Healing Dramas: Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

Abstract

Healing Dramas: Divination and Magic in Modern Puerto Rico By Raquel Romberg Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009 295 pages; $30.00 [paper] ISBN: 978-0-292-72350-4 Reviewer: Iris Zavala Martinez, The City University of New York-Center for Puerto Rican StudiesThis stimulating book takes us on a meditative but also curiously pragmatic ethnographic journey into the "drama of divination and magic rituals" as intimately experienced and reflected upon by the author ten years after her fieldwork in Puerto Rico. It traverses through the haunting closeness of the phenomenology of the "corporeal spirituality of brujeria" (p. 1), defined as "witch healing," to recapture the elusive and intense experiential space shared by healers and their participants. As she relives the taped interviews and re-creates her fieldwork notes, Romberg treats us to an ongoing process of self-observation and questioning of her own transformative process. For example, she wonders if the time distance from the original experience will affect her perception and attempt to provide "important ethnographic clues" of the spiritists' healing dramas, and privileges the reader to relive some of the author's own engaged experiences of the healing dramas and their irrepressible after-effects years later. On one occasion, she found herself mindlessly lighting a candle in memory of one who had passed. Seemingly, she too yearned for a transcendence that eluded erasure while asserting its captivating memory.Moreover, throughout this book of six chapters (and an Introduction and Epilogue), we are treated to a host of anthropological, socio-historical, philosophical, psychoanalytic, literary, and other references that infuse the work with rigor and amplitude, making for very challenging reading. Romberg observes, theorizes, analyzes, deconstructs gestures, actions, meanings. She is variously a scholar, a witness, a participant, an advocate, an accomplice, and a narrator. She intimates that her work was "a kind of 'gossip style' anthropology" that narrates and "entextualizes.... experience-based discourse" (p. 31). As such, we experience vicariously the relived and reconstructed dramas of her healers, through the "mimetic memories of a brujo" (Chapter 1); through the interpretative and theoretical ruminations of embodied, disembodied, healing, premonitory, and her own fieldwork dreams (Chapter 2); through the witnessing of dramatic, multiform sensuously somatized healing rituals that transmute into hypnotic trances (Chapters 3, 4, and 5); and through sojourns into nature, to the different magical spaces that potentiate healing and divination, embracing spiritual energies. The "gossips" of Haydee, Mauro, Ken, Basi, among others, reverberate throughout the book, but the added treat of transcribed healing sessions and photographs provide an unparalleled glimpse, if only for a fleeting moment, into the workings of the spiritual world.The dramas that Romberg documents evoke the "pragmatics of brujeria" as she strives to illustrate how healing manifests itself in the ritualistic process and how a participant's emotions, body, and self-knowledge are transformed by these magical rituals whether they are spirit-based or "brujeria." She wants to "illuminate the performative significance of healing rituals and magic works, their embodied nature, and their effectiveness in transforming the emotional, proprioceptive, and (to some extent) physiological states of participants" (pp. 6-7). She argues that "the intangibles of magic are manifested by the added dramatic denial of any playful artifice of correspondences, illustrating a form of embodied knowledge and feeling by proxy that connects the body of healers to the spiritual world by means of chains of resemblances and their skillful erasure" (p. 11). In essence, Romberg alleges that it is through these "chains of resemblances in discourse, body movement, the manipulation of objects, and the senses" and through these "obsessively mimetic corporeal aesthetics, exposed as manifestations of the otherwise concealed world of spirits" (p. …