Paper for LSE workshop “Debating ethnographies of sightand visibility”

28/05/2013

Moving knowledge: fluid imagery, spirit flows, andcollective perception in Cuban espiritismo

Perception and knowledge

At first gaze, practictioners of Afro-Cuban religions

seem to epitomize the ‘Western’ hypervisualist discourse.

In Havana, where I did my fieldwork, both long-time

believers in, and recent converts to, these popular

practices are wont to describe themselves as being ‘like

St. Thomas’ – needing to see to ‘believe’. Indeed, it is

not uncommon even for seemingly dedicated practitioners

to express skepticism, couched as a belief that faith

should not simply be taken for granted but substantiated,

even ‘proved’, with an accumulation of experiential and

visual evidence (evidence from spirits, gods, effective

ritual recipes, and so forth) – the lack of which may

disrupt or sever religious commitment. In the Cuban

Creole practice of espiritismo, on which this paper will

be mostly based, believers articulate their own spiritual

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lucidity in visual terms. For instance, spirit mediums –

known simply as espiritistas – speak of receiving images,

visual flashes, or ‘movie-like’ flows of imagery. To have

‘mediumship’, people say, is to ‘have sight’ (tener vista),

or indeed, to have ‘light’ (tener luz). It is no coincidence

that at the start of certain spirit mediumship rites

officiants often place the palm of their hands over a lit

candle and then touch their eyes so as to ‘further’ their

sight. And indeed, this allusion is pervasive. For

instance, experts and followers of the main African-

inspired religions of Santería and Palo Monte appeal and

sing to Saint Clara, a popular Catholic mystical figure

associated with occular health, namely, to strengthen

spiritual ‘clarity’ and ‘reach’, or to unfog the

trappings of occult witchcraft.

But ‘vision’ here – for most practitioners – is

unrestricted to waking, conscious life. The protagonism

and importance of the dream as the site of ‘real’ or

‘true’ vision among religious folk, is evidence of a kind

of ‘visualism’ that encompasses imagery received by means

other than ordinary perception and in which is implied

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truth, often precisely because of its extraordinary

character. In dreams - but also, through the exercise of

receptive forms of mediumship and clairvoyance – one

‘sees’ as spirit, as well as through spirits. Considered the

most transparent means of ‘reception’, dreams epitomize

what is a broader logic of perception. To ‘see’, among

spirit mediums – whether through internally or externally

produced imagery – is to perceive, to know.

While this may seem an obvious connection – after

all, in Spanish, vidente, seer, is another word for medium –

(and in fact, as Bloch recently shows, this may well be a

universal tendency, 2008), this paper has another aim. I

would like to suggest that, if Cuban spiritist practices

at first appear to coroborate a visualist ‘bias’, they

simulteaneously challenge the equally ‘visualist’ notion

that what is ‘seen’ exists prior to the act of ‘seeing’,

which, far from passive or contemplative, is a creative

(if sometimes recreative) act. Two points will be made by

recourse to the ethnography on Cuban forms of espiritismo

in Havana. First, that mediumistic ‘seeing’ is conceived

indissociably to a mobile universe of information (or

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spirits, in fluid form); defined precisely through its

capacity for multiplicity in manifestation. Thus, seeing,

too, is characterized by properties of movement and

fluidity. Second, that in ritual contexts, ‘seeing’

occurs collectively, between participants who actively

construct, publicly and in real-time, a knowledge

‘scenario’ – in espiritismo aptly called a “spiritual

painting” (cuadro espiritual). Both of these points imply that

knowledge here is inextricable from the acts of ‘sight’

that bring it about – that is, that reconstruct or

represent an aspect of the cosmos in a given space-time.

They also suggest that knowledge is not the corollary of

seeing, say, a set of propositions about something ‘out

there’, but a moving, mutable, and emergent form of seeing

itself, which is negotiated, both between persons and

spirits, and between persons themselves. Espiritismo

arguably wields a perceptual hyperconstructionism that is

at odds, at the same time, with the notion that seeing,

and thus knowing, is an individual, representational

endeavor.

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Ways of Seeing

In its popular version in Havana, Cuban espiritismo

furnishes its wider religious ecology with a technology

for discerning, catering to and appeasing dead; more

specifically, the ancestors or eggún in the West African-

inspired Santería, and the nfumbe in Bantu-Congo

associated practices of Palo Monte. Founded on 19th

century esoteric European visions of ‘spiritual

evolution’ and scientific spirituality, in Cuba spiritism

nevertheless developed in close partnership with local

Afro-Cuban cosmologies, to the extent that its most

pervasive ‘version’ is routinely called “crossed”

(cruzado) by both anthropologists and practitioners. But

the presence of spiritist imaginaries in the Afro-Cuban

field have done more than add a means by which to access

the dead: they have signifiantly redefined the believer’s

sensory-scape. The dead are not transcendent, like

Santería’s Cuban-Yoruba oricha deites (which speak

through cowry-shell oracles), or the Catholic saints that

are pleaded with, but fully immanent (Ochoa, 2007),

visceral even. Indeed, some muerrtos, as the dead are

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generally referred to, even stake a claim to a person’s

selfhood, namely, by comprising sets of guides (called a

cordón espiritual) that are thought to not just to protect a

person throughout the course of his or her life, but to

directly affect his or her personality and destiny.

Communicating with these muertos is tantamount to

communicating with aspects of one’s self; developing

them, materially, somatically, imagistically, and in

trance, is tantamount to existentially expanding oneself

and one’s possibilities. Most of all, then, espiritismo

furnishes its spiritual environment with mechanisms of

knowledge-generation through the education of modes of

perception through being. ‘Sight’ here would result from the

numosity and effectiveness of this spirit-person system,

knowledge, being, in turn, a product of this system’s

operation, its motion. Thus, in a very obvious sense,

‘seeing’, in Cuban creole espiritismo, is linked to

‘being’ itself.

But we can further our observations. Two in

particular in particular will be made from this starting

point in this section. The first is that perception, in

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espiritismo, is subject to the idiosyncrasies of what I

have called a spirit-person ‘system’. This variability

has certain common parameters, however, or at least,

bases of articulation. One of these is suggested by the

salience of tropes or metaphors of fluidity and movement

in the description of visual imagery. But fluidity here

is not merely a descriptive device for ‘seeing’ fluidly –

which leads to the second point: ‘fluid’ is the manner in

which knowledge (as well as spirits) presents itself in

the first place.

As the base technologies of insight, mediums’ bodies

are impelled into action as spirit-person complexes

through forms of encounter such as illness or crises.

Subsequently, through modes of mediumistic attentiveness

and spiritual care, mediums learn to discern information

from feelings; premonitions; images and revelations that

spontaneously appear in the mind; words, names and

numbers that become momentarily salient; certainties that

arise from apparent informational and behavioral chaos;

as well as to make use the less mediated information-

retrieval technique of trance. To have luz larga (long

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vision – long light), is, in this sense, to be able to

trust that these are knowledge, rather than inventions of

the psyche. The imagination as a tool for spiritual

reconnaissance is so pronounced in espiritismo that

information is thought to reach the conscious mind quite

easily through it. The question is to tell the difference

between specific imagery received in the ‘mind’s eye’

(‘internally produced’ information, as Deena Newman would

say, 1999) and parsed as cogitations of the imagination,

and one’s own fantasy. Eventually, mediums will learn to

say, mis muertos me dejan ver, my muertos are letting me see,

relative to such forms of access. Seeing becomes a

collaborative affair between persons and spirits.

Among the most ubiquitous of such ‘seeing’

experiences is dreaming, which has been compared, by some

of my spiritist informants, to a state of unconscious

possession, a sort of ‘death state’, where an

individual’s physical and mental boundaries are diluted.

Some mediums will even describe themselves as ‘dreaming

mediums’: me lo ponen en sueños, they will say, I ‘receive’

from my spirits through dreams. Dreaming here would

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constitute not a window into an alternate or imaginal

reality, but an extension of sight into domains

contiguous with waking reality. As one healer once told

me, in contrast to daily activity, in dreams ‘we don’t

interrupt the connection between our consciousness and

the environment’, which includes the spiritual world.

But dreaming is not simply an aspect or quality of

mediumship; in many ways, it epitomizes a Cuban

espiritismo concern with visual imagery, manifest through

flow. Espiritistas are wont to articulate their visions as

if these were playing themselves out in a reel of film: lo

veo como una película, many will say, sometimes perceiving its

repetition. This movement is itself constitutive of what

mediums feel is a necessary ‘flow’ of information or

knowledge through them. Indeed, the body is routinely

refered to by espiritistas as ‘matéria’, that is, a

material canvas or container for this flow. It is not a

coincidence that objects and substances that are

conducive or reflective of flow – such as water – figure

prominently in espiritistas’ narratives of development,

and in particular, of early forms of spiritual vision; it

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is the quintessential index of motility – pure, fluid

multiplicity, as mediums’ bodies are themselves. Diasmel,

a theologian and spiritist in his forties, makes this

point poignantly through the following account.

‘I was eighteen, and I went with my mother to the house of an

espiritista friend who threw cards. I wanted to know about a

relationship that I had back then with a girl. The woman told

me what I knew already as well as what I didn’t already know.

But when she finished throwing the cards I suddenly started

consulting her. I had no consciousness of my abilities then, and

even my mother was surprised, as well as her friend. She told

me that I had a lot of light [tenia mucha luz] and that I should

develop [desarrollarme]. She had an altar and in one of the water

glasses I started to see the figure of a Gypsy woman holding a

tambourine. I asked her if I could pick up the glass and then I

walked all around her house with it in my hand to check whether

what it was that I was seeing was somehow a reflection. But it

wasn’t. Then I sat down and began to see a whole set of images

that would present themselves in my mind but also in the glass.

I was impressed.’

In this example, Diasmel’s ability to ‘see’ became quite

literally entangled with the possibilities of the liquid.

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But the point here is that what mediums describe as

a ‘flow’ is not a mental but a physical ‘thing’. A key

term espiritistas refer to in order to frame this flow is

‘fluido’. Both ‘concept’ and ‘thing’ (Henare et al, 2007)

fluido it is as much the spirit in fluid,

undifferentiated, circulating form (or in formless

matter), as it is knowledge-in-potential, sensation-cum-

information. Espiritistas evoke fluido through processes

of cultivating proximity – the construction of altars

with water vessels, spirit representations, possession

rites, and divination ceremonies. But it would be

misleading to suggest that it comes from spirits; indeed,

fluido is described in terms that often suggested it is the

spirits, or at the very least, their trace. For instance,

after a particularly successful (i.e. fluidified)

consultation or ritual espiritistas might remark on the

high number of air bubbles that have accumulated inside

their altar’s water vessels, namely, as post-facto

evidence of a well-mobilized universe of muertos.

Similarly, fluido manifests as chills and goosebumps in

the body, as well as peaks of lucidity and

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perceptiveness. While espiritistas would certainly not

posit that the bubbles are the spirit, inasmuch as spirits

are ascertained through their materializations (in people

and things), it would not be analytically incorrect to

say that bubbles, like bodily sensations, visions and

messages, are actualizations of the ‘spirit’ immanent in

any given moment. Fluido is more than a trope, then, for

spirits are also motion, as well as set in motion by the very

relationships that index their becoming. If we put it

simply, then, espiritismo functions to elicit, transmit

and instantiate fluido (defined as both spirits and

knowledge). The transmissive perrogrative, in particular,

is so constitutive of a medium’s identity that its

blockage is potentially detrimental to his or her health.

Ana, an experienced medium in her late fifties,

expresses this in the following way. ‘Sometimes I look at

someone’s face and I begin to see images’ she says, ‘to

capture messages, according to what the person is saying…

I can even describe their house or their situation’. ‘Or

I fix upon a particular spot on the wall, for example,

and I begin to see images, moving, like a film was being

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projected on there’. Ana says that often she experiences

overwhelming pressure by her spirits to say things to

others. She feels something mount at the back of her

neck, like a cramp, and can even begin to feel ill until

she unleashes the message. ‘Sometimes I’m too ashamed to

say certain things to people that come to me, or I’ll

know they are hard to hear’, she says. But, she adds, ‘if

the spirit is intent on passing the information in

whatever shape or form, in the end it’s better if I do it

myself!’, rather than, say, risk possession. Knowledge,

Ana suggests, has weight, literally. Expressing it –

making it – is akin to seeing it. This brings us to my

final point. If knowledge exists through its expresssion,

then ‘sight’ may also be enabled through and with others

through collective forms of expression.

Making (seeing) knowledge

The necessary relationship between expressing/making

knowledge and seeing it is never more evident than in the

context of a misa espiritual, espiritismo’s bread-and-butter

rite, where a collectivity of mediums and spirits work

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together in order to ‘build’ something that is not

properly reducible to the sum of each medium’s messages.

Here, the achievement of knowledge-as-sight becomes a

social effort, coming into existence through the

participative act itself whereby it becomes a public

object. The idea of a cuadro espiritual (literally, a

spiritual ‘picture’, ‘painting’, or ‘frame’) exemplifies

this process in its simplest way.

The term “cuadro espiritual” refers to an image, a

piece of information or a set of knowledge about and for

someone that hang together as a coherent whole, but whose

construction is done in parts, like the brush strokes of

an artist which in the end slowly come to ‘look like’

something recognizable. While in the context of a

consultation a medium will engage in describing a cuadro

only she has access to, in a misa, a cuadro is produced in

the public domain, in a distributed fashion. One medium

builds on another’s message in sequential fashion by

adding detail and depth to the former’s knowledge. What

may begin as an initial hilo, or thread, of knowledge, can

turn into a detailed and informative prediction or

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description, in its collective pursuit. Unlike a two-

dimensional canvas, whose artist layers on the paint -

stroke by stroke –until a picture is produced, in a misa

spirit mediums are understood to work together in three

dimensions, with the exteriorization process reflecting

the processual nature of collective knowing. Mediums say

a particular feature of a cuadro only becomes ‘visible’

once it has been described; it is knowledge made real at

that moment, which then, and only then, becomes

accessible as something to work with to the other

mediums’ gaze.

Take the following example, an excerpt from my

fieldnotes of a misa. In it, O., R. and J., the three

officiating mediums, and L., a practitioner of Palo

Monte, bounce off each other’s visions, adding to an

increasingly detailed cuadro relating to F., the

‘investigated’ person, who is about to receive a major

initiation in Palo (the ‘presentation’) and whose family

spirits require some attention.

O: I see in your cordón espiritual a man [O. describes this spirit’s

physical appearance in detail].

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F: It’s my grandfather’s brother, I think.

O: This person has much to do with your constant camino, your

walking in the world, your journeys to different places. He

needs light – he needs you to give him light so that he can in

turn illuminate your path.

R: You have a complicated family history….it’s an arrastre [a

weight, something that is dragged from behind] that’s causing

you many problems (…). In your infancy you were the victim of

very bad witchcraft. You need a rompimiento [a type of exorcism]

before your initiation.

L: Luz! [confirmation] Yes, when I consulted her the muerto said

that she should have a rompiento before she’s ‘presented’.

Confirmation!

O: Yes…there was a trabajo done against you that was very

powerful. The only reason why you haven’t fallen [died, become

ill] is because you have a very strong acción [influence,

through a muerto] of San Lázaro [the saint of illness and cure

in Cuba] with you.

R: Do you suffer with some sort of illness in your bones?

F: Yes (…).

R: It’s that San Lázaro protection of hers that keeps her

standing, you see?

O: Your main spirit is a negro congo [a ‘black Congo’] who walks

barefoot. Whenever you can, walk barefoot and blow some rum on

your feet to refresh them. This spirit wants you to place him a

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palo duro [a type of stick] with a red and purple ribbon on it

[purple is the color of San Lázaro].

J: She has a profound family arrastre this girl…(…). I see this

same African spirit too, but he does a desdoble [a metamophosis]

and he becomes a negra [a female Black spirit], a spirit who

works very much with the sea and the river.

O: Luz for that spirit of yours! They were a couple! This spirit

had a lot to do with Yemayá and Ochún [deities to do with the

sea and river respectively, in Santería], just like F. does.

You should find yourself a black female doll and dress her in

blue. It should then be ‘charged’ [with magical substances].

This spirit isn’t giving up her name yet, but it’s possible

that once she’s charged she will.

In this example, what began with a simple message – O’s

vision of F’s male kin spirit – unfolded into a complex

web of observations relating to family karma, witchcraft,

and the muertos who seemed to be presenting themselves to

ask for help, or provide some relief to the situation. By

observing the first muerto, and thus publicly

materializing it, the first medium had effectively

unleashed the possibility of developing a common cuadro,

allowing for the valuable contribution of all other

mediums. In the best of cases, a cuadro a manifestation of

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the plain actualization of spiritual fluido in the form of

visual information: it is the epitome of knowledge

itself, made possible via the uninterrupted flow of

spiritual relationships in any one given mediumistic

moment, and thus, of being itself.

But misas are also prime examples of how knowledge-

as-sight (and thus evidence) can be curtailed by the

blockage of fluido-as-spirit. Ana, the middle-aged medium

I mentioned, often chastizes her spiritual godchildren if

she feels they are holding back at her weekly misas. ‘If

things don’t flow here’, I heard her once tell them

harshly, ‘it’s also your fault, since if someone has an

idea or an image and they don’t spell it out, the

spiritual currents will die right here and now. The

spirits will go elsewhere, where people are willing to

speak their mind!’ Holding back speech is simply one

obstacle to the effective generation of vision-as-

knowledge.

Espiritismo circles are replete with scathing

criticisms of one or another medium for delivering their

messages in an unrefined or abrupt manner, thereby

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severing links of trust to vulberable clients, for

example, or for coarsely publicizing sensitive

information in the context of a collective ritual. For

some, this lack of refinement has effects beyond

etiquette. Eduardo, for example, one of my main spiritist

informants and friends, sustains that the more a person

instructs herself and amplifies her range of intellectual

knowledge, the more detailed the information that reaches

her hands through the exercise of mediumship. More

importantly, the more the muertos will also allow

themselves to be seen. According to him, a language of

knowing is also a language of seeing.

Conclusion

In his argument for taking ‘knowledge’ rather than

‘culture’ as the ethnographer’s real object of study,

Fredrik Barth says that whereas ‘knowledge provides

people with materials for reflection and premises for

action’, the notion of culture ‘too often readily comes

to embrace also those reflections and actions’ (2002:

230). His solution is to focus on interactional events,

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in which process takes precendence over form. However, in

the ethnography I have been presenting in this paper,

‘knowing’ does not occur in the absence of a self with

particular capacities and perspectives for knowing –

‘sight’. It cannot simply be transacted or distributed in

culturally specific ways: it is subject to the

configuration of unique self-systems and modulated by

socialities that are not just human. It is a mobile

thing, becoming indistinguishable at times to the spirits

themselves, in fluid form. But it does not reduce to

individual sensations and their imprint, being, at once,

a product of collective efforts, as we have seen. What

does this imply about ‘seeing’?

In his history of religious prophets and man-gods in

Enlightenment America, Eric Leigh Schmidt argues that ‘it

is not just that we moderns are hard of hearing – [it is]

that for us seeing (and only seeing is believing)’. For

Schmidt, the loss of ‘hearing’ was a symptom of a more

pervasive ‘spiritual impairment’, or religious absence,

in the West (2000: 28), the loss of ‘God’s voice’. The

connection Schmidt makes between the senses and ontology

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is telling. In his critique of the recent ‘anthropology

of the senses’ turn, Tim Ingold argues that the problem

with ‘Western’ traditions is less one of ‘hypervisualism’

or ‘occularcentrism’ than of a particular ‘cognitive

style’ (following Fabian 1983: 123), which is manifest,

in an evident way, in an anthropological rendition of the

senses. On the one hand, the ‘senses’ literature tends

almost overwhelmingly to naturalize seeing, hearing, and

other sensory modalities, by positing the differences

between the manner in which people perceive or sense in

different cultures as derivative of the relative weight

given to one mode over another (2000: 281-2); thus, ‘our’

own hypervisualist aesthetic. This is not simply

exaggerated and reductionist, says Ingold, but, on the

other hand, it occults the reductionism embedded in the

very premises of the visualist argument, whose source is

a particular theory of knowledge and knowing. An

indication of this reductionsim is the fact that in this

literature ‘the body and its senses is taken to comprise

the cognitive rather than the existential ground of culture’

(ibid: 283) – sensory experience is assumed to model or

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reflect culture, rather than constituting an object of

investigation proper. Indeed, Ingold continues, ‘the

reduction to vision, in the West, has been accompanied by

a second reduction, namely, the reduction of vision’

(ibid). It may be the case that we are saddled with a

peculiarly sight-based perceptual modality; but, says

Ingold, the responsibility lies not with this hegemony of

vision (to be replaced, say, by one of hearing), but with

the dualist varieties of thought that brought it about.

The most pervasive of these rests on a distinction

between the physical and cultural dimensions of

perception (Ingold, ibid: 283), on the assumption that

people ‘represent’ their world in order to make sense of

it. We are probably all familiar with the general

undercurrents of Ingold’s arguments. The point here is

simply that in my ethnography too, vision cannot be

construed analytically if it cannot be disentangled from

the premise of representationalism. In Cuban spirit

mediumship practices, vision does not exist to simply or

only represent, but to (re)create (or collapse) a world.

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