Despite its powerful influence on Cuban culture, Espiritismo has often been overlooked by scholars. Developing the Dead is the first in-depth exploration of contemporary Espiritismo in Cuba. Based on extensive fieldwork among religious practitioners and their clients in Havana, this book makes the surprising claim that Spiritist practices are fundamentally a project of developing the self. When mediums cultivate relationships between the living and the dead, argues Diana Espirito Santo, they develop, learn, sense, dream, and connect to multiple spirits (muertos), expanding the borders of the self. This understanding of selfhood is radically different fromEnlightenment ideas of an autonomous, bounded self and holds fascinating implications for prophecy, healing, and self-consciousness. Developing the Dead shows how Espiritismo's self-making process permeates all aspects of life, not only for its own practitioners but also for those of other Afro-Cuban religions.

Exploring how technological apparatuses "capture" invisible worlds, this book looks at how spirits, UFOs, discarnate entities, spectral energies, atmospheric forces and particles are mattered into existence by human minds. Technological and scientific discourse has always been central to the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century spiritualist quest for legitimacy, but as this book shows, machines, people, and invisible beings are much more ontologically entangled in their definitions and constitution than we would expect. The book shows this entanglement through a series of contemporary case studies where the realm of the invisible arises through technological engagement, and where the paranormal intertwines with modern technology.

Afro-Cuban religiosity is likely to bring to mind beliefs and practices with a visibly 'African' flavour - music, dance, spirit possession, sacrifices and ritual language that have undergone a transformation, on Cuban soil, under a strong Spanish and Catholic influence. Much anthropological work has analysed Afro-Cuban religion's 'syncretic' character in the light of these European influences, taking as a given that each tradition is relatively independent, and focusing on well-documented origins in specific socio-historical environments. In this context, understandings of religious innovation based on charismatic leaders have resulted in a top down approach. However, this volume argues that there are alternatives to cult-centred accounts, by looking at the relationships between Afro-Cuban traditions, and indeed going beyond 'traditions' to place the focus on creativity as an embedded logic in everyday religious practice. From this forward-looking perspective, ritual engagement is no longer a means of recreating pre-existing universes but rather of generating, as well as participating in, an ever-emerging cosmos. Traditions are not perceived as given doctrines or mental constructs but as perceptual habits and potencies beyond questions of spirit or matter, mind or body. Offering a fresh, improvisatory ethnographic vision, this book recasts the Afro-Cuban religious complex in the terms of the experts and adepts who creatively sustain it and responds to the significant fact, often overlooked or ignored, that many Cubans engage with more than one tradition without any sense of conflict. Amidst the cacophony of calls to 'creativity' and 'innovation' as cultural commodities, here's a remarkable collection about the power of creation as a condition of human existence, rather than just its outcome. If you want to see what the world might be like without the very distinction between creator and creation - or, for that matter, between human beings and the worlds they inhabit - then look at Afro-Cuban religious traditions, the editors tell us. The sheer vivacity of the material is astounding, and suggests altogether new ways to think about not just the classic concerns of Caribbean anthropology with syncretism and cultural borrowings, but also basic categories of anthropological thinking such as ritual, technology, myth and cosmology. Martin Holbraad, Professor of Social Anthropology, University College London Beyond Tradition, Beyond Invention shows how far scholarship has transcended the verificationist searches for origins, reification of traditions as bounded entities, and sterile quests for typological coherence that, for too long, dominated the anthropology of Afro-Caribbean ritual praxis. The contributions not only vividly exemplify how mechanistic conceptions of tradition and cultural change, or pseudo-problems such as syncretism, can be overcome by ethnographic means. They also point towards novel theories of the ever emergent, hence thoroughly historical, nature of worlds shared by humans, deities, and spirits. This book ought to inspire all anthropologists working on complex and 'inventive' ritual traditions. Stephan Palmie, Professor of Anthropology, The University of Chicago"

When approaching the multiplicity of the spiritual experiences of healing, ethnographers are often presented with ideas of the existence of "other" worlds that may intersect with the so-called "material" or "physical" worlds. This book proposes a sensory ethnography of healing with a focus on ethnographic knowing as embedded in an embodied epistemology of healing. Epistemological embodiment signals that personal scholarly experience of the "unknown"-be it in the form of trance, or as the embodiment of an "other"-shapes the concepts of healing, body, trance, self, and matter by which ethnographers craft out analysis.

This edited volume applies the analytic notions of paradox and play to the ethnographic manifestation of spirits, angels, and demons in different locations around the world. The 10 case studies conceptualize the co-presence of humans and entities with terms that do not exclude spiritual reasoning on the one hand, and social explanations on the other. Through in-depth descriptions of localized possession cosmologies, the different chapters collectively propose path-breaking methodological directions in this field, which incorporate ethnographic theories of simultaneity into anthropological theories of religion, kinship, and ritual. Framed by an introduction written by the editors and an afterword by Michael Lambek, a leading authority in possessions studies, the volume contains cutting edge analyses that will provide readers with new tools to evaluate previously unstudied aspects of spirit possession; all of which stem from the fantastic forms of human movement that accompany the phenomenality of paradoxes in mundane reality.

Spirited Histories combines ethnography with critical theory to provide a sophisticated exploration of the intersection of haunting and the paranormal with technology, media, and history. Retrieving the past in places of trauma and death can take on many facets. One of these is an attention to hauntings, ghosts, and absences that go with the collective experience of loss and disappearance. People memorialize the dead and their stories in myriad ways. But what about the untold stories, or the forgotten, unnamed? This book explores the ways groups of Chilean paranormal investigators and ghost tour operators produce alternate histories using paranormal machinery, rather than simply theatricalizing pain. It offers a look at technologies, machines, and apparatuses - themselves imbued with a long history of supernatural and scientific expectations - and a social analysis of how certain groups of people marshal the voices of the dead to generate particular micro-histories. This fascinating volume will be of interest to a range of disciplines, including anthropology, sociology, history, religious studies, and scholars of technology and new media.

The analysis of religion has often placed an emphasis on beliefs and ideologies, prioritizing these elements over those of the material world. Through the ethnographic analysis of a variety of contemporary religious practices, Making Spirits questions the presumed separation of spirit and matter, and sheds light on the dynamics between spiritual and material domains. By examining the cultural contexts in which material culture is central to the creation and experience of religion and belief, this volume analyses the different ways in which the concepts of the material and spiritual worlds intersect, interact and inform each other in the reproduction of religious rites. Using examples such as spirit mediums, fetishes and ritual objects across a variety of cultures such as Latin America, Japan and Central Africa, Nico Tassi and Diana Espirito Santo offer insights that challenge accepted categories in the study of religion, making this book important for scholars of comparative religion, anthropology and sociology.

Going beyond the frameworks of the anthropology of death, Articulate Necrographies offers a dramatic new way of studying the dead and their interactions with the living. Traditional anthropology has tended to dichotomize societies where death "speaks" from those where death is "silent" - the latter is deemed "scientific" and the former "religious" or "magical". The collection introduces the concept of "necrography" to describe the way death and the dead create their own kinds of biographies in and among the living, and asks what kinds of articulations and silences this in turn produces in the lives of those affected.

Spirits can be haunters, informants, possessors, and transformers of the living, but more than anything anthropologists have understood them as representations of something else - symbols that articulate facets of human experience in much the same way works of art do. The Social Life of Spirits challenges this notion. By stripping symbolism from the way we think about the spirit world, the contributors of this book uncover a livelier, more diverse environment of entities - with their own histories, motivations, and social interactions - providing a new understanding of spirits not as symbols, but as agents. The contributors tour the spiritual globe - the globe of nonthings - in essays on topics ranging from the Holy Ghost in southern Africa to spirits of the "people of the streets" in Rio de Janeiro to dragons and magic in Britain. Avoiding a reliance on religion and belief systems to explain the significance of spirits, they reimagine spirits in a rich network of social trajectories, ultimately arguing for a new ontological ground upon which to examine the intangible world and its interactions with the tangible one.