Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo/Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santería

Abstract

Diana Espirito santo, Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2015) cloth 338pp. IsBN: 9780813060781Kristine Juncker, Afro-Cuban Religious Arts: Popular Expressions of Cultural Inheritance in Espiritismo and Santeria (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2014) cloth 216pp. IsBN: 9780813049700If you thought that religious practices in Cuba were more or less the same as in the rest of Central and South America, these two books published by University Press of Florida quickly dispel these misapprehensions.Although Cuba's most widespread religion is Christianity, primarily Roman Catholicism, in some cases it has been greatly reshaped by syncretism. As is widely known, the most popular of these syncretic religions is Santeria, which combines the Yoruba religion of the African slaves with Catholicism and some Native American elements. It includes the worship of the Orisha - head guardians - and religious beliefs of the Yoruba and Bantu people who inhabited what is now Southern Nigeria, Senegal and Guinea Coast. These are combined with elements of Roman Catholicism. Arriving as slaves in the Caribbean, Santerians preserved the elements of their religion by equating each Orisha of their traditional religions with a corresponding Christian Saint. However, as well as the syncretic religions, what is less widely known is a widespread adherence to a form of communicating with the spirit world known as espiritismo.Diana Espirito Santo's book Developing the Dead, first, takes this on with a confidence which is based on extensive fieldwork among espiritistas and their patrons in Havana, and she makes the compelling espiritistas that Spiritist practices are basically a project of developing the self. Diana's name in itself is interesting, meaning Holy Spirit, and I presume that this is not a nom de plume. But, for me, the project of developing the self is a concept that is not an easy one to grasp. However, Diana, assistant professor of social anthropology at the Institute of Sociology, Pontifical, Universidad Catolica de Chile, has taken on the subject with confidence and puts the whole topic with great ease into the political framework of Cuba, right from the early days of the revolution, through the desperate days of Cuba's break with the Soviet Union after its break-up, right to the present day. I found explaining this political background to be extremely useful, especially how, initially, all forms of religion were frowned upon by the socialist government, principally because the Catholic Church in Cuba colluded with the US in smuggling out children from the island so that they would not be con- taminated by a form of politics that did not sit well with the larger neighbour.This is a fascinating topic, with probably as many different forms of this practice as there are practitioners. The author argues cogently that when mediums cultivate relationships between the living and the dead, they develop, sense, dream and connect to multiple spirits - muertos - and, by so doing, expand the borders of the self. Of course, this is a concept that readers in the West (and probably much of the East) will have difficulty in coming to terms with and I take my hat off to the University Press of Florida for publishing these two books. Never having experienced anything remotely like this myself, the whole study has, for me, an air of surrealism and when the author takes us through the various steps that she painstakingly describes, one is left feeling astounded and thrilled that a Western academic was allowed to take part in and learn about these practices. For instance, the author calmly recounts,I learned that my cordon espiritual comprises the spirit of a devoted young nun, wearing a long chain with a cross and a wooden rosary around her neck, who belonged to some order of the Carmelites, as well as an older man, a mother superior, an Iberian gypsy woman who was fiercely independent and seductive; a Hungarian woman who presents herself before the mediums in traditional folkloric costume, a competent Jewish accountant or paper pusher who is usually seen in a black suit with a briefcase and a peculiar ornamental hat, suggesting the Middle East; a monk in rags, a pilgrim or travelling missionary of some sort . …