Chapter 2

Materiality, Cosmogony and Presence among Cuban Spirits

and MediumsDiana Espirito Santo

Matter’s dialogue with spirit in Cuba(is chapter is about the ontological signi)cance of material things in the practice of Cuban spiritism, a popular mediumship cult embedded in and fundamental to the wider Afro-Cuban religious cosmos, and thus known as ‘syncretic’ or ‘crossed’ spiritism (Mederos and Hodge Limonta, 1991). Espiritistas are gifted individuals adept at materialising the presence of the dead in their own lives and in those of their clients, namely, through speci)c forms of homage and representation, designed both to bring out their ‘muertos’ in the likeness of themselves, and to provide them with the means by which to e*ect good deeds on a material level. It is thought that each person, regardless of their beliefs, is accompanied by a unique set of protective entities, whose personalities and characteristics are ascertained through the course of ritual engagement, but whose appearance is also subject to the manner with which they are engaged. (ese spirits typi-cally embody the images of Cuba’s ethnic, racial and religious diversity, as well as its trauma and con+ict. (eir cultivation and worship implies a constant investment in the expansion of a particular ‘self ’, at once one conceptualised in terms of its multiplicity, and consolidated by virtue of its material indexes. (is is done both individually and in the context of larger ritual gatherings, called misas espirituales (spiritual masses). While spiritist moral discourses tend to place it as the less ‘material’ of Afro-Creole reli-gious practices, espiritismo arguably equips this realm with the clearest

34 Making Spirits

technology for establishing mutually transformative ontological relations, with equally clear implications for the development of personhood.

In Cuba one often hears the term ‘materialisation’, mostly with reference to ritual artefacts, magical objects, spirit representations such as dolls and icons, and importantly, animal blood, all of which are thought both to empower (by housing, representing, feeding) and to make visible (by exte-riorising and giving form to) the world of the dead and its deities. Indeed, the place of ‘matter’ is so prominent in the religious cosmos that Jorge and Isabel Castellanos are among several scholars to suggest in recent years not just the instrumentality of contemporary Afro-Cuban religion, but the ‘animistic’ nature of its relationship to ‘things’. In all reglas (branches of Afro-Cuban religion), they argue, there are several important commonali-ties, among which is the ‘belief in a mysterious and active power of super-natural nature that can infuse natural objects (mineral, vegetable, animal or human) with a dynamism, an energy or power that they would otherwise not possess’ (1992: 16, my translation). An example of this is the Regla de Ocha’s (also known as Santería) concept of aché, which, like the Polynesian notion of mana (cf. Holbraad 2007 for a comparison), is associated with an extra-human lifeforce – emanating from and distributed by gods to objects and persons – as well as with good fortune, authority, virtue and power; thus its human embodiment. Another closely related theme, say the Castellanos, is the belief in the idea that ‘objects and natural phenomena may be inhabited by souls or other spiritual powers’ (ibid). An example here would be magical objects of the Reglas de Palo (or Palo Monte, associated with traditions from the Congo basin), especially the nganga, a recipient )lled with natural substances, bones and sticks, to which is tied the spirit of a deceased person, its ‘slave’ (perro). In both these cases, matter is imbued with something that is extra to it and in which it participates only insofar as it becomes its object.

In the light of these postulates, it is unsurprising that the Castellanos understand the Afro-Cuban religious cosmos as one premised on a logic of quantative ritual accumulation. On the one hand, their argument seems to refer to a historical process of syncretic ritual and cosmological brico-lage, so to speak, where popular versions of Catholicism have added to a basis of West African deity-worship, in turn enriched via the magical practices associated with the dead in Bantu-speaking cultures, in turn articulated within the ontological parameters of European-derived forms of spiritism brought to Cuba in the nineteenth century, and so on. On the other hand, it points also to what is quite a widespread assumption in Cuba: that followers of the various modes of Afro-Cuban religion will tend

35Materiality, Cosmogony and Presence

to be faithful neither to single religious identities nor to particular groups or temple a,liations, moving instead to where circumstance and e,cacy takes them (cf. Argyriadis 2005). According to the Castellanos, a shared ‘implicit or underlying monotheism’ (ibid) supporting more polytheistic forms, as well as the absence of a single religious hierarchy or authority system, may be what allows for such mixing and matching to occur without much cognitive friction. (e visible accumulation of ritual ‘things’, accom-panying an increasing number of spiritual commitments and/or protec-tions as an individual’s religious career progresses, would then simply be the corollary of this. How does matter multiply, then? Digitally, would be the answer here, for it is an index of something else – power, aché, spirit, and so on – where this ‘something else’ is a substance of an autonomous a priori sort, with quanti)able results precisely through the inert ‘things’ it animates.

But while the clearly pragmatic character of Afro-Cuban religion cannot be denied – religion resolves, people say (cf. Hagedorn 2001) – the notion of ‘materiality’ implied in the above observations raises a few problems, not least of which is that it arguably does not start from an indigenous under-standing of what ‘matter’ is, does or can do.

Consider the example of Daniel, a young practitioner of Afro-Cuban religion, whose main spirit guide (an African sorcerer) increasingly appears to him in his dreams to direct and warn him. Daniel’s understanding of his relationship with his spirit’s ‘things’ (as well as his relationship with his spirit through ‘things’) – especially the role of spirit representations – substantially unsettles some of the above precepts. He says:

It was when I )nally represented him [in the shape of a doll], and I dressed him with his clothes, that I remember seeing him, in a dream, in a room where I was living then. I remember that he took o* the old pair of shorts that he had been wearing until that moment, and he put on the new ones that I had o*ered him in the representation. I also remember that he placed a plate of food for me on the ground. It was as if he was telling me that I should eat what he was o*ering, but at the same time, that I should o*er him food, real food. So I did. After that, every time I began to stand close to that representation, I would feel all the hairs on my body stand on end; I would feel his presence.

In this citation, Daniel alludes to the fact that his material actions (the placing of clothes on a spirit representation) resulted in spiritual changes

36 Making Spirits

(the spirit putting on new shorts), which in turn solicited somatic and thus material responses on his part (hairs standing on end), where the opposite is also the case (the spiritual/virtual food beckons forth the physical food, which in turn transforms into spiritual ‘food’). In what could be seen meta-phorically – in the style of the artist Escher (I take this image from a book by a popular writer on quantum physics, Fred Alan Wolf 2001) – as a hand (matter) that draws another hand (spirit) drawing another hand (matter) and so on and so forth, the image provided here draws us deeply into a reconsideration of the nature of ‘things’ in the experience and articulation of cosmology; or rather, it draws us to the need to relate experience with articulation in this context. (ere is nothing in Daniel’s account to suggest that a normal concept of ‘infusing’ or ‘imbuing’ of artefacts is at play. Rather, we are looking at a much more complicated ontological dialogue which undercuts any simplistic view of religious ‘matter’.

In a chapter dedicated to pursuing the theoretical implications of under-standings of ‘power’ and ‘powder’ among the Afro-Cuban diviners of the cult of Ifá (2007), Martin Holbraad sharply demonstrates the untenability of the idea that objects are always mere ‘recipients’ of immaterial ‘stu* ’. Rather, he shows, things, such as the sacred powder (curiously also called aché), with which the divination priests – babalawos – make their oracle god immanent (Orula) in each consultation, are also qualities such as power, or even divinities. If we are to take ‘native’ thought seriously, then, a ‘thing’ is not always distinct from an idea, or a spirit, or vice-versa. At times, it may be both, allowing it to become something which is categori-cally and ontologically transgressive. (is is coherent with the argument advanced by Holbraad and his colleagues Henare and Wastell (2007) in which they call for an anthropology of artefacts that suspends epistemo-logical inquiry (why people believe objects have power, for example) in favour of an analysis of its ontological return (what our ontological prem-ises must look like in order to allow for the existence of powerful objects). I also agree that to render an account of religious objects viable in the Cuban context it is necessary to collapse heuristically any distinction that may prevail between what the analyst takes as ‘matter’ and its various possible opposites – spirits, selfhoods, aché or magical substances – so that ‘thing-ness’ may be seen not simply as a precondition for but as a crystallisation of human and spiritual interactions. (is is clearly not the same as a view of objects as ‘condominiums’ of meaning, for instance, as ‘qualisigns’ that may evoke di*erent responses in distinct semiotic regimes (cf. Manning and Meneley 2008: 287–8). Rather, what I will propose is that matter directly a*ects the ontological spectrum (rather than just

37Materiality, Cosmogony and Presence

representing it in its manifold registers) by providing the spirit world with the tools with which to generate and manifest di*erence, materially. Matter and spirit seem to work with each other as alternate )gure-ground perspectives, where perspective shifts (spirit, person) in this ontological spectrum – namely, through actions on both levels – are what allow for cosmological relations to occur in the )rst place.

In respect of Cuba it would not be incorrect to state that spirits exist as virtualities, or potentials; that is, potentials for action or even for war; potential sources of knowledge or vision; potentialities of one’s own character, or facets of oneself in a state of becoming; in sum, presences in potential which call for consolidation through the human manipulation of certain material ‘things’. To make such a statement is in no way to discredit the reality of spirits, or their tangibility for some, or to locate them in states of mind or beliefs. It is simply to recognise what most practitioners of Afro-Cuban religion and spiritism do: that, indepen-dently of the fact of existence, there is a strong sense in which spirits and deities must also be ‘made’ and accomplished on earth, not simply worshipped as transcendent members of a given cosmos. Indeed, matter is the almost inevitable bedfellow of spirit. In Afro-Cuban religious circles one is simply not understood without the other, for it is somehow in their conversation that ‘presence’ can be generated and experienced, even sensorially or viscerally. (e question is: what is the nature of this conversation? In this chapter I will show that as the ultimate ground for manifestation and often the manifestation itself, ‘things’ – artefacts, dolls, food – can be seen as intimately creative of cosmology, not just re+ective of it. But this is simultaneously because ‘things’ may not, after all, be mere ‘matter’ – that is, de)ned in Kantian/Cartesian mode as containers for meaning. (ey also project symbols (or a virtual version of themselves) that take on life in a spirit world where they are transformed into a spiritual potential that may in turn become materialised. (is is made especially apparent in the local practices of spirit mediumship, known as espiritismo, where we are alerted to the peculiarly cosmogonic quality of this interaction. I will argue here that forms of recognising spiritual existence through matter can paradoxically not just give form to, but actually dynamically create multiple and unpredictable aspects of that which already exists. In spiritism we are not faced simply with the agency of spirit acting on matter (object as ‘vessel’ for meaning); we must also deal conceptually with the agency of matter acting on spirit and enabling its potential to act back (spirit as ‘vessel’ for matter). (e question then becomes: what is ‘materialising’ what?

38 Making Spirits

Michael Lambek argues – in relation to his own ethnography of Mayotte religion but also with respect to studies of spirit possession generally – that there should be no sharp distinctions drawn between the anthropologist’s descriptive material and its analysis or interpretation; in many cases, the order of exposition itself determines interpretation (1981: 11). With this in mind, in what follows I do several things, some simultaneously, which include: tracing the various meanings and functions of materiality and materialisation in Cuban spiritist practices, particularly those relating to the prevalent spirit representation; arguing that a double-ended theory of materiality calls for a review of traditional de)nitions of ‘materialisa-tion’, since both ‘things’ and ‘spirits’ here may be carriers of ‘matter’; and proposing that the developed spirit medium be regarded as an expert in the cosmogony – rather than simply expression – of a universe of spirits and their agency, in as much as he/she intimately partakes of the contin-uous creation and recreation of his/her muertos (spirits of the dead). In this particular ethnography, neither is matter dead (or lifeless) nor is the spirit entirely animate. Rather, the person seems to be a privileged activator of both, directing and orchestrating ontological forms through the manipu-lation of images and objects, with corresponding results for knowledge, perception, and self.

Materiality: dolls, clothes and gifts for spirits‘What is so important about spirit representations?’ I once asked Eduardo, one of my close friends and informants in Havana, and an experienced spiritist and practitioner of Afro-Cuban religion. Eduardo’s and his wife Olga’s apartment was testament to the spiritist commitment to homaging the dead through objects of representation. Like most other religious houses in Havana, their +at was replete with statuettes of indigenous or Arab spirits, barbie or rag dolls dressed like gypsies or African princesses or warriors, and images that represented one or another entity, ancestor or saint, laden with attributes such as miniature machetes, bows and arrows, trinkets, bracelets, cards and fans, as well as gifts of money, candles, perfume, tobacco, co*ee and rum. Propped up on small tables or doll-sized wooden chairs, or on cupboard shelves and other furniture, these presences stare out from their respective corners and demand the specta-tor’s gaze, for they are also somehow sentient, growing things. If the spirit world depends on material recognition from its living counterpart, then Cuban living rooms o*er no shortage of appetising forms of acknowledge-ment. But these varied )gures mark more than mere hypothetical agencies in a given religious cosmology; they are instruments and mediators for the

39Materiality, Cosmogony and Presence

performance of various sorts of ontological operations – that is, they have e*ects beyond those of a ‘representational’ sort. Eduardo made this clear enough. ‘(e point of representations is to materialise [the spirit], to bring him closer. (e representation is an icon, a reference that serves as an inter-mediary between your conscious attention and the spiritual world,’ he said, in answer to my question. (e spirit may also be drawn to it, enabling the gap between ‘us’ and ‘them’ to be bridged, Eduardo added. But, he goes further:

Each material object has a corresponding symbol in the spirit world. Take this plate of food, for example. (ere is a symbol there that transmutes from the material to the spiritual through the icon that is the doll. In the spiritual world the vitality of the food is absorbed.

(e same can be said for other objects:

When you place a bell, a necklace, or a dress with certain char-acteristics, you are typifying images which give the spirit power – even jurisdiction – to act on, produce change, modify, add to, remove or bene)t from the basis of what is transmitting through this image, usually to help the person.

(is is reminiscent of how devotees of the Afro-Cuban deity Ochún, associated with the Virgin of Caridad del Cobre, o*er her ‘sweet’ things, such as fruit and cakes, in order to ‘sweeten’ their love lives. Or, more morbidly, how people’s names may be written on pieces of paper that are then ‘weighed down’ by a stone or other heavy object, so as to incapaci-tate or immobilise the person named. (e e,cacy of matter can work on sympathetic principles, then. But far from being simply material manifesta-tions of something that transcends them, what Eduardo is also suggesting is that matter’s symbolic properties are neither as material nor as symbolic as we might think; instead, the object serves precisely as a kind of convertor of material symbols (and intentions) to spiritual ‘materials’. Furthermore, artefacts and consumables may not be simply gifts: they are literally a mode of permission (and ammunition) for the spirits to carry out their duties and bestow their favours.

A very brief online-dictionary search of the meaning of the word ‘mate-rialisation’ produces some of the following typical de)nitions: ‘to come into being’, ‘to become reality’, ‘to appear’, ‘to cause to appear in bodily

40 Making Spirits

form’, ‘to come into perceptible existence’, ‘to become actual or real’ and ‘to become corporeal’. As a verb, ‘to materialise’ produces ‘to give material form to’, ‘to invest with material attributes’ and ‘to make physically percep-tible’. It is also ‘to emerge’ or ‘to rise’. ‘Materialisation’ in our common vocabulary, then, is impossible without the existence of something to be materialised. What is materialised? Good ideas, predictions, plans, projects, illnesses, artistic visions, thoughts and ghosts. Implied in all these de)nitions is a direction – a transition to be made from the ideal to the concrete, from the imaginary to the palpable. But Afro-Cuban religious (and particularly spiritist) practices resist a unidirectional understanding of ‘materialisation’, especially one that takes as the starting point of this process some ‘thing’ whose integrity is independent of the process itself. As I have mentioned above, Cuban spirits expect to be ‘made’. By this I mean not just that a person’s relation to a spiritual entity must be discerned and achieved – temporally, materially, phenomenologically – but also that this relation is in some way constitutive of the entity itself, which paradoxically both pre-exists its relationship to people and depends on it for continuous e,cacy, presence, and importantly, substance. To ‘make’ is not just to mate-rialise: it is to make possible entirely new entities and spiritual forms, with shifting qualities, like Eduardo alludes to above. (is means that ‘making’ is simply not equivalent to ‘representing’ or to ‘making corporeal’; it can be said to be fundamental to the ‘substance’ of that which it ‘makes’ in the )rst place.

In a now-classic article, Karin Barber proposes a similar argument. ‘(e orisa [‘gods’] are, according to Yoruba traditional thought, maintained and kept in existence by the attention of humans. Without the collaboration of their devotees, the orisa would be betrayed, exposed, and reduced to nothing’ (1981: 724). Worship here is instrumental through and through, inasmuch as the strength of the orisa’s blessings depend in turn on the devotees’ commitment to its existence. (e resemblance between such data and the Cuban case is not coincidental, of course: contemporary Afro-Cuban religious forms draw signi)cantly on West African notions of cosmos and self, such as the so-called lucumi traditions (a word used in Cuba to describe the Yoruba-speaking peoples). In Santería, arguably Cuba’s best-known Afro-Cuban religious practice, the orichas, known simply as santos after the Catholic saints with whom they are associated historically, are whimsical and capricious, demanding of their ‘children’ a sustained project of faith through materiality – the consecration of certain recipients and stones, the o*ering of gifts, food and especially the blood of sacri)ce, thought to contain aché, the life force essential to their continued

41Materiality, Cosmogony and Presence

immanence in earthly a*airs. Devotion here is thus an actively material endeavour (cf. Brown 2003), where things are directly implicated in the health of a cosmology that cannot be said fully to exist without such rela-tions of reciprocity. Further, having been once human beings themselves, dei)ed precisely through such sustained devotional loops over centuries, the orichas provide ipso facto evidence of the e,cacy of matter: not just in mediating between the imaginal and the actual in a symbolic sense, but in producing, in an ontological sense, one via the other and back again.

As a worldwide movement ‘spiritism’ made and continues to make claims to scienti)c-derived thought, particularly European positivist de)-nitions of spirituality that exclude ritualism or iconophilia (Allan Kardec (1804–69) was the father of modern spiritism; a Frenchman, he claimed that spiritism was not religion but science, morality and philosophy). Cuban spiritist practices, however, undeniably inherit an Afro-Cuban consciousness of the potency of ‘things’. In contrast to countries such as Puerto Rico (Núñez Molina 1987) and Brazil (Hess 1991), where spiritist groups and federations have largely generated an ideological if not insti-tutional autonomy from co-existing Afro-Latin religious forms (while nevertheless in+uencing these cults), in Cuba spiritist mediums by and large emerge from the dynamics of a wider Afro-oriented religious environ-ment. Spiritist mediums perform the vital function of allowing the souls of the protective and ancestral dead their rightful place in all the reglas, in a natural yet ritually separate manner (Brandon 1997; Palmié 2002). And because there is no formal ritual criterion or threshold constraining practice, anyone who properly develops his/her faculties, and who proves them, can be known as a medium. (ere is only one term used to designate a spiritist medium – espiritista – and most Afro-Cuban religious adepts recognise that it describes a quality in an individual, a talent, rather than an initiatory stature. (is fact, combined with the importance of spiritism as a technology for accessing the dead in the Afro-Cuban religious )eld, means that many followers and experts of Santería and Palo Monte, for instance, will also be experienced spirit mediums in their own right (cf. Feraudy 1999; Garoutte and Wambaugh 2007). Along with other religious objects, such as the ceramic or clay containers in which Santería’s ‘santos’ are placed or Palo Monte’s nganga, these religious devotees must set out a small altar in a private place in their homes – usually a small table, covered with a white cloth and set with several glasses of water, next to which they pray for and plead with their dead. (e materiality of these altars – called bóvedas espirituales – is indissociable from the experience of spiritual pres-ence. As I will show in the next section, as matter grows and expands in

42 Making Spirits

a spiritist’s domain, so does the presence of their muertos, and vice-versa, allowing mediums to ful)l their mission of giving voice to the needs and advice of the dead.

In fact, espiritismo’s consciousness of the cosmological dimensions of matter seems to be so embedded that it becomes obvious only in confronta-tion with more doctrinal forms of spiritism, such as that practised by the espiritismo cientí!co (scienti)c spiritism) groups, of which there are a handful in Havana. To these latter spiritists, a spiritism that deals in altars, spirit representations and o*erings is an espiritismo cruzado (lit. ‘crossed’ spir-itism): negatively syncretic, contaminated by less ‘modern’ systems of belief and ritual, such as those of African origin (cf. Wirtz 2009). Scholars at the beginning of the last century, such as Roger Bastide, would have similarly characterised Cuban forms of spiritism as ‘low spiritism’ (1978), as he did for Umbanda practices in Brazil. But even these cientí!cos, who hold that spiritism is science, morality and philosophy, reject ‘matter’ (ritual parapher-nalia) in their mediumship sessions only inasmuch as they also recognise its ontologically transformative capacities – that is, in their view it creates undesirable kinds of spirits (cf. Espirito Santo 2010). What we are looking at, then, is a widely shared appreciation that the agency of ‘things’ is not restricted to their capacity to carry meanings. Something else is going on.

Representing as makingMany religious people in Havana are advised, for their own well-being, to ‘represent’ their spirits, mostly in the form of dolls or small plaster statues, the latter widely available in hierberos, shops that specialise in Afro-Cuban religious materials such as special plants, necklaces and cocoa butter for initiations. (e dolls can be white- or black-faced (in which case they are sometimes painted), vinyl or plastic, and are purchased either in the shops mentioned above or from private sellers, who will also have dressed them, some being clothes-makers themselves. (ey will be generally recy-cled dolls, some even antiques which will over time have passed through several pairs of hands. Around them might be placed necklaces, in colours belonging to the ‘santo’ with whom the spirit is associated – red beads for Changó, yellow for Ochún, and so on. If the dolls represent female spirits, lips may be painted with crayon or lipstick, or eyebrows retouched. Some of these dolls, particular if they represent African spirits, will have their head covered with a cloth, typical of initiates of Santería; the gypsies might wear a lace shawl, and hold fans and divination cards. Candles will be placed next to them; in most religious houses candle-stubs abound next to the dolls, evidence of favours asked and granted, as do cups of rum, sugar-cane

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liquor and co*ee. (e very anthropomorphic characteristics of these dolls, including their sitting poses and their carefully laid out costumes, create spaces around them that invite an anthropomorphisation of material-homage exchange. (ey will receive gifts worthy of people, because they once were people. Dolls may also be made of rags or cloth, their head and limbs stu*ed with cotton to appear human. One such doll is that belonging to Leonel, a Santero and spiritist in his forties whose African slave spirit – Francisco – is represented in life-size proportions, and sits with a smile on his face on a chair in Leonel’s religious room, sometimes with his legs crossed. Yet most spirit representations are relatively small objects, handled easily by their carers, who routinely wash their clothes and comb their hair, maintaining their cleanliness. (e wood, clay or plaster statuettes are usually the smallest, although versions of indigenous spirits crafted in earlier days can also be of impressive proportions. But however standardised certain forms of ‘representing’ spirits have become (in Havana, identical statues of índio spirits can be bought from every reli-gious dealer), the attention given to each one is what turns the unique ‘things’, with correspondingly unique and unfolding attributes, into spirit forms. In essence, it is what happens around and to the object that gives the spirit the capacity to intercede in the lives of those to whom it belongs – not the doll’s initial condition as a doll. Via the constant attentive and active social gaze of humans, the dolls acquire their mediatic role to the beyond. As Webb Keane argues:

(ese materializations bear the marks of their temporality … To try and eliminate the materiality of religion by treating it as, above all, evidence for something immaterial, such as beliefs and prior experiences, risks denying the very conditions of sociality, and even time itself (2009: 118–19).

In my last visit to Havana, my knowledge of some of my spirits was both rea,rmed and augmented. I had retained much the same set of protec-tive entities – a gypsy woman, a Christian orthodox nun, a Jewish notary/lawyer, an Arab astrologer, a Franciscan priest and an African sorcerer, among others – but some had also grown and shifted in unpredictable ways, according to the mediums I visited. C, an Afro-Cuban espiritista in her early )fties whom I was meeting for the )rst time, told me that I should place a plate of honey next to my gypsy – whom I have represented at home – so that I can sweeten my love prospects. (e gypsy also works with +ower petals, C informed me: I should o*er her a small box with coins

44 Making Spirits

inside, in which I could also lay the petals that have fallen from the +owers I place for her. My notary spirit also demanded some attention. C described him as a serious, trustworthy and con)dent man, an expert in the law, who may have come from Middle-Eastern lands. He wears spectacles and carries a briefcase, and he seems to have strong links with the Afro-Cuban deity Obbatalá, one of the most powerful beings in the Yoruba pantheon. I should place a glass of water for him, and a miniature scale, representing justice, as well as a small eight-step staircase, representing an ascending spiritual path (eight being the number corresponding to Obbatalá). On previous occasions, the notary had ‘presented’ himself to mediums quite simply – wearing a dark suit and with the document case mentioned above. Now his physiognomy and appearance had become more complex. (e gypsy, too, had mutated, according to Olga. She described her long tunic, necklaces and pale skin. Whereas two years earlier I had been advised to o*er my gypsy a pack of divination cards (such as Tarot or Spanish deck), this same spirit now projected a di*erent image to that of the ordinary card- or palm-reading fortune teller, so common in Cuban portrayals. As C had observed, I should be o*ering her coins and +owers as a response to this change, which had somehow been brought about by a change also in myself. As her husband Eduardo told me: ‘(e spirit transforms itself according to the facets of yourself that you are developing at that moment. (e attributes, the garments – these are symbols that the spirit ‘wears’ so that you will identify di*erent stages of your own spirit.’

(e descriptions in the above paragraph are meant to point to two over-lapping but vital facets of the process of ‘representing’ spirits. (e )rst point is that description – of the spirits’ physical appearance, personal char-acteristics and strengths – tends to be coupled with prescriptive information on how to represent and cater for them. For example, while all Arab and Indian spirits appreciate being o*ered sun+owers, the individual nature of each will determine what else they may warrant in order to be e,cacious as protective entities. (us, I have heard these spirits asking for objects such as feathers or plumes from large birds, or speci)c kinds of precious stones, fruit, eggs or +owers, depending on how they are perceived by the mediums or on the messages they give during possession. (ey may also ask for miniature instruments of war, such as knives or bows and arrows. Many of these requisites will not have obvious antecedents, but will follow from the inspiration of each medium on each occasion. (e second point is that these forms of homage will turn on the individual’s own interpersonal, religious and situational problematics. (is is not just because followers of spiritism tend to materialise ‘goodies’ when they want something from

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their muertos, but because, as Eduardo suggests above, a spirit’s ‘virtual’ state (i.e. what it projects as a workeable image of itself) is to an important degree subject to the life context of the person to whom it belongs. (us, a spirit may need a weapon because it is )ghting a war on the person’s behalf. Or indeed, it may make itself known precisely so that it can )ght that war, one perhaps brought on by the person’s own conduct. It may also be perceived according to circumstance, so that its physique may be a telltale sign of the perceiver’s own situation or ‘grade’ of evolution. (us, in a way, it ‘materi-alises’ the perceiver.

(ere are several important aspects of this self-referencing and recursive relationship between person and spirit that are of relevance here. One of these is the processual and mutually constituting nature of the ‘self ’, of spirit and of person, where alterations and evolutions in either one are seen to a*ect and be evident in the other. Another is that ‘matter’ is a direct player in such alterations and evolutions, precisely because it is a means of controlling, evoking or directing change. Both of these factors point to the centrality of personhood in an understanding of materiality, and vice-versa. ‘Selfhood’ is here intimately tied to ‘spirithood’, where ‘matter’ oper-ates as an instantiator of both on a simultaneous plane – in other words, as a facilitator of the creative dimensions of self-making. Understood as a ‘system’ rather than as a set of entities each of which exists independently of the others, in espiritismo the spirit-person complex is both anchored by and made visible via the manipulation of objects such as dolls. (is remits us, among other things, to consider the role of materiality in the formation of persons.

(e )eld of material culture studies takes for granted that materi-ality is constitutive of humanity at many levels. In his ‘Introduction’ to Materiality (2005), Danny Miller argues – following Hegel – that: ‘We cannot comprehend anything, including ourselves, except as a form, body, a category, even a dream. As such forms develop in their sophistication we are able to see more complex possibilities for ourselves in them’ (2005: 8). Matter, then, is the mirror in we gauge the processes by which we create form; it is the measure of our own creative capacities. In another recent edited volume, David Morgan phrases the issue in this way:

(ere is the politics of things, their in+ection within social )elds, and there is the poetics of things, that is, their capacity to act upon us, to assert agency, to make rather than only to be made. […] Seeking an integrated account may begin with recognizing the degree to which things are the sca*olding by which the body

46 Making Spirits

extends itself, the avenues by which the mind travels as a physical structure in time and space (2010: 72).

Cuban spiritists would agree with all these de)nitions on the place of ‘form’, ‘matter’ and ‘object’. In spiritist practices, artefacts extend persons by giving shape to human intentionality and consciousness; in particular, by locating the souls of the dead with whom the mediums work in one feasible material location, so that ‘more complex possibilities’ of interac-tion and mutual constitution between humans and spirits are enabled. And they are testament to the mind’s sca*olding in its physical environ-ment. But this is not all they are. Artefacts, objects and other ‘things’, including consumables, are also technologies of ontological transforma-tion, both generative of spiritual presence in the physical world, and of physical attributes in the spiritual one, as I have attempted to show above. In the following section I will pursue this point further by examining the ways in which the ‘making’ of spirits is also experienced as the ‘making’ of oneself through otherness – the spirit medium as ‘maker’ of cosmology, both in relation to spirits who paradoxically already exist, and those whose existence must be fabricated ex nihilo, to which I will brie+y allude in the conclusion to this chapter.

Presence: personhood and cosmogonyEva is a charming, middle-aged Afro-Cuban Santera and medium. She remembers ‘seeing’ things ever since she was a 14-year-old girl, even though her parents believed in nothing. Eva discovered her devotion to Cuba’s main patron saints – the Virgin of Regla and the Virgin of the Caridad del Cobre – very early on, and her mother would often accuse her of being a ‘fanatic’ for going to church so often, echoing the Cuban Revolution’s early stance on religiosity, warning her that she would go crazy. When she grew up, Eva would place a single glass of water on her altar and sit down with the spirits she suspected (and felt) were around her. She would pray to them, and they would place images and information in her mind. Slowly, she began to help her friends and colleagues with these messages. One of the key moments in her spiritual development was the strong and sudden impulse to acquire a doll for her beloved spirit guide, an African slave in Cuba she calls Francisca Siete Sayas (lit. Francisca Seven Skirts). She remembers it clearly: it was 21 July and she was sitting chatting with a friend, when an overwhelming feeling came over her. ‘It was like something was telling me – today – do it today [acquire a spirit representation]’. So she went home and took out one of her daughter’s dolls, a small ‘mulatta’ with

47Materiality, Cosmogony and Presence

a baby-doll dress (typical of the 1960s), and began to prepare it. ‘I suddenly wanted to dress her in a skirt of many colours,’ Eva continued, so she sewed seven strips of di*erent cloths onto the dress, until she was satis)ed the image was consistent with her intuition – she had felt the spirit’s a,nity with the Afro-Cuban deity Yemayá, the goddess of the seas, associated in Cuba with the Virgin of Regla and with the number seven. Since that day she has attended to this doll on a daily basis. ‘Francisca Siete Sayas – everything I have in the world, in my 59 years, I owe to this spirit, even my initiation in Santería,’ she says. ‘Ever since I began sitting down with her, she puts things in my ears (me pone las cosas en el oído)’.

For Eva, representing her spirits is part and parcel of having spirits. (e alcance (‘reach’) she enjoys as a medium was, for Eva, forged via just this materiality, her spirit’s and her own basis of development: )rst a glass of water, then the imperative doll. ‘Sitting down’ (sentarse), as Cuban spir-itists frequently say, is exactly this – to acknowledge by acknowledging materially, spatio-temporally, and thus to bring forth the spirit world. But Eva also knows that in some ways, she is also what brings it forth. (e overlap between her sensations and those of her muertos is so tangible that rigid views of the separation of matter and the immaterial are premised on wrong categories. For just as she may somatise this spirit’s ailment, so her spirits ‘materialise’ the actions and attention she directs at them, pointing to a need to examine the person-spirit relation beyond the matter-spirit one. Indeed, understanding what I have been calling the ontologically ‘creative’ aspects of ‘matter’ in Cuban spiritism crucially requires understanding ideas of the body as a particular kind of matter (and matter as a particular kind of body), as well as local ontologies of the self which undercut this division almost entirely. It is by locating the relation between the two that we can come to terms with how materially developing one’s spirits is also about developing oneself as a person. In the following paragraphs I will explain how this comes about.

Kardecist spiritism posited the ultimate expendibility of matter. (e body was a ‘skin’ of sorts, that the evolving soul would shed once its purpose in one or another life had been achieved (or not). (e notion of metempsychosis, or the belief in multiple incarnations, made popular through the works of the democratic and romantic socialists of the early nineteenth century (Sharp 2006), critiqued disenchanting forms of mate-rialism by placing individual and social evolution on a grander temporal scale. Spiritism attempted to enchant science itself, but by doing so it also super)cially reproduced common dualisms of spirit and body. It was clear for early spiritists that the genuinely ‘real’ lay beyond the world of the

48 Making Spirits

visible; the body was not an extension of the spirit, it was its temporary vessel, even if it was also what made quanti)able the previously unquanti-)able. Matter was of minor importance – ‘good’ spirits were characterised by the predominance of spirit over matter. Indeed ‘matter’ and ‘spirit’ were such radically di*erent substances that they needed to be woven together by what Kardec’s spirits called the ‘perispirit’, the ‘intermediary principle’, a subtle ‘semi-material substance, which constitutes the innermost enve-lope of the spirit, and unites the soul with the body’ ("e Spirits’ Book, Bk. II, Ch. 2, question 135), permitting the spirit (one’s own and those of disencarnate beings) to act on the material body. For Kardec, medium-ship itself was enabled by the perispirit, which reached out to connect to those of the dead, and which could change its appearance throughout a body’s lifetime. Later on, in his second work, "e Mediums’ Book, Kardec also described the perispirit as a ‘+uidic body’, which could be dispersed or emanated by spirits or persons. (us, while spiritists were undeniable dualists, the notion of a perispirit also contained within it the seeds of dualistic subversion in its implicit suggestion that matter and spirit could be mutually creative, even if separated by the event of death. It was the ‘+uidic’ aspect of the perispirit that was to have greater in+uence. In Latin America in particular, there is a prevalent idea that a spirit (free or incar-nate) can generate healing ‘+uids’. Nowadays, Brazilian mediums ‘+uidify’ their clients; for instance, with their laying-on of hands (called ‘passes’ in Portuguese, cf. Cavalcanti 2008). In sum, the concept of ‘perispirit’ opened up a )eld of interactive possibilities between beings, and between beings and things, while the explicit link between them remained suitably ambiguous in the literature.

In Cuba, understandings of #uido came to associate themselves closely with West African notions of aché. Indeed, it is #uido that has currency in common syncretic forms of Cuban spiritism, not the more formal notion of ‘perispirit’. Like aché, #uido is thought of as an invisible substance that may be passed from one person to another in order to heal or cleanse; from a spirit to a medium so that she may heal or cleanse for him; it is the spirit itself expressed in formless matter, thus a potential: it is both generated in a misa espiritual (a spiritist ritual called a ‘spiritual mass’) and crucial for the e,cacy of the same ritual; it must be evoked but also held by the medium for its successful evocation; it is both spirit and information (because mediums translate the sensations of the #uido into messages); concept and thing. Like aché, #uido is neither fully matter nor fully immaterial, and in this way it is uncontainable in bodies or souls. To ‘feel’ the #uido is to feel spiritual presence, not just in the body, but out there – yet co-extensive with

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it. In Cuba, the ‘perispirit’ has spilled out into the world, so to speak, which then assumes the role of mediating a return back to the spirit.

Indeed, analytically speaking, it seems to me that there are two possibili-ties which are not mutually exclusive. (e )rst is that objects and artefacts replace the function of the original concept of ‘perispirit’, which acted as a link between the consciousness of the body and that of the soul, or other souls. (is means that like bodies, which are permeable to aché and #uido, ‘things’ are not just physical substances. (e nature of their ‘thing-ness’ is relative – it is given by their ability to transport information from one realm to another, changing both in the process. Examples of the ontologically transgressive capacities of objects are plentiful in a country where forms of magical manipulation are premised on the idea that witchcraft objects can directly a*ect the physical or psychic lives of its victims, namely by having the object be the ‘body’ of the person in question. (e second possibility (suggested by Marcio Goldman in personal conversation) also supports the above descriptions, namely the ‘African’ perspective. (e idea is that this same dual existence of ‘things’, so to speak, derives in part from the role of worship ‘materials’ in West African religious understandings such as those of the Yoruba described by Barber (1981). ‘(ings’ must exist as other than just things in order to establish such reciprocity bonds, as gods also exist in more ways than one – as original gods and as their earthly, particularistic versions, manifest through the bodies of their followers.

But in Cuba notions of personhood have complicated this picture further. Some spirits are experienced as actual parts or aspects of persons, through the importance they assume in everyday life and through their primordiality in relation to the person’s own existence. When Cubans refer to their muertos, they mean one of two things. One’s muertos are one’s ancestors – religious, ritual, and kin; iku lobi ocha (the dead give birth to the orichas). Santeros repeats this phrase in answer to questions relating to the role of the dead in their practice: )rst come the dead, then come the santos, since the dead give birth to the santos, mythically – because the orichas were once living persons in Africa, which gradually became deities – and pragmatically – because before any ritual step is taken the spirits of the ancestral dead must be complicit and willing. But the spiritist movement in Cuba introduced another meaning for the term, one that constitutes the most prevalent understanding of muerto: namely, one’s protective dead. Kardec had talked about ‘spirit-protectors’ and ‘guardian angels’; in Cuba, these entities are known collectively as one’s cordón espiritual (lit. ‘spir-itual cord’) and form a group of spirits that accompany and guide people, from the moment of their birth to that of their death. While for Kardecists

50 Making Spirits

these spirits were elevated and generally anonymous beings, in Cuba they assumed entirely historical characteristics (Brandon 1997) and appeared with very human guises and temperaments. (ey became African slaves, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century creole Cubans and Spaniards, doctors, colonial-society grandes dames and intellectuals, indigenous Caribbean ‘Indians’, gypsies, Haitians and Chinese, Muslims, and any other person-ality embedded in the nation’s imaginary and its sense of collective identity and memory. Nowadays, these muertos )nd life among those they protect by acting on their dispositions and talents, thoughts and moods, decisions and even illnesses. When Cuban spiritists discover their mediumistic abili-ties, they must also discover the relations obtaining between aspects of themselves and their spirits’ previous incarnations, which in some cases are vital to the exercise of mediumship – such as with spirits that cleanse or heal. Catering, materially, to such entities requires patience and persever-ance, for these relations are revealed and consolidated only with time, and importantly, this is a question of placing self-awareness (psychological and bodily) at the centre of the experience of spirit presence.

In Cuban spiritism, the development of selfhood can be characterised at its crudest as a two-fold process: )rst, an embrace of multiplicity, where medium may begin to see themselves as constituted through and by their spiritual relationships (thus, as a multiple existence); and second, a process of material exteriorisation, through which these relationships are transformed into ontologically potent (and present) ones. It is in this exteriorisation that we may see what Jackson calls ‘arrested moments’ (1998: 6), tensions gener-ated by the interface of self and spirit that seems to engender the existence of both simultaneously. A spirit representation helps contain and control a spirit, as well as furnishing a space around which to render tribute; the same applies in a more general way to spiritual altars, the bóvedas espiritu-ales. (ey are places of communion and emotional bonding. But they are also organic and emergent ‘things’, whose growth is tightly woven into the medium’s own growing sense of con)dence, vision and spiritual presence, and whose direction may not be fully determinable. Just as a doll’s appear-ance may mutate, the gradual construction of an altar provides us with a clear instance of how such expansions of ‘matter’ are also expansions of ‘soul’ (or consciousness), and vice-versa. In this ethnographic context, it is unsurprising that it is here that experiences akin to what Robert Orsi calls ‘abundant events’ – ‘experiences of radical presence or realness’ (2008: 15) – can take place.

Bóvedas are small tables, usually decorated with white linen or knitted cloths, and on which the medium places seven glasses of water, as well

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as a more ornate chalice dedicated to God. (e bóveda will normally be adorned with +owers, and the medium will cleanse him/herself with cologne and pray to the spirits while facing them. In some religious houses an extra shelf is added above the bóveda, to set out other items such as cups of co*ee, tobacco and spirit representations. In others, photographs or items belonging to deceased family members are also hung, in remem-brance and as means to assist these spirits also, who, while not necessarily part of a cordón espiritual, may come to need attention. But it is the glasses that de)ne the bóveda’s raison d’ être, for the spirits manifest their #uido through the water, making them readily accessible to those in close prox-imity (the accumulation of air bubbles in the glasses is frequently cited as post-facto evidence of the strength of the spiritual vibes at a given moment). In principle, each one will be placed for a single spirit, or for a comisión – a group of spirits – where the layout of the glasses on the table will often mimic the structure of the person’s spirit set, and even its hierarchical divi-sions. But rarely does a medium set out all eight glasses of water at once. Instead, it is more usual for a neophyte to begin with one glass, as in Eva’s case above, and then expand, as her own cordón espiritual assumes shape and presence. In a sense, the water is the )rst port of call, the universal form of spirit representation, the ‘entry’ and ‘exit’ point for spirits and their knowledge, which transposes potential into presence, much like the spirit representation. Some may place speci)c +owers in the water requested by their spirits, others coins, cruci)xes, objects from the sea such as shells and stones, and jewellery. (e point here is also that objects and artefacts can and do provoke moments of intense revelation and catharsis. It is at the foot of the bóveda or in conversation with a spirit representation that Cuban spiritists report achieving ‘closeness’ (acercamiento) to their spirits, so vital for the functioning of good mediumship.

In sum, if in all this we see what Cuban spiritists call ‘to educate the dead’ (educar a los muertos), by which they mean the transformation of the dead into intelligible, manageable and manifest beings, this same process also occurs in reverse: educating the muertos implies the contin-uous creation of a particular kind of ‘self ’ de)ned by this presence – a self whose multiplicity must be not just materialised but recreated constantly through this materiality. And it also implies that the relationship is never one-sided. Cuban spiritists’ typical tenderness, dedication and respect towards their muertos remind us that much as these spirits may materi-alise the wills and intentions of living human beings, humans are also shaped by other-worldly designs for their destiny, some of which they may be a participant to. Just as a change of clothes on a representation has

52 Making Spirits

ontological e*ects – the spirit ‘puts on’ the clothes and appears di*er-ently to the medium (as in the above example with Daniel) – so a person’s conduct and imagination has dividends for the existences of the entities with whom he/she is irrevocably related. (e processual nature of this mutuality is so pronounced that, according to one informant, protective spirits may even replace others so as to keep up with the person’s develop-ment. As Rane Willserlev argues: ‘(e moment we accept that the self is caught up in a world that transcends it, our selfhood cannot take the kind of uni)ed transparency that Descartes attributed to it’ (2007: 24). Rather, he says, the self ‘needs the “otherness” of the world as a condition of its possibility’ (ibid). By this I take him to mean not just social ‘others’, but also ontological otherness.

Conclusion: fabricating entitiesMaximo, a religious friend of mine in Havana, once told me that he had started to ‘cultivate’ economic abundance by photocopying one-dollar bills (actually Cuban Convertible Pesos) and distributing them to his friends. He now has over a million dollar notes himself, he told me. But why, I asked? In a climate of poverty and need like Havana’s, this is surely an ironic, even cruel, joke. Maximo’s answer elucidates one of the points on ‘matter’ that I have been arguing here: like attracts like, he says.

It is not di,cult to read into Cuban spiritism’s understanding of matter James Frazer’s formulation of the Laws of Similarity and Contagion. Or even more ‘new age’ formulations of such laws, like those in the massively popular recent book "e Secret, which are not in the least unfamiliar to religious Habaneros. But cosmogonic creativity in spiritism is not just a question of mimesis – of copy and contact and mimetic ‘magic’ (Taussig 1993). While spiritists use the mimetic faculty with great dexterity to ‘mime the real into being’ (particularly via songs during ritual, details of which I omit due to space considerations), speaking precisely to the paradox I mentioned at the start of this chapter, spiritists also sometimes participate in the creation of what does not already exist. It is in these cases that the spirit is more clearly an object-carrier of the meanings and intentions of its maker, existing almost singularly by virtue of this, and in which we see the cosmogonic power of religious experts at work. I am here referring to the literal ‘fabrication’ of entities, which, while conceived to be impos-sible to achieve using solely spiritist ‘tools’ – usually, the ‘heaviest’ kind of witchcraft work is done within the domain of Palo Monte – is nevertheless premised on some of its basic understandings of matter and spirit. Consider the following story.

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Reina is an Habanera in her twenties whom I recently accompanied to a misa espiritual. She was about to throw a homage party for her spirits – in Cuba called an acción de gracias – and, as is protocol, she needed to ‘let them [the dead] know’ (darles conocimiento) about it, via ritual. But the misa did not turn out quite as she expected: very soon into the ritual, Esther, one of the two mediums working the misa, told her that as she had sat down, a very strange spirit had sat down behind her, indicating that he had come into the house with her.

He’s a mulatto man, with patchy hair. And he’s murmuring some-thing, like he’s talking to himself. When he looks at me his eyes are as transparent and green as a cat’s, contrasting with the colour of his skin. But at the same time, it’s like this man were a kind of devil.

Reina was taken aback by these descriptions. Just a week earlier she had encountered in the street a man who had these same physical traits. Enigmatically, he had called her name from among a crowd of people, but when he approached her, she realised she had never seen him before. Following a sudden hunch, she turned her back and +ed. What these two mediums were now suggesting was that this had been an encounter with a spirit – a very materialised one – and here he was. But where did he come from and what did he want? In the careful mediumistic deconstruction of Reina’s problem that followed, the entity was slowly (and literally) taken to pieces, and its origins made explicit. Juan, the other medium, described the ‘mulatto man’ that Reina had seen not as a spirit proper, but somehow as a ‘skin’, a disguise, that in the mediums’ eyes could be easily peeled o*, only to reveal a kind of diabolic entity inside. Both mediums concluded that this was a case of an enviación, a spirit sent to trap Reina into falling in love with its sender, and they slowly but surely determined who it was. ‘But if it’s not a spirit, what is it?’ I asked. ‘Something built to convey and achieve its maker’s purposes,’ came the answer. From ‘bits’ of spirits and elements and forces of nature woven together with magical formulas and prayers, Reina’s enviado was made to resemble a person in ways that were fully clear neither to her nor to me, but that signalled the powerfully cosmogonic quality of whatever material elements were used to construct it, and most singularly, the intentional force behind it.

Spirit ‘creations’ are not uncommon in Afro-Cuban religious prac-tice. Palo Monte itself is premised on the distribution of the spiritual agency of the nganga, in which muertos are conceived to be composites

54 Making Spirits

of sorts, amalgams of the nganga’s own power (also generated by mate-rial substances) and aspects of the ‘identities’ of spirits of people who once lived. As Stephan Palmié argues, in relation to the object that is the nganga: ‘(e entire assemblage constitutes more than the sum of its parts. Inside the total object, its various and variegated parts enter into synergetic rela-tions’ (2006: 861), producing, I would add, spirits that may be constituted equally on such variegated parts, rather than essences. While this may be an extreme case of the cosmogonic capacities of religious experts in Cuba, in my view it underlines well the logic of materiality in the practices that I have been describing, of which the most important principle is that the manipulation of matter has creative and thus often unpredictable e*ects.

Acknowledgements(e doctoral and post-doctoral research on which this chapter is based was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal), respectively. I also acknowledge the Royal Anthropological Institute for their )nancial help. In Cuba, I am deeply grateful to Leonel Verdeja Orallo, to Daniel, Eva, Maximo, and especially to Eduardo and Olga Silva. In Brazil, I thank the ‘Sextas na Quinta’ group at the Museu Nacional for listening to and commenting on a draft of this paper, particularly Marcio Goldman. (is chapter is dedicated to the memory of Enriquitico Musachio (deceased December 2009), his ‘coronas’, and their beloved spirit, Papá Elegguá.

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