Imagination Sensation and The Education PDF

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Imagination, Sensation and

the Education of Attention
Among Cuban Spirit Mediums
a
Diana Espirito Santo
a
Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
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the Education of Attention Among Cuban Spirit Mediums, Ethnos: Journal of
Anthropology, 77:2, 252-271
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Imagination, Sensation and the Education of
Attention Among Cuban Spirit Mediums
Diana Espirito Santo

Universidade de Lisboa, Portugal
abstract This article attempts to come to terms with the phenomenology of learning
in the popular Cuban spirit mediumship practice of espiritismo. Espiritistas’ talents
derive from the unique relationships they construct with their muertos (the protective
dead), allowing them to receive, discern, and interpret valuable information for others.
Learning here does not result from explicit knowledge transmission but from a guided
expansion of consciousness, where the neophyte learns to attend to the particulars of
the spirit world through his or her imagination and sensation. I associate this process
with what Ingold has described as the ‘education of attention’, and use his concept of
‘entanglement’ to propose that learning mediumship be conceptualized as implying the
development of a particular kind of person. I have further used Latour’s definition of
‘acquiring a body’ as ‘learning to be affected’ to better understand the mutual consti-
tution of the spiritual landscape and the self.
keywords Possession, learning, spiritism, Cuba, phenomenology
Introduction
The idea that ‘possession’ is learnt, instructed, or acquired somehow, calls out
for careful and critical scrutiny. As Berliner and Sarró have recently argued,
the ‘precise way religious concepts about supernatural beings are acquired
and practices linked to them are learnt has remained largely understudied by
anthropologists’ (2007: 7). Fair enough: as they say, citing David Parkin, religion
does not just happen to people. But that the anthropology of religious learning
has been all but dominated by preoccupations with mechanisms of transmission
is evidence that hard-line cognitive approaches have been quick to colonize this
space, arguably to the detriment of the visibility of more processual, even ‘situ-
ated’ (Lave & Wenger 1991), cognitive perspectives. Further, in so doing, some
ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

# 2012 Routledge Journals, Taylor and Francis
issn 0014-1844 print/issn 1469-588x online. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2011.600832
Attention Among Cuban Spirit Mediums 253
of these approaches have set the parameters within which learning is to be

legitimately understood in the first place – namely, within the confines of the
mind and its pre-specified structures. While most of these authors (such as
Boyer 1994; Sperber 1996, and more recently Cohen 2007) claim to dialogue
in some way between ‘innate’ and ‘environmental’ factors, allowing them, as
Tim Ingold observes, to also postulate that the environment is implicated in
the development of this architecture, the underlying implication still is that
‘the process starts not with a plan for constructing cognitive modules that is
as yet unrealized, but with preconstituted modules whose “needs” for infor-
mation are as yet unspecified’ (2001: 127). This understanding of learning is inevi-
tably and recursively informed by and also informs further definitions of
knowledge and of the knowing subject; thus, ‘representations of’, ‘concepts

about’, ‘beliefs in’ – all of which promulgate in one way or another the unexa-
mined assumptions of what Charles Taylor calls the modern ‘buffered’ self
(2007) – in turn, part and parcel of what Michael Lambek deems ‘the naturalist
paradigm’ (1989: 36) in the anthropology of religion. It is uncontroversial but
pertinent to note in passing the extent to which modern anthropology has
inherited from a Western Judeo-Christian notion of the person (cf. Asad
1993). In Taylor’s terms, the modern buffered self knows no fear of possession
because it is not permeable. But the fact is that while our ethnographic data
on spirit possession and mediation largely contradict such a view, most anthro-
pology of such phenomena continues to presuppose a ‘disengaged’ self in its
analyses, namely, one that must acquire a certain type of knowledge (or set of
beliefs) in order to become possessed.
At stake, it seems to me, is the need to understand possession simultaneously
and without contradiction as an embodied skill, a form of perception, and an
intellectual pursuit. But more importantly, as resulting from a particular way
of moving in, responding to, and producing oneself in conjunction with, a lived
environment over time. Following Ingold, I suggest in this article that an ‘eco-
logical’ approach to the analysis of becoming a spirit medium is possible and
desirable and bypasses in the process some of the pitfalls of many reductionist
stances. More specifically, I will attempt to work on Ingold’s notion of the ‘edu-
cation of attention’ (Ingold, 2000, 2001) into the framing of mediumship learn-
ing processes in the Afro-Cuban practice of espiritismo cruzado. As I will show,
for Cuban espiritistas the experience of human – spirit interaction is far from con-
fined to ‘event’ formats such as moments of ecstasy or revelation; it is a normal
extension of the development of a particular kind of self, one that is aware of and
connected to a landscape in which the dead are incipient and immanent, and in

254 diana espirito santo
which perception can be naturally educated over time to reveal what the world
really is. This means not just taking local ontological assumptions seriously into
account of spirit mediumship, but recognizing that such ontologies may have
effects beyond epistemology. In particular, I will show that the person is
trained into being affected by his or her encounter with the environment in
such a way as to yield certain forms of spiritual knowledge, making a distinction
between pre-formed ideologies and their phenomenal effects redundant.
Implicit here is the manner in which spirits can be conceptualized (also) as
elements of physical space and things, including of certain bodies, such as
those of mediums, whose sensitization to the particulars of their existence
occurs precisely through this interface. Finally, ‘ecology’ must be understood
as including not just ‘things’, but indeed things-as-spirits, and effects-as-spirits.

Tim Ingold has used the term ‘sentient ecology’ (2000: 25) to describe what
he understands as the kind of knowledge people have of their own environ-
ments. ‘It is knowledge not of a formal, authorised kind, transmissible in con-
texts outside those of its practical application’, he argues. ‘On the contrary, it
is based in feeling, consisting in the skills, sensitivities and orientations that
have developed through long experience of conducting one’s life in a particular
environment’ (Ingold 2007: 25). This is the type of knowledge that hunters, such
as those of the Cree people of northeastern Canada, draw on: for instance, the
Cree hunter can detect ‘those subtle clues in the environment that reveal
the movements and presence of animals’ (Ingold 2007: 24), such that the
animal, the caribou, often offers itself up to the hunter. This depiction of the
caribou, says Ingold, ‘reveals powers of agency, intentionality, and sentience
embodied in a living, moving being’ (Ingold 2007: 121), recognized in such
moments of encounter. The point here is that the environment of a particular
organism is that which exists for it, and takes on meaning in relation to it; by
the same token, the environment also comes into existence via the organism’s
development in it (Ingold 2007: 20). I will argue that what Ingold understands
as the mutual constitution of organism and environment can be similarly seen
with respect to the mutual constitution of self and spirit in the everyday practice
of Cuban espiritismo. This begs the question, as one of this text’s reviewers has
aptly pointed out, of how such practices come to be cast in terms of spirits in the
first place. In order to defend an ecological approach to spirit mediumship, a
reconceptualization of embodiment is required, and specifically of body. For
this, I will draw on Latour’s argument (in turn drawn from Vinciane Despret’s
reading of William James on emotion) that ‘to have a body is to learn to be
affected, meaning “effectuated”, moved, put into motion by other entities,

humans or non-humans’ (2004: 205, original emphasis). For Latour, the body is
not an essence or substance that exists as a residence for something else, but
instead ‘an interface that becomes more and more describable as it learns to be affected
by more and more elements’ (Latour 2004: 206, original emphasis). In Cuban espir-
itismo, the body, as the site of sensation, imagination, and affect, is also the spirit
as it is revealed through encounter, an encounter that casts ‘difference’ as rel-
evant spiritual information. That learning – as a process of emerging effects
– is seen as indeterminate and going further renders the distinction here
between an abstract system of ideas and action obsolete.
In the following sections I will do several things, in two steps. First, I will
explore the importance of a specific ontology of self to an analysis of the pro-
cesses that guide religious learning and spiritual discovery, relative to my

Cuban data and beyond it; second, I will propose that these processes can be
looked at ‘ecologically’, that is, as a ‘result not of information transmission
but of guided rediscovery’ (Ingold 2001: 138) in an environment that is replete
with material and social cues, material structures, and other forms of guidance,
and where learning to commune with spirits implies a temporally distributed
trajectory of educating attention toward the particulars of the spirit world
through one’s own imagination and sensation. Essentially, what I will argue
is that this education of awareness is not just one of sensitizing perception
and knowledge, but of the enskillment of oneself, where the spirit medium’s
self-consciousness as such reveals and epitomizes the profound ‘entanglements’
(Ingold 2006) that are obtained between different beings. I will analyze the
notion of ‘entanglements’ more specifically through Latour’s notion of the
body as a medium acquired, not given; where knowledge results from the com-
plexification of ‘affects’. I will propose, in the following two sections, that the
acquisition of a medium’s body-self in espiritismo is indissociable from the sim-
ultaneous acquisition of an environment of spirits who enter into relation with it
and through it manifest. As Latour says, ‘acquiring a body is thus a progressive
enterprise that produces at once a sensory medium and a sensitive world’ (2004:
207).
Spirits in Persons and Persons in Spirits

In the widely practiced forms of Cuban of spirit mediumship, known popularly
under the umbrella term espiritismo cruzado (lit. ‘crossed’ spiritism, cf. Aguelles &
Hodge Limonta 1991; Bolivar et al. 2007; Millet 1996), the dead are thought to
cross paths with the living on a daily basis, whether the living perceive it or
not. While some spirits come to help, others come in need of ‘light’, symbolic

of knowledge and spiritual evolution. Spirit mediums appeal to powerful Catho-

lic saints and African deities for success in their charitable missions of appeasing
the unruly elements of the spirit world. So embroiled are the vicissitudes of the
dead with the events of the everyday that in Havana many spirit mediums earn a
living by practicing their prowess of discerning one from the other. Through the
performance of collective spiritist rituals, called misas espirituales (lit. spiritual
masses), where two or more experienced mediums lead a rite of invocation
and song, such influences are identified and if possible, dealt with. In one
such misa I witnessed, Eduardo and Olga, two close friends and mediums
whose work I followed routinely, aimed to alleviate the woes of one family
whose home had been adversely affected by the presence of a deceased
family member. After initial opening prayers and some song, the messages
began. ‘I see a spirit standing next to you that’s dressed in black’, Eduardo
told Daniel, the elderly owner of the house; ‘he comes with you, but he’s not
yours’. The spirit was identified by Daniel’s wife, Hilda, as her brother-in-law,
a rancorous old gray-haired man who had attempted suicide once and with
whom she had never enjoyed a peaceful relationship. His attachment to the
house was the principal cause of the family’s recent misfortune and lack of
unity. Daniel had also been the unwitting victim of witchcraft on the part of
a jealous co-worker at the hotel he worked at, resulting among other events
in the spontaneous combustion of his motorcycle, from which he had thank-
fully escaped unscathed. Olga informed Daniel of the significance in this
respect of a powerful spirit protector of his – an Indio (meaning an American
Indian or indigenous caribbean) – who had ‘rescued him from many slippery
situations’ before, including this one. The Indio was now presenting himself
clearly. Just as in similar instances I had observed in Eduardo and Olga’s
work, this spirit’s visibility (both to the medium’s perceptual apparatus and to
the person it protected) was closely tied in their explanation of the events to
its saliency in the resolution of the problem-at-hand. When Eduardo referred
to the disruptive spirit above as having ‘come with’ Daniel, but as not being
‘his’, he was making a distinction central to the spiritist project. If, on the one
hand, Daniel’s brother had no longer any legitimate or productive place
among his kin, his presence, as also the onset of potentially deadly entities
sent by means of witchcraft, is registered on the other by something which is
more akin to an extension of Daniel himself – one of his spirits, in this case,
the Indio. Whatever else they did to ammeliorate Daniel and Hilda’s situation
– cleaning their house by burning certain plants, dissolving the witchcraft by
falling into trance with their powerful spirit guides for example – Eduardo

and Olga also effectively materialized a spirit in Daniel’s consciousness, a protec-

ción whose existence they forged relationally to the above occurrences. The
contingency of this spirit’s self-revelation on the revelation, in turn, of
Daniel’s problems, they were all too aware of themselves as developed espiritis-
tas, for the identities of their own spirits had emerged through similar encoun-
ters. Indeed, as natural mediums, these encounters had for Eduardo and Olga
been even more visceral, having manifest among other things as sickness (I
will discuss the importance of illness in the next section).
In Havana espiritistas do not just discern or become possessed by the spirits of
others. They are espiritistas by virtue of a set of spirit guides through whom they
acquire their vision and voice as mediums. While all persons have such guides
since birth, which form a collectivity known as the cordon espiritual (lit. spiritual
‘cord’), or just muertos, mediums depend for their task on the achievement of a
gradual and conscious interpenetration between such entities and their own
sentient, moving bodies. At times such entanglements become so fierce that
the medium’s persona in some sense becomes equivalent to their muerto, in as
much as most of daily life occurs in its presence. Such is the case with Marcelina,
an Afro-Cuban medium in her mid-sixties, whose spiritual work with Paloyan-
san, the spirit of a Haitian traditional healer who first manifested in her body
when she was just a child, continued to define her existence. As a well-
known espiritista in the neighborhood of Centro Habana, Marcelina rests
only at night, after everyone standing in the queue outside her door has been
seen. The ease with which Marcelina incorporates her guide during consul-
tations indicates a fine line dividing one from the other; their gestures and man-
nerisms have homogenized: typically, Marcelina looks up after only a brief
moment of concentration and begins to speak as Paloyansan, with a cigar in
her mouth. Paloyansan’s expert knowledge of plants and their medicinal prop-
erties has become Marcelina’s too, by extension. Paloyansan’s biography and
character have crystallized in the objects decorating her humble apartment,
where material forms of homage such as dolls and paintings, not just to the
spirit, but to those he knew and loved in life, pay testament to this intersection
of lives and bodies. Paloyansan lived two hundred years ago in Haiti and,
according to him, was over one hundred years old when he died. While he
and Marcelina have theoretically little in common except for their spiritual
purpose, the former’s path on Earth, traced day after day through the latter’s
body over their 50 years of work together, has left temporal and other marks.
Paloyansan had begun as the epileptic attacks that crippled a 12-year old girl,
Marcelina. Now he manifested as the spiritually fluent, but tired body of a

woman who seems to bear many more years than her own. Learning her trade,
and refining her talent, had been for Marcelina not principally a matter of
acquiring knowledge from someone – although she too had had her mentors
– but of learning a particular kind of body, in this case a permeable, shifting
body, tantamount to a particular kind of self.
Contemporary Cuban espiritismo draws from a varied pool of influences,
including the nineteenth-century mystical writings of Allan Kardec, founder
of European forms of spiritism, and importantly, the predominant Afro-
Cuban religious traditions. Indeed, the sheer prevalence of spiritist misas espiri-
tuales, largely domestic affairs, betrays the fluid but the crucial role that espiritis-
tas play in the larger Afro-Cuban religious cosmos: that of both articulating and
engendering religious ‘selves’ through the identification of one’s spirit guides

and their needs. Despite beginning its career as a ‘scientific’ religion attended
to by the urban educated elite (Bermudez 1967), versions of which still exist
today, espiritismo expanded as a healing-oriented practice via its association
with the two main Afro-Cuban religious cults: Santerı́a, the cult of the orisha,
the West African gods of the Yoruba people, and Palo Monte, a term which
refers to a set of ritual traditions based on the worship and manipulation of
the dead, derived from the Bakongo regions of Africa. In both these practices,
the dead are central, unavoidable, but ‘remain entities whose moral character-
istics can be ascertained only in the course of interaction’ (Palmié 2002: 195),
a ‘wilderness’ of sorts (Palmié 2002: 195) for which espiritistas are able to
provide a conceptual and pragmatic social map. More significantly, from the
enlightened and intellectual spirits whose wise messages Kardec was the recipi-
ent of in the séances of French high society, in Cuba the above-mentioned
‘guides’ became equipped to deal with the crosses of the everyday; they came
to embody the historical and ethnic particularities of an emerging Creole iden-
tity (Brandon 1997), acquiring the contours of existent forms of folk religiosity
and their imaginaries. Spiritism ‘became a system of action rather than abstract
philosophical ideas’ (Garoutte & Wambaugh 2007: 161), a means of ascertaining
the possibilities and limitations of one’s condition, and of subverting them
through the careful production of oneself via knowledge of these entities.
Gypsies, African warriors and divination priests, slaves and creoles, Cuban
entrepreneurs and doctors, Muslims, Haitians sorcerers, Spanish clergy, indi-
genous ‘Indians’, dames and writers, missionaries, independence martyrs, com-
munists, and so on: spiritism’s cordones espirituales negotiate a biographical
multiplicity that is Cuban history itself. As an embedded ‘logic’ of sorts, particular
to each person, such cordones present religious Cubans with blueprints for good

living and if necessary, battle. As the characteristics of the entities of each cordon
become known, so the person sketches a trans-dimensional understanding of
herself as a connected being, born from the relations she constructs with her
spirits over time. Los muertos in Cuba are not simply expired beings in need of
remembrance. These particular muertos are conceptualized as prime com-
ponents of the ontology of persons, components that must nevertheless be
worked into existence.
Spiritist ontology turns on a fundamental paradox. On the one hand, the pro-
tective muertos clearly exist. They come with the person at birth. On the other,
their existence must also be achieved, somehow. The cordon must be awoken
from an initial state of dormancy, activated, brought into being through the pro-
cesses involved in becoming an espiritista. In what can best be described as a

developing ‘system-in-motion’, mediumship is not considered here a property
of individual minds or souls. Instead, it is a relational capacity whose processual
character is evident not just from the fact that it is living itself which brings
about the conditions with which such entities can become manifest through
the medium – the obstacles he or she faces (such as witchcraft) which may
bring certain spirits to the fore as a response – but also from the idea that
the living can have transitory, mutable relationships with these presences.
While it is recognized that all persons have cordones, it is widely appreciated
that mediums epitomize the liquidity, for lack of a better term, that is seen to
characterize the co-existence of persons and spirits, namely, by virtue of the
technical, imagistic, and interpretative mastery they possess over their own
bodies. It is understood that such forms of overlap are implicated in the consti-
tution of the person more generally, giving shape to their moods and personal-
ities, talents, motivations, physical vulnerabilities, and even vices. Indeed,
contemporary Cuban spiritist practices present us with selves that are not
simply vessels for, but are imbued with the spirits of the dead with whom
more or less explicit relations are founded. Seen as an activation of sorts, the
learning process is also one of self-discovery via expansion: ‘your muertos are
reflections of you’, an experienced medium once told me – ‘you need to put
them to work’. Knowing them, he suggested, is tantamount to knowing
oneself, not a pre-existing self, but one in constant formation in a changing
lived environment. Thus, the spiritist ‘paradox’ is paradoxical only if a categori-
cal distinction between self and world is maintained. But, as we will see, espiri-
tismo’s onto-‘logic’ dissolves it, namely, by conceiving the muertos as existing
precisely in and as the interface of body and world. A couple of brief examples
I came across during my fieldwork will serve to illustrate this point.

The first is the case of Andrés, a young artist and practicing medium. He
once told me that we are the ‘laboratories’ for our spirits, who work with
and through us. In this sense, they too are our ‘laboratories’. His main spirit
guide is that of a painter who died young, a frustrated man, with much of
his good work still ahead. Andrés attributes his life-long artistic impulse to
the presence of this spirit, who has helped him ‘evolve’ through his art. For
Andrés, artistic talent is neither fully inherent in him nor fully inherited
from his spirit: both come into being through its practice, without which
neither’s talent could exist as facts. Versatility, inspiration, and craftsmanship
are inseparable from the movement of his brush or pencil, materialized in the
canvasses that come into being, making the partnership behind them visible.
While he has other less ‘talented’ spirits whose presence is felt in other ways,
one for example in the intense womanizing instincts that he feels he must
often curb and control, had he chosen a different profession, Andrés specu-
lates, he would not have known of this particular spirit’s existence. This obser-
vation of his leads to our first point: that doing here, experimenting, setting in
motion, moving, painting is perhaps not simply a means of mobilizing the spirit
but indeed is the spirit, conducted through certain bodily dispositions and per-
severently trained aptitudes. The next example is of David, another young
man who described being ‘accompanied’ by the spirit of a wise and aged
Chinese man. In what would appear to be a prototypical spirit bodily take-
over, he curls his back like a bow, draws his hands toward himself contempla-
tively, closes his eyes in expressive wrinkles, and speaks in a soft and largely
incomprehensively lingo as if David had vanished altogether. But possession
here is the corollary of a much longer process of what Csordas has called a
‘modulation of somatic mode of attention’ (1994). For years during his
youth David had felt Chinese – he describes his mannerisms, interests and
even food tastes as having been ‘Oriental’. David is not merely referring to a
passing ‘fad’ in his life. He is positing a necessary connection between the
arousal of certain intellectual curiosities (in oriental philosophy, for
example), or the evocation of marked responses of desire toward certain
‘things’ (such as his appetite for Chinese food) and his growing awareness
of this spirit. However, like many others, these ‘feelings’ changed over time.
The China man left center stage, and others appeared in his stead. When I
met him, David was establishing a closer relationship with an African spirit
in his cordon, a sorcerer, and was feeling peculiarly powerful. The second
observation here would thus go in the direction of the self-as-process, but
more specifically, sentient-body-as-spiritual-process. This is where questions

of learning become pertinent, but also potentially obfuscating if they are not
well framed.
In his work on Brazilian Candomblé, Marcio Goldman rejects what he calls
the ‘systematic form of teaching’ model, ‘essentially hydraulic in kind, imply-
ing a ready-made content derived from another ready-made but full container,
which – paradoxically enough – is not emptied in the process’ (2007: 109).
Learning simply doesn’t happen this way in Candomblé, an Afro-Brazilian
possession cult similar to Cuba’s Santerı́a. Learning to be a mãe or pai-de-
santo (ritual expert), as Goldman argues, is learning to be a particular kind
of person, taking her from a relatively undifferentiated being to a structured
self. In Candomblé, as he explains, the person is assumed to be multiple and
layered, ‘not in terms of the adjective “multiple”, which is necessarily

opposed to “one”, but as a substantive and an index of pluralism in opposition
to all forms of binarism and its variations’ (Goldman 2007: 113). A person is
thought to simultaneously belong to and be composed of a main deity, an
orisha, as well as a number of secondary ones, including a guardian angel
and a soul. But the idea is that these are not given, but constructed throughout
the process of initiation, which may take up to 21 years; thus the deities must
also be made with the person, taking on a personalized form. It is no coinci-
dence that the main initiation ritual is called the feitura de cabeça, meaning
the ‘making of one’s head’. We are reminded here of Karin Barber’s obser-
vation in her study of the Orisà cult in Nigeria, that it is not just a devotee’s
relation to a particular deity which must be achieved, but also the deity itself
via such relation (1981). To ‘be’, Goldman suggests with respect to Candomblé,
must be conceptualized along the lines of a continuum at the other end of
which is an indifferentiation of being, a ‘not-be’, of sorts (the non-initiate). I
bring up this ethnographic example here for two reasons. First, because in
espiritismo too a person must in some sense be ‘made’ over time, in a socially,
materially, and temporally distributed process with no definitive end. And
second, because Goldman reminds us to look more astutely at the relatedness
of questions of whom and how in religious learning. Questions, most of all that,
as he notes, remind us that while it is valuable and desirable to explore the
connection between the fact of possession, on the one hand, and the relevant
biophysical, cognitive, and social structural facts, on the other, it should be the
end point instead of the beginning of such analyses (1985: 29). Rather, all the-
ories of possession demand a theory of the person so that we do not end up
dissociating selves that have come into being precisely through relational
and associative processes.

Imagination, Sensation and the Acquisition of Bodies

In the beginning of this article I mentioned Ingold’s concept of ‘entangle-
ment’. In this section I will try to address its relevance here by showing how
sensory participation and the experience of material forms of spiritual
homage produce both knowledge of a spirit world, and the spirits themselves,
as effects of what Latour calls ‘articulations’ (2004: 209), the registering of differ-
ences or contrasts. First, I will argue that learning involves developing a deep-
seated and self-monitoring consciousness of sensation, emotional experience,
and imagination, as well as the ability to rationalize such phenomena as infor-
mation. The ‘education of attention’ on the part of mentors becomes transfor-
mational to this endeavor. Second, I will briefly analyze the place of ‘things’ as
instruments of ‘articulation’, in the sense that these extend spirit-person selves

into realms where ‘differences’ are made tangible, with corresponding recursive
(and ontological) effects.
Cuban spirit mediums gain in spontaneity and effortlessness as they practice
their mediumistic ‘vision’ over time. It is unsurprising that espiritistas often refer
to their material bodies (and generally themselves) as ‘instruments’. As one of
the reviewers of this article usefully pointed out, there are indeed fascinating
comparisons to be made between learning in espiritismo and other forms of
apprenticeship in Cuba, such as that of the sacred bata´ drums, played in
Afro-Cuban worship ceremonies to invoke and express the orisha’ presence.
Education here is a total affair, involving not simply musical training but the
whole person geared to the embodiment of all other pragamatic and spiritual
dimensions of effective religious production. The artisan-built bata´ drums are
‘born’ as the voice of the deity Aña´ via an elaborate process of construction-
as-consecration which requires the performance of specific songs, prayers, the
consultation of oracles, and sacrificial offerings (cf. Bolivar 1990; Ortiz 1996).
Bata´ players are ‘called’ to the drums, just like Santerı́a initiates are called to
their deities, and must learn to ‘interpret’ the drums through arduous training
of body and ear. As Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert argue, ‘mastery of the drum-
ming technique is a long process, akin to learning to speak a language; but it is
the drums and not the drummer who “speak”’ (2003: 71). It also implies a more
general training of one’s social and individual self, through the observance of
specific abstinences, cleansings, and prohibitions, as the drummer is tuned to
his task, made co-extensive with the magical properties of the instrument he
plays and of those who played before him. This co-extensivity is illustrated
not just in the fact that drummers generally inherit bata´ from more senior,
experienced drummers, but also by one of the teaching techniques employed

by these masters: while the novice sits with the drums between his legs, the
teacher will be behind him, drumming on his back with corresponding hands
the rhythmic designs he wishes the novice to reproduce, rendering a drum of
his body of which subsequent echoes will follow.
Notwithstanding the above parallel, there are obvious differences between
the ‘initiatory’ cults in Cuba, and espiritismo, and this also goes to the heart of
the matter. Unlike in Santerı́a, for example, in espiritismo there is no set of
ritual procedures (such as ‘receiving a saint’) that immediately capacitate the
medium; development is not digital. Rather, it is premised on the accumulation
of instinct, if you will, definable not cognitively, but as a combination of increas-
ing somatic openness (with consequences for a medium’s capacity to enter into
trance, have visions, dreams, and so forth) and a ripening ability to articulate the
effects of this openness as facts or statements about the world. Like the bata´
drummers above in some measure, at stake in the learning process is the necess-
ary collapse of metaphysical and physical distinctions so that the sphere of the
body becomes the domain of the spirit, that which articulates its existence.
Espiritistas’ reference to their muertos ‘letting them see this or that’ is not meta-
phorical: seeing is a corollary of being in espiritismo, learning to ‘be’ is learning to
‘see’, whether in possession or out. An image received in the mind’s ‘eye’ does
not represent the world: it signals access to a multi-dimensional world often
layered in ways that ordinary perception is untrained to achieve. As Ingold
says (following Hallowell 1960) of the Obijwa hunters and trappers of northern
Canada: ‘knowledge does not lie in the accumulation of mental content. It is not
by representing it in the mind that they get to know the world, but rather by
moving around in their environment, whether in dreams or waking life, by
watching, listening and feeling, actively seeking out the signs by which it is
revealed. Experience, here, amounts to a kind of sensory participation, a coup-
ling of one’s own awareness to the movement of aspects of the world’ (2000:
99). The question, for espiritismo, is what these ‘signs’ consist of, and what
they ‘reveal’.
Espiritistas are characteristically preoccupied with the effects of first contact:
they will reiterate time again that their muertos may at first be coarse, unrefined,
even violent, suggesting that manifestation needs to be trained not just on the
human end but on the spirit end too. However, it is this lack of ‘education’
on the part of disincarnate beings (namely, because they lack bodies and have
forgotten how they feel) that allows for any ‘articulation’ (in Latour’s sense)
to commence. The surest signs of presence are indeed imminently physical,
taking the form of chills and goosebumps, feelings of electricity and hairs stand-

ing on end, sudden jolts or jerky movements, numbness, an increased heart rate,
and so forth, namely, in the absence of perceivable stimuli. These confer to the
medium what William James called a ‘sense of reality’, ‘a feeling of objective
presence, a perception of what we may call ‘something there’’ (1982: 58) that is
extra to the body, and specifically outside the limits of the tangible. It is unsur-
prising that the first few steps in learning mediumship consist in an explicit
acknowledgement of these sensations, a surrendering to them. Todd Ramón
Ochoa makes this point very nicely in an article on the muertos of Cuba’s
Palo Monte, the Kalunga. According to his main informant Isidra, ‘the world
and experience, all things available to perception and perception itself, are a
series of condensations within this fluid mass of the dead’; Kalunga, the great
sea indifferentiated sea of the dead is ‘immanent to the living’, ‘immanent, as

in saturating, as in suffusing’, ‘at times powerfully moving, at others fleetingly
vague’ (Ochoca 2007: 482). Further, Ochoa argues, Kalunga is ‘tangibly
learned as radically subjective perceptions at the absolute limit of sentience
and credibility’, a kind of viscerality held ‘as the very definition of closeness
itself” (Ochoa 2007: 483), a closeness, I can add, that both the Bakongo-inspired
Palo Monte practices and those of espiritismo prioritize.
Espiritistas in fact describe the first stages of learning under the term acerca-
miento, which means the ‘coming closer’ of one’s spirits so as to yield physical
response. Often this acercamiento is initially involuntary, even traumatic. Such
is the case with the experience of sicknesses for which no immediate medical
explanations are found. One could call these ‘entanglement’ wake-up calls: cat-
alysts for the new forms of knowledge retrieval that must follow. Examples are
not lacking. Leonel, one of my closest friends and informants, was, he says,
wrongly diagnosed as an epileptic as a child, when what was strongly manifest-
ing was an African spirit guide he now calls Francisco. Another informant, Enri-
quito, experienced paralysis as a sign of latent mediumship and was later able to
recover. Mental illness is another often-cited sign of spiritual ability, namely, an
excess of it, producing chaos in the place of information. Espiritista stories also
tell of how these symptoms, when uncontrolled, can lead to an excess of
signs of another kind, namely, those in the physical and social surrounding
environment. One disturbing example of this is that of a 17-year old medium
whose family describes having been the victims of the destructive potential of
her undeveloped spirits. They attribute events such as glass breaking unaided
in their home, objects flying off shelves, fire erupting spontaneously, and even
the death of one of her teachers to the punctual anger of her entities.
Whether successfully ‘processed’ or not, the idea is that spiritual existences

have effects, and at that least some of these are registered as oscillations in
bodily feeling and mobility, of self or others.
Let us go back to the idea of ‘articulation’ as proposed by Latour. Using an
example of the training of ‘noses’ for the perfume industry with use of ‘odor kits’,
Latour analyzes the students as having been previously inarticulate not in their
ability to speak about odors but in the sense that “different odours elicited the same
behaviour” (2004: 210). The articulate subject, on the other hand, what they
became via the use of odor-palettes, ‘is someone who learns to be affected by
others’, where articulation means being affected by the differences elicited by
these ‘others’: ‘a subject only becomes interesting, deep, profound, worthwhile
when it resonates with others, is effected, moved, put into motion by new enti-
ties whose differences are registered in new and unexpected ways” (Latour
2004). I have been arguing that bodily events and their corresponding shifts
in somatic modes of attention constitute the primary means of generating differ-
ences, where extra-somatic events, such as the death or sickness of others, are
also factors. The ‘other’ in Latour’s articulation thesis, can be analyzed in this
context as a series of things, including illness and other happenings in the
person’s environment, but importantly, it can also be taken literally as the
social other, thus the importance of observers and teachers in the process of
articulation. Consider the following account, by David (above), whose
Chinese spirit was first identified by an espiritista friend of his:
The first time I felt him was on the eve of Saint Lazarus day, one time. I was in my
house, doing a misa espiritual, and well, I was sitting, and I was sieving through the
flowers that I would offer him, plucking their petals and placing these in water so
that people could clean themselves before the misa, and all at once I feel a change.
A friend of mine was there and he noticed, he said – how you’ve changed suddenly!
He saw me serene, calm, different somehow, and I felt it, I was conscious of it! My
friend said ‘my God, this man complicates his life, look how he plucks each petal
one by one, look how he does it slowly, he puts it in the water and he doesn’t
want it to move, like a perfectionist!’ It was like he understood that it was the spirit.
David contrasts his Chinese spirit’s soft and artistic demeanor with his own gen-
erally rather clumsy inattentive manners. The observer here was crucial to the
articulation of this difference.
A medium’s social environment is imperative to the development of certain
mechanisms of acquiring certainty. One such mechanism is trust. Mentors,
sometimes referred to as madrinas and padrinos (godmothers and fathers), are
not just experts at detailing a neophyte’s spirits but also teach him or her to

cut up his/her experience in such as way as to render it pregnant with infor-

mation. Learning to trust one’s body, and thus differentiate on the basis of it,
is key, where differentiation is at once a form of ‘entanglement’. In ritual
environments this is most evident. Ritual participation is less about the trans-
mission of meanings than about the offering of the conditions for these to be
generated in real time, as part of a necessary flow of knowledge between the
living and the dead, a flow known as a corriente espiritual (spiritual current).
Experienced mediums will tell their inarticulate counterparts not to be afraid
of speaking their minds when they ‘receive’ information. Exteriorization, com-
munication, is the medium’s function par excellence; blocking the movement of
this corriente can be potentially hazardous. But rituals such as misas espirituales
exist to provide the means for such information to appear. Songs, in particular,
whose words refer generally to the group identity of spirits – such as the
Gypsies, the Africans, or the doctors – are exceptional mimetic tools in the evo-
cation of corrientes by virtue of the spirits’ identification with them. Indeed, in
certain misas, namely, those whose purpose is to discern and consolidate a neo-
phyte’s spirit guides, clues as to the identity of his or her cordon espiritual are
inferred from the neophyte’s post facto account of their experience during the
performance of varied songs. ‘If we are singing the Ave Maria [Hail Mary]
and you suddenly need to cry’, says Teresita, an experienced medium to her stu-
dents, ‘this is the “click”, since it is quite possible that your guia [main spirit
guide] is a nun or a priest’. Similarly, Teresita forces them to attend to the
shivers, emotions, images, or messages that all signal the proximity of one or
another spirit. ‘If you see a pink elephant’, she says hypothetically, ‘don’t
worry about, we’ll help you interpret it’. These first images, be they of nature,
objects, animals, or situations, are determinate in ascertaining who their
muertos are. But in such misas the intention often goes further: it is often precisely
to provoke somatic and cognitive disarray, and thus extreme difference. Posses-
sion is actively sought even in neophytes with little experience and is often a
disheveling event. Perhaps the objective for this is to serve as a reminder that
there is something about spirit – human relationships that is simultaneously
inarticulatable, thus allowing the potential medium to head dive into the
locus of the ‘really real’ (van de Port 2005) and come out the other end with
a broken sense of their previous contained self.
The role of the imagination in Cuban espiritismo has by now become clear:
not imagination as invention, however, but as embodied disclosure. In an
article on sorcery and imagination in Sri Lanka, Kapferer holds that ‘conscious-
ness, while always embodied and constituted and expressed through the action

of the body, is formed’, he stresses, ‘through its engagement with other human
beings in the world’ (1995: 134). Sorcery, he says, ‘is the expression of the experi-
ence and imagination of fear’ (Kapferer 1995: 141) and the ‘imagination of fear has
no limitations apart from itself’ (Kapferer 1995: 140). I would like to suggest that
in learning Cuban espiritismo the exact reverse is the case – the ‘play’ of the
imagination unchains and opens up bodies and minds to knowledge that is
extra to them, precisely by directing attention toward the legitimate paths by
which such knowledge may be sought and which define a medium’s capacity
for sight (and insight) in the world. As Sneath et al. say on imagination,
‘rather than some special (let alone delusional) form of cognition, we are
dealing with a capacity involved in everything from the basic perception of
objects to our engagement with entirely immaterial knowledge’ (2009: 12).

The fully developed medium need not even distinguish her thoughts from
those of her spirits: they have collapsed into one and the same path of percep-
tion, for to ‘know’ is already to ‘know from’. We could say that the medium
becomes literally ‘entangled’ with her spiritual landscape, one in which if at
first articulated mostly via the perturbations and variations of subjective
bodily experience such as those described above, through which a ‘body’ is
found, after a certain amount of development these differences become ‘articu-
latable’ via the differences of others, after a body is gradually acquired. El muerto
me deja ver (the spirit is letting me see) this or the other; dice el muerto mio que (my
spirit tells me) this or that; el espiritu me deja sentir (the spirit is letting me feel)
that, and so forth: from detailed descriptions of others’ own muertos, images that
diagnose the causes of complex social and amorous situations in a client’s life, or
that relate to pasts and to futures, a medium’s embodied imagination – thus her
body – is her sharpest knowledge tool. But this ‘body’ is also constituted by its
various material extensions and objectifications. Latour argues that the advan-
tage of the world ‘articulation’ is not its ambiguous connection to language,
‘but its ability to take on board the artificial and material components allowing
one to progressively have a body’ (2004: 210). Latour’s notion is pertinent to my
final set of observations, namely, on the role of ‘things’ in the acquisition of
certain kinds of bodies and thus, spirits.
Objects, such as spiritual altars and spirit representations like dolls, are not
seen as intermediaries between distinct domains. By most espiritistas they are
regarded as fundamental to the task of achieving spirits, as I mentioned in the
previous section. Things are particularly critical to the processes of acknowl-
edgement that precede any serious religious development, acting both as
sources of revelation and activation, and further permitting the organization

of one’s spirits through their localization. They are also primary instances of the
material forms by which a neophyte’s attention is educated, over time, gaze-
traps in the sense that they easily become objects of his or her concentration.
Bovedas espirituales, as these altars are called, are uncomplicated tables
covered in white cloths, and prepared with flowers, candles, and a few glasses
of water. They may also be the site of smaller gifts such as candy or coffee,
but the most significant element is indeed the water glasses, through which
the spirits’ ‘fluids’ are thought to be channeled, and subsequently transformed
or converted into ‘differences’ felt by the medium as corrientes of energy.
Bovedas are also places of ontological opportunity: as parts of ‘selves’, spirits
can be calmed, even tamed, reincorporated into selves whose perception of
these differences is attenuated over time. One espiritista, who for a time tells
of experiencing the permanent discomfort of having an ‘uneducated’ African
spirit guide close to him, says the following:
. . .I began to talk with the dead for a few minutes a day at my boveda, to talk to them
like I’m talking to you now (. . .), to tell them what I’d been doing that day. And I
began to interpenetrate with my spirits, and to feel a kind of spiritual relief, tranquility.
It seems that because I was talking to him (the African) regularly, he calmed down,
and that fury that he had subsided, the fury of always having to be on top of me. . .
The dolls, images, statuettes, or anthropomorphic icons that are commonly

consecrated to particular spirits fulfill a similar function. These objects do not
merely serve to direct the neophyte’s relationship with the constituent
members of her or his cordon by locating them in precise spatiotemporal coor-
dinates. These things also serve as fluid components of the extended body that
is the medium-plus-spirits. A doll has a face, it can wear jewelry, receive offer-
ings, be handled and cared for, washed and clothed, talked to, and even
gauged for particular moods and ‘looks’. Questions of representation here are
clearly subordinate to the role of these objects in providing an artificial and
material setting for the creation of ‘differences’ for further articulations.
Concluding Remarks
In this article I have attempted to shift attention away from learning as a
mental process to learning as a complex process of educating attention and
awareness, and specifically, following Latour, of the acquisition of a ‘body’
that learns to be ‘affected’. I have tried to show how ideal learning results in
the development of particular selves, selves who are anterior to possession

states in whichever forms these take. Indeed, it is interesting that in Cuba full
possession is often seen as a more facile or lesser type of mediumship,
namely, because it can imply an unconscious kind of ‘entanglement’ which
on occasion may be inconsistent with the spiritist understanding of selves
and spirits as intentional and mutual co-creators. This does not mean, as we
see from Marcelina’s and David’s example, that possession always leads to
the momentary annihilation of consciousness. Rather, an experienced espiritista
will know that good, productive possession can only occur as a consequence of
years of working and living such ‘entanglements’, requiring an immanent, con-
scious complicity.
Tanya Luhrmann notes that learning is not simply about ‘learning to speak a
new language’ (1989: 310); it requires an intellectualization, of sorts, which leads

to slow and steady shifts of perception, as well as commitments to certain kinds
of ‘assertions’ (Luhrmann 1989) about the world. She has called this gradual
change an ‘interpretive drift – the slow, often unacknowledged shift in some-
one’s manner of interpreting events as they become involved with a particular
activity’ (Luhrmann 1989: 312). She uses the term ‘drift’ because often ‘the trans-
formation seems accidental, unintended’, highlighting that ‘as the newcomer
begins to practice, he becomes progressively more skilled at seeing new patterns
in events, seeing new sorts of events as significant, paying attention to new pat-
terns’ (Luhrmann 1989). However, in my view the idea of ‘interpretation’ already
unnecessarily posits a divide between perceiver and world perceived, inter-
preted, represented. What I have tried to suggest here is that in Cuban medium-
ship practices one is not separate from the other. As Varela et al. argue, if ‘our
lived world does not have predefined boundaries, then it seems unrealistic to
expect to capture commonsense understanding in the form of a representation
– where representation is understood in its strong sense as the re-representation
of a pregiven world’ (2000: 148).
Tim Ingold has described animacy ‘not as a property of persons imagina-
tively projected onto the things with which they perceive themselves to be sur-
rounded’, but as the ‘dynamic, transformative potential of the entire field of
relations within which beings of all kinds, more or less person-like or thing-
like, continually and reciprocally bring one another into existence’ (2006: 10).
The animacy of the life world, he continues, is thus ‘not the result of an infusion
of spirit into substance, or of agency into materiality, but is rather ontologically
prior to their differentiation’ (ibid.). What I have been describing as the espiritista
ontology is similarly animistic in the sense that life here ‘is not an emanation but
a generation of being” (ibid.: 11). Spirits exist, as do the bodies of the mediums

that perceive and receive them. But these bodies also come into being through
their continuous encounter with an animate world, a world that is differentiated
through the careful development of the mechanisms of discernment character-
istic of mediumship practices. In this case, espiritistas learn to make visible a
world, and in so doing, they also generate and regenerate that world.
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and to the Royal
Anthropological Institute (RAI) for the funding that supported the doctoral research
leading to this article. I thank Vlad Naumescu and Arnaud Halloy for convening their
panel on spirit possession at the 2008 EASA conference in Slovenia, and for the invi-
tation to participate in this collection. Thanks also go to my three anonymous

reviewers for some excellent suggestions. Some pseudonyms have been employed
in the text so as to protect privacy.
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Diana Espirito Santo

keywords Possession, learning, spiritism, Cuba, phenomenology

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

of these approaches have set the parameters within which learning is to be

knowledge and of the knowing subject; thus, ‘representations of’, ‘concepts

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

as including not just ‘things’, but indeed things-as-spirits, and effects-as-spirits.

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

cesses that guide religious learning and spiritual discovery, relative to my

Spirits in Persons and Persons in Spirits

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

of knowledge and spiritual evolution. Spirit mediums appeal to powerful Catho-

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

and Olga also effectively materialized a spirit in Daniel’s consciousness, a protec-

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

engendering religious ‘selves’ through the identification of one’s spirit guides

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

cesses involved in becoming an espiritista. In what can best be described as a

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

layered, ‘not in terms of the adjective “multiple”, which is necessarily

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

Imagination, Sensation and the Acquisition of Bodies

instruments of ‘articulation’, in the sense that these extend spirit-person selves

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

sea indifferentiated sea of the dead is ‘immanent to the living’, ‘immanent, as

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

cut up his/her experience in such as way as to render it pregnant with infor-

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

objects to our engagement with entirely immaterial knowledge’ (2009: 12).

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

The dolls, images, statuettes, or anthropomorphic icons that are commonly

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

new language’ (1989: 310); it requires an intellectualization, of sorts, which leads

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

tation to participate in this collection. Thanks also go to my three anonymous

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

pp. 134–52. ASA Monographs 33. Routledge.

ethnos, vol. 77:2, june 2012 (pp. 252–271)

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