that an analysis of “self” must take into account that those very spirits also come into being through the person: that one does not precede the other. I recognize that an ethnographic focus on notions of self is by no means unproblematic. 4e idea of searching for an indigenous model of person, articulated as a category of thought (Mauss ) or “being” that prescribes and informs an individual’s encounter with his world, is flawed in more ways than one. On the one hand, it may unjustifiably presuppose an a priori division between self and world, as well as self and other, from the perspective of those selves. As a “category” it is perhaps comparable, in its anthropologically constructed nature, with that of “religion,” or “society” or “divine.” Indeed, Cubans do not men-tion the self very often as a concept—it would translate in Spanish as the reflexive si mismo—and neither did I ask about the self directly. As an analytic “thing,” it was necessary to extrapolate it from the manner in which espiritistas and others talked about themselves. It became evident to me as an ethnographic object precisely because it encom-passed more within it, so to speak, than the selves of those of my own society. On the other hand, neither does the existence of a cultural model imply its equivalence with individual private experience nor its homogeneity. It has become commonplace in anthropology to note how privileging ideas over action in analysis of personhood may obfus-cate more than elucidate the mechanisms that enable the emergence of

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an awareness of oneself as a self, many of which are nonlinguistic and precognitive; it is not difficult to see how theorization of the selves of others can become anthropologically self-referential, indulgent, and even redundant. 4e “self” as an object of inquiry is tricky precisely because it does not invite or facilitate qualification in the same way as perhaps other forms of social classification: “to work with a concept of self is to conceptualize the human being as a locus of experience, including experience of that human’s own oneness” (Harris , ), a seemingly intractable problem for all but phenomenologists. In this book I seek to address these quandaries by examining wide-spread theological and group-specific understandings of the person in espiritismo and Afro-Cuban religion, as well as individual personal narratives of spiritual discovery and development. While I would ar-gue for the existence of a generalized and consensual “onto-logic” of making persons both within and without espiritismo, I also recognize that the concept of personhood is less appropriate than is “selfhood” or even “beinghood” (Santos-Granero ), for the very ontological assumptions that espiritistas share are appreciated to produce very dif-ferent kinds of persons, as noted above. Indeed, it would be false to di-chotomize macro and micro dimensions of personhood, to distinguish too greatly between ideological and public aspects of personhood and its experience. Garoutte and Wambaugh (, ), for example, have described the process of religious development in Afro-Cuban practices—desar-rollo or desenvolvimiento—as the “unwrapping of the self,” suggesting a multilayered spiritual reality underpinning physical existence, which must paradoxically be “layered” by initiations. In espiritismo this pro-cess is better conceptualized by the idea of emergence, in which no sole “command” self that exclusively determines the person’s fate is assumed to exist but rather a distribution of agencies with critical and evolving interrelations. Espiritismo affords a community of practice and participation (Lave and Wenger ), or rather, a multiplicity of these, whereby these selves can come to full fruition as the situationally unique entities that they are. 4ese spaces furnish medium and client alike with a basic ground for discernment: a means by which to know self from nonself, spirits sent by witchcraft from protectors or those of “light,” imagination from information, and right from wrong religious

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path. Ultimately, this discernment forms the axis of an individual’s spiritual ontogeny, in whichever ritual arena the medium circulates. Selves in espiritismo—in as much as they are composed of varying spirits—are ultimately experienced though intersubjective interaction and communion, where the muertos become discernible: objects to themselves and others and selves in their own right. One of the most obvious routes the espiritista medium can know him or herself lies in an analysis of the social processes by which his or her social self be-comes relationally possible. 4is was of course G. H. Mead’s concern in Mind, Self, and Society (), in which he argued that there are as many selves as there are social situations, for it is social process that is responsible for these selves’ appearance. Meaning is not to be un-derstood ideologically and, therefore, as existing independently of ac-tion, and neither is consciousness a property of the individual; rather, it belongs to the social environment out of which selves emerge. 4us, for Mead, as for others (see Goffman ; Hallowell ), the self is not so much a substance as a process in which a set of orientations has been internalized within organic and psychological form. For these authors, social others mirror parts of the self to itself. Espiritistas are certainly “interactionist” in the sense that they, too, sustain that the identification and sanctioning of their spirits is usually the prerogative of others, since it is also a process extended through time and circumstance in which a building of trust in such encounters becomes key; the things that people make, make people in turn (Miller , ): in this case, people peopled by spirits. Furthermore, they are pragmatists for, much like William James (), espiritistas be-lieve that religious belief can bring into existence that which is the ob-ject of belief. 4ere is a commitment to the ontological effects of doing and acting among espiritistas in relation to the existence of spirits that resonates with James’ claim that truth becomes so through the process of its verifying itself as such (, ). A problem that needs some rethinking, however, is what counts as “social,” and thus “self.” 4e “social processes” by which espiritistas de-velop as mediums are distributed not just through time and space, via the historicity of their spirits as well as their own, but ontologically, by comprising realms of existence that are unconfined to physical bod-ies. In espiritismo the “social” comprehends both visible and invisible

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levels of existence: matter and spirit, living and dead beings. 4ese do not simply conflate in embodied experience; in other words, this “self” does not disappear into itself. It becomes an object to the person inasmuch as bodily experience is not unified but often fragmented, disjunctured, evidenced as being both of persons and spirits (cf. Will-erslev for a similar reading). 4is also implies that phenomenolo-gist Schutz’s notion of the self as “undivided” and “total” (, ), as ultimate author of its experience, has limits in its application to Cuban espiritismo. 4e person becomes conscious of herself as the locus of her spirits, therefore, precisely through the divisions and distinctions she must make to tell herself from her spirits. 4e question then be-comes: what are the rules for self-knowledge? Spirits may emerge as selves in their own right via the person’s interaction with social others. But is this all they are—bits of the “social self”? My contention in this book is that espiritistas are not just made via sensorial, social, or material cues; rather, these cues reveal worlds of spirits that are nurtured and instantiated through people but do not reduce to them. Cuban espiritismo seems to be at the crossroads of a number of cosmologies of the person, including nineteenth-century European, Asian, Christian, and West African. On the one hand, es-piritismo articulates a dualism of mind/spirit and body coherent with early European spiritualist movements for which, with their Asiatic and Indic influences, the material body was ultimately expendable, a gross tool with which to progress infinitely in the real spiritual world. On the other, espiritismo has absorbed the language of Afro-Cuban religion and its vital forces that reveal the permeable nature and properties of material things, as well as the agency of the body and its substances. It dialogues with Afro-Cuban concepts of destiny, path, camino, and character, as given by tutelary deities and oracular signs (see Panagi-otopoulos ), and with classic Kardecist notions of free will, which tally with Afro-Cuban beliefs that one’s fate is not determined but can be helped. Further, it articulates Christian concerns with morality and a supreme God, and with salvation, which is also a pervasive theme in other Afro-Cuban religious milieus. 4ere is also the possibility that espiritismo’s concepts of self were influenced by the rise of Protestant-ism in Cuba, indexing the country’s strong ties with the United States, and with the new forms of moral self-awareness that these entailed (cf. Pérez Jr. ).

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One of the arguments I make (in a specific way in the next chapter and more generally throughout the book) is that espiritismo allows for the person or selfhood to be understood as having both horizontal and vertical axes. On the one hand, it expresses a cosmology of ascension and liberation, Kardecist-style: spirits “receive light” in order to elevate themselves and get closer to the divine, even if it is unachievable. 4is is a hierarchical cosmos. On the other, espiritismo thoroughly embraces a horizontalization of selves through a multiplication of their “bits” in worldly things: spirit-representation dolls, for instance, or Palo Mon-te’s ritual recipients. It is a polytheistic cosmos, and thus self, “held together from the inside,” as Handelman would put it (), tolerant of uncertainty, transgression, porosity, and integration. In this juxta-position there is a deep “psyche” or “self” as well as a process-oriented one, both needing to be framed within a single movement. A Freudian psychoanalytic perspective would do less justice here than a transper-sonal Jungian one (cf. Nuñez Molina ), for instance, where the individuation process of the unconscious could be compared to the development of individual spirits (as potentials). Another analogy is biologist Rupert Sheldrake’s concept of a “morphic” or “morphoge-netic field” (, ), defined as a “probability structure” for de-velopment, emerging historically, as patterns of formative causation over time. Arguably similar to espiritismo’s sets of protective muertos, morphic fields are essentially blueprints for becoming, invisible fields of information that guide an organism in its development and yet do not overdetermine it. 4e discipline of psychology itself provides in-numerable other comparative and analogical sources, such as systems psychology, or psychosynthesis, whereby selves are regarded as or-ganic, evolving “systems” of relations. By positing these comparisons I do not wish to discount the myriad historical, social, and philosophi-cal influences on “self ” in Cuba but rather to provide an essentially heuristic and multiple-conceptual frame with which to more faithfully elucidate espiritismo’s “psychology” without merely reducing it to this.

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II. Cuban crises and spiritual politics

Surviving the “Special Period”

In his analysis of the intertwined semiotics of magical and political power in post-Soviet Cuba, Kenneth Routon examines how Afro-Cre-ole sorcery, brujería, “is just as much a ritual arena as it is an infor-mal political discourse concerning the circulation of power in society and a social chronicle of the misfortunes, afflictions, and struggles of everyday life” (, ). As a host of scholars have noted (Argyriadis a; Ayorinde ; Hagedorn ; Hernandez-Reguant ; Holbraad , ), Cuba’s so-called Special Period in Times of Peace—the long process of economic austerity and material shortage that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellites—gen-erated a new set of logics in all sectors of Cuban society including the deepest recesses of Afro-Cuban religious praxis. Indeed, the periodo especial marks for many religiosos, as much as for laymen and women, a historical “ground zero” (Weinreb , ) or a point of no return, whereby memories of the way “things used to be done” nostalgically evoke a past of pure intentions and incorruptible ritual principles, to be contrasted with today’s greedy and spiritually inattentive frenzy for religious godchildren and financial capital. Brujería, as Routon sug-gests, has in this light also become an alluring discourse of accusa-tion, a means to set the boundaries of legitimacy and degeneration, to propose and contest new religious ideologies and innovations, and to publicly damn rival religious practitioners (cf. Argyriadis b, ). 4e material difficulties of the economic crisis for the ordinary person, coupled with morally violent contradictions of reforms such as the dual-economy, have arguably created a new category of person in Cuba: the “unsatisfied Cuban citizen-consumer” (Weinreb , ): a politically disenchanted (as well as disenfranchised) individual frus-trated by both wasted personal potential and an inability to fully enjoy the spoils of a consumer society that is accessible to few. In the wake of this, Afro-Cuban religious practices have exponentially expanded their appeal and support-bases, albeit for reasons irreducible to the failure of Cuba’s political economy and its accompanying personhood project. As Brotherton argues, “scholars must address state power not as a monolithic function but as a proliferation of strategies that

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shape individual experiences,” which in turn enables an exploration “of how everyday practices culturally constitute the state as a dispersive network of multiple actors, institutions, and bureaucratic processes” (, ). In September , Fidel Castro declared at the Fourth Party Con-gress: “Now, we have a universal responsibility; ours is the only social-ist country in the West. . . . We are alone—all alone—here in this ocean of capitalism that surrounds us” (quoted in Pérez , ). After decades of dependence on subsidized trade with its former communist allies, Cuba was engulfed by deprivation and hardship and forced to find the ingenuity to survive, often at individual, local levels. Yet, as political observers the world over were predicting the rapid demise of Cuban socialism, Revolutionary officialdom was reinventing its strat-egies and rhetoric in response to the dramatic and overnight change: “Cuba contra todos!” [Cuba against all]; “Socialismo o Muerte!” [So-cialism or death]; “Patria o Muerte!” [Nation or death] went the slo-gans, posters, and propaganda. Ordinary people, however, engaged in a different battle: that of maintaining or acquiring work, housing, food, basic domestic goods, and medicine where there were often none to be had. 4e Soviet bloc (COMECON) accounted for percent of Cuba’s trade prior to its dissolution; afterward, Cuba’s economy almost imme-diately shrank by percent (Eckstein , ). Castro’s economy had been built on large-scale, undiversified, and largely inefficient So-viet production models, making the country particularly unattractive to potential investors after the fall of the Eastern bloc. Over the years, Cuba had attempted to reduce its dependence on sugar exports but without much success: in , over percent of its exports were still sugar derived, with percent of these destined for Soviet markets. 4e USSR had provided both a trade circuit and a source of aid for Cuba since the s: Soviet oil and petroleum byproducts, bought at below world-market prices or on credit, had accounted for percent of Cuba’s energy needs. By the summer of , described by many as the height of the cri-sis and marked by the departure of thirty-five thousand balseros [raf-ters] from the shores of Havana and its neighboring towns, Cubans had endured three years of deepening recession and an accumulated five-year economic decline of percent (Kapcia , ). In the

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early to mid-nineties, Cubans described experiencing unprecedented shortages of basic products and services ranging from food and trans-port to electricity (blackouts were normal for as many as eighteen con-secutive hours a day). Many workers were left redundant as industry plummeted and salaries dwindled or disappeared altogether. Shop and supermarket shelves were left empty, rationing tightened at local bode-gas [government-run food warehouses], and people hoarded. Scarcity led to outbreaks of malnutrition and related epidemics (Moses ); as a result, Cubans say that children born or raised in the Special Pe-riod are shorter and frailer. Stories of sugar-water subsistence, toxic homemade liquor, and chronic public food poisoning were a staple. A black market of goods sprung up at every corner and soared, as did its prices. Crime and petty theft increased, followed by prostitution and hustling, adding to the perception of degradation. Traffic ground to a halt; the camellos were invented (“camels”—large trucks equipped for public transport), and tens of thousands of bicycles were imported from China, albeit with few spare parts. Panoplies of small-scale sur-vival strategies kept those who remained in Cuba afloat: terms such as inventar, which refers to Cubans’ quasi-miraculous ability to mate-rialize, or “invent,” much-needed resources, and the aforementioned resolver became the conceptual and linguistic currency of la lucha, the battles, of the everyday. Networking and favor-exchange became requisites of continued physical as well as social existence, sparked by more individualistic concerns than before. “We were creative,” says Leonel, a santero and espiritista of Havana and my closest friend. “We were so hypercreative that I think we’re now bulletproof. Nothing worse can come. People gained in responsibility, they matured very fast. But there was one thing that hurt me a lot—people lost their trust in one another. We are luchando for that now.”

Tourism, consumption, and the divisiveness of money

As the United States tightened its embargo in a bid to strangle what it saw as Cuba’s last political breath, families with relatives abroad called out for help, and remittances began to flow, albeit with a limit imposed by Washington. 4e dollar, possession of which had previously led to harsh prison sentences in Cuba, trickled in, through legitimate chan-

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nels and otherwise. By , smothered by helpless debt and hard cur-rency deficit, Fidel Castro depenalized it. Other liberalizing measures included allowing for limited private enterprise, seen, for example, in the establishment of the casas particulares, whereby people could now apply for licenses to rent out one or two rooms in their own homes; the paladares, home-run restaurants with a small number of tables catering to Cubans and later foreigners; and the agromercados, open-air markets where farmers could now sell their surplus at a limited margin of profit. Most significantly, Castro opened up his country to tourism, including international joint ventures and partnerships, som-berly informing citizens that he had been left with no other choice. Capitalism was about to enter through the back door, as Rosendahl has put it (, ), opening a new can of worms for both Cuba’s leadership and its inhabitants: “Any remaining residues of ‘Che’ Gue-vara’s utopian vision of the ‘new man,’ who worked for the good of society, not individual gain, were relegated to the dustbin of history,” says Eckstein (, ). Cuba became a society of two worlds: the dollar (the Cuban peso convertible after ) and the national peso cubano, and the ideals that these would generate. Cubans were not, in principle, meant to mix with foreigners; the coexistence on the island of socialists and capitalists was seen as a necessary but temporary ill, to be attenuated by measures clearly demarking respective space. Until the s, Cubans were barred from hotels, tourist-only beaches, and foreigner-designated pharmacies and shops (such as the diplotiendas, shops once reserved for diplomats). 4ose Cubans who mingled were regularly harassed and even jailed. But this separation was ultimately hard to maintain. To the millions of visitors to Cuba every year were added those of exchange programs, cultural and academic ventures, and religious and initiatory tourism. Open to the world for the first time since , the Revolution’s austere segregation measures, and its authority, began to crack. Access to dollars and to foreigners became socially divisive and often racially determined questions. White communities were gen-erally better off during the crisis than black ones, and they still are, due to historical immigration patterns and concomitant access to re-mittances. Racial and social tensions ignited, placing the Revolution’s myth of a raceless utopia under the spotlight. Gender biases in the

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management of household economies were also made salient (Perti-erra , Rundle ), revealing critical sexual inequalities that con-tradicted normative discourses. A conspicuous sort of consumerism began to emerge, characterizing certain artistic (S. Fernandes, ) and Afro-Cuban religious scenes (Holbraad, ) most evidently, but eventually spreading to most sectors of the urban milieu, even if only in an imagined sense, creating dependencies on consumer goods that were previously absent. Finally, one of the Revolution’s earliest arch en-emies, prostitution, now in the form of jineterismo, described variously as solicitation, pimping, hustling, and the formation of relationships spun on a foundation of mutual interests, became a dominant feature of the Cuban landscape once more (N. Fernandez ; Simoni , ), prompted by and prompting an increasingly nefarious sexual tourism trade. 4e Havana of my main research period of /, and then later in shorter research periods until , was clearly still suffering from Special Period withdrawal symptoms, compounded by the global economic recession, which hit Cuba’s tourism business hard. While al-liances with the Bolivarian states (Bolivia and Venezuela, in particular) have considerably taken the pressure off Habaneros’ survival strate-gies since the early s, economic difficulties are still prolific and crippling. Subsidized rations were not just inconsistently distributed city wide, but are plainly insufficient to meet a family’s monthly needs. Food and other indispensables are the most frequent topics of con-versation among the Cubans I lived with, with their family members, and with their neighbors: the rising prices of vegetables, fruit, butter, oil, soaps; the disappearance of chickpeas and lentils from agros and the choppings (Cuban convertible peso shops); the bad quality of the bodega toothpastes; and so forth. 4is food “gossip” is constitutive of social life, promoting forms of mutuality characteristic of crisis times. Under these conditions, notwithstanding reliance on the agromerca-dos, the black market continues to be the most affordable source of sustenance. Housing was also a major concern, and the waiting lists for the city’s safe-houses, or albergues, are as long as thirty years. Ille-gal permutas, exchanges of houses, were profuse, prompted by overly officious bureaucracy; favor banks and unofficial bribing standards reign among these and other public services. Habaneros further com-plain of a lack of doctors in the city, poor medical supplies, and inad-

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equate hospital facilities, despite Cuba’s renowned medicine industry. 4e young in particular seem disconnected from any form of political engagement, with ever more students dropping out of their college degree-granting programs prior to completing their social service so as not to be “trapped” by their qualifications in a country they per-ceived held little promise for their futures or those of their children. Fertility rates correspondingly dropped, confirming this bleak picture. Coerced political marches and neighborhood CDR guardias [shifts] are regarded as dreary reminders that “things never change.” In Fidel Castro fell ill, and his brother Raul took command in . Raul has been less coy about expressing the need for domes-tic reform, such as in agriculture and the economy, and in pursuing foreign investment, particularly in the light of Cuban ally Venezuela’s recent political instability since Chavez’s death. A number of key re-forms, easing restrictions on private enterprise and property and pro-posing a positive restructuring of the public service corps, may pro-duce profound changes, although the mass of the Cuban population has yet to see their effect. By July , almost a million and a half people—from nurses to factory workers—had lost their jobs, with little other work available to them. Cuentapropistas [small-business own-ers] were proliferating in the streets of Havana, albeit in undiversified services and crippled by limited resources. Pensions had been reduced, Internet access further restricted. As Cuba’s leaders age, Cubans look to the future, some more confidently than others. For la religión, used to absorbing the trials and tribulations of the nation’s distress, it is very much business as usual.

Vigilance, paranoia, and persecution

Castro’s Revolution had promised much—a radical change in social and moral values, equal gender opportunities and responsibilities, the eradication of exploitation and of racism, free education and health-care, economic self-sufficiency, and national self-determination, among other things. It delivered, for the most part, on at least a few of these key promises, meanwhile restricting dissent, sometimes bru-tally. But it was in the establishment of horizontalized local politics, and more specifically in the creation of an ethic of community vigi-lance, achieved mainly via the massive installation of neighborhood

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level CDRs [Committees for the Defense of the Revolution], that the state wielded its most psychologically and socially corrosive power. 4e people became the watchdogs of the new state, the patrollers of their own morality, with some disturbing results still visible today. During most of their existence, the CDRs filtered crucial information regarding religious and sexual orientations, illicit dealings, social con-tacts, particularly foreign ones, and level of political participation. For decades this information was employed by the state to bar individuals from political, educational, and professional placements, to keep an eye on potential subversives, and, in some cases, to mount campaigns of persecution. It was a practice that contributed to a permanent state of doble moral [double morality], or division between an individual’s socially performative and “official” persona and his or her more per-sonal endeavors and opinions. Most religiosos, particularly those in the Afro-Cuban religious do-main, were subjected to the most extreme forms of doble moral into the s due to the condescension and hostility with which they were treated by both officialdom and some sectors of the populace. Johan Wedel cites a number of authors in this regard: Susan Segal notes that “restrictions were placed on their functioning; their leaders were often arrested and sometimes imprisoned; their adherents encountered dis-crimination in employment” (quoted in Wedel , ); many experts and believers were accused of antirevolutionary sentiment and activ-ity, and their meetings were subject to restrictions or banned, notes Miguel Barnet (), an avid revolutionary himself; while Rhonda P. Rabkin (, , quoted in Wedel ibid.) points out that religious affiliation could hinder workplace opportunities or advancements. Indeed, Afro-Cuban spiritual biographies are pregnant with tales of interrupted initiations and the arrests of godmothers and fathers, of the implementation of governmental public health strategies perceived by many to be designed to invade and monitor household religious activities—arguably echoing colonial and neocolonial associations be-tween African-derived religions and health and sanitation malaises (cf. Bronfman ; Wirtz )—and of the experience of years of care-ful religious occultation. When, in , the Communist Party made the milestone decision to accept religious believers, followed by a new constitution in , it encompassed the tacit recognition that religio-sos had increased despite the Revolution’s having portrayed syncretic

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religions as a burden of an irrational and uncivilized past (Sarduy and Stubbs , ). 4e Afro-Cuban religious “market” had thrived in its own way under the pressure of forced obscurity, producing, more-over, underground informal economies and subsistence networks that arguably rivaled more visible ones. In the post-Soviet era, unabated Afro-Cuban religious groups were potentially poised to embody an ef-fective and dangerous kind of resistance, one the Revolution could not afford to ignore. Indeed, according to many creyentes, the Revolution had disrespected the orichas, the powerful deities of Santería’s spiritual pantheon, for long enough (despite wide popular belief that reads Fidel Castro’s continuity in power as having been a product of secret pacts with powerful spirits and even initiations, cf. I. Miller ; Routon ).

Religion and the foreign gaze

4e shift toward effective religious freedom in the s owed much to the Revolution’s relationship to Catholicism and the Church more generally, which was seen by the leaders of the Revolution in the light of its collusion with both the Spanish colonial regime and the neo-colonial dictators that followed. After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in , Castro accused the Church of conspiring outright, and with reason. Among other activities, in the first few years of the Revolution the Cuban Catholic Church had arranged for the flight of thousands of Cu-ban children to the United States, away from the evils of communism and what it declared to be the regime’s plan to brainwash its young in Soviet camps. In response, Castro suspended seminary schools and invalidated Catholic university titles, expatriating and imprison-ing priests. In there was one priest per , people in Cuba; in , one per ,, whereas the inverse trend is noted for doctors (Bolívar and Orozco , ). Afro-Cuban religious expression was restricted by imposing limitations on nonstate associations and gath-erings of any kind, subjecting ceremonies and drum festivities to forc-ible disruptions and dissolving most formerly institutionalized spiritist centers. While relations with the church thawed in the s (Sarduy and Stubbs ), an unprecedented visit by Pope John Paul II to Cuba in was seen as the consolidation of the arrival of a new era. 4e Pope expressed disdain for the U.S. embargo, pleasing Castro, but also

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asked for greater religious tolerance for Christians and others, which Castro was now willing to concede. 4is acknowledgment was to have repercussions well beyond the Church; indeed, it was seen widely as a victory for Afro-Cuban religious practitioners and spiritists, most of whom also professed a Catholic belief-basis. 4ose creyentes who had simultaneously been Marxist could also finally “come out,” although this created some embarrassment. Hernandez-Reguant argues that Castro’s s reformulation of Cuban “internationalism” required a unified national identity, predi-cated on a negation of internal differences of both race and cosmology, and led to a reclaiming of a discursive ideology of mestizaje (, ). Cuba as an “Afro-Latin” country was thus rhetorically born, as Fernando Ortiz’s famous concept of the ajiaco, the Cuban creole stew, became a political as well as cultural metaphor: As Ayorinde has ar-gued, “the principle of national unity now required the party to ac-knowledge different perspectives and find a way to make them work together” (, ). Accounts of contemporary religiosity based on notions of immu-table credence or on self-declared affiliatory patterns (cf. Calzadilla ) fail to appreciate the particular logics of practice that obtain between and among Afro-Cuban religious communities themselves. Argyriadis (, b) and Jorge and Isabel Castellanos () have described one of these logics as consisting of a premise of instrumen-talist ritual accumulation. Havana’s religious networks are primarily composed of independent-minded persons whose loyalty to one or an-other house does not exclude the construction of a highly pragmatic approach to religiosity, as well as to godmothers and fathers. Religion has to “work,” and this “work” is largely achieved as paths carved in and through ritual spheres, remedies, spirit advice, and, if necessary, certain initiations. 4e religioso in Havana is the material and spiritual embodiment of these multiple, heterogeneous alleys of efficacy, pur-sued throughout the course of a life, but he or she is often uncontained by them; the cumulative enterprise must be seen through the lens of each person’s quest to achieve a sort of equilibrium—a self that is both given and made, and similarly, a destiny that must be both accepted and sought. 4ese social facts point irreversibly to the need to rela-tivize questions of belief, as a total, encompassing cognitive state (cf.

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Figure !. A stand in a market of religious items in Central Havana. Photo by Ana Stela Cunha.

Glazier ). “Being a believer in my own way”—a truism in Cuba (Argyriadis b, )—is tantamount to moving in a determined but often critical, even skeptical, manner though the myriad folds of Afro-Cuban religiosity. 4e city’s physical landscape is the ultimate witness to this wide-spread intuitive form of faith building. Havana’s religious topography resembles those of the Cuban religioso’s house and his life. It is a messy, distributed collection of public and not-so-public markers of hom-age and worship: sacred trees, crossroads, and outdoor markets form meaningful points of ritual reference, circulation, and sociality, solidi-fied in recent times by the rise in initiates and Afro-Cuban religious in-terest. 4e city’s sacred geography is also evident in the plastic bags of witchcraft-related substances or newspaper-wrapped ritual waste set beside trees, on corners, outside hospitals, and in cemeteries, in both urban crevices and open landscape, punctuating the paths of those who move in those common spaces (cf. Wirtz ). Altars at home are similar collages of tradition set in place by the paths of experience:

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Figure ". A male iyawó in Central Havana. Photo by the author.

Santería’s oricha-santos reign in their ceramic vessels, high on shelves, ornamented with smaller items of value, coins, objects from the sea, bells, food, and Catholic imagery. Contact with the foreign “other” accelerated and accentuated Afro-Cuban religious proliferation for two main reasons: Firstly, Cuba would now be under greater international scrutiny, arguably foregrounding the absence of certain liberties; and secondly, political investment in a cultural and economic “opening” brought unexpected dividends. More relaxed policies on remittances from Cubans abroad meant that more conspicuous and lavish ceremonies could take place; meanwhile, or-dinary tourism expanded into the religious cult houses, acting as a primary catalyst of contemporary religious revival in the public sphere.

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Havana’s Afro-Cuban material religious markers quickly became a fea-ture of urban geography: Santería’s white-clad novices reappeared in the outdoor markets to complete their initiation ceremonies; religious adepts and experts adorned themselves publicly with their ritual par-aphernalia and colorful beaded necklaces, now status symbols; and even some typically domestic espiritistas began to consult on street corners with their glasses of water, divination cards, and gypsy spirits, claiming space in a growing economy of religious visibility. 4e commercialization of the island’s cubanía, the influx of religious tourists, and the increase of initiation interest among non-Cubans and Cubans living abroad sparked both intense competition between practitioners, and profiteering and exploitation. Exposure to long-term material scarcity had, for some, generated a dark shadow: the mercantilization of la religión. Santeros, paleros, and priests of Ifá (the divination branch of the Regla de Ocha) were, and are still, the most discernible protagonists in the new paradigm of accusations, mainly due to costs associated with ceremonies that may run into thousands of dollars (or pesos for Cubans). Espiritistas carved out a corner for themselves in this discourse either as being specialists at construct-ing “purer,” less commerce-minded spiritual relations or as being more “scientific,” rebutting their association with Afro-Cuban religions alto-gether. Yet, in practice, the dead are still considered indispensable tools with which to ascertain financial opportunities and gains, to discern potential enemies and the means by which to deal with social men-ace, and to determine the initiations or ritual protections best in both Santería and Palo Monte for “getting ahead” (salir adelante) or leaving the country. While in espiritismo the notion of a “godchild”—essential to the structure and endurance of Afro-Cuban religious cult houses—is less salient, espiritistas do cultivate their allegiances carefully, and many hold multiple ritual roles simultaneously. In contemporary Havana, a city of religious sharks, everyone is green: “Hay que tener mucho cuidado a casa de quien vas” [You should be very careful whose house you go to], I was often warned; “Hoy en día no se puede estar en la casa de cualquiera” [Nowadays you can’t just go to anyone’s]. 4e crisis provoked an underlying and generalized neurosis about evildoers and brujería that still reverberates today.

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Situating espiritismo’s self-makings in wider scope

It seems fair to ask, in the light of the social, political, moral, and eco-nomic context described above, how we should regard the self-making efforts of espiritistas and other religiosos in relation to their impact on wider realities. By asking this I am not suggesting that there is direct, causal link between the two or that we should suppose that the answer is simple. Indeed, it would be a round mistake to divorce these same “wider” realities from their personal, individual dimensions. One of my arguments in this book is exactly that religious “knowledge,” or self-knowing, does not precede its encounter, or generation, in and as the lived-in world. Religious experience is in no form “explainable” as a reaction or response to conditions, say, those of a post-Soviet Cuba. In my view, espiritismo does not substitute state-failed areas of wellbeing for Cubans, nor is it a space of resistance against an all-powerful state, as much as it inevitably participates, like other informal religious prac-tices, in the creation of both old and new forms of subjectivity in Cuba. 4ese forms do not overtly compete with the state in a traditional sense, or at least until they are forced to (such as through measures of repression or confrontation). And neither are they experienced as somehow “complementary.” Rather, it is better to say that they coexist. In a recent paper, Anastasios Panagiotopoulos and I argue that this coexistence is arguably made viable by what we could say is a pervasive ethos of pragmatic individualism embedded within the cosmo-logics of the main Afro-Cuban religious practices, including espiritismo. 4us, these religions propose “paths” (caminos), destinies, and solu-tions that are person-centered, not collectivity- or nation-centered, effectively destabilizing the notion that they must relate in some spe-cial way to Revolutionary politics, i.e. “context” (Panagiotopoulos and Espírito Santo ). We argue that this ethos is well represented in the popular phrase referring to the prestigious oracle of Ifá and its scope, “En Ifá está todo” [Everything is contained in Ifá], and that it is also obvious in the highly personalized nature of an espiritista’s muertos or in the client-centered moralities of Palo Monte’s nfumbes, the spirits of the dead they work with. 4e Revolution’s own motto, “¡Dentro de la Revolución, todo, fuera de la Revolución, nada!” [Inside the Revolu-tion, everything; outside of it, nothing!], is the corollary of the opposite

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side of the coin. But both statements vie for absolute, albeit ultimately unattainable, forms of “encompassment,” namely, of the person. 4e question is less one of how these two “projects” coexist or come into conflict with each other than of observing that these very differences in their ontological assumptions may render this competition moot. Most importantly, the argument here is that the hyperindividualism (note: not equivalent to selfishness or greed), so to speak, that anthro-pologists have been so keen to document in the popular religious field since the s is more accurately seen as a more evident manifesta-tion of what is an arguably inherent logic of self-making in the wider Afro-Cuban religious sphere. Following on from this, it becomes more feasible to forward some thoughts on espiritismo’s wider impact in light of this “exacerbation” of individualism from the s. In his ethnography of contemporary Cubans’ health-seeking behavior, P. Sean Brotherton suggests that Cu-bans regularly engage in practices that imply the massive but necessary development of informal strategies of survival and resolution, particu-larly since the country’s economic crisis (). 4ese strategies are part and parcel of new forms of subjectivity that reflect the fact that people have largely taken the production of their own wellbeing into their own hands. 4is does not imply a rejection of state-sponsored mainstream or alternative medicine, but a pragmatic reliance on in-formal economies and complex networks of friends, family, and socios to ensure a better chance at achieving health. 4ese behaviors are not antigovernment but instead crosscut myriad personal, institutional, familial, state-sponsored, and private spheres (, ). In my view, many people who avail themselves of espiritista ritual masses, con-sultations, and solutions follow a similar logic of the pursuit health and wellbeing. Espiritismo is not simply about physical health, as I will show, but in its popular spheres it is overwhelmingly about the betterment of one’s life and one’s future possibilities, achieved more often through a combination of forms of diagnosis and action than by investing in that of a single domain. Espiritismo’s person-centered cosmology makes this arrangement of solution-pluralism a more than comfortable one, given that it is often a person’s own muertos that de-mand that she see a doctor or a santero or that one or another moment is a better time to change jobs, houses, countries.

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III. Ethnologists, spiritists, and categories

Folklore and the secularization of Afro-Cuban religion

According to Natalia Bolívar and Román Orozco (), the s can be characterized as a dark period for Cuban religiosity. At the end of the s, the authors claim, the Party published a few copies of a book called Sectas religiosas [Religious sects, n.d.], to be printed and circulated within the militia and among Party members. 4e book was essentially a combat manual designed for the younger cadre with the intention of providing basic guidelines by which to frame and deal with all manner of religious manifestation. Its tone was notably deprecia-tive, casting religious phenomena as retrograde and unscientific and, most damningly, as antirevolutionary. Revolutionary officialdom modified its stance over the years, at-tempting to discern a basis on which to politically assimilate the population of religiosos who had been an active component of the pro-Revolutionary vanguard. A case was thus made to chart “scien-tifically” and to conserve the aesthetic elements, material culture, and mythology of Afro-Cuban cults while meanwhile discouraging their practice, beliefs, and so-called degenerate ways of life. 4is effort was to be a project of museology and artifact collection as much as one based on ethnographic and sociological survey. Hernandez-Reguant (, –) tells us that “cultural policy sustained the separation between high European culture (alta cultura) and popular culture (un-derstood as traditional)”—and widely associated with Afro-Creole religious practices—which required research in order to retain it in authentic form for educated urban audiences removed from its mi-lieu. 4e author notes that the “evaluation of folklore’s authenticity and revolutionary relevance was a scientific task, and it fell on the growing body of folklorists and musicologists who, as traditional anthropolo-gists elsewhere, became the guardians of the nation’s purity” (ibid., ). Anthropology was to become ethnology proper, modeled on So-viet ethnography and geared toward the classification of the nation’s panoply of folkloric traits, an understanding of their previous function, and their incorporation into Cuba’s new Revolutionary identity. 4is change was to be achieved through a process of secularization. According to Ayorinde, the first Party Congress in agreed that the

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folkloric cultural values of the Afro-Cuban religions—music, dance, and musical instruments—“should be assimilated, purg-ing them of mystical elements, so that their essence can no longer be used to perpetuate customs and ideas inconsistent with scien-tific truth” (Partido Comunista , –). Writers and artists were encouraged to use these cultural elements in their work. Folkloric studies were to provide the theoretical framework for these elements’ incorporation into national culture. (, )

Efforts had already been made in this direction, but as Ayorinde ar-gues, “folklorists and cultural theorists were engaged in a delicate bal-ancing act: the enchantment and wisdom of Afro-Cuban mythology was to be extolled while at the same time the negative and alienating aspects of Afro-Cuban religious beliefs were to be revealed” (ibid., ). According to Guanche, while the term afrocubano was once necessary to defend the presence of African cultural elements in the formation of Cuban nationhood against its critics, it had subsequently become “inappropriate and anachronic” vocabulary since Cuba recognized it-self in “the essentially Hispano-African transculturation process that led to a new cultural formation distinct from its antecedent elements” (, , my translation). Guanche’s observation is ironic in light of the fact that, as most scholars of “Afro-Cuban” religions know, the Revolution’s project of “folklorization” sees continuity with a process of nation-building that had begun well before , arguably with Fernando Ortiz’s call for the study of the “Afro-Cuban” element of his country’s cultural complex. “Without the Negro, Cuba would not be Cuba,” he says in an address to the elite Afro-Cuban Club Atenas in , wherein he glances ret-rospectively at his career motivations (reproduced in article format in ): “He could not therefore be ignored. It was imperative then to study this integral element of Cuban life; but no one had studied him, and indeed, it appeared that no one cared for him” (Ortiz , ). While he had not invented the term “Afro-Cuban,” Ortiz’s early works gave it massive popular currency, as well as opened the door to move-ments outside academia that aimed to reintegrate African-derived traditions into the consciousness of the nation but did so largely by purifying them into more “respectable” forms (Ayorinde , ). While these movements constituted “compromises” (ibid., ), one

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of the results of the elites’ co-opting Cuba’s African heritage in their reimagining of nation was the uncritical perpetuation of the myth of a “color-blind” Cuba (Kapcia , ), idealizing what was in fact a divided society. 4e above observations are relevant because they signal the de-velopment of a very particular kind of anthropology, one that began ideologically with Ortiz and some of his contemporaries and which was vigorous from the beginning of the Revolution into the s: namely, an anthropology of simultaneous abstraction and explanation. While from the s religious cultural value was to be extracted and preserved as a significant component of a unified nation in a nod to Republican-era anthropology, its persistence—seen through a Marxist lens—required a form of justification, one that unfolded comfortably in the crisis events of the s and in the boom in religious expres-sion thus provoked. A “scientific” sociology was to inform most stud-ies conducted on Afro-Cuban religiosity during the first decades of the Revolution and even more so in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet collapse. A focus on social function, arguably to the detriment of anthropological exegesis, was also to permeate the scant studies of spiritist activity and cosmology.

Not quite a religion: Ambiguous espiritismos

In their treatise on “syncretic” religions and espiritismo, Argüelles Mederos and Hodge Limonta () argue that spiritism found an ideal home in Cuba’s educated classes as early as the mid-nineteenth century because the country’s difficult political and economic situa-tion favored the search for religious solutions, a situation fuelled by later exploitation, unemployment, hunger, and illness in the broader population. It is an interpretation that echoes the Revolution’s official rhetoric of religion as the “opium” (or illusion) of those with a “low level of instruction” (ibid., ). It is less clear, however, as the Party’s Sectas religiosas manifesto also suggests, where Afro-Latin espiritismo was to sit in a post-Revolution folklore paradigm; it seemed to fall into an ambiguous middle ground of spontaneous magico-superstitious prac-tices devoid of significant religious complexity or influence (Calzadilla , ). In a model that ranks Cuban religious manifestations ac-cording to more or less “elaborated” versions of credence, Calzadilla

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argues that religion has neither sociopolitical significance nor capacity to intervene in the reproduction of concrete society in Cuba (, ), with espiritismo one of the least elaborated religious practices of all. Considering these formulations, arguably representative of Cuban social scientific academia, it is unsurprising that espiritismo was to rank low in Cuba’s politically-oriented research priorities. Indeed, barring an informative text on the Cuban “variants” of es-piritismo in by José Millet (an anthropologist at Santiago’s Casa del Caribe), the aforementioned Los llamados cultos sincréticos y el espiritismo () by Argüelles Mederos and Hodge Limonta, and a short book by Bolivar, González, and del Río titled Corrientes espiri-tuales en Cuba (), in which popular spiritism is glossed superfi-cially, at most, little published work has emerged on what is probably Cuba’s most prolific ritual practice. So much so that in , on the first page of the introduction to their book El espiritismo de cordón (), Córdova Martínez and Barzaga Sablón complain that while there is a varied and rich bibliography in Cuba on the so-called Afri-can syncretic cults, very little has been written about espiritismo. 4is may be partly explained through its continuity with the cultural ethos of previous era when the term “Afro-Cuban”—and the racialization of African-inspired practices—came into wide circulation, pitting cer-tain religious complexes, such as those that became known as Santería, Palo Monte and Voudon, in opposition to “European-derived” ones, such as Catholicism, or spiritism (cf. Wirtz , ), despite ample evidence to suggest that the racial makeup of their followers had long been heterogeneous. Espiritismo never quite fit the images of enchant-ment, magic, or witchcraft, or indeed “tradition,” that many associated with the “Afro-Cuban” religions and their potential for an extended concept of national culture, as “Afro-Cuban” as its membership prob-ably was in the first half of the twentieth century. In his history of spiritist Mustelier’s activities and reach, for example, Reinaldo Román () indicated that the spiritism of the time was of a charismatic, popular, or grassroots sort, while in El Monte, Lydia Cabrera speaks of espiritismo “marching hand in hand” with the “cults of African ori-gin . . . tightly united despite its pretensions of spirituality, of ‘spiritual advancement, light, faith, and progress’” ( [], ). At the same time, Cabrera’s interpretations of espiritismo bleed into fuzzy concepts of lo espiritual, or indeed mediumship itself, described by some of her

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informants as “nothing new” (ibid., ). “Catholicism always falls into espiritismo,” says the cimarrón Estebán Montejo to Miguel Barnet (Barnet , ), his biographer, of his days among other runaway slaves; “in the barracks everyone had their glass of water and his spe-cial plants hung on the wall . . . an exclusive Catholic doesn’t exist. 4e rich people of before were Catholic but they gave their attention, once in a while, to brujería” (ibid., ).

Anthropological categories and their corollaries

Arguably the most important paper dealing with Cuban espiritismo was written in by Armando Andrés Bermúdez, “Notas para la historia del espiritismo en Cuba.” Its importance derives not from the detail of its historical data or its analytical precision, but from the fact that it provided a solid classificatory standard from which curiously few anthropologists have since diverged in their characterizations of espiritismo. What was essentially a useful article calling for more re-search on Cuban spiritism, rather than a proclamation of ontologi-cal certainty, was to henceforth become a counterproductively static point of reference. Bermúdez postulated the existence of four kinds of spiritism in Cuba: the first is espiritismo de cordón, characterized by chants and dancing movements occurring within a cord of mediums, and it has syncretic ties with Catholicism (, ). 4ere is no doubt that Bermúdez was correct in assuming its distinctiveness as a reli-gious mode, and his observation is still relevant. Cordoneros gather in centers whose liturgy, language of invocation, and phenomenology of possession has developed in ways specific to them, generally confined to the east of Cuba. 4e other three categories are more ambiguous: espiritismo de mesa or científico [table or scientific spiritism]; espiritismo de cari-dad [charity spiritism]; and espiritismo cruzado. Bermudez suggests that members of the sect known as espiritismo de mesa or científico follow the work of Allan Kardec, founder of European spiritism and do not consider themselves ritualists as their practice consists in per-forming certain invocations around a table before falling into a trance. While this description bears some resemblance to a few of the spiritist groups with whom I worked in Havana in that they do not consider themselves ritualists and they associate their practice with scientific

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thought, other elements, such as following the beliefs of spiritism’s founder, are in fact widespread. Most espiritistas read, or have at least heard of, Kardec’s books, framing their practice within Kardec’s broad ontology of spirits. Furthermore, the “table,” mentioned by Bermúdez, is a characteristic feature of all spiritist gatherings, generally set up as an altar on which are placed certain items, such as flowers and water. Only once during my field research did I observe mediums “sitting around” a table as suggested by Bermúdez, something more reminis-cent of Euro-American séances. Furthermore, the term científico is less than straightforward in the religious landscape. In Havana, both indi-viduals and groups stake a claim of scientificity through discourses and practices whose heterogeneity precludes any simple understanding of a hermetic espiritismo científico sector. 4e category of espiritismo de caridad also merits critical scrutiny. Bermúdez argues that this is similar to espiritismo de mesa in its beliefs but differs in that at the core of its practice are rituals of cleansing and blessing (despojo and santiguación) through which a client can receive the benefits of charity (caridad), normally to help recover from ill-ness (Bermúdez ). 4ese rituals are actually embedded aspects of the contemporary practice of most forms of Cuban spiritism, which seeks the amelioration of seekers’ woes through prayer, possession, and cleansing rituals with designated elements such as plants. As a Christian concept, while “charity” probably referred to the fact that early mediums worked free of charge (and some still do), it is now a generalized form of speaking about the mission proper of spiritists and spirits: that of helping people. Bermúdez here misleadingly takes what is a prominent component of discourse, as well as ritual specialization, as a distinct “cult.” Finally, he identifies espiritismo cruzado or crusao, as presenting elements of the “Afroid religions.” In its dominant form, he argues, this espiritismo appears “amalgamated” with elements of Bantu-Congo religious ascendancy in particular (, ); this claim has characteristically confused researchers into presenting this form of espiritismo as an extension or function of other Afro-Cuban religious rituals, which is a gross oversimplification (as I discuss in chapter ). Bermúdez’s classification appears uncritically in the works of other anthropologists of Cuban espiritismo, such as José Millet (), who lists these same four “types” from the outset. Although he has curiously little to say on the enigmatic espiritismo de caridad, beyond reproduc-

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ing Bermúdez’s definition of it as despojo and santiguación, and does not expand on the espiritismo científico group he mentions, he use-fully suggests the existence of other vertientes, such as Regla Muertera and Bembé de Sao, relatively unexplored spiritist-oriented practices of Cuba’s Oriente that arguably deserve far more attention than they have received so far. Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert, in their Cre-ole Religions of the Caribbean (), take a slightly different route. For them, the principle espiritismos of Cuba are the científico or de mesa—clearly following Bermúdez—the cruzado, and the cordón. While their characterization of espiritismo cruzado offers a little more in the way of ethnographic detail, their description of científico spiritist practices repeats the erroneous assumption of its practitioners as table-sitting, Kardec-reading adepts. My research, however, suggests a different picture from those of Bermúdez, Millet, and others. Practitioners of less “ritualistic” forms of spiritism in Havana comprise a heterogeneous set who largely fol-low idiosyncratic, and often complex, doctrines passed down to them by group founders which are not limited to Kardecist precepts. In-stead, these groups tend to follow the teachings of unique spirit guides, generally via their founders’ psychographic production (information received through the automatic writing form of mediumship), whose particulars are tied to their history and raison d’être. While the es-piritistas who describe themselves as científicos or de investigación may loosely classify themselves as “Kardecists,” and some do belong to international spiritist federations, their practices and work philoso-phies are by no means uniform, and neither can they be seen as being divorced from the broader Afro-Cuban religious sphere. Indeed, re-gardless of certain efforts at staving off the influence of what are seen as more “lowly” kinds of spirits, sometimes defined in racial-ethnic terms, these espiritistas generally work with the same strata of meta-physical beings as do any other espiritistas: their cordones espirituales bear just as many “African” or “Indian” or “European” influences, and their “ritualism” differs only in perspective.

Creolization and “Afro-Cuban” espiritismo?

Spiritist concepts are understood to have “arrived” in Cuba in the s via the importation of European spiritist texts (either through

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the United States or Spain), particularly Kardec’s foundational works !e Spirits’ Book () and !e Mediums’s Book (), which not only posited a cosmos of spirits and persons in progressive evolution and immanent communication, but offered a moral philosophy of ra-cial and sexual equality based on empiricist principles compatible with Victorian science. It is true that spiritist centers proliferated in the new Republic after , and federations and societies emerged country-wide, signaling the early success of an “institutionalized” sort of spirit-ism, but espiritismo quickly became “annexed” (Brandon , ) to existing healing traditions and ritual systems, particularly among the lower-middle and lower classes (ibid., ), meanwhile gelling with folk Catholicism to become the seat of an uninstitutionalized saint cult. More significantly, spiritism may have provided a workable, yet ritually separate, solution to the absence of ancestor cults among practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions due to the “pulverizing of African lineages and families, which was a result of Cuban slavery” (ibid., ). Spiritists were poised to plug into a crucial, and hitherto inaccessible, layer of beings, the Afro-Cuban ritual and family dead, the eggún or the nfumbe, and to become indispensable in their veneration. Indeed, this indispensability is so pronounced today that Jorge and Isabel Castellanos venture to as-sert that the spiritist rite par excellence, the misa espiritual [spiritual mass], a ceremony whereby the dead are invoked and possess the living in prayers and song, “is never celebrated in Cuba if not as an integral part of an Afro-Cuban rite” (, , my translation). 4e Castellanos’s observations on the creolization of modern spirit-ist rites bring up several vital points, touched on above. One of these is the issue of whether contemporary forms of espiritismo—or more appropriately, espiritismo cruzado—can legitimately be described as “Afro-Cuban.” And if so, when can we see this transition occurring in time? Neither are easy questions. As I have noted above, not only does the term “Afro-Cuban” require problematization as a product of the largely political interests in which Republican-era scholars produced their work, its use must be accompanied by a critical reading of in-tersections between scholarly, lay, and religious understandings of it in a current climate. Espiritismo is, paradoxically, a unique axis from which to observe these intersections because its perceived origin and ideology are often deployed in religious discourses to construct certain spaces of legitimacy and moral viability, sometimes in racialized terms.

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As Palmié points out, the qualifiers “Cuban” and “African” “ought not to be seen, here, as unambiguously referring to racial constructions. Rather, they circumscribe historically volatile and synchronistically fluctuating collectivities within which individuals come to be posi-tioned” (, ). 4e approach taken here is that popular forms of espiritismo are “Afro-Cuban.” 4is is not just because spiritist mediumistic technol-ogies permeate the ritual spaces of Afro-Cuban cults—in particular Santería and Palo Monte—endowing their priests and priestesses with critical sanction and guidance from the world of the dead but, more importantly, because they participate unambiguously, even constitu-tively, in the cosmo-politics of their wider spiritual spheres. Far from static, the assumptions behind categories such as “Afro-Cuban,” “Afri-can,” or “Africa”—or for that matter, “modern,” “scientific,” “evolved,” “primitive,” “witchcraft”—may be seen to be in a process of permanent negotiation, redefinition, and reconstruction, as well as validation. While some of the espiritistas científicos that I worked with would no doubt wince at the idea of labeling their craft “Afro-Cuban,” as wielders of a particular elite image of spirit mediumship, they too transform the ideological and language regimes of their surrounding religious envi-ronment, as well its conditions of efficacy and legitimacy. In this book I explore Palmié’s () hypothesis concerning the critical contribution of spiritism’s evolutionary taxonomy to a broader ontology of beings in Cuba. But I also examine the possibility that, in its Cuban version, spiritism contributed an ontological model of the person, as well as spiritdom, well beyond its practice borders. At the basis of this model, as I suggested above, are the components of the cordón spiritual: Kardec’s protective spirit guides “creolized” and inte-grated into the conscious functioning of the entire individual. 4e cen-tral relationship between espiritismo and its sister cults, Santería and Palo Monte, is not merely one of ritual and social interdependence, but a more essential one of selfhood. Paying homage to the dead in Afro-Cuban religion is not just a religious obligation but a way of construct-ing selves, persons whose paths are forged in a systematic and dialecti-cal relationship between the minutiae of life and its eventualities, and the advice, counsel, actions, and influences of the realm of variously inclined spirits, thereby cross-cutting not just espiritismo categories but Afro-Cuban religious boundaries as well.

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As it is experienced and practiced by most people in Havana, espir-itismo is not a separate, clearly delineated religion or cult. In its creole, popular version, it derives its appeal and efficacy precisely from its ability to provide answers to ontological problems in its religious en-vironment. It is “porous” not only in the sense that clients and experts may come and go from and between its practice environments, but also in the sense that it forges, as well as constitutes, a connective tis-sue that enables transits and associations between practice domains, cosmologies, and ritualities. 4rough the development of idiosyncratic muertos, espiritismo spins myriad existential and religious “worlds” that overlap with the practice domains of Santería and Palo Monte. My research results underline the notion that spirits (muertos) can-not be disentangled ontologically from how people regard and expe-rience their own constitutions, their “selves.” While some categories of muertos—such as ancestors—are considered separate beings, by far the most pervasive grouping of spirits, comprising the cordón es-piritual, is, paradoxically, both “inside” and “outside”: inside because they are in and of one’s body and mind, existing as one’s character and emotions; outside because they have the capacity to intervene and ef-fect changes “out there” on one’s behalf. While people may consider themselves autonomous from their muertos—since, these too, had lives and autonomous existences—they understand themselves as not just a part of them, but in fact, interconnected on a number of causal and structural levels. How are these two characteristics reconcilable? One of the answers explored here is that material things—the spirits’ reflections in the world—are also components of a person. 4is is not to suggest that espiritistas—or for that matter, most religious folk in Cuba—are not mind-body/soul-body dualists. In most cases they are. People conceive of themselves as having souls or spirits, essences of their being which largely survive death, that are capable of all kinds of extraordinary feats and encounters, and which are distinguished from the perishable body. By arguing that a person’s “inner” and “outer” self are contiguous, in constant articulation and mutuality and, sometimes, dissolvable, I wish to echo espiritista concerns with the effects of ac-tion, event, and material objects on the development and construc-tion of an “inside” consisting of qualities, grace, capacities, character, destiny, but also spirits. Central to the development of the argument that a person’s “self” goes beyond the borders of the body is that his or

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her spirits are also made via material markers in the world, as well as by the behaviors and posture of those the spirits protect. Ultimately, my argument is that espiritismo’s concepts of “self”—its ontology of being—are not simply to be seen by the anthropologist as a theoretical background to experience or a post facto way to contextualize psycho-physiological processes such as states of possession. We should take the specifics of this ontology seriously because through the mechanics of its particular logic, persons, spirits, and material entities and pos-sibilities come into being.

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Developing the dead: mediumship and selfhood in Cuban spiritism

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