Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

Abstract

Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico. By Raquel Romberg. (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003. Pp. xvii + 315, preface, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, notes, bibliography, index. $50.00 cloth, $24.95 paper). This captivating work on Puerto Rican brujeria, or witch-healing, is a breakthrough study transcending geographic and disciplinary boundaries. Honoring the wishes of the bruja Haydee, a close collaborator during fieldwork, author Raquel Romberg will attempt to "let the world know what brujos really do" (xv) in contemporary capitalist Puerto Rico. Far from ethnicizing brujos as a group outside the mainstream, Romberg shows that they actively participate at the center of post-capitalist social systems while using their spiritual power and secular savvy as a means of enhancing their clients' spiritual and material well-being. Confounding widely held dichotomies of "materialist and spiritualist" or "worldly and cosmic," the author makes a compelling case for linkage between these extremes in the contemporary practice of brujeria. Romberg accomplishes her goals by combining multi-layered historical and ethnographic approaches. The historical first part traces brujeria from the Spanish Catholic period, when it was persecuted as heretical (1502 to 1860), through a period of nationalist discourse that marked brujeria as anti-progressive (the 1860s through the 1970s), and into the current phase, characterized by spiritual entrepreneurialism (1980 to the present). Relating brujeria to the broader arena of political, religious, economic, state, and globalization discourses, this section provides a critical apparatus for understanding the way contemporary brujeria is interwoven with the past and with other locales. Taking the reader deep into the daily practice of Haydee and other brujos, the book's second part presents what brujeria means to practitioners and clients in their everyday lives in Puerto Rico. For them, the spiritual world provides power and resources for well-being in this world, a conviction that boosts their pursuit of material prosperity without at all conflicting with their faith in brujeria. Taking advantage of the laissezfaire space open to them and even resorting to manipulation of the institutional power that until recent decades persecuted them, brujos as spiritual entrepreneurs today legitimately exercise power. They not only solve their clients' mundane problems but also enhance their worldly success, and in so doing, brujos increase their own fame and their potential to attract clients. Romberg interlaces her ethnographic observations with issues that are both current and residual in folklore, anthropology, and religious studies; these include globalization, transnationalism, and authenticity. …