The Social Life of Spirits

Ruy Blanes, Diana Espírito Santo, Ruy Blanes, Diana Espírito Santo

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780226081779, 9780226081632
• eBook ISBN: 9780226081809
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Comparative Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

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. 

CHAPTER ONE

Introduction

On the Agency of Intangibles

Diana Espírito Santo and Ruy Blanes

Just ’cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there—“There There,” Radiohead, 2003

We cannot be too sure what Thom Yorke, the singer and lyricist behind Radiohead, the alternative musical act from Oxford, was thinking when he wrote the song “There There.”¹ The line from the epigraph, which is a verse from the song “There There,” could be a reversion of a radically empiricist stance (“I only believe what I see”), but it could also be an expression of self-doubt regarding the reliability of our own senses and perceptions (“Should I believe in what I feel?”). Or both. In any case, it brings to mind the notion of “perceptive faiths” (Merleau-Ponty 1968, 17) and of how to understand and integrate perceptive and sensorial alterity in the practice of anthropology and other humanities disciplines. The reliability of the senses, as we know, is a notoriously tricky issue. But we don’t have to rely on them to be able to conjure up an assortment of entities whose existence we routinely take for granted—“culture” being one familiar to the anthropologist—but that are as empirically invisible as ghosts.

This book, which explores different conceptualizations of an “agency of intangibles,” sets out to unravel the contingency of various “entities” on their effects. This exploration rests upon a philosophical and epistemological assumption, which is also a challenge: the recognition of the anthropological relevance of the mechanics and effects of so-called invisible or intangible domains, whether these are constituted by spirits, quarks, the law, or money value.

This, in many ways, has been part of anthropological inquiry since its inception. Below we explore stories of nineteenth-century concerns with the invisible, which we are heirs to. We could also understand the long-standing interest in spirit possession as one such interrogation. Moving beyond psychological, neurophysiological, metaphysical, and representational accounts of possession, anthropologists have long sought to understand and explain, both emically and etically, contacts, manifestations, and mediations (or mediumships) with the otherworldly, and the regimes of proof and evidence that underlie them (Lambek 1981; Lewis [1971] 2003). In this line of thought, one frequent materialization of spirit possession effects has been located in bodily or embodied practices. Through the body, as Janice Boddy (1989) suggests, we uncover meaning and context, idiom and ideology. This volume inherits these classic attempts to unveil cultural context, while seeking to explore the “alien” dimension of phenomena such as spirit possession: the categories of sovereignty and foreignness (Voss 2011) involved and the spiritual, ontological, and political consequences of such frontier making.

On the other hand, there is no anthropological exclusivity in charting the conditions of possibility of the invisible and its effects. Ioan Lewis describes, in his classic Ecstatic Religion, how a body of literature on the occult predicted trance becoming as “easily accessible as electricity” ([1971] 2003, 16). Ever since, scientists have studied and speculated over the invisible and intangible through their effects, conjuring up several assumptions regarding empirical evidence along the way (see Latour 1993b). From this perspective, astronomy, as the study and prediction of “effects” in the interface of empirical observation and theoretical speculation, has long been a discipline of “limits”—one that determines the frontier of the universe, our world, our knowledge, our understanding. Probably for that same reason, it has also been a discipline of systematization and organization, at least since Pierre-Simon Laplace’s Exposition for a System of the World (1808), in which the renowned astronomer and mathematician sought to explain celestial mechanics through the “apparent movement of celestial bodies,” and identified the existence of black holes as phenomena so dense in gravity that they become “un-observable.”

If astronomy has its own “black holes,” in terms of explanatory theories and refutations that address limits, perceptions, quandaries, and so on, so does anthropology. By tracing the conditions by which such entities have effects, and by exploring crucial dimensions of definition and narrativization involved in processes of recognition and legitimation—and thus, the sanctioning of their social life—we aim, firstly, to sideline concerns with conceptual bounding and instead attend to the production of the “indexicalities” (Keane 2007) that allow them to “come into being” as objects, scientific (Daston 2000) or otherwise. Secondly, our aim is based on a critical reflection on the kinds of problems generated by an epistemology of the senses, both in terms of how we generally think through and about empiria, materiality, and evidence in our practices as anthropologists and persons and in terms of the scope of the senses as producers of knowledge. The assumption here is that entities can reside outside as well as inside this sensorial scope by virtue of the traces, symptoms, and effects they socially and materially engender.

This book’s proposal is both old and new. On the one hand, it follows from the commonsense notion that most of the things that affect us as human beings are invisible, disperse; we cannot touch them as we would objects or confine them to a particular essence, space, or time. It also drinks from the discipline’s historical openness toward epistemologically challenging objects (Vasconcelos 2008). On the other hand, it follows from anthropology’s urge to engage with extramaterial forms of sociality and practice—both by coming to terms with the notion that people develop and live in worlds that are often radically different to each other, where they perceive and interact with different entities, and by engaging in the extension and revision of some anthropological concepts and methods to deal with these ontological differences, particularly those that see “entities” in a purely mental or conceptual sense. The aim of this introduction is to identify some of the problems and dividends associated with assuming (invisible, intangible) entities as objects of research.

One problem has to do with the processes of tracing and defining entities and their effects (marks, manifestations, consequences) in informants’ lives. This tracing traditionally relies either on the idea of the unquestionability of the senses—something we intend to bracket in this volume—or on the notion of representations, which we aim to move beyond. A second, subsequent problem concerns how those effects intersect with the realm of the social, becoming part of personal and collective histories and biographies, and identifiable through processes of narrativization. Historian Marc Bloch (1953) would argue that those traces are precisely what makes history “history.” By taking Bloch’s point to an extreme, and as we discuss below, by treating those traces as objects and processes, it becomes possible to make things “become evident”; however, that should not be taken as an excuse for intellectual laxity but rather as an opportunity to think about “evidentiary regimes” and how they come about within specific regimes of rationality (Palmié, this volume). Finally, a more general, methodological question becomes inescapable: How do we work (around, with, as) an “anthropology of intangibles”?

The chapters in this book coincide by exploring some of these debates ethnographically within specific religious and spiritual contexts—or, as in many of the cases presented, by invoking and analyzing some of the pervasive social consequences of those extrahuman forms of agency: for instance, their location in specific landscapes and sceneries (the river, the forest, the streets and crossroads, the room), the tracing of their effects in particular contexts of experience (dreams, visions, sensations, memories) and/or interrelatedness (ritualization, conflict, healing), and their materialization in certain orders of discourse and definition (biographies, songs, drawings). However, as the discussion below on mesmerism, spiritualism, and nineteenth-century science points out, it should be made clear that the “agency of intangibles” is not—at least in the way we conceive it—an exclusively religious problem, or rather a problem exclusively of the anthropology of religion. Our argument on agency and intangibility aims to transcend the particularities of religiosity or spirituality (regardless of its configurations) and thus speak to broader debates on invisibilities—namely, by calling for a similar epistemological leverage to be accorded to both the domain of spirits, deities, gods and, say for example, that of “the economy,” “the market,” “race,” or “value” (Palmié, pers. comm.).

But it would be misleading to deny the existence of strong antecedents in what we could call a “pragmatics of effects” approach to the invisible, upon which we certainly build, beginning perhaps most obviously with the work of William James. For instance, in a lecture-turned-essay called “What Pragmatism Means” (1907), James says the following: “Is the world one or many?—fated or free?—material or spiritual?—here are notions either of which may or may not hold good of the world; and disputes over such notions are unending. The pragmatic method in such cases is to try to interpret each notion by tracing its respective practical consequences. What difference would it practically make to any one if this notion were true?” (2000, 25). As we know, James’s Varieties of Religious Experience ([1902] 1982), which takes as its axis the intrinsic value of religious feelings and phenomenology—which he sees as analytically primary and separate to theorizations or historicizations of religion—was crucial to the subsequent development of body-, psychology-, and emotion-centered approaches to religious experience. For James, belief is true or realized inasmuch as it engenders actions, effects, and affects. Irving Hallowell’s pioneering concept of a “behavioral environment” can arguably be seen in its continuity, or at least resonance, with some of James’s precepts. Taking self-awareness as one of the conditions for the functioning of any social group, Hallowell proposes that we see “environment” not only in terms of its visible properties or objects but also in terms of a total behavioral field that may include spiritual beings of all kinds, to which man responds and in the midst of which he lives. “Such objects,” he says, “in some way experienced, clearly conceptualized and reified, may occupy a high rank in the behavioral environment although from a sophisticated Western point of view they are sharply distinguishable from the natural objects of the physical environment. However, the nature of such objects is no more fictitious, in a psychological sense, than the concept of the self” ([1955] 1988, 87). Hallowell’s observations have only recently been recovered in anthropology—for example, in the work of Tim Ingold (2000, 2001), whose ecological approach to dwelling, skill, cognition, and cultural transmission arguably takes root in just the assumptions wielded by Hallowell on the inextricability of lived environment and conceptual experience. For Ingold, human beings “do not construct the world in a certain way by virtue of what they are, but by virtue of their own conceptions of the possibilities of being. And these possibilities are limited only by the power of the imagination” (Ingold 2000, 177). Experience, as an encompassing phenomenon, emerges as inseparable in these approaches from the ontological possibilities it both is intertwined with and brings forth. This is clear in Godfrey Lienhardt’s refusal to posit a distinction between “natural” or “supernatural” events or beings in his ethnography of the Dinka (1961). So embroiled were the Dinka’s spiritual beings, which he calls Powers or divinities, with the Dinka’s experience of events—physical, social, and environmental—that Lienhardt analytically pits them as representations or images of a range of particular “configurations of experience” (1987, 147). For the Dinka, he argues, the Powers are not spiritual beings in the sense that they exist above or separate from man; instead, they are of the world and its events, at once beings and activities or behaviors: “To refer to the activity of a Power is to offer an interpretation, and not merely a description, of experience” (ibid., 148). While to the Dinka—whereas clearly not for Lienhardt—divinities do exist “out there,” Lienhardt’s analytical collapse of the experience and entities categories (true to the Dinka themselves) meant he never had to make that judgment.

These early theorists of religious, spiritual, and animistic phenomena arguably advocated what we might call an ontology-oriented approach, one that has partly (and regrettably) faded in the postmodern vogue and has at the same time seen a partial niche comeback in the last four or five years. The spirit possession literature in particular still seems trapped with what to do anthropologically with the possession event itself, and this has arguably constrained its analytical frameworks. While possession is conceived of as key in making spirits real or natural (Levy, Mageo, and Howard 1996, 17), and its mechanics are an object of enduring fascination, significantly less attention is accorded to the “work” spirits do in any given society, which is a far more central concern for those who experience it than is their ability to manifest spirits through dissociation or extension of themselves. As Douglas Hollan says, referring to the Indonesian Toraja understanding of self and spirits, “For most villagers the question is not, Which of these spiritual beings actually exist and which do not?, but rather, Which of these beings—at any given moment in one’s life—has the power to influence the course of one’s fate and fortune, and so should be acknowledged and perhaps propitiated?” (1996, 233). The questions this volume seeks to address run along lines similar to those invoked by the early pragmatists of the anthropology of religion: What entities, spirits, beings become true and evident in any given community? How does this come be, and with what effect or value? For this, we may have to ask not just how concepts give birth to worlds (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell, 2007) but also how entities can come to be through their myriad traces, whether or not visible, culturally sanctioned, specifiable, or predictable.

The chapters in this book ethnographically and theoretically explore spiritual entities of various kinds, not (just or primarily) as concepts or components of given, shared cosmologies but as effects-in-the-world, with a potential for constant unpredictability and transgressiveness. In this way, our general proposal here is to work backward, from effects to form, from tangible to invisible, from motion to substance, from manifestation to agency, and so on—that is, to understand and define spiritual (and other nonphysical) forms of existence as manifest (and ultimately knowable) through their extensions, if you will, on a social and even historical plane, where extensions leave markings, traces, paths, and, ultimately, “evidence.” In our view, this is an aim that capitulates less to anthropology’s visualist (Clifford and Marcus 1986) or materialist biases, than it speaks to the need to radically disentangle itself from some of anthropology’s most counterproductive premises, among which is the assumption that “we are all living in the same world—one best described and apprehended by science,” leaving to social scientists the task “to elucidate the various systemic formulations of knowledge (epistemologies) that offer different accounts of that one world” (Henare, Holbraad, and Wastell 2007, 9). By working from a general pragmatic perspective, not dissimilar to what James had in mind with his “pragmatic method” (which he defined as “primarily a method of settling metaphysical disputes that otherwise might be interminable” [2000, 25]), in which the truth of notions is interpreted by tracing its practical consequences, we explicitly sideline a formulation of “entities”—spirits, gods, deities—that implies a necessary supernature or transcendent, with corresponding opposites, and likewise we repudiate a gap between what the “native” thinks is there and what we “really” know isn’t. While we do not share James’s concern with gauging the usefulness of religious notions (if they generate positive effects they are true), and thus a kind of gradation of “truthfulness,” we are inclined to agree in some sense with the curious idea that “truth happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process: the process namely of its verifying itself, its veri-fication. Its validity is the process of its valid-ation” (2000, 88). Truth being alternatively read here as effect; idea, as entity. Thus, what we are suggesting also is that effects themselves may have further ontological effects; that entities may recursively create multiple versions of themselves as effects, where it becomes less important to locate the original “version” than to analyze its sequels. In our view, it is more valid and productive as anthropologists of “intangible” phenomena to begin from the premises of their influence, extension, or multiplication in the world than from substantive ontological predefinitions.

In order to do this, we must move away from naturalizing, explanatory frameworks characteristic of the anthropology of spirit (and trance) possession and mediation, for example, whose theoretical spectrum ranges from reductive functionalist and medical analyses to the more recent (but still arguably reductive) propositions of a cognitive anthropology of religious phenomena (Barrett 2004; Boyer 1994; Cohen 2007). We wish to consider, on the one hand, the usefulness of phenomenological approaches, which privilege the body as the site of culture (Csordas 1990), and which articulate the ontological effects of entities through a focus on the creation of certain kinds of orientations and subjectivities, and on the other, the acknowledged, taken-for-granted, social dimensions of this experience, in particular, the manner in which it betrays an intertwining of registers—living and dead, visible and invisible, corporeal and ethereal, and so on—that cannot always be conceptually or experientially distinguished. Thus, we seek to understand the existence of particular ontological beings or entities as defined and refracted through the pragmatics of their effects in and on the world, many of which through such forms of intertwining, which are biographical, physical, and social. This also means exploring the processes by which this “otherness” assumes shape and efficacy in different contexts and discourses, reconfiguring expectations and constituting webs of practical and visible effects, effects that are confined neither spatiotemporally nor to bodies themselves. The unseen, unheard, or intangible, may be by all pragmatic definitions present, whether or not it is explicitly felt or represented, challenging materialist ontologies intrinsic to social science disciplines whose overarching project has assumed that reality (world, nature) is one, and that difference (and the effects of difference) is thus a matter for belief and representation (see Argyrou 2002).

This core assumption, as Asad (1993) shows, has shaped the concept itself of religion in anthropology in terms that have, among other things, obfuscated important aspects of spiritual experience, including technical, material and sensorial ones. As Fennella Cannell argues in her analysis of the influences of Christianity on the discipline, “Religious phenomena in anthropology may be described in detail, but must be explained on the basis that they have no foundation in reality, but are epiphenomena of ‘real’ underlying sociological, political, economic, or other material causes” (2006, 4). Indeed, according to her, Christianity “haunts” anthropology, functioning as its “repressed” (ibid.). What we may need is an approach to “entities” that does not expect them to reside either in the minds of believers or in Geertz-like “webs of significance” (1973), masking other more measurable elements of sociality, and more importantly, that does not “neutralize” them, as Eduardo Viveiros de Castro (1998) argues in relation to alterity in general, but that draws out their theoretical and methodological implications instead.

Spirits and Science

Certainly both science and séances had and still have their spirits. The nineteenth century, for instance, generated entities whose ontological status was as (un)verifiable in scientific practice as it was in religious-spiritual communities. Electricity, evolution (social and natural), and the mind’s unconscious arguably saw parallels in notions of ether, spiritual fluid, and animal magnetism. In both domains, entities were inferred from their markings or effects: hypnotism, neurosis, light. Indeed, the conflation of scientific and invisible realms was so pronounced that one question we could rudimentarily, even naively, ask is, how did spiritual phenomena and other metaphysical entities come to be excluded from the realm of the scientifically possible, or “real,” or measurable? For instance, in a book called On Miracles and Modern Spiritualism, published in 1875, Alfred Russell Wallace stated the following: “That intelligent beings may exist around and among us, unperceived during our whole lives, and yet capable under certain conditions of making their presence known by acting on matter, will be inconceivable to some, and will be doubted by many more, but we venture to say, that no man acquainted with the latest discoveries and the highest speculations of modern science, will deny its possibility” ([1875] 2009, 41; original emphasis).

Like Wallace, who was eventually ostracized from the scientific community on account of his beliefs in the “inexistent,” a number of prominent p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Copyright Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Chapter 1. Introduction: On the Agency of Intangibles
• Chapter 2. Intangible Motion: Notes on the Morphology and Mobility of the Holy Spirit
• Chapter 3. What the Invisible Looks Like: Ghosts, Perceptual Faith, and Mongolian Regimes of Communication
• Chapter 4. The Materiality of “Spiritual Presences” and the Notion of Person in an Amerindian Society
• Chapter 5. Spirits and Stories in the Crossroads
• Chapter 6. Enchanted Entities and Disenchanted Lives along the Amazon Rivers, Brazil
• Chapter 7. Spirit Materialities in Cuban Folk Religion: Realms of Imaginative Possibility
• Chapter 8. João da Mata Family: Pajé Dreams, Chants, and Social Life
• Chapter 9. Amerindian and Priest: An Entity in Brazilian Umbanda
• Chapter 10. Toward an Epistemology of Imaginal Alterity: Fieldwork with the Dragon
• Chapter 11. Historicist Knowledge and Its Conditions of Impossibility
• Notes
• Reference
• Contributors
• Index