. Resenha de Suspect others, by Stuart Strange [American Ethnologist]

In Darkness & Secrecy - The Anthropology of Assault Sorcery and Witchcraft in Amazonia, pp.51-82, ed. Neil L. Whitehead and Robin Wright (Duke University Press), 2004

In this paper we analyze and compare the role of sorcery and witchcraft in contemporary local and regional politics in Guyana and the Venezuelan Amazon in order to illustrate the way in which occult forces have been incorporated into the regional and national political process. In general terms this has recently been the subject of study by both Taussig (1997) and Coronil (1997) who, in different ways, consider how the ‘magic’ of the Venezuelan State is established through its association with occult powers, particularly the popular spirit-cults. In a broader frame of reference it is evident that Voudoun has played a similar role in the establishment of the Duvalier regime in Haiti (Diedrich 1970, Ferguson 1989) and it will be suggested here that Obeah has also been used to enhance the political potency of the Forbes Burnham regime in Guyana. However, although we may have elegant and informative studies of the forms of ideology that the ruling elites have deployed to gain consensus for their projects of modernization and development, we have little sense of how those process played out in the margins of ‘national’ political culture, or what broader cultural forms are harnessed in the process of occult government, in particular those that invoke indigenous powers or ‘indigeneity’ in general. Thus Taussig (1997) for example, discusses the ideological power of the “Tres Potencias” but does so through an exclusive consideration of the ‘Spirit Queen” - the latent and darkly mysterious spirit force of “El Indio” is left without commentary. This chapter is partly intended to correct that lack through a consideration of how native dark shamanism, by kanaimàs, pitadores and false prophets, has fed the political imaginary and practice of post-colonial Guyana and Venezuela.

In this article, I explore how the cosmologies of two popular spirit possession cults—Espiritismo in Cuba and Umbanda in Brazil— exhibit forms of recursivity and self-reflexivity. Taking my cue from Don Handelman's notion that the cosmos often contains its own logic of self-becoming, I argue that in these ethnographic cases, recursivity results from the interplay between, on the one hand, the spirits' expression of their autonomy from living beings and, on the other, the spirits' contingency for their effectiveness on human belief, representation, perception, and action. In Espiritismo and Umbanda, spirits intervene in human affairs unpredictably, throwing new light on anthropological and native conceptualizations of reflexivity.

Choice Reviews Online, 2008

Ⅲ Comments by Diana Espirito Santo "Why spirits?" asks Emma Cohen (97)-why are concepts of intentional and agentive supernatural beings such as spirits and gods so prevalent cross-culturally? What makes them appealing, contagious, and lasting? And what kinds of assumptions about the world and its workings do they entail and do they generate? In Th e Mind Possessed, Cohen off ers us some answers; to some degree by appealing to her ethnography of the Afro-Brazilian practice of batuque in the Amazon-bordering town of Belém, but mostly by subordinating particularistic concerns to what she considers more general 'scientifi c' ones. However, it may be the questions, rather than the answers, that merit revising. Cohen holds that the minds of human beings are constrained by certain tacit (and largely unconscious) assumptions about the natural and social world, inherited from our evolutionary past ('naive biology' , for instance; or, more important in this case, 'theory of mind' , consistent with the modularity thesis). Following authors such as Barrett (1999, 2004), Boyer (1994, 2001), and Sperber (1996), she argues that the spirit beliefs that are likely to be transmitted from one person to the next generally consist of a balance of intuitive (the spirit has thoughts and feelings) and counterintuitive principles (the spirit has a mind but no body). Furthermore, spirits (such as orixás) are catchy ideas because they are socially relevant-they are believed to have access to crucial 'strategic information' , and this keeps people coming back. Possession, Cohen explains, is an interpretation of what can be regarded as a relatively normal 'alternative state of consciousness' , one based on the over-attribution of agency, both from the perspective of the possessed and from that of his or her audience ("subtle contextual cues and psychological biases come into play" on both ends [131]). Comparatively little attention is given to the structure and experience of possession, or to how it is properly learned and developed over time, which strikes this reader as paradoxical given the author's concern with explaining the continued existence of these phenomena. By disembedding the conceptual from the phenomenological, Cohen ends up not being able to say much about the 'cognition' leading up to and of spirit possession itself, 'on the ground' (as she oft en says), which is a historical, intersubjective process, some aspects of which are shared and others unique to each person. In other words, because she separates so determinately native explanations from the so-called objective ones, Cohen is unable to transform ethnographic categories into vital analytical ones, permitting a rather one-sided conversation to take place. Th at the former kinds of explanations are relegated to the status of 'beliefs'-by

French Studies, 2015

Journal of Haitian Studies, 2016

Review of Alessandra Benedicty-Kokken's "Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History" (2015). Journal of Haitian Studies, Vol. 22, No. 1 (Spring 2016): 208-215. www.jstor.org/stable/24894158.

American Anthropologist, 2010

Anthropologists may find this book by sociologist Stanley Bailey frustrating because it contains no ethnographic descriptions or analyses. However, Legacies of Race provides a body of new evidence that buttresses an emerging consensus among anthropologists and sociologists, Brazilian and non-Brazilian, about the "common sense" of racial identity in Brazil and how it compares to the United States. As Bailey explains, there has been an "absolute lacuna of public opinion research on racial attitudes in Brazil" (p. 7). To remedy this, he uses three large-scale public-opinion surveys on racial attitudes conducted between 1995 and 2002 (two national surveys and one in the state of Rio de Janeiro), evidence rarely used by anthropologists. His goal is to advance an understanding of the attitudes toward race of "everyday Brazilians" to make the point that neither white nor nonwhite Brazilians deny the existence of racial discrimination in all walks of life. For this reason, Legacies of Race is a welcome addition to the growing literature on the subject. The first half of the book reviews the sociological models for measuring racial attitudes, including "groupness" and racial boundaries. In chapter 3, Bailey applies four tests to his data and finds that racial boundaries are neither as "bright" nor as "hard" as they are in the United States. Brazil, he concludes, lacks a "robust racial subjectivity" (p. 40), which leads him to suggest that the United States is not an appropriate prototype for analyzing Brazilian racial attitudes. In chapter 4, Bailey discusses whether the census should replace the color categories of "pardo" (brown) and "preto" (black) with negro, a term that today carries positive ethnic and political connotations. He concludes that because African-derived cultural manifestations have been fully incorporated into the national self-conception of Brazil (i.e., candomblé, capoeira, samba), there is no basis for a "negro community of culture" (p. 75), supporting anthropologist Lívio Sansone's (2003) conclusion, based on extensive ethnographic research, that in Brazil there is "blackness without ethnicity." REFERENCES CITED

With specific reference to the spread of non-traditional forms of spirit possession, this article explores the growing influence of the Afro-Brazilian religion of Umbanda upon the Brazilian new religion of Santo Daime. The following material opens by introducing Santo Daime and plotting the historical trajectory of spirit possession from the movement’s beginnings in 1930s’ Brazil, to its spread to various parts of the industrialized world. Subsequent to detailing the contemporary spirit possession repertoire of Santo Daime, the article offers a typology of the most prominent kinds of spirit possession practiced by Santo Daime. The article closes by relating the increasing popularity of Umbanda-inspired possession motifs to the growing influence of a white, urban-professional constituency imbued with typically late-modern concerns.

As a technology for the production of historicized spirit forms, espiritismo continually forges its own cosmology from the raw materials of a Cuban syncretistic imagination, with permutations of figures such as the " Congo " and the " Indio " bringing its more visible agencies to the forefront. These yield extensive material forms—dolls, statues, photographs , altars, vessels, and consumables. In this article I ask whether understandings of the " substance " of spirits are tied to, or yield, concepts of the self, and vice-versa. Are selves " deeper, " more connected to the " beyond, " if the spirits are anonymouss Are they " flatter " and more material, the more aesthetically personalized they become? In order to answer these questions I explore two ethnographic contexts divided by ontological assumptions as well as by practitioners. The first is a " scientific " spiritist society, and the second is made up of individuals who worship Chinese spirits from their extended families. Each context exemplifies an extreme of personalization and distance.

Anthropology and Alterity: Responding to the Other (ed. Bernhard Leistle), 2017

Indigenous peasants in the Peruvian Andes describe abnormal and unsettling bodily experiences as encounters with place-based spirits. While community members expect they can make sense of their experience in terms of their own frameworks of understanding, in some instances neither this nor any other cultural rationality is enough to order what has happened. These types of situations can be analyzed in terms of alienness not simply because of the apparent presence of a spiritual entity, but because the cause, consequence, and significance of the event remain elusive, and in this sense strange, foreign, and other to the individual. Drawing on the philosophy of Bernhard Waldenfels, this chapter contrasts empirical otherness and radical otherness (or alienness) in ethnographic situations in the community of Kañaris. This distinction allows us to understand the observable other as not merely different, but in relation to something which cannot be brought into an order. Radical otherness (or alienness) provides a conceptual tool to understand an experiential event in terms of its affective strangeness rather than objects of perception. Waldenfels’ theory of alienness can be applied to sociocultural analysis because it provides an alternative account of why it is necessary to respond once one feels addressed by a situation, even when the origin of this feeling and the appropriate reply are unknown.

Journal of Mind and Behavior, 2018

Mark Crooks’ article offers a new paradigm for exploration: namely, that many instances in the transcultural phenomenon of spirit possession reflect the activity of genuine and harmful spirits. Although subsequent research may refine a number of points, the activity of genuine spirits reflects the most common indigenous explanation and makes sense of a significant part of the data that is more difficult to explain on some other academic paradigms. Indigenous explanations do not always view all spirits as harmful, but they usually treat many spirits as harmful, and a case can be made that this is true of much other spirit activity as well. Crooks’ explanatory model brings coherence to many points of data less well served by some competing models, and thus merits continuing exploration.

In: Felbeck, Christine, Klump Andre (Eds.), „Dominicanidad“ (Schriftenreihe America Romana). Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang

Book - Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer, 2020

The Brazilian Spiritualist Christian Order Vale do Amanhecer (Valley of the Dawn) is the place where the worlds of the living and the spirits merge and the boundaries between lives are regularly crossed. Drawing upon over a decade of extensive fieldwork in temples of the Amanhecer in Brazil and Europe, the author explores how mediums understand their experiences and how they learn to establish relationships with their spirit guides. She sheds light on the ways in which mediumistic development in the Vale do Amanhecer is used for therapeutic purposes and informs notions of body and self, of illness and wellbeing. Pierini, E., 2020, Jaguars of the Dawn: Spirit Mediumship in the Brazilian Vale do Amanhecer, New York; Oxford: Berghahn. https://www.berghahnbooks.com/title/PieriniJaguars

In this article I argue that caution, suspicion and even paranoia are natural outcomes, as well as processes generative, of the behaviour of knowledge and of knowing in the Cuban religious cosmos, and beyond it. "Knowers", here, may be variably absent, invisible, or immanent in the social plane, which implies necessary, if temporary, vacuums of knowledge and of certainty. I start with an anecdote from my fieldwork in Havana, Cuba, among spirit mediums, of being accused by one of my interlocutors of being a spy for the Cuban government. I then reason that this paranoid "intrusion" into my selfdefinition was less a case of what went wrong but of what went right. Spirits of the dead are master instigators of both relations and fracturing suspicion between people, and the economy of Afro-Cuban religious knowledge is one with many absences and invisibilities, generating pervasive doubt and spiritual insecurity. In order to come to grips with this distressing accusation I had to reflexively reconstitute my own forms of extreme proximity with practitioners and their muertos (spirits), the ontological uncertainties that were implied by this proximity, and the role of non-living entities in the equations of everyday life, including mine.

Anthropos , 2014

Spirit possession is the core religious practice in most Afro- American religions. It is usually described as "mount- ing"; the spirit "rides" the body of the devotee as a horseman rides a horse. The description projects the image that a spirit takes control over the body of the medium and "uses" the hu- man medium; the body of the person is passive and submissive, while the spirit is active and dominant. However, this view does not reflect the highly elaborate discourse about spirit possession in Brazil. The article is based on fieldwork among communities of Afro-Brazilian and Spiritist traditions in São Paulo, Brazil. Based on subjective narratives about bodily experience and the academic debate about body and mind, the article contributes to a wider understanding of the possession experience.