Liquid sight, thing-like words, and the precipitation of knowledge substances in Cuban espiritismo

Diana Espırito´ Santo Pontificia Universidad Cat´olica 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, 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 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 , 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

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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 ; ‘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 ’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 , 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 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 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 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 , 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 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 does not have substance; it is a substance of sorts – one that is sensed and absorbed by bodies that must communicate it. This may be, then, a very different kind of ‘knowledge’ to that Barth refers to – or, indeed, Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1966)orGeorgeH.Mead(1962 [1934]). In this context, human acts and subjectivities are intrinsic to its appearance and behaviour, but do not entirely contain or define it. In particular, I will show that the precipitation of knowledge in espiritismo is related first to mediumistic speech, which enables its generation, flow, and shape; and, second, to sight, tantamount to knowing itself, which, far from a sense with a clear referent and direction (the seeing of something that exists already), is an ontologically creative act, the bringing forth of the object of vision-knowledge at the same time that it is seen. Finally, I argue that the link between knowledge and personhood is not incidental in this ethnographic context. The point here for a broader anthropological consideration is that knowledge should not be regarded as content or construct for pre-existing selves but as interconnected with, even constitutive of, those selves and their faculties, in this case, from outside of them.

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Brakes in the system Havana’s pervasive Creole espiritismo scene is comprised not of centres or temples but of distributed networks of largely independent-minded individuals who either work collective rites in the company of other mediums, or retreat into their own private spaces, consulting clients from their homes and with oracles that range from cards, shells, and stones to plates. I followed these networks, working with espiritistas young and old, black and white, male and female, poor, and generally living in the central areas of Havana. Requiring neither formal initiation nor institutional sanction of any kind, espiritistas become respected, even famous, according to the quality and reach of their spirit transmissions and insights, news of which travels fast. A ‘great’ espiritista is not necessarily an elder; a medium’s brilliance is a function only of her talent for precipitating knowledge flows, both in private settings and in the public sphere of misas espirituales, espiritismo’s bread-and-butter spirit possession rites. But just as individual consultations may alternately marvel or disappoint discerning clients, and even great espiritistas may falter, misas are not fail-safe spaces of knowledge flow even for the most experienced; they are occasions where substantial effort must be made to garner the spirit world into its folds and to bring the mediums’ competencies to full fruition, brakes on which can compromise the generation of knowledge irremediably. One of the first misas I was invited to was a disaster – not just from the point of view of the officiating mediums, two middle-aged Afro-Cuban ladies hired by Lourdes, the temperamental owner of the house where the misa took place, but from that of Lourdes herself, a commanding espiritista in her own right. Chairs were arranged in semi- circular fashion in Lourdes’s ample nineteenth-century living room in Centro Habana, the audience comprising of her immediate family, some friends, and myself. After some initial spirit evocation songs, the youngest of the espiritistas lurched forward suddenly in her chair, as if shoved over by an invisible hand from behind. She cursed, Co˜no! One of her muertos, her spirit guides, was trying to come through. While she quickly composed herself, she shuddered with spirit-induced ‘hiccups’ for a few minutes. ‘There is a good spiritual current (corriente espiritual) here’, she said, touching the goose bumps that had materialized on her arms. But Lourdes was not impressed. Swaying back and forth impatiently on her rocking chair, she made it patently clear that she would have no spirit possession episodes in her house. ‘There are people who are not content without the spectacle of a muerto, but not in my house. Clairvoyance (videncia)willhaveto suffice!’ As the misa progressed, Lourdes was increasingly dismissive of and even rude to the officiating espiritistas. One of them, A., followed up on a message she was receiving from a spirit of Lourdes’s, and told her she must work harder to please the eggun of her house (the spirits of her ancestors), for whom the misa had been commissioned in the first place. A. began to describe this spirit but was soon interrupted by an angry Lourdes. ‘Leave it alone!’ she told her, cutting A.’s words short. ‘I know about this spirit. Leave it be’. A. said she should also explore more of the ‘African’ religious side, by which she meant Santer´ıa, Cuba’s popular religion of the oricha . Lourdes’s muertos were flowing, as were A.’s, and they were telling her, through A., that she may need an initiation of some sort. But Lourdes was having none of that. ‘I loathe la religi´on’, she snapped coldly. ‘I have no need to put any cloth on my head [meant both literally and as a metaphor for work done in Afro-Cuban religion]. The orichas have never done anything for me, only my muertos have’. A. was taken

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 579-596 C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015 Liquid sight, thing-like words 583 aback by her response and immediately said that she herself was not a religious ‘fanatic’. The misa had begun with several messages on the part of the older medium, H., who said she perceived some obstacles to do with the house and with official papers involved in a move. But contrary to the norm, Lourdes did not verify or deny this information, leaving H. to her own tenuous explorations of her visions, which soon came to a halt. Now, in one last stab at achieving some semblance of sense, H. told Lourdes that she saw her leaving the country, a generally very desirable vision, but to which the immediate, sarcastic response was: ‘I have no intention of ever leaving this country’.The misa soon lost its dynamic: the mediums grasped at straws of information seemingly bubbling around them, received them fleetingly, without control, and communicated them, only to have them subsequently shot down by Lourdes, who became increasingly impatient at what she perceived to be the espiritistas’ incompetence. The misa came to a stunted impasse; an embarrassing end for the two hired mediums produced, in no small measure, by Lourdes’s constant and arrogant interruptions of its flow. It was not the last time that I was to observe this knowledge impasse, equal, in espiritista terms, to a collapse in the intensity and flow of fluido, literally ‘fluid’. Fluido is understood both as a semi-material substance that spirits bring,sometimesreferred to as corrientes espirituales or their residue, and knowledge itself, in fluid, virtual (uninstantiated) form. ‘Mediums are not machines’, says Leonel, who has been an espiritista since he was a child; ‘we can’t switch on and off at will’. For Leonel, there are countless variables that influence the outcome of a misa or an oracle in espiritismo. On saying this he was partly responding to his partner’s irritation at having attended a not altogether successful consultation with a famed medium in West Havana. The espiritista in question had apparently failed to ‘see’ some quite apparent facts about Leonel’s partner Elmer, who had, nevertheless, come to the conclusion that his own scepticism had interfered with the espiritista’s ability to summon up good, accurate knowledge. He admitted that he had kept saying ‘no’ to the assertions she made, which had probably dissipated whatever good fluido had been achieved at the start, which he reluctantly admitted having felt himself. Like most Cubans who seek divinatory counsel, Elmer’s parsing of the consultation’s efficacy was not an absolute verdict either on this espiritista’s ability to produce solid knowledge – whether about the status quo or the future – in other hypothetical circumstances, or on espiritismo’s more general claim to successfully produce evidence and insight from the muertos.Instead,itwasa commentary on the quality of knowledge achieved in the specific context in which he, as participant, was inevitably embedded. As Daniel Halperin (1995), Paul Johnson (2002), Edward Schieffelin (1996), Kristina Wirtz (2007), and others have demonstrated in a variety of spirit possession contexts, believers are often the harshest of critics. Certainly, scepticism, gossip, and post-ritual analysis are constitutive components of internal validation processes. But a closer look at the nature of knowledge here reveals more than power relations or politics of legitimation in a given social and religious climate. It points to the need to understand the very ‘stuff’ or substance of mediums and spirits in this context and the logics underpinning its manipulation and transformation. This inevitably has a close connection with notions of the person in espiritismo. All versions of Cuban espiritismo ultimately stem from nineteenth-century mystical renditions of death, the afterlife, and its laws of reincarnation and progress, from which notionssuchasfluido draw in the first place. Sharp argues that French secular , transformed into a movement, , by pedagogue from the 1850s,

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spoke of an imponderable substance that acted upon matter, an idea it borrowed from strands of post-Newtonian pseudo-science, particularly those wielded by Mesmerism (2006: 127). Magnestists, led by Anton Mesmer, used their knowledge of a magnetic fluid, described as a universally diffused medium that acted in and between animated bodies, to cure their patients’ imbalances. Many believed this fluid to have an ‘extra- natural source’,and while there were rivalries between the two groups, according to Lynn Sharp, ‘spiritist mediums often contacted their spirits through trances brought about by magnetists’ (2006: 127). Indeed, central to French Spiritism was that spirits could act on matter precisely because they were ‘enveloped’ by a semi-material substance that Kardec called a p´erispirit, allowing them to influence planchettes, tables, or the mediums’ arms while they wrote (Sharp 2006: 128). This ‘fluidity’ would make of matter and thought two sides of the soul (Sharp 2006: 128), and spurn what in they would call ‘passes’, acts of passing on the spirits’ fluids to a person in need by the laying on of hands (see Cavalcanti 2008 [1983]). ‘Fluids’, in Brazil, are thought to be the spirits’ vehicles of thought and the means by which spirits affect people. In a study of Puerto Rican Spiritism, which applies also to the Cuban context, Joan Koss (1988) alludes to the symptoms that such fluidos may produce:

energyenteringthestomachandleavingtheheadormovinglikeasnakeinthebody,fluidoslike sexual energy, buzzing sounds, body lightness, rapid thinking, feelings of contentment and relaxation in the presence of a good spirit, feelings of nervousness, fatigue or fear in the presence of a bad spirit (cited in Romberg 2009: 202). Cuban versions of espiritismo employ an entrenched concept of fluido tied irremediably to the presence of spirits. For instance, the elite ‘scientific’ espiritismo communities in Havana, who promote doctrinal study and stricter spiritual rites, often produce texts by means of (psychography) or give speeches insitigated by inspiration thought to come through spiritual fluids. Equally, espiritismo ‘de cordon’, a practice from eastern Cuba whereby mediums join hands (in a ‘cord’) and enter into trance by making specific gestures and movements of the body, backwards and forwards, applies the language of fluids to bodily processes and effects. As Enrique, a cordonero, told me once:

The cord´on rituals are extremely physical . . . and provide a way for the spirit to let go (desahogar), a way for the medium of controlling the spirits’ fluidos such that they do not damage him or her. This is particularly important when one is developing as the fluido from the spirit is experienced in a totally new physical way, and people don’t always know how to breathe until they getusedtoit. In these two examples, fluido can both translate to knowledge (‘scientific’ espiritismo) and modify or affect the matter that absorbs it (‘cord´on’). Although founded on these esoteric European visions of spiritual evolution and scientific spirituality, in Cuba diffused forms of espiritismo nevertheless developed in close partnership with local Afro-Cuban cosmologies. Indeed, this is so much the case that its most pervasive ‘version’ is routinely called ‘crossed’ (cruzado)by both anthropologists and practitioners (Millet 1996), even if, as Reinaldo Roman´ (2007) notes, neat divisions of ‘popular’ versus ‘scientific’ espiritismo do violence to the larger ideological tides from which such categories discursively emerged. In its popular version in Havana, Cuban Creole espiritismo furnishes its wider religious ecology with a technology for discerning, catering to, and appeasing the dead (Brandon 1997;Palmie´ 2002); more specifically, the ancestors in the West

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African-inspired Santer´ıa, and the nfumbe in Bantu-Congo-associated practices of Monte. Diffuse forms of espiritismo also contribute in decisive ways towards the larger informal religious pragmatics of Havana, constituting an important link in what has become a predominant ethic of person-centred strategies (formal and informal) in the achievement of health and social and economic well-being (cf. Brotherton 2012; Wedel 2004). But the presence of spiritist imaginaries in the Afro-Cuban field has done more than add a means by which to access the dead: it has significantly redefined the believer’s sensory environment (Wirtz 2014). The dead are not transcendent, like Santer´ıa’s Cuban-Yoruba oricha deites (whose truths are discerned through cowry-shell oracles, cf. Holbraad 2008), but fully immanent (Ochoa 2007), visceral even. Indeed, some muertos even stake a claim to a person’s selfhood, namely by comprising sets of guides (called a cord´on espiritual) that are thought not just to protect a person throughout the course of his or her life, but also to directly affect his or her personality and destiny (Esp´ırito Santo 2012). Communicating with these muertos is tantamount to communicating with aspects of one’s self; developing them, materially, somatically, imagetically, and in trance, is tantamount to instantiating one’s plain existence and its possibilities. Most of all, then, espiritismo furnishes its spiritual environment with mechanisms of knowledge-generation through the education of modes of perception through being. Two observations in particular can be made from this starting-point. The first is that knowledge is subject not just to the perceptive idiosyncrasies of what could be called a spirit-person ‘system’,but also to its bases of articulation. One of these is suggested by the salience of tropes or metaphors of fluidity, liquidity, and movement in the description of visual imagery. But fluidity here is not merely a descriptive device for ‘seeing’ fluidly: ‘fluid’ or ‘liquid’ is the manner in which knowledge (as well as spirits) presents itself in the first place. The second observation that can be made is that language acts as the trigger and vehicle of this fluidity – not in the semantic sense of carrying its meaning, but in the far more crude sense of carving out intentional form and movement from its multiplicity. Without words, fluido does not attain the necessary viscosity to gain form and content as knowledge and spirit. Instead, it becomes heavy, immobile, unusable, and a liability to the medium’s physical well-being.

The substance of flow and thing-like words 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, from premonitions, images, and revelations that spontaneously appear in the mind, as well as to make use of the less mediated information-retrieval technique of trance. To have luz larga (long vision – long light) is, in this sense, to be able to trust that these are knowledge, rather than inventions of the psyche. The challenge is to tell the difference between specific imagery received in the ‘mind’s eye’ (‘internally produced’ information, as Deena Newman [1999]would say) 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. The learning process is long and steeped in obstacles born from the conscious mind. It is no wonder that mediums begin to develop themselves in quiet, private environments. As Montalbo, a young espiritista says: ‘I have always tried, when I’m sitting at my , to leave my mind

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blank so I can let the spirit’s fluido get to me. I call him [the spirit], and sometimes I see him working on something . . . I know he’s here next to me, I see him’. For Montalbo, his spirit comes not through but as fluido. Among the most ubiquitous of such ‘seeing’ experiences is dreaming, which has been compared, by some of my interlocutors, to a state of unconscious possession, a sort of ‘death state’ where an individual’s physical and mental boundaries are diluted in absolute. Dreaming here would constitute not a window into an alternate or imaginal reality, but an extension of sight into domains contiguous with waking reality (cf. Maitland Dean 1993). It is no coincidence that mediums often report entering into trance while asleep. But dreaming is not simply an aspect or quality of mediumship; in many ways, it epitomizes a Cuban espiritismo concern with visual imagery, and, more particularly, with flow and fluidity. Espiritistas are wont to articulate their visions as if these were playing themselves out in a reel of film: lo veo como una pel´ıcula, many will say. Indeed, the body is routinely referred to by espiritistas as mat´eria, that is, a material canvas for this flow. But what mediums describe as a ‘flow’ is not a metaphor for a feeling but a physical, moving ‘thing’ with varying degrees of density and variable qualities, and, importantly, with physiological impact. This is evident from what some espiritistas consider to be the dangers of trance. Armando, a 60-year-old espiritista who is well known in Havana for his studious approach, asserts that trance can often be highly dangerous because ‘losespiritusavecesdejansusfluidos’ (the spirits sometimes leave their fluids), a part of them which is not fully gone, which can become manifest in the living through the symptoms of the illnesses they had in life, and perhaps died from. Indeed, the physical dimension of fluido is one of the first signs of spirit presence – mediums will report feeling chills, goose bumps, electric sensations in the spine and head, or, more ominously, headaches, nausea, and mental confusion, as well as peaks of lucidity and consciousness, as mentioned above. The education of the mediumship faculty involves, among other things, learning to discern the subtleties of this fluido and to be able to productively draw from it strings of valid information, insight, and imagery. This near equivalence of fluido and knowledge is articulated by Israel, a young but experienced medium who teaches his novices that messages from the spirits can cause harm when they come from illicit (non-authorized) spirits. According to him, negative communications – in the shape of bad fluidos – can risk causing even a medium’s physical death. Here medium and message collapse tragically – the substance of knowledge can have pervasive, consuming effects. Israel’s warning reveals the ultimate importance of communication and words to the sensing of fluidos and their transformation into articulate, propositional knowledge; but also their relationship to the body. Mediums feel, see, and hear; but above all, they speak, and through speech, they activate and intensify further fluido. This prerogative of transmission is so constitutive of a medium’s identity and function that its blockage is potentially detrimental to his or her health. Much like the spiritual currents flattened by scepticism and obnoxiousness in Lourdes’s misa, a medium may him- or herself flatten spiritual knowledge flows by his or her reluctance to give voice and direction to fluido, trapping its impetus in a body that may become scarred and even annihilated by its own silence. Stories of naturally talented yet stubbornly sceptical (or, worse, Communist and atheist) mediums meeting with crippling illnesses, or even the wrath of unacknowledged muertos, circulate widely. In the greater cosmic scheme of espiritismo, where concepts of ‘service’ and ‘mission’ hold weight, refusing to assume a -determined role whose physiological

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 579-596 C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015 Liquid sight, thing-like words 587 dimensions are so implicit can have equally resounding physiological and mental effects. 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, 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 projected on there.

Ana says that often she experiences overwhelming pressure by her spirits to say things to others. She feels an intense sensation mounting 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 who 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 involuntary possession. Knowledge, Ana suggests, has weight, literally. Expressing it is akin to making knowledge from fluido. As the initial example in this article shows, misas are prime examples of how knowledge (and thus evidence) can be curtailed by the obstruction of fluido, namely through the blocking of language flow. One of the golden rules of developing as a medium is learning to speak. Ana often chastises her spiritual godchildren if she feels they are holding back at her weekly development misas, called escuelitas (little schools). ‘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 crushes espiritismo’s unfolding cosmology of spirits just as allowing it to flow unimpeded is a catalyst for the intensification of the presence of muertos and their informational synergies. But communication has caveats, which quickly turn into polemics. Espiritismo circles are replete with scathing criticisms of one or another medium for delivering their messages in an unrefined or abrupt manner, thereby severing links of trust to vulnerable 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 or propriety. Eduardo, for example, sustains that the more a person instructs him- or herself and amplifies his or her range of intellectual knowledge, the more detailed and clear the information that reaches his or her hands through the exercise of mediumship. More importantly, there is a greater possibility that the muertos will allow themselves to be seen. According to Eduardo, a knowledgeable conceptual language, reflected through an ability to speak eloquently and precisely, is also a means of seeing, or precipitating knowledge in the first place. Ethnographic concerns with the efficacy of religious language require a rudimentary deconstruction of the notion of agency itself, argues Webb Keane (1997: 675). Keane describes how in the speech of ancestral Sumbanese ritualists in Indonesia, ‘the signs of power are conceived to be generated by a source that remains distinct from the bodily individuals who wield them’ (1997: 675), making ritual language efficacious in acting against a world of invisible agents. The counterpart Western understanding of language became patent through incoming Protestant Christian , who viewed the religious specialists’ ascription of power to language as fetishist at best – a confounding of object and subject, interior and exterior (Keane 1997: 682). Sumbanese ritualist language neither originated necessarily in the speaker nor conveyed a set of

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propositions (Keane 1997: 684), but was instead designed to do something, to intervene in the world. This is one of the underlying premises of Simon Coleman’s analysis of a Charismatic Protestant group in Sweden, for whom sacred words are not vessels for meaning but means of changing, pervading, and filling the self, sometimes in a very physical sense (2006: 165). Words are ‘thing-like’, Coleman says; if for Keane’s eastern Indonesians words derive their power from ancestors, among the The Word of Life Christians, they are object-like containers of the living influence of God (Coleman 2006: 173), transmissible and impactful. These two examples are useful in deploying a series of images that dissolve normative views of language as ontologically non- interventional, much as Magnus Course does in his analysis of what he calls the ‘excess force’ of language among the Mapuche in Chile, given not by words themselves but by an underlying force constitutive of all beings (2012: 2). Practitioners of Afro-Cuban religion are themselves no strangers to the force of languages used for myriad rites that often remain opaque even to them, such as is the case with Yoruba chants and prayers during Santer´ıa ceremonies. In this context, words sanctify religious materials and sacrificial offerings, cleanse the heads of the sick or distraught, appease restless ancestors, and build bridges between human beings and gods, all with little or no direct semantic awareness on the part of those who dispatch them into the world. In espiritismo, too, speaking activates the semi-autonomous substance that is fluido, as latent knowledge. But here words matter because they serve to focus on, objectify, and thus create form (spirits, visions, propositional knowledge) from the ontological potential of any given mediumistic moment. Thus, in contrast to much ritual language in Santer´ıa and in Palo Monte, most of which is formulaic and linguistically foreign to speakers, espiritismo relies on the largely spontaneous, engaged, and creative character of participants’ subjectivities. Through descriptive language, mediums interact with and direct flow, instigating the self-organization and emergence of knowledge as new cosmology comes to the fore, responding to such descriptions. This means that words are ultimately entwined with mediumistic ‘sight’,as espiritismo’s prime modus operandi.

Seeing knowledge At first glance, practitioners of Afro-Cuban religions seem to epitomize so-called ‘Western’ hyper-visualist discourse. In Havana, 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 scepticism, couched as a that 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, etc.) – the lack of which may disrupt or sever religious commitment. 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, espiritistas appeal and sing to St Clara, a popular Catholic mystical figure associated with ocular health, in order to strengthen spiritual ‘clarity’ and ‘reach’, or to unfog the trappings of occult witchcraft. While this may seem an obvious connection – after all, in Spanish, vidente, seer, is another word for medium (and in fact, as Maurice Bloch [2008] has shown, this may

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 579-596 C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015 Liquid sight, thing-like words 589 well be a universal tendency) – I would like to suggest in this section that, if espiritista practices at first appear to corroborate a visualist bias, they simultaneously challenge the equally visualist notion that what is ‘seen’ exists prior to the act of ‘seeing’ as well as describing, which, far from passive or contemplative or referential, is a creative act. The main point that I will make is 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). This implies 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. Again, this suggests that knowledge is not the corollary of perceiving or capturing, 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 hyper-constructionism that is at odds, at the same time, with the notion that seeing, and thus knowing, is an individual, representational endeavour. If knowledge exists through its expression, as the last section aimed to demonstrate, then ‘sight’ may also be enabled through and with others through collective forms of expression. The necessary relationship between expressing/making knowledge and seeing it is never more evident than in the context of a misa espiritual. 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 form. The term cuadro espiritual refers to an image, a piece of information, or a set of knowledge about and for someone that hangs together as a coherent whole, but which gradually takes shape, like the brush-strokes of a painter which slowly come to resemble something recognizable. While in the context of an individual consultation a medium will engage in describing a cuadro only he or 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, born from the fluido immanent among a group of people at a given time, can turn into a detailed and informative prediction or 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 progressively in three dimensions, with the exteriorization process reflecting the processual and emergent nature of collective knowing. Mediums say a particular feature of a cuadro only becomes ‘visible’ once it has been described, put in language, and released into the mediumistic space; it is knowledge actualized at that moment, which then and only then becomes accessible as something to work with under 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 Monte (the ‘presentation’) and whose family spirits require some attention.

O:Iseeinyourcord´on espiritual a man [O. describes this spirit’s physical appearance in detail]. F: It’s my grandfather’s brother, I think.

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O: This person has much to do with your constant camino [path], 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, very often sorcery] 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’. I confirm! O:Yes...therewasatrabajo [a sorcery ‘job’] 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 acci´on [influence, through a muerto]ofSanLazaro´ [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 Lazaro´ 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 palo duro [a type of stick] with a red and purple ribbon on it [purple is the colour of San Lazaro].´ J: She has a profound family arrastre this girl . . . I see this same African spirit too, but he does a desdoble [a metamorphosis] 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 Yemayaand´ Ochun´ [deities associated with the sea and river, respectively, in Santer´ıa], 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 begins with a simple message – O.’s vision of F.’s male kin spirit – unfolds 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 and expressing the first muerto, and thus publicly materializing it, the first medium effectively unleashes the possibility of developing a common cuadro, allowing for the subsequent and incremental contribution of all other mediums. In the best of cases, a cuadro is a manifestation of 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 the spiritual relationships in any one given mediumistic moment, and thus also of the selves of those implicated in it. 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 is telling. In his critique of the recent turn to the ‘anthropology of the senses’, Tim Ingold (2000) 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 (Ingold 2000: 281–2); thus ‘our’

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 579-596 C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015 Liquid sight, thing-like words 591 own hyper-visualist aesthetic. This is not simply exaggerated and reductionist, says Ingold, but, indeed, it obscures 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’ (2000: 283, original emphasis) – sensory experience is assumed to model or reflect culture, rather than constitute 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’ (2000: 283, original emphasis). We may be 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 2000: 283), or the assumption that people ‘represent’ their world in order to make sense of it. The general undercurrents of Ingold’s arguments are probably familiar to the reader. The obvious point here is that in this ethnographic context vision cannot be construed analytically if it is not disentangled from the premise of representationalism that normatively accompanies it. In Cuban spirit mediumship practices, vision, like ritual- descriptive speech, does not exist to simply or only represent, but to (re-)create or refashion a world and the things in it. Knowledge is, as I have demonstrated in the previous section, a mobile thing, indistinguishable at times from the spirits themselves, in fluid form. But it does not necessarily reduce to individual sensations and their imprint, being, at the same time, a product of collective efforts in public rites.

Selves and substances: a conclusion The question of what knowledge ‘represents’ and how it is ‘represented’ has been a central one in Afro- and Latin contexts, entangling with it questions of social and historical memory and its transatlantic racial cosmographies and moral economies (Johnson 2014a;Palmie´ 2002; 2008;Pares´ & Sansi 2011;Routon2008). Knowledge in this morally and historically laden context necessarily says something – about history, oppression, race, social marginality, suffering, reconciliation, empowerment, critique, irony, imagination, the human spirit, and so on. These categories can be practically carved out of the ‘excess’ that spirit possession religions generate for ethnographers. Questions of power and agency over the body and its history, for instance, seem more than implicit. As Paul Johnson argues,

The history of slavery hovers over and chains together the tropes of spirit possession, material possessions, and possessable persons. That legacy may not determine contemporary ritual performance, but at least in the context of the religions of African Americans it is often present, sometimes overtly and consciously, sometimes as a barely audible drone or a scar only just visible (2014b: 6).

It may be unsurprising, then, that one of the main analytical frames employed by scholars of such traditions is one of ‘performance’ (of knowledge). In her analysis of some of the spirit possession literature that follows this line, for instance, Carrie Viarnes´ sees these scholars suggesting that ‘in possession, during the moment when the self is split (or forgotten), cultural history as it is imagined literally inhabits the present as the dead manifest themselves in the bodies of the living, and aspects of the (colonial)

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past, even if they cannot be spoken, are acknowledged through performance’ (2007: 132). In contrast, the material I have expounded here has been suspiciously bereft of such concerns, as important as they are. This is not just because I deeply contest the notion that espiritista rites are somehow embodied performances of or commentaries on the historical representations of their larger communities (which is clearly not the same thing as saying that there is no connection between Cuban spirit forms and collective memory or imagination), but because my concerns in Cuban Creole espiritismo have tended to be on the side of something ‘made’ rather than something ‘represented’. In the light of an ontology that refuses to prioritize one over the other, questions of knowledge production in espiritismo are necessarily questions of self- production. In the context of the ethnography I have presented in this article, concerns with fakery, authenticity, and discourses of legitimacy in spirit possession knowledge seem important, yet largely secondary, questions, relative to the broader creative or, better, cosmogonic dynamics at play. However, the only way to unwind this assertion is to begin from the premise that the body-mind is not a vessel for meaning but instead produces itself in an emergent and ongoing fashion – it is collaborative, not just in terms of social others, who witness, condone, and build on a person’s self-knowledge, nor in relation to a material environment, which exteriorizes and extends the reflexive self, but, more fundamentally, in relation to itself. In other words, it is knowledge. In as much as mediums construct their self-concepts through modes of spiritual evocation, interaction, expression, and internalization over time, espiritismo presents us with selves that are, in an essential and non-reductive sense, constituted on knowledge, that is, spirit perspectives and corresponding substances. We could say here that bodies, too, are not the recipients of knowledge, nor a ‘material substrate upon which meaning is encoded’ (Conklin & Morgan 1996: 670), but are meaning or meanings themselves, literally, physically. Approaches that emphasize the collaborative and substantive intersubjective dimension of self-making processes are thus better equipped to ground espiritismo’s ontology of knowledge and its dividends. For instance, in her ethnography of Akan and Ewe priests and shrine objects in Ghana, Miho Ishii (2012) follows the work of philosopher of science Hideo Kawamoto in suggesting that selves are never produced on their own but in matrices of emergent coherence enabled by co-actions and co- actants, animate or not. Among the priests, she argues, the process of creating and shaping the suman magical idols is never fully idealized nor controlled in practice, but rather is infused with the indeterminacy and virtuality inherent in collaborative affairs (Ishhii 2012: 381): ‘We see, then, that the power of the suman is manifest and recognized only through the effect of connecting various actors and expanding social relations’ (2012: 382). Ishii’s analysis recognizes something that espiritistas do too: that self, like knowledge, or indeed material creations, exists and takes shape only as it is ‘laid down in walking’, in the words of Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch (2000: 205). But as I have attempted to show through ethnographic examples, conocimiento in espiritismo does not behave according to conceptions of knowledge as fact, certainty, or truth, accumulated by a person or a society through study, experience, trust in others, or otherwise, distinguishable, say, from belief, fantasy, or illusion. Rather, epistemology, the nature and scope of knowledge, itself participates in ontology, in as much as perceiving (seeing/describing) directly impinges upon the creation of a momentary world. This

Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.) 21, 579-596 C Royal Anthropological Institute 2015 Liquid sight, thing-like words 593 means that definitions of ‘true’ knowledge are necessarily tied to notions of ‘good’ knowledge, with implications for a view of knowledge as a variably intense, moving, or flowing thing, with all its opposites possible. Thus, we could say that espiritistas are less idealists than vitalists, where reality is experienced as animated or constituted by some substance, energy, or ´elan vital that confers a particular truth or quality upon a given set of persons in a ritual context and beyond. This vitalism has obvious roots. Jeffrey Sconce, for instance, argues that the Euro-American Spiritualist movement articulated some of the era’s first fantasies of disembodied consciousness and communication, influenced as they were by their contemporary pseudo-scientific concepts of universal substances, such as ‘ether’ (2000: 63), or animal magnetism. But there is more at stake: the person. Marcio Goldman’s analysis of Brazilian Candomble´ points in the right direction. Goldman (2005) argues that for Candomble´ priests, both gods and people are ‘made’ through initiation, a years-long process which takes the person from a relatively indifferentiated being to a structured self. In this ontology, existence itself is relative – ‘being’ occurs on a scale – while everything in the universe is ultimately a modulation or crystallization of ach´e, a sacred force out of which all entities emerge. It is no wonder that Goldman revives the Levy-Bruhlian´ notion of ‘participation’ to elucidate the logics of these processes of becoming. In espiritismo, too, developing mediumship, a lengthy process referred to as desarrollando muertos (developing the dead), is a process of conquering and expanding one’s own being in its known and imagined potential – given, primarily, via the protective dead and their respective influences: talents, interests, intelligence, whims, vices, physical propensities, inspirations. In this co-developing constellation, muertos are made as persons are; not ‘in here’, as ideas of spirits, but ‘out there’, as moving, acting bodies, born from what Kristina Wirtz calls ‘perspicience’, the experiential and sensorial aspect of conocimiento (2014: 125). However, it is not enough to look at the education and tuning of the embodied self in this context. Conocimiento is not simply lucidity or perception but that which perception bumps up against, taking form as it does so. If articulated knowledge is the result of ongoing constructive ‘seeing’ and expression, then fluido is its ground source, its prima materia, whose continued flow (in and through persons, or in ritual contexts) depends precisely on those actions. What I have argued in this article is that the circulation of knowledge ‘substances’ in espiritismo should be dealt with not metaphorically, but as intimately bound to the making of persons through processes of perception, sensation, and speech, which, in turn, create particular reality effects/possibilities. This means that knowledge is neither just ‘symbolic’ nor just ‘material’, but an emergent, mutable, circulating ‘thing’ with powerful dividends for the self.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my interlocutors in Cuba for sharing their stories and perspectives, especially Leonel Verdeja and Eduardo Silva. The ethnographic data from which this article draws were made possible by research funds from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Fundac¸aoparaaCi˜ enciaˆ e Tecnologia, to whom I am grateful (particularly the FCT project PTDC/CS-ANT/114825/2009, 2011–2014 led by David Picard). I am also thankful to Ruy Blanes, Ramon Sarro,´ Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, and Katie Swancutt for comments on a very early draft of this article presented at the workshop ‘I Know What I Saw’, hosted by the London

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School of Economics in 2013. Finally, I am grateful to JRAI’s three anonymous reviewers.

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Vision liquides, mots-choses et precipitation´ des substances du savoir dans le spiritisme cubain R´esum´e L’auteure avance que dans les pratiques de l’espiritismo des Creoles´ cubains, les « connaissances » produites par le rituel ont des effets ontologiques et pas seulement epist´ emologiques,´ quel que soit le roleˆ de la cognition. Elle montre que la connaissance est vecue´ comme une « substance » fluide et mobile, exterieure´ au corps, qui peut s’accumuler, peser, rester en suspens et s’evaporer.´ Cette substance est aussi sensible au discours descriptif des mediums,´ devenant un objet de connaissance visionnaire en memeˆ temps qu’elle est vue et verbalisee´ collectivement. L’article montre que la circulation des « substances » de la connaissance n’est pas metaphorique´ mais liee´ aux processus qui fabriquent les personnes, et pose la question de savoir si la connaissance peut apparaˆıtre non seulement comme quelque chose d’intersubjectif et de relationnel mais comme quelque chose de substantiel, voire de physiologique.

Diana Esp´ırito Santo (Ph.D., University of London, 2009) is currently an Assistant Professor of Social Anthropology at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica´ de Chile. Her work has centred on Afro-Cuban religion and Creole epiritismo in Havana and, more recently, Umbanda in Rio de Janeiro and Sao˜ Paulo.

Programa de Antropologia, Instituto de Sociologia, Pontificia Universidad Cat´olica de Chile, Vicu˜na MackKenna 4860, Santiago, Chile. gimmefi[email protected]

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