Imagination, sensation and the education of attention among Cuban spirit mediums

This article was downloaded by: [Diana Espirito Santo]On: 17 July 2012, At: 11:50Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T3JH, UK

Ethnos: Journal ofAnthropologyPublication details, including instructions forauthors and subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/retn20

Imagination, Sensation andthe Education of AttentionAmong Cuban Spirit MediumsDiana Espirito Santo aa Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal

Version of record first published: 17 Jul 2012

To cite this article: Diana Espirito Santo (2012): Imagination, Sensation andthe Education of Attention Among Cuban Spirit Mediums, Ethnos: Journal ofAnthropology, 77:2, 252-271

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.600832

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private studypurposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any formto anyone is expressly forbidden.

The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make anyrepresentation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up todate. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses shouldbe independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not

be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs ordamages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly inconnection with or arising out of the use of this material.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

Imagination, Sensation and the Education ofAttention Among Cuban Spirit Mediums

Diana Espirito SantoUniversidade de Lisboa, Portugal

abstract This article attempts to come to terms with the phenomenology of learningin the popular Cuban spirit mediumship practice of espiritismo. Espiritistas’ talentsderive from the unique relationships they construct with their muertos (the protectivedead), allowing them to receive, discern, and interpret valuable information for others.Learning here does not result from explicit knowledge transmission but from a guidedexpansion of consciousness, where the neophyte learns to attend to the particulars ofthe spirit world through his or her imagination and sensation. I associate this processwith what Ingold has described as the ‘education of attention’, and use his concept of‘entanglement’ to propose that learning mediumship be conceptualized as implying thedevelopment of a particular kind of person. I have further used Latour’s definition of‘acquiring a body’ as ‘learning to be affected’ to better understand the mutual consti-tution of the spiritual landscape and the self.

keywords Possession, learning, spiritism, Cuba, phenomenology

IntroductionThe idea that ‘possession’ is learnt, instructed, or acquired somehow, calls outfor careful and critical scrutiny. As Berliner and Sarro have recently argued,the ‘precise way religious concepts about supernatural beings are acquiredand practices linked to them are learnt has remained largely understudied byanthropologists’ (2007: 7). Fair enough: as they say, citing David Parkin, religiondoes not just happen to people. But that the anthropology of religious learninghas been all but dominated by preoccupations with mechanisms of transmissionis evidence that hard-line cognitive approaches have been quick to colonize thisspace, arguably to the detriment of the visibility of more processual, even ‘situ-ated’ (Lave & Wenger 1991), cognitive perspectives. Further, in so doing, some

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)# 2012 Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis

issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.600832

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

of these approaches have set the parameters within which learning is to belegitimately understood in the first place – namely, within the confines of themind and its pre-specified structures. While most of these authors (such asBoyer 1994; Sperber 1996, and more recently Cohen 2007) claim to dialoguein some way between ‘innate’ and ‘environmental’ factors, allowing them, asTim Ingold observes, to also postulate that the environment is implicated inthe development of this architecture, the underlying implication still is that‘the process starts not with a plan for constructing cognitive modules that isas yet unrealized, but with preconstituted modules whose “needs” for infor-mation are as yet unspecified’ (2001: 127). This understanding of learning is inevi-tably and recursively informed by and also informs further definitions ofknowledge and of the knowing subject; thus, ‘representations of’, ‘conceptsabout’, ‘beliefs in’ – all of which promulgate in one way or another the unexa-mined assumptions of what Charles Taylor calls the modern ‘buffered’ self(2007) – in turn, part and parcel of what Michael Lambek deems ‘the naturalistparadigm’ (1989: 36) in the anthropology of religion. It is uncontroversial butpertinent to note in passing the extent to which modern anthropology hasinherited from a Western Judeo-Christian notion of the person (cf. Asad1993). In Taylor’s terms, the modern buffered self knows no fear of possessionbecause it is not permeable. But the fact is that while our ethnographic dataon spirit possession and mediation largely contradict such a view, most anthro-pology of such phenomena continues to presuppose a ‘disengaged’ self in itsanalyses, namely, one that must acquire a certain type of knowledge (or set ofbeliefs) in order to become possessed.

At stake, it seems to me, is the need to understand possession simultaneouslyand without contradiction as an embodied skill, a form of perception, and anintellectual pursuit. But more importantly, as resulting from a particular wayof moving in, responding to, and producing oneself in conjunction with, a livedenvironment over time. Following Ingold, I suggest in this article that an ‘eco-logical’ approach to the analysis of becoming a spirit medium is possible anddesirable and bypasses in the process some of the pitfalls of many reductioniststances. More specifically, I will attempt to work on Ingold’s notion of the ‘edu-cation of attention’ (Ingold, 2000, 2001) into the framing of mediumship learn-ing processes in the Afro-Cuban practice of espiritismo cruzado. As I will show,for Cuban espiritistas the experience of human–spirit interaction is far from con-fined to ‘event’ formats such as moments of ecstasy or revelation; it is a normalextension of the development of a particular kind of self, one that is aware of andconnected to a landscape in which the dead are incipient and immanent, and in

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

Attention Among Cuban Spirit Mediums 253

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

which perception can be naturally educated over time to reveal what the worldreally is. This means not just taking local ontological assumptions seriously intoaccount of spirit mediumship, but recognizing that such ontologies may haveeffects beyond epistemology. In particular, I will show that the person istrained into being affected by his or her encounter with the environment insuch a way as to yield certain forms of spiritual knowledge, making a distinctionbetween pre-formed ideologies and their phenomenal effects redundant.Implicit here is the manner in which spirits can be conceptualized (also) aselements of physical space and things, including of certain bodies, such asthose of mediums, whose sensitization to the particulars of their existenceoccurs precisely through this interface. Finally, ‘ecology’ must be understoodas including not just ‘things’, but indeed things-as-spirits, and effects-as-spirits.

Tim Ingold has used the term ‘sentient ecology’ (2000: 25) to describe whathe understands as the kind of knowledge people have of their own environ-ments. ‘It is knowledge not of a formal, authorised kind, transmissible in con-texts outside those of its practical application’, he argues. ‘On the contrary, itis based in feeling, consisting in the skills, sensitivities and orientations thathave developed through long experience of conducting one’s life in a particularenvironment’ (Ingold 2007: 25). This is the type of knowledge that hunters, suchas those of the Cree people of northeastern Canada, draw on: for instance, theCree hunter can detect ‘those subtle clues in the environment that revealthe movements and presence of animals’ (Ingold 2007: 24), such that theanimal, the caribou, often offers itself up to the hunter. This depiction of thecaribou, says Ingold, ‘reveals powers of agency, intentionality, and sentienceembodied in a living, moving being’ (Ingold 2007: 121), recognized in suchmoments of encounter. The point here is that the environment of a particularorganism is that which exists for it, and takes on meaning in relation to it; bythe same token, the environment also comes into existence via the organism’sdevelopment in it (Ingold 2007: 20). I will argue that what Ingold understandsas the mutual constitution of organism and environment can be similarly seenwith respect to the mutual constitution of self and spirit in the everyday practiceof Cuban espiritismo. This begs the question, as one of this text’s reviewers hasaptly pointed out, of how such practices come to be cast in terms of spirits in thefirst place. In order to defend an ecological approach to spirit mediumship, areconceptualization of embodiment is required, and specifically of body. Forthis, I will draw on Latour’s argument (in turn drawn from Vinciane Despret’sreading of William James on emotion) that ‘to have a body is to learn to beaffected, meaning “effectuated”, moved, put into motion by other entities,


254 diana espirito santo

Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

humans or non-humans’ (2004: 205, original emphasis). For Latour, the body isnot an essence or substance that exists as a residence for something else, butinstead ‘an interface that becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affectedby more and more elements’ (Latour 2004: 206, original emphasis). In Cuban espir-itismo, the body, as the site of sensation, imagination, and affect, is also the spiritas it is revealed through encounter, an encounter that casts ‘difference’ as rel-evant spiritual information. That learning – as a process of emerging effects– is seen as indeterminate and going further renders the distinction herebetween an abstract system of ideas and action obsolete.

In the following sections I will do several things, in two steps. First, I willexplore the importance of a specific ontology of self to an analysis of the pro-cesses that guide religious learning and spiritual discovery, relative to myCuban data and beyond it; second, I will propose that these processes can belooked at ‘ecologically’, that is, as a ‘result not of information transmissionbut of guided rediscovery’ (Ingold 2001: 138) in an environment that is repletewith material and social cues, material structures, and other forms of guidance,and where learning to commune with spirits implies a temporally distributedtrajectory of educating attention toward the particulars of the spirit worldthrough one’s own imagination and sensation. Essentially, what I will argueis that this education of awareness is not just one of sensitizing perceptionand knowledge, but of the enskillment of oneself, where the spirit medium’sself-consciousness as such reveals and epitomizes the profound ‘entanglements’(Ingold 2006) that are obtained between different beings. I will analyze thenotion of ‘entanglements’ more specifically through Latour’s notion of thebody as a medium acquired, not given; where knowledge results from the com-plexification of ‘affects’. I will propose, in the following two sections, that theacquisition of a medium’s body-self in espiritismo is indissociable from the sim-ultaneous acquisition of an environment of spirits who enter into relation with itand through it manifest. As Latour says, ‘acquiring a body is thus a progressiveenterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world’ (2004:207).

Spirits in Persons and Persons in SpiritsIn the widely practiced forms of Cuban of spirit mediumship, known popularlyunder the umbrella term espiritismo cruzado (lit. ‘crossed’ spiritism, cf. Aguelles &Hodge Limonta 1991; Bolivar et al. 2007; Millet 1996), the dead are thought tocross paths with the living on a daily basis, whether the living perceive it ornot. While some spirits come to help, others come in need of ‘light’, symbolic



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

of knowledge and spiritual evolution. Spirit mediums appeal to powerful Catho-lic saints and African deities for success in their charitable missions of appeasingthe unruly elements of the spirit world. So embroiled are the vicissitudes of thedead with the events of the everyday that in Havana many spirit mediums earn aliving by practicing their prowess of discerning one from the other. Through theperformance of collective spiritist rituals, called misas espirituales (lit. spiritualmasses), where two or more experienced mediums lead a rite of invocationand song, such influences are identified and if possible, dealt with. In onesuch misa I witnessed, Eduardo and Olga, two close friends and mediumswhose work I followed routinely, aimed to alleviate the woes of one familywhose home had been adversely affected by the presence of a deceasedfamily member. After initial opening prayers and some song, the messagesbegan. ‘I see a spirit standing next to you that’s dressed in black’, Eduardotold Daniel, the elderly owner of the house; ‘he comes with you, but he’s notyours’. The spirit was identified by Daniel’s wife, Hilda, as her brother-in-law,a rancorous old gray-haired man who had attempted suicide once and withwhom she had never enjoyed a peaceful relationship. His attachment to thehouse was the principal cause of the family’s recent misfortune and lack ofunity. Daniel had also been the unwitting victim of witchcraft on the part ofa jealous co-worker at the hotel he worked at, resulting among other eventsin the spontaneous combustion of his motorcycle, from which he had thank-fully escaped unscathed. Olga informed Daniel of the significance in thisrespect of a powerful spirit protector of his – an Indio (meaning an AmericanIndian or indigenous caribbean) – who had ‘rescued him from many slipperysituations’ before, including this one. The Indio was now presenting himselfclearly. Just as in similar instances I had observed in Eduardo and Olga’swork, this spirit’s visibility (both to the medium’s perceptual apparatus and tothe person it protected) was closely tied in their explanation of the events toits saliency in the resolution of the problem-at-hand. When Eduardo referredto the disruptive spirit above as having ‘come with’ Daniel, but as not being‘his’, he was making a distinction central to the spiritist project. If, on the onehand, Daniel’s brother had no longer any legitimate or productive placeamong his kin, his presence, as also the onset of potentially deadly entitiessent by means of witchcraft, is registered on the other by something which ismore akin to an extension of Daniel himself – one of his spirits, in this case,the Indio. Whatever else they did to ammeliorate Daniel and Hilda’s situation– cleaning their house by burning certain plants, dissolving the witchcraft byfalling into trance with their powerful spirit guides for example – Eduardo



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

and Olga also effectively materialized a spirit in Daniel’s consciousness, a protec-cion whose existence they forged relationally to the above occurrences. Thecontingency of this spirit’s self-revelation on the revelation, in turn, ofDaniel’s problems, they were all too aware of themselves as developed espiritis-tas, for the identities of their own spirits had emerged through similar encoun-ters. Indeed, as natural mediums, these encounters had for Eduardo and Olgabeen even more visceral, having manifest among other things as sickness (Iwill discuss the importance of illness in the next section).

In Havana espiritistas do not just discern or become possessed by the spirits ofothers. They are espiritistas by virtue of a set of spirit guides through whom theyacquire their vision and voice as mediums. While all persons have such guidessince birth, which form a collectivity known as the cordon espiritual (lit. spiritual‘cord’), or just muertos, mediums depend for their task on the achievement of agradual and conscious interpenetration between such entities and their ownsentient, moving bodies. At times such entanglements become so fierce thatthe medium’s persona in some sense becomes equivalent to their muerto, in asmuch as most of daily life occurs in its presence. Such is the case withMarcelina,an Afro-Cuban medium in her mid-sixties, whose spiritual work with Paloyan-san, the spirit of a Haitian traditional healer who first manifested in her bodywhen she was just a child, continued to define her existence. As a well-known espiritista in the neighborhood of Centro Habana, Marcelina restsonly at night, after everyone standing in the queue outside her door has beenseen. The ease with which Marcelina incorporates her guide during consul-tations indicates a fine line dividing one from the other; their gestures and man-nerisms have homogenized: typically, Marcelina looks up after only a briefmoment of concentration and begins to speak as Paloyansan, with a cigar inher mouth. Paloyansan’s expert knowledge of plants and their medicinal prop-erties has become Marcelina’s too, by extension. Paloyansan’s biography andcharacter have crystallized in the objects decorating her humble apartment,where material forms of homage such as dolls and paintings, not just to thespirit, but to those he knew and loved in life, pay testament to this intersectionof lives and bodies. Paloyansan lived two hundred years ago in Haiti and,according to him, was over one hundred years old when he died. While heand Marcelina have theoretically little in common except for their spiritualpurpose, the former’s path on Earth, traced day after day through the latter’sbody over their 50 years of work together, has left temporal and other marks.Paloyansan had begun as the epileptic attacks that crippled a 12-year old girl,Marcelina. Now he manifested as the spiritually fluent, but tired body of a



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

woman who seems to bear many more years than her own. Learning her trade,and refining her talent, had been for Marcelina not principally a matter ofacquiring knowledge from someone – although she too had had her mentors– but of learning a particular kind of body, in this case a permeable, shiftingbody, tantamount to a particular kind of self.

Contemporary Cuban espiritismo draws from a varied pool of influences,including the nineteenth-century mystical writings of Allan Kardec, founderof European forms of spiritism, and importantly, the predominant Afro-Cuban religious traditions. Indeed, the sheer prevalence of spiritist misas espiri-tuales, largely domestic affairs, betrays the fluid but the crucial role that espiritis-tas play in the larger Afro-Cuban religious cosmos: that of both articulating andengendering religious ‘selves’ through the identification of one’s spirit guidesand their needs. Despite beginning its career as a ‘scientific’ religion attendedto by the urban educated elite (Bermudez 1967), versions of which still existtoday, espiritismo expanded as a healing-oriented practice via its associationwith the two main Afro-Cuban religious cults: Santerıa, the cult of the orisha,the West African gods of the Yoruba people, and Palo Monte, a term whichrefers to a set of ritual traditions based on the worship and manipulation ofthe dead, derived from the Bakongo regions of Africa. In both these practices,the dead are central, unavoidable, but ‘remain entities whose moral character-istics can be ascertained only in the course of interaction’ (Palmie 2002: 195),a ‘wilderness’ of sorts (Palmie 2002: 195) for which espiritistas are able toprovide a conceptual and pragmatic social map. More significantly, from theenlightened and intellectual spirits whose wise messages Kardec was the recipi-ent of in the seances of French high society, in Cuba the above-mentioned‘guides’ became equipped to deal with the crosses of the everyday; they cameto embody the historical and ethnic particularities of an emerging Creole iden-tity (Brandon 1997), acquiring the contours of existent forms of folk religiosityand their imaginaries. Spiritism ‘became a system of action rather than abstractphilosophical ideas’ (Garoutte &Wambaugh 2007: 161), a means of ascertainingthe possibilities and limitations of one’s condition, and of subverting themthrough the careful production of oneself via knowledge of these entities.Gypsies, African warriors and divination priests, slaves and creoles, Cubanentrepreneurs and doctors, Muslims, Haitians sorcerers, Spanish clergy, indi-genous ‘Indians’, dames and writers, missionaries, independence martyrs, com-munists, and so on: spiritism’s cordones espirituales negotiate a biographicalmultiplicity that is Cuban history itself. As an embedded ‘logic’ of sorts, particularto each person, such cordones present religious Cubans with blueprints for good



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

living and if necessary, battle. As the characteristics of the entities of each cordonbecome known, so the person sketches a trans-dimensional understanding ofherself as a connected being, born from the relations she constructs with herspirits over time. Los muertos in Cuba are not simply expired beings in need ofremembrance. These particular muertos are conceptualized as prime com-ponents of the ontology of persons, components that must nevertheless beworked into existence.

Spiritist ontology turns on a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, the pro-tective muertos clearly exist. They come with the person at birth. On the other,their existence must also be achieved, somehow. The cordon must be awokenfrom an initial state of dormancy, activated, brought into being through the pro-cesses involved in becoming an espiritista. In what can best be described as adeveloping ‘system-in-motion’, mediumship is not considered here a propertyof individual minds or souls. Instead, it is a relational capacity whose processualcharacter is evident not just from the fact that it is living itself which bringsabout the conditions with which such entities can become manifest throughthe medium – the obstacles he or she faces (such as witchcraft) which maybring certain spirits to the fore as a response – but also from the idea thatthe living can have transitory, mutable relationships with these presences.While it is recognized that all persons have cordones, it is widely appreciatedthat mediums epitomize the liquidity, for lack of a better term, that is seen tocharacterize the co-existence of persons and spirits, namely, by virtue of thetechnical, imagistic, and interpretative mastery they possess over their ownbodies. It is understood that such forms of overlap are implicated in the consti-tution of the person more generally, giving shape to their moods and personal-ities, talents, motivations, physical vulnerabilities, and even vices. Indeed,contemporary Cuban spiritist practices present us with selves that are notsimply vessels for, but are imbued with the spirits of the dead with whommore or less explicit relations are founded. Seen as an activation of sorts, thelearning process is also one of self-discovery via expansion: ‘your muertos arereflections of you’, an experienced medium once told me – ‘you need to putthem to work’. Knowing them, he suggested, is tantamount to knowingoneself, not a pre-existing self, but one in constant formation in a changinglived environment. Thus, the spiritist ‘paradox’ is paradoxical only if a categori-cal distinction between self and world is maintained. But, as we will see, espiri-tismo’s onto-‘logic’ dissolves it, namely, by conceiving the muertos as existingprecisely in and as the interface of body and world. A couple of brief examplesI came across during my fieldwork will serve to illustrate this point.



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

The first is the case of Andres, a young artist and practicing medium. Heonce told me that we are the ‘laboratories’ for our spirits, who work withand through us. In this sense, they too are our ‘laboratories’. His main spiritguide is that of a painter who died young, a frustrated man, with much ofhis good work still ahead. Andres attributes his life-long artistic impulse tothe presence of this spirit, who has helped him ‘evolve’ through his art. ForAndres, artistic talent is neither fully inherent in him nor fully inheritedfrom his spirit: both come into being through its practice, without whichneither’s talent could exist as facts. Versatility, inspiration, and craftsmanshipare inseparable from the movement of his brush or pencil, materialized in thecanvasses that come into being, making the partnership behind them visible.While he has other less ‘talented’ spirits whose presence is felt in other ways,one for example in the intense womanizing instincts that he feels he mustoften curb and control, had he chosen a different profession, Andres specu-lates, he would not have known of this particular spirit’s existence. This obser-vation of his leads to our first point: that doing here, experimenting, setting inmotion, moving, painting is perhaps not simply a means of mobilizing the spiritbut indeed is the spirit, conducted through certain bodily dispositions and per-severently trained aptitudes. The next example is of David, another youngman who described being ‘accompanied’ by the spirit of a wise and agedChinese man. In what would appear to be a prototypical spirit bodily take-over, he curls his back like a bow, draws his hands toward himself contempla-tively, closes his eyes in expressive wrinkles, and speaks in a soft and largelyincomprehensively lingo as if David had vanished altogether. But possessionhere is the corollary of a much longer process of what Csordas has called a‘modulation of somatic mode of attention’ (1994). For years during hisyouth David had felt Chinese – he describes his mannerisms, interests andeven food tastes as having been ‘Oriental’. David is not merely referring to apassing ‘fad’ in his life. He is positing a necessary connection between thearousal of certain intellectual curiosities (in oriental philosophy, forexample), or the evocation of marked responses of desire toward certain‘things’ (such as his appetite for Chinese food) and his growing awarenessof this spirit. However, like many others, these ‘feelings’ changed over time.The China man left center stage, and others appeared in his stead. When Imet him, David was establishing a closer relationship with an African spiritin his cordon, a sorcerer, and was feeling peculiarly powerful. The secondobservation here would thus go in the direction of the self-as-process, butmore specifically, sentient-body-as-spiritual-process. This is where questions



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

of learning become pertinent, but also potentially obfuscating if they are notwell framed.

In his work on Brazilian Candomble, Marcio Goldman rejects what he callsthe ‘systematic form of teaching’ model, ‘essentially hydraulic in kind, imply-ing a ready-made content derived from another ready-made but full container,which – paradoxically enough – is not emptied in the process’ (2007: 109).Learning simply doesn’t happen this way in Candomble, an Afro-Brazilianpossession cult similar to Cuba’s Santerıa. Learning to be a mae or pai-de-santo (ritual expert), as Goldman argues, is learning to be a particular kindof person, taking her from a relatively undifferentiated being to a structuredself. In Candomble, as he explains, the person is assumed to be multiple andlayered, ‘not in terms of the adjective “multiple”, which is necessarilyopposed to “one”, but as a substantive and an index of pluralism in oppositionto all forms of binarism and its variations’ (Goldman 2007: 113). A person isthought to simultaneously belong to and be composed of a main deity, anorisha, as well as a number of secondary ones, including a guardian angeland a soul. But the idea is that these are not given, but constructed throughoutthe process of initiation, which may take up to 21 years; thus the deities mustalso be made with the person, taking on a personalized form. It is no coinci-dence that the main initiation ritual is called the feitura de cabeca, meaningthe ‘making of one’s head’. We are reminded here of Karin Barber’s obser-vation in her study of the Orisa cult in Nigeria, that it is not just a devotee’srelation to a particular deity which must be achieved, but also the deity itselfvia such relation (1981). To ‘be’, Goldman suggests with respect to Candomble,must be conceptualized along the lines of a continuum at the other end ofwhich is an indifferentiation of being, a ‘not-be’, of sorts (the non-initiate). Ibring up this ethnographic example here for two reasons. First, because inespiritismo too a person must in some sense be ‘made’ over time, in a socially,materially, and temporally distributed process with no definitive end. Andsecond, because Goldman reminds us to look more astutely at the relatednessof questions of whom and how in religious learning. Questions, most of all that,as he notes, remind us that while it is valuable and desirable to explore theconnection between the fact of possession, on the one hand, and the relevantbiophysical, cognitive, and social structural facts, on the other, it should be theend point instead of the beginning of such analyses (1985: 29). Rather, all the-ories of possession demand a theory of the person so that we do not end updissociating selves that have come into being precisely through relationaland associative processes.



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

Imagination, Sensation and the Acquisition of BodiesIn the beginning of this article I mentioned Ingold’s concept of ‘entangle-

ment’. In this section I will try to address its relevance here by showing howsensory participation and the experience of material forms of spiritualhomage produce both knowledge of a spirit world, and the spirits themselves,as effects of what Latour calls ‘articulations’ (2004: 209), the registering of differ-ences or contrasts. First, I will argue that learning involves developing a deep-seated and self-monitoring consciousness of sensation, emotional experience,and imagination, as well as the ability to rationalize such phenomena as infor-mation. The ‘education of attention’ on the part of mentors becomes transfor-mational to this endeavor. Second, I will briefly analyze the place of ‘things’ asinstruments of ‘articulation’, in the sense that these extend spirit-person selvesinto realms where ‘differences’ are made tangible, with corresponding recursive(and ontological) effects.

Cuban spirit mediums gain in spontaneity and effortlessness as they practicetheir mediumistic ‘vision’ over time. It is unsurprising that espiritistas often referto their material bodies (and generally themselves) as ‘instruments’. As one ofthe reviewers of this article usefully pointed out, there are indeed fascinatingcomparisons to be made between learning in espiritismo and other forms ofapprenticeship in Cuba, such as that of the sacred bata drums, played inAfro-Cuban worship ceremonies to invoke and express the orisha’ presence.Education here is a total affair, involving not simply musical training but thewhole person geared to the embodiment of all other pragamatic and spiritualdimensions of effective religious production. The artisan-built bata drums are‘born’ as the voice of the deity Ana via an elaborate process of construction-as-consecration which requires the performance of specific songs, prayers, theconsultation of oracles, and sacrificial offerings (cf. Bolivar 1990; Ortiz 1996).Bata players are ‘called’ to the drums, just like Santerıa initiates are called totheir deities, and must learn to ‘interpret’ the drums through arduous trainingof body and ear. As Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert argue, ‘mastery of the drum-ming technique is a long process, akin to learning to speak a language; but it isthe drums and not the drummer who “speak”’ (2003: 71). It also implies a moregeneral training of one’s social and individual self, through the observance ofspecific abstinences, cleansings, and prohibitions, as the drummer is tuned tohis task, made co-extensive with the magical properties of the instrument heplays and of those who played before him. This co-extensivity is illustratednot just in the fact that drummers generally inherit bata from more senior,experienced drummers, but also by one of the teaching techniques employed



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

by these masters: while the novice sits with the drums between his legs, theteacher will be behind him, drumming on his back with corresponding handsthe rhythmic designs he wishes the novice to reproduce, rendering a drum ofhis body of which subsequent echoes will follow.

Notwithstanding the above parallel, there are obvious differences betweenthe ‘initiatory’ cults in Cuba, and espiritismo, and this also goes to the heart ofthe matter. Unlike in Santerıa, for example, in espiritismo there is no set ofritual procedures (such as ‘receiving a saint’) that immediately capacitate themedium; development is not digital. Rather, it is premised on the accumulationof instinct, if you will, definable not cognitively, but as a combination of increas-ing somatic openness (with consequences for a medium’s capacity to enter intotrance, have visions, dreams, and so forth) and a ripening ability to articulate theeffects of this openness as facts or statements about the world. Like the batadrummers above in some measure, at stake in the learning process is the necess-ary collapse of metaphysical and physical distinctions so that the sphere of thebody becomes the domain of the spirit, that which articulates its existence.Espiritistas’ reference to their muertos ‘letting them see this or that’ is not meta-phorical: seeing is a corollary of being in espiritismo, learning to ‘be’ is learning to‘see’, whether in possession or out. An image received in the mind’s ‘eye’ doesnot represent the world: it signals access to a multi-dimensional world oftenlayered in ways that ordinary perception is untrained to achieve. As Ingoldsays (following Hallowell 1960) of the Obijwa hunters and trappers of northernCanada: ‘knowledge does not lie in the accumulation of mental content. It is notby representing it in the mind that they get to know the world, but rather bymoving around in their environment, whether in dreams or waking life, bywatching, listening and feeling, actively seeking out the signs by which it isrevealed. Experience, here, amounts to a kind of sensory participation, a coup-ling of one’s own awareness to the movement of aspects of the world’ (2000:99). The question, for espiritismo, is what these ‘signs’ consist of, and whatthey ‘reveal’.

Espiritistas are characteristically preoccupied with the effects of first contact:they will reiterate time again that their muertos may at first be coarse, unrefined,even violent, suggesting that manifestation needs to be trained not just on thehuman end but on the spirit end too. However, it is this lack of ‘education’on the part of disincarnate beings (namely, because they lack bodies and haveforgotten how they feel) that allows for any ‘articulation’ (in Latour’s sense)to commence. The surest signs of presence are indeed imminently physical,taking the form of chills and goosebumps, feelings of electricity and hairs stand-



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

ing on end, sudden jolts or jerky movements, numbness, an increased heart rate,and so forth, namely, in the absence of perceivable stimuli. These confer to themedium what William James called a ‘sense of reality’, ‘a feeling of objectivepresence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there’’ (1982: 58) that isextra to the body, and specifically outside the limits of the tangible. It is unsur-prising that the first few steps in learning mediumship consist in an explicitacknowledgement of these sensations, a surrendering to them. Todd RamonOchoa makes this point very nicely in an article on the muertos of Cuba’sPalo Monte, the Kalunga. According to his main informant Isidra, ‘the worldand experience, all things available to perception and perception itself, are aseries of condensations within this fluid mass of the dead’; Kalunga, the greatsea indifferentiated sea of the dead is ‘immanent to the living’, ‘immanent, asin saturating, as in suffusing’, ‘at times powerfully moving, at others fleetinglyvague’ (Ochoca 2007: 482). Further, Ochoa argues, Kalunga is ‘tangiblylearned as radically subjective perceptions at the absolute limit of sentienceand credibility’, a kind of viscerality held ‘as the very definition of closenessitself” (Ochoa 2007: 483), a closeness, I can add, that both the Bakongo-inspiredPalo Monte practices and those of espiritismo prioritize.

Espiritistas in fact describe the first stages of learning under the term acerca-miento, which means the ‘coming closer’ of one’s spirits so as to yield physicalresponse. Often this acercamiento is initially involuntary, even traumatic. Suchis the case with the experience of sicknesses for which no immediate medicalexplanations are found. One could call these ‘entanglement’ wake-up calls: cat-alysts for the new forms of knowledge retrieval that must follow. Examples arenot lacking. Leonel, one of my closest friends and informants, was, he says,wrongly diagnosed as an epileptic as a child, when what was strongly manifest-ing was an African spirit guide he now calls Francisco. Another informant, Enri-quito, experienced paralysis as a sign of latent mediumship and was later able torecover. Mental illness is another often-cited sign of spiritual ability, namely, anexcess of it, producing chaos in the place of information. Espiritista stories alsotell of how these symptoms, when uncontrolled, can lead to an excess ofsigns of another kind, namely, those in the physical and social surroundingenvironment. One disturbing example of this is that of a 17-year old mediumwhose family describes having been the victims of the destructive potential ofher undeveloped spirits. They attribute events such as glass breaking unaidedin their home, objects flying off shelves, fire erupting spontaneously, and eventhe death of one of her teachers to the punctual anger of her entities.Whether successfully ‘processed’ or not, the idea is that spiritual existences



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

have effects, and at that least some of these are registered as oscillations inbodily feeling and mobility, of self or others.

Let us go back to the idea of ‘articulation’ as proposed by Latour. Using anexample of the training of ‘noses’ for the perfume industry with use of ‘odor kits’,Latour analyzes the students as having been previously inarticulate not in theirability to speak about odors but in the sense that “different odours elicited the samebehaviour” (2004: 210). The articulate subject, on the other hand, what theybecame via the use of odor-palettes, ‘is someone who learns to be affected byothers’, where articulation means being affected by the differences elicited bythese ‘others’: ‘a subject only becomes interesting, deep, profound, worthwhilewhen it resonates with others, is effected, moved, put into motion by new enti-ties whose differences are registered in new and unexpected ways” (Latour2004). I have been arguing that bodily events and their corresponding shiftsin somatic modes of attention constitute the primary means of generating differ-ences, where extra-somatic events, such as the death or sickness of others, arealso factors. The ‘other’ in Latour’s articulation thesis, can be analyzed in thiscontext as a series of things, including illness and other happenings in theperson’s environment, but importantly, it can also be taken literally as thesocial other, thus the importance of observers and teachers in the process ofarticulation. Consider the following account, by David (above), whoseChinese spirit was first identified by an espiritista friend of his:

The first time I felt him was on the eve of Saint Lazarus day, one time. I was in myhouse, doing a misa espiritual, and well, I was sitting, and I was sieving through theflowers that I would offer him, plucking their petals and placing these in water sothat people could clean themselves before the misa, and all at once I feel a change.A friend of mine was there and he noticed, he said – how you’ve changed suddenly!He saw me serene, calm, different somehow, and I felt it, I was conscious of it! Myfriend said ‘my God, this man complicates his life, look how he plucks each petalone by one, look how he does it slowly, he puts it in the water and he doesn’twant it to move, like a perfectionist!’ It was like he understood that it was the spirit.

David contrasts his Chinese spirit’s soft and artistic demeanor with his own gen-erally rather clumsy inattentive manners. The observer here was crucial to thearticulation of this difference.

A medium’s social environment is imperative to the development of certainmechanisms of acquiring certainty. One such mechanism is trust. Mentors,sometimes referred to as madrinas and padrinos (godmothers and fathers), arenot just experts at detailing a neophyte’s spirits but also teach him or her to



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

cut up his/her experience in such as way as to render it pregnant with infor-mation. Learning to trust one’s body, and thus differentiate on the basis of it,is key, where differentiation is at once a form of ‘entanglement’. In ritualenvironments this is most evident. Ritual participation is less about the trans-mission of meanings than about the offering of the conditions for these to begenerated in real time, as part of a necessary flow of knowledge between theliving and the dead, a flow known as a corriente espiritual (spiritual current).Experienced mediums will tell their inarticulate counterparts not to be afraidof speaking their minds when they ‘receive’ information. Exteriorization, com-munication, is the medium’s function par excellence; blocking the movement ofthis corriente can be potentially hazardous. But rituals such as misas espiritualesexist to provide the means for such information to appear. Songs, in particular,whose words refer generally to the group identity of spirits – such as theGypsies, the Africans, or the doctors – are exceptional mimetic tools in the evo-cation of corrientes by virtue of the spirits’ identification with them. Indeed, incertain misas, namely, those whose purpose is to discern and consolidate a neo-phyte’s spirit guides, clues as to the identity of his or her cordon espiritual areinferred from the neophyte’s post facto account of their experience during theperformance of varied songs. ‘If we are singing the Ave Maria [Hail Mary]and you suddenly need to cry’, says Teresita, an experienced medium to her stu-dents, ‘this is the “click”, since it is quite possible that your guia [main spiritguide] is a nun or a priest’. Similarly, Teresita forces them to attend to theshivers, emotions, images, or messages that all signal the proximity of one oranother spirit. ‘If you see a pink elephant’, she says hypothetically, ‘don’tworry about, we’ll help you interpret it’. These first images, be they of nature,objects, animals, or situations, are determinate in ascertaining who theirmuertos are. But in suchmisas the intention often goes further: it is often preciselyto provoke somatic and cognitive disarray, and thus extreme difference. Posses-sion is actively sought even in neophytes with little experience and is often adisheveling event. Perhaps the objective for this is to serve as a reminder thatthere is something about spirit–human relationships that is simultaneouslyinarticulatable, thus allowing the potential medium to head dive into thelocus of the ‘really real’ (van de Port 2005) and come out the other end witha broken sense of their previous contained self.

The role of the imagination in Cuban espiritismo has by now become clear:not imagination as invention, however, but as embodied disclosure. In anarticle on sorcery and imagination in Sri Lanka, Kapferer holds that ‘conscious-ness, while always embodied and constituted and expressed through the action



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

of the body, is formed’, he stresses, ‘through its engagement with other humanbeings in the world’ (1995: 134). Sorcery, he says, ‘is the expression of the experi-ence and imagination of fear’ (Kapferer 1995: 141) and the ‘imagination of fear hasno limitations apart from itself’ (Kapferer 1995: 140). I would like to suggest thatin learning Cuban espiritismo the exact reverse is the case – the ‘play’ of theimagination unchains and opens up bodies and minds to knowledge that isextra to them, precisely by directing attention toward the legitimate paths bywhich such knowledge may be sought and which define a medium’s capacityfor sight (and insight) in the world. As Sneath et al. say on imagination,‘rather than some special (let alone delusional) form of cognition, we aredealing with a capacity involved in everything from the basic perception ofobjects to our engagement with entirely immaterial knowledge’ (2009: 12).The fully developed medium need not even distinguish her thoughts fromthose of her spirits: they have collapsed into one and the same path of percep-tion, for to ‘know’ is already to ‘know from’. We could say that the mediumbecomes literally ‘entangled’ with her spiritual landscape, one in which if atfirst articulated mostly via the perturbations and variations of subjectivebodily experience such as those described above, through which a ‘body’ isfound, after a certain amount of development these differences become ‘articu-latable’ via the differences of others, after a body is gradually acquired. El muertome deja ver (the spirit is letting me see) this or the other; dice el muerto mio que (myspirit tells me) this or that; el espiritu me deja sentir (the spirit is letting me feel)that, and so forth: from detailed descriptions of others’ own muertos, images thatdiagnose the causes of complex social and amorous situations in a client’s life, orthat relate to pasts and to futures, a medium’s embodied imagination – thus herbody – is her sharpest knowledge tool. But this ‘body’ is also constituted by itsvarious material extensions and objectifications. Latour argues that the advan-tage of the world ‘articulation’ is not its ambiguous connection to language,‘but its ability to take on board the artificial and material components allowingone to progressively have a body’ (2004: 210). Latour’s notion is pertinent to myfinal set of observations, namely, on the role of ‘things’ in the acquisition ofcertain kinds of bodies and thus, spirits.

Objects, such as spiritual altars and spirit representations like dolls, are notseen as intermediaries between distinct domains. By most espiritistas they areregarded as fundamental to the task of achieving spirits, as I mentioned in theprevious section. Things are particularly critical to the processes of acknowl-edgement that precede any serious religious development, acting both assources of revelation and activation, and further permitting the organization



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

of one’s spirits through their localization. They are also primary instances of thematerial forms by which a neophyte’s attention is educated, over time, gaze-traps in the sense that they easily become objects of his or her concentration.Bovedas espirituales, as these altars are called, are uncomplicated tablescovered in white cloths, and prepared with flowers, candles, and a few glassesof water. They may also be the site of smaller gifts such as candy or coffee,but the most significant element is indeed the water glasses, through whichthe spirits’ ‘fluids’ are thought to be channeled, and subsequently transformedor converted into ‘differences’ felt by the medium as corrientes of energy.Bovedas are also places of ontological opportunity: as parts of ‘selves’, spiritscan be calmed, even tamed, reincorporated into selves whose perception ofthese differences is attenuated over time. One espiritista, who for a time tellsof experiencing the permanent discomfort of having an ‘uneducated’ Africanspirit guide close to him, says the following:

. . .I began to talk with the dead for a few minutes a day at my boveda, to talk to themlike I’m talking to you now (. . .), to tell them what I’d been doing that day. And Ibegan to interpenetrate with my spirits, and to feel a kind of spiritual relief, tranquility.It seems that because I was talking to him (the African) regularly, he calmed down,and that fury that he had subsided, the fury of always having to be on top of me. . .

The dolls, images, statuettes, or anthropomorphic icons that are commonlyconsecrated to particular spirits fulfill a similar function. These objects do notmerely serve to direct the neophyte’s relationship with the constituentmembers of her or his cordon by locating them in precise spatiotemporal coor-dinates. These things also serve as fluid components of the extended body thatis the medium-plus-spirits. A doll has a face, it can wear jewelry, receive offer-ings, be handled and cared for, washed and clothed, talked to, and evengauged for particular moods and ‘looks’. Questions of representation here areclearly subordinate to the role of these objects in providing an artificial andmaterial setting for the creation of ‘differences’ for further articulations.

Concluding RemarksIn this article I have attempted to shift attention away from learning as a

mental process to learning as a complex process of educating attention andawareness, and specifically, following Latour, of the acquisition of a ‘body’that learns to be ‘affected’. I have tried to show how ideal learning results inthe development of particular selves, selves who are anterior to possession



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

states in whichever forms these take. Indeed, it is interesting that in Cuba fullpossession is often seen as a more facile or lesser type of mediumship,namely, because it can imply an unconscious kind of ‘entanglement’ whichon occasion may be inconsistent with the spiritist understanding of selvesand spirits as intentional and mutual co-creators. This does not mean, as wesee from Marcelina’s and David’s example, that possession always leads tothe momentary annihilation of consciousness. Rather, an experienced espiritistawill know that good, productive possession can only occur as a consequence ofyears of working and living such ‘entanglements’, requiring an immanent, con-scious complicity.

Tanya Luhrmann notes that learning is not simply about ‘learning to speak anew language’ (1989: 310); it requires an intellectualization, of sorts, which leadsto slow and steady shifts of perception, as well as commitments to certain kindsof ‘assertions’ (Luhrmann 1989) about the world. She has called this gradualchange an ‘interpretive drift – the slow, often unacknowledged shift in some-one’s manner of interpreting events as they become involved with a particularactivity’ (Luhrmann 1989: 312). She uses the term ‘drift’ because often ‘the trans-formation seems accidental, unintended’, highlighting that ‘as the newcomerbegins to practice, he becomes progressively more skilled at seeing new patternsin events, seeing new sorts of events as significant, paying attention to new pat-terns’ (Luhrmann 1989). However, in my view the idea of ‘interpretation’ alreadyunnecessarily posits a divide between perceiver and world perceived, inter-preted, represented. What I have tried to suggest here is that in Cuban medium-ship practices one is not separate from the other. As Varela et al. argue, if ‘ourlived world does not have predefined boundaries, then it seems unrealistic toexpect to capture commonsense understanding in the form of a representation– where representation is understood in its strong sense as the re-representationof a pregiven world’ (2000: 148).

Tim Ingold has described animacy ‘not as a property of persons imagina-tively projected onto the things with which they perceive themselves to be sur-rounded’, but as the ‘dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field ofrelations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence’ (2006: 10).The animacy of the life world, he continues, is thus ‘not the result of an infusionof spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologicallyprior to their differentiation’ (ibid.). What I have been describing as the espiritistaontology is similarly animistic in the sense that life here ‘is not an emanation buta generation of being” (ibid.: 11). Spirits exist, as do the bodies of the mediums



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

that perceive and receive them. But these bodies also come into being throughtheir continuous encounter with an animate world, a world that is differentiatedthrough the careful development of the mechanisms of discernment character-istic of mediumship practices. In this case, espiritistas learn to make visible aworld, and in so doing, they also generate and regenerate that world.

AcknowledgementsI am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and to the RoyalAnthropological Institute (RAI) for the funding that supported the doctoral researchleading to this article. I thank Vlad Naumescu and Arnaud Halloy for convening theirpanel on spirit possession at the 2008 EASA conference in Slovenia, and for the invi-tation to participate in this collection. Thanks also go to my three anonymousreviewers for some excellent suggestions. Some pseudonyms have been employedin the text so as to protect privacy.

ReferencesArguelles, Mederos, Anıbal & Illeana Hodge Limonta. 1991. Los Llamados Cultos Sincrte-

ticos y el Espiritismo. La Habana: Editorial Academia.Asad, Talal. 1993. Genealogies of Religion, Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and

Islam. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press.Barber, Karin. 1981. HowManMakes God inWest Africa: Yoruba Attitudes Towards the

“Orisa”. Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, 51(3):724–45.Berliner, David, Ramon, Sarro (eds). 2007. Learning Religion: Anthropological Approaches.

Oxford, NY: Berghahn Books.Bermudez, Armando Andres. 1967. Notas para la historia del espiritismo en Cuba. Etno-

logia y Folklore (4), 5–22.Bolivar, Natalia. 1990. Los Orishas en Cuba. Havana: Editorial Ciencias Sociales.Bolivar, Natalia, Gonzalez Carmen & Natalia, del Rio. 2007. Corrientes Espirituales en

Cuba. Havana: Editorial Jose Marti.Boyer, Pascal. 1994. The Naturalness of Religious Ideas: A Cognitive Theory of Religion. Ber-

keley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press.Brandon, George. 1997. (1993). Santeria from Africa to the New World: The Dead Sell Mem-

ories. Indiana: Indiana University Press.Cohen, Emma. 2007. The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an Afro-

Brazilian Religious Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Csordas, Thomas. 1994. The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing.

Berkeley, CA, London: University of California Press.Garoutte, Claire & Anneke, Wambaugh. 2007. Crossing the Water: A Photographic Path to

the Afro-Cuban Spirit World. Duke: Duke University Press.Goldman, Marcio. 1985. A construcao ritual da pessoa: a possessao no Candomble. Reli-

giao e Sociedade, 12(1):22–54.——. 2007. How to Learn in an Afro-Brazilian Spirit Possession Religion. In Learning Reli-

gion: Anthropological Approaches, edited by David Berliner, Sarro Ramon, pp. 103–19.Oxford, NY: Berghahn Books.



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

Hallowell, A.L. 1960. ‘Ojibwa ontology, behaviour and world new’ in Culture in history:essays in honor of Paul Radin, ed. S. Diamond. pp. 19–75. New York: Colombia Uni-versity Press.

Ingold, Tim. 2000. The Perception of the Environment: Essays in Livelihood, Dwelling andSkill. London and New York: Routledge.

——. 2001. From the Transmission of Representations to the Education of Attention, InThe Debated Mind: Evolutionary Psychology Versus Ethnography, Chapter 4, edited byWhitehouse, Harvey, pp. 113–54. Oxford, New York: Berg.

——. 2006. Rethinking the Animate, Re-animating Thought. Ethnos, 71(1):19–20.James, William. 1982. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature.

New York: Penguin Books.Kapferer, Bruce. 1995. From the Edge of Death: Sorcery and the Motion of Conscious-

ness’. In Questions of Consciousness, edited by Cohen Anthony P., Nigel Rapport,pp. 134–52. ASA Monographs 33. Routledge.

Lambek, Michael. 1989. From Disease to Discourse: Remarks on the Conceptualizationof Trance and Spirit Possession. In Altered States of Consciousness and Mental Health: ACross-Cultural Perspective, pp. 36–61, edited by Colleen Ward. London: Routledge.

Latour, Bruno. 2004. How to Talk About the Body? The Normative Dimension ofScience Studies. Body & Society, 10(2–3):205–29.

Lave, Jean, Etienne Wenger. 1991. Situated Learning, Legitimate Peripheral Participation.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Luhrmann T.M. 1989. Interpretive Drift: The Slow Shift Towards Belief. In Persua-sions of the Witch’s Craft: Ritual Magic in Contemporary England, edited byLuhrmann T.M. pp. 307–23, Chapter 21. Cambridge MA: Harvard UniversityPress.

Millet, Jose. 1996. El Espiritismo: Variantes Cubanas. Santiago de Cuba: Editorial Oriente.Ochoa, Todd Ramon. 2007. Versions of the Dead: Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality,

and Ethnography. Cultural Anthropology, 22(4):473–500.Olmos, Fernandos, Margarite & Lizabeth, Paravisini-Gebert. 2003. Creole Religions of the

Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santerıa to Obeah and Espiritismo.New York and London: NYU Press.

Ortiz, Fernando. 1996. Los Instrumentos de la Musica Afrocubana. Madrid: Editorial MusicaMundana Maqueda, 2 volumes.

Palmie, Stephan. 2002. Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity andTradition. Duke: Duke University Press.

van de Port, Mattijs. 2005. Circling Round the Really Real: Spirit Possession Ceremoniesand the Search for Authenticity in Bahian Candomble. Ethos, 33(2):149–79.

Sneath, David, Martin Holbraad &Morten Pederson. 2009. Technologies of the Imagin-ation: An Introduction. Ethnos, 74(1):5–30.

Sperber, Dan. 1996. Explaining Culture: A Naturalistic Approach. Oxford: Blackwell Pub-lishers.

Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA, London, England: The BelknapPress of Harvard University Press.

Varela, Francisco J, Evan Thompson & Eleanor Rosch. 2000 (1991). The Embodied Mind:Cognitive Science and Human Experience. CambridgeMA, London, England: TheMITPress.



Dow

nloa

ded

by [D

iana

Esp

irito

San

to] a

t 11:

50 1

7 Ju

ly 2

012

Imagination, sensation and the education of attention among Cuban spirit mediums

Documents

Transcript of Imagination, sensation and the education of attention among Cuban spirit mediums