Espiritismo is the name given to a wide range of cultural practices that revolve around human interactions with the spirits of the dead, and in Developing the Dead: Mediumship and Selfhood in Cuban Espiritismo, Diana Espírito Santo has crafted a rich and detailed ethnography of this dynamic and pervasive complex of expressive culture in contemporary Cuba. She makes a compelling argument that these interactions constitute—literally bring into being—both the spirits and the people who engage them. The book weaves together diverse strands of theoretical reflection and thus provides ample perspective on the vast body of rich data presented. Exploring the social and cultural contexts of Revolutionary Cuba, the author locates these practices in the nexus of the unusual economics of the “Special Period” with its exigencies, the flow of tourists with their unrelenting gazes, and the discourse of ethnographers with their insistent categories. These multiple contextualizations stand out as necessary frames for understanding the more analytic insights that follow.
From the outset, the monograph argues that espiritismo must be understood as a flexible system of beliefs and practices that allow people to explore and expand their sense of self. “Developing the dead” refers to the process by which people forge meaningful and productive relationships with the many spirits they experience around them. “Espiritismo requires both talent and perseverance, but it is essentially a self-reconstructive technology” (7). The book describes multiple examples of how individuals and communities develop the dead—and to what ends. Obviously any diverse set of practices will have a wide variety of motives and moods, and the author provides rich case studies that illustrate in detail the different practices. Yet in the end, they all revolve around “making a cosmos of spirits, which awakes from dormancy through the education of an espiritista’s body and mind over time” (188).
This embodied cosmogony initiates another major line of argument throughout the text, exploring a tension between “spirit” and “matter” that pervades the ideology of most espiritistas. With great detail, Espírito Santo traces two of the most prevalent ideas in the tradition, “educating the dead” and “materializing the dead.” These twin aspects of “developing the dead”—from which the title of the book comes—reflect intersecting processes that bring spirits from potentiality to full presence along a spectrum from immaterial to material. Educating the dead almost always develops clarity and awareness of the spirit’s relationship with the material world and especially the body of the medium, a process that often includes increasing skill in incorporating the spirit in possession. Materializing the dead provides increasing levels of physical forms, thus representing and instantiating the spirits in the social world of the spiritists.
In addition to multiple questions that illuminate this complex terrain of espiritismo, Espírito Santo demonstrates a deep commitment to gathering and analyzing an enormous body of data. Beyond deploying spiritist idioms as categories of exploration and analysis, the book includes scores of interviews, some presented in depth. It richly describes key rituals like the misa spiritual and the coronación. And it provides clear examples of the spiritual “cords” or “portraits” of individual practitioners. As a longtime observer of espiritismo, I highly recommend Developing the Dead, which distinguishes itself as a detailed and richly nuanced ethnography of Cuban espiritismo, replete with numerous theoretical insights and data that are both extensive and remarkable.
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[Review length: 548 words • Review posted on January 25, 2017]