Liquid Sight, Thing‐Like Words, and The

Liquid sight, thing-like words, and the precipitation of knowledge substances in Cuban espiritismo Diana Espırito´ Santo Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile This article argues that in Cuban Creole espiritismo practices, ritually generated ‘knowledge’ has ontological, rather than just epistemological, effects, independent of the role of cognition. I will show that knowledge is experienced as a fluid, moving ‘substance’ external to the body that can accumulate, weigh down, hang suspended, and dissipate; it is also responsive to mediums‘ descriptive speech, becoming an object of vision-knowledge at the same time that it is seen and spoken of collectively. I will also show that the circulation of knowledge ‘substances’ should be seen not as metaphorical but as tied to processes of making people, and ask whether knowledge can figure not just as something intersubjective or relational but as something substantive, even physiological. Introduction: displacing knowledge On the face of it, Cubans are obsessed with knowledge, or at least with the concept of it. This is helped, perhaps in no small measure, by decades of Socialist Revolutionary propaganda linking education to collective freedom and dignity, knowledge to citizenship, and philosophical and scientific thought to moral standing. This is ironic, given the correspondingly long period of restricted access to information (books, media, and Internet) experienced by most Cubans, despite the incontestable gains in literacy and education. The notion of knowledge is so central to the ‘New Man’ that the Revolution’s mythical hero and prophet, writer, and poet, JoseMart´ ´ı, links human moral value with knowledge quite explicitly in most of his work: for Mart´ı, education is not just constituted by the internalization of a set of information, but at its best is a means to reach the soul and mould the sentiments (cf. Martinez Gomez 2010; see also Kapcia 2000). In line with this connection, during my fieldwork in Havana on Cuban Creole espiritismo and the dead in Afro-Cuban religion, I often heard certain people being admiringly singled out as gente preparada, con conocimiento (people who are prepared, who have knowledge), contrasted not just with their ‘ignorant’ counterparts in the religious matrix but also with savage, immoral practitioners. Spirits, too, were classified under a cosmography of knowledge and its lack (alternatively referred to as ‘light’): lowly, ignorant muertos (the dead) whose prerogative is human destitution sat on one end of the spectrum, while enlightened, numinous beings who work Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 579-596 C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015 580 Diana Espírito Santo for the good of humankind sat on the other. While popular Victorian parameters of social and racial evolution clearly fed into this intellectual-moral ontology and its mechanics – unsurprisingly, given Cuban espiritismo’s nineteenth-century Euro- American influences – and, indeed, continue to fuel a potent (and correspondingly racially stigmatized) economy of representations relative to legitimate and illegitimate magical agency (Argyriadis 2005;Wirtz2009), I always felt that there was more to ‘knowledge’ here than merely knowing or its absence. That knowledge did something (to people and their environment) rather than just was something (something learned, transmitted, obscured between people) was evident to me in myriad circumstances, the ethnographic descriptions of which will form the cornerstone of this article. However, I can start with a couple of brief examples. The notion that knowledge can have ontological rather than merely epistemological effects was often suggested in the domain of healing, to give one instance. Alfredo Duran,´ a Communist spirit medium and leader with whom I had intermittent contact during my early fieldwork, always insisted that knowledge heals. And he meant it quite literally. ‘Our bodies are almost perfect, we need never be sick’,he told me once while he massaged one of his patients in his Spiritist centre; ‘sickness derives from our states of mind. Every school should teach a special course on psychic states, so that children can learn how to think and be healthy’. It may not have been a coincidence that for Duran,´ healthy (Socialist) minds yield healthy societies. Indeed, it may not be out of character that Duran´ explicitly refers to Cuba’s 1960s alphabetization campaigns in Spiritist language: ‘The people of Cuba received a great caridad in 1959’,he said. The word caridad, charity, infused here with a double meaning, is, in espiritismo, a typical term for healing. But it was not just Communist espiritistas who wielded such views. In Creole espiritista rites, the recently deceased (note: not religious ancestors) are ‘elevated’ from their material appendages through forms of what mediums call ‘giving knowledge’ – darle conocimiento a los muertos. This in part means that the dead must become conscious of their state of defunct-ness; but it is also the generation of ‘something’ which does not depend on the dead’s acknowledgement of their deadness. ‘Giving knowledge’ is essentially paying homage – through prayers, songs, and lit candles. However, it is thought that the dead are ascended through mere exposure to such enacted forms of conocimiento. I, too, came up against such ‘exposures’ when seriously admonished by Eduardo, my religious ‘godfather’, for reading ritual recipes that were beyond my own scope as uninitiated. According to him, the problem was less one of disrespect than one of the dangers of coming into contact with such knowledge for myself,regardless of whether I understood it. In his words, el conocimiento compromete – knowledge commits (or compromises) you. The anthropology of religion has recently devoted some much-needed attention to the question of learning (e.g. Barrett 2004; Berliner & Sarro´ 2007;Boyer2001,Luhrmann 2012;McCauley&Lawson2002;Severi2004; Whitehouse 2004), reviving, albeit with a predominantly cognitive slant, Fredrik Barth’s call for a sociology of knowledge (2002), articulated in his classic work on Papua New Guinean rituals and cosmology (1987). As David Berliner and Ramon Sarro´ note, the question of how knowledge transmission occurs, in religious contexts, is far from clear; certainly, the ‘acquisition’ of religion ‘is not merely a cold-blooded technical process of cognitive downloading’ (2007: 10), but indeed involves a variety of socialization processes, contexts, cues, as well as competences. In possession religions, these knowledge contexts are even fuzzier to define, for, as Michael Lambek argues, not only is it true that ‘possession has no Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 579-596 C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015 Liquid sight, thing-like words 581 explicit pedagogy’,but in most cases ‘it is spirits who decide to possess humans, not the reverse, and spirits who then must be educated, and so its eventuality and course are unpredictable’ (2007: 75). However, more primary than all of these questions together is arguably the question of what knowledge is in the first place. Most, if not all, of the above studies assume that it resides in the person – that is, the mind, embodied, socialized, disciplined, dissociated, or otherwise. As a body of literature, the anthropology of spirit possession has usefully reminded us that the incorporation of spirits is a way of knowing, as well as of performing knowledge (e.g. Brown 1991;Lambek1988;Stoller1992;Wafer 1991; cf. Boddy 1994: 424). But what if the relation between ‘known’ and ‘knower’ is displaced such that ‘knowledge’ becomes something out there rather than in here? The notion that the world itself – material, social, technological – provides not just a repository of essential codes, cues, and information, but also the scaffolding for human cognitive functioning is foundational to the work of anthropologists such as Jean Lave and Etienne Wenger (1991) and Edwin Hutchins (1995), among others. Indeed, according to philosopher and artificial intelligence theorist Andy Clark (2008), our minds spill out into the world with such minimum effort that computationally there is little difference between neural, bodily, and environmental resources, knowledge- wise. For Clark, the question here is less one of the extension of mind than it is of mind as a function of entire distributed systems, where knowledge arises or emerges from collective functioning. But however liberated knowledge becomes from its mental confines in this model, can we release it from the trappings of a broader computational structure altogether? In this article I wish to attempt to do so, namely by understanding knowledge as a ‘substance’ or ‘thing’ whose effects are independent of the role of cognition as stipulated by the approaches above – whether brain-bound, extended, or human-environment coupled. I do this from the basis of my ethnography on Cuban Creole espiritismo, where knowledge is transacted, transmitted, and absorbed in ways that suggest that it is more ‘thing’ than ‘concept’,in the words of Amiria Henare, Martin Holbraad, and Sari Wastell (2007). In the cosmology of espiritista rites and consultations, relevant spiritual knowledge is not immanent within or performed by the medium(s) but must be punctually evoked, coaxed into becoming from a state of non-existence; knowledge accrues, diminishes, is blocked, disappears, dissipates, hangs suspended, is intermittent, becomes suddenly unavailable, and reacts to situations and people. Knowledge

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