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Abstract
This article brings together three distinct, yet articulating, ethnographic perspectives on the effects and affordances of material things, in particular human substances, in the Afro-Cuban religious practice of Palo Monte, a complex of Bantu-Congo inspired traditions. The authors argue that Palo Monte engenders ontological forms that are irreducible to either ‘matter’ or ‘spirit’ and thing or idea, but instead predicate their agency on a hybridity that necessarily encompasses objects, human bodies, and spirits of the dead, as well their bones. Palo both takes a notion of embodiment to the extreme – objects become bodies, bodies become spirits, and spirits become objects – and questions its limitations, since for practitioners spirits are unconfined to their materialization, but may appear in dreams, for example. Furthermore, Palo experts deal inherently with processes of physical, social, and spiritual disassembly (as well as assembly), asking of us to rethink essentialist concepts of agency, intention, and personhood.
Acknowledgements
Diana Espírito Santo would like to thank the Economic and Social Research Council (UK) and the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal) for doctoral and post-doctoral research funding, respectively. She is also grateful to CRIA for its institutional support since 2012. As always, very heartfelt thanks go to Eduardo and Olga Silva in Havana.
Katerina Kerestetzi would like to thank the Société d'Ethnologie de Nanterre, the Musée du Quai Branly, and the Fernand Braudel fellowship for post-doctoral funding. She would also like to forward a special thanks to her Cuban interlocutors, all the paleros of Cienfuegos that generously gave of their time, trust, and friendship.
Anastasios Panagiotopoulos would like to thank the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Edinburgh (UK), especially his mentor and friend Dr Dimitri Tsintjilonis, and also the College of Humanities and Social Sciences (University of Edinburgh) and the Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia (Portugal) for doctoral and post-doctoral research funding, respectively. A special thanks to Yosdado, the protagonist of the present paper, as well as all those friends in Cuba who made the research possible.
The authors collectively thank Joost Fontein and John Harries for the invitation to write this ‘nganga-esque’ paper. We also acknowledge the extremely pertinent insights of our two peer reviewers, whose comments and suggestions we have done our best to integrate here.
Notes
1. Since 2003 I have conducted a long-term ethnographic research on Palo Monte practices in Cienfuegos, a Cuban town 250 km south of Havana.
2. For this, they constantly engage in dialogues with the cauldrons, regularly seek their approval or blessing, become their spokesman during ritual possession, and handle objects that instantiate their presence or voice, such as bells or divination devices.
3. In Cuba, the central position and importance of a skull in an nganga is known only to those who attended an nganga's fabrication, but in Miami it is obvious to see because Cuban paleros in this city put the skull at the top of the cauldron, creating the impression of a human body.
4. Paleros emphasize that they offer their blood only during their initiation, in order to seal a pact with their initiator's spirit, and during the assembly of their own nganga, in order to animate the dead hosted in the object. To feed the nganga, they use merely animal blood.
5. I use the term ‘identification’ as Laplanche and Pontalis do: ‘A psychological process through which a subject assimilates an aspect, a feature, an attribute of somebody else, and is being transformed, totally or partially, upon the latter's model. Personality is constituted and is differentiated through a series of identifications’ (quoted from Warnier Citation2009, 53).
6. As with many initiation traditions, initiation in Palo Monte is considered as a test: the person who adheres to Palo Monte has to have some qualities that permit him to resist the sufferings of this ritual.
7. A few words about the part played by reflexivity in Palo Monte might be useful here. Paleros share a common passion for religious discussion and controversy: they can get into long conversations with colleagues and rivals in order to prove the superiority of their religious methodology and the inferiority of another's or to justify the use of an unusual ritual procedure.
8. For example, they use them in a ritual drink called as chamba (a mixture of rum, chilli, garlic, and human bones reduced to powder). And every time they serve it, they do not fail to mention how strong and dangerous it can be to drink it.
9. Spiritists also ask the dead to interfere with human matters, in order to cure, to bring familial peace, and so on, but do not use human materials to do so.
10. The mpakas are two ox horns closed with a piece of mirror. They contain the same ingredients as the nganga; they are like miniature nganga and the palero uses them when ‘working’ far from his sanctuary. They are usually put at the top of the cauldron. They are also used for divination and for this they are also called as ‘the eyes of the nganga’: the worshipper puts those ‘binoculars’ to his eyes to watch ‘all the mysteries’.
11. It is important to mention that some of the sequences enacted during the initiation are repeated during the funeral. For example, during initiation a magical sign is painted on the novice's skin and the same is done during his funeral and during initiation a candle is lit, with the exact same candle lit during the initiates funeral. This situation suggests that the funeral ritual acts as a second initiation (Hertz Citation1960), which enables the palero to enter the world of the dead. Of course, it also suggests the opposite: that initiation acts as a first funeral. The paleros would certainly not dislike this second hypothesis. After all, these ritual experts do define themselves (as) ‘walking dead’ (James Figarola Citation2006a, 78).
12. I have conducted ethnographic research in Havana on spirit mediumship practices since 2005. The main focus of my work has been Cuban creole forms of spiritism – called as espiritismo cruzado – however, in lieu of the fact that the two practices frequently overlap, I have also spent more than 20 months collecting substantial data on Palo Monte practices and cosmology.