This compelling, though at times dense, work is an ethnographic and theoretical exploration of spiritual entities as “effects-in-the world” (6). Editors Ruy Blanes, Diana Espírito Santo, and the volume’s ten contributors—all anthropologists with academic posts in the Americas or Europe—delineate the social effects of entities in a number of particular religious and spiritual contexts. Their aim is to provide frameworks for understanding intangible beings “in their incipient and imminent dimensions, as movements and events (and persons), as well as separate, autonomous existences” (16). The authors intend for this “prospective ‘anthropology of intangibility’” to challenge materialist tendencies in anthropology that favor the analysis of entities in terms of biomedical or socio-cultural functions. They instead demonstrate the value of phenomenological approaches for understanding the “ontological effects” of spiritual beings and the social dimensions of experiencing them (7). Though the ten case studies within this volume focus on the religious and spiritual dimensions of an “agency of intangibles,” the authors argue that the methods and theories suggested within are also applicable to debates surrounding more general, impalpable concepts such as, for example, those of race or the economy (4).
Following the editors’ essential introduction (chapter 1), which outlines the volume’s theoretical aims and orientation, the next three chapters take on the issue of spirit “presence” (30). In his case study on Zambian Pentecostal-charismatic churches, Thomas G. Kirsch examines how devotees experience and engage with muya usalala (the Holy Spirit). Kirsch is particularly concerned with the spirit’s morphology and movement. As such, he outlines three distinct types of “spirit mobility” and conceptualizes muya usalala not as an abstraction or representation but as an “agency of divine ontology in its own right” (49-50). In chapter 3, Grégory Delaplace outlines the “regime of communication” by which nomadic herders perceive and encounter supernatural beings in Mongolia. He argues that ghosts are uncanny “sensations" that challenge the very nature of human perception and disrupt what Merleau-Ponty has termed “perceptual faith” (55). Florencia C. Tola, in chapter 4, explores the ways in which the Toba people of the Chaco region in Argentina coexist and interact with nonhuman beings. Tola analyzes narratives about Huoqauo’ lae’—the site of a massacre where some also believe a supernatural event occurred—and accounts and drawings that chronicle a young shaman’s personal experiences with the spirit world. Tola’s aim is to demonstrate how the Toba people understand their relation to nonhumans through the effects they produce on physical spaces, human bodies, and the subjectivities of those who can see and interact with them (71).
Conceptually building on the previous chapters, Vânia Zikàn Cardoso next focuses on encounters with spirits known as the pova da rua, or “people of the streets,” in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. She explicates the performative means by which the pova da rua are constituted and constitute themselves through narrative in the ritual context of macumba—a term which generically refers to Afro-Brazilian religious practices but which Cardosa uses to denote “a way of perceiving, imagining, and engendering the everyday as imbued with the presence of spirits.” Cardoso is particularly attentive to the ways in which her own ethnographic narrative is “akin to [the] verses of incantation” and likewise “continuously [brings] spirits into existence” (95).
In chapter 6, Mark Harris utilizes a “historical phenomenology approach” to emphasize that Amazonian spirit entities in Pará, Brazil, have their own complex histories, distinct from people’s stories about them. He argues that the river itself and the encantados (spirit beings) dwelling within it are experienced as living beings that coexist with the local ribeirinhos (rural river dwellers). Further, the encantados speak for the ribeirinhos, shaping their perspectives, experiences, and worldview in such a way that there is no distinction between visible and invisible worlds for these Amazonian river dwellers (117).
Entering the second half of the volume, Kristina Wirtz, Ana Stela de Almeida Cunha, and Emerson Giumbelli focus on processes of narrativization. In particular, their chapters offer new perspectives on biography and autobiography, challenging the human exclusivity that has previously dominated these genres (31). In chapter 7, Wirtz attends to spirit biographies as a particular kind of spirit materialization important for its “impact [on] the social trajectories of spirits and people alike” (128). Her case study of one particular Cuban folk religious practitioner demonstrates how autobiographical accounts of spiritual development often intertwine with spirit biographies. Wirtz argues that this “intertwining” occurs because of perspicience, or the “knowing awareness” of a practitioner that a spirit exists (127). Such awareness is vitally important for the efficacy of ritual practices and further realizations of spirit manifestations (156). Cunha’s chapter 8 explores the manifestation of spirits through dreams and chants employed by practitioners of Pajé, an African-based religion widely practiced in the rural Maranhão region of Brazil. In her discussion of the social and familial networks of encantados—the same river dwelling spirits considered by Harris—Cunha elucidates the social lives of these entities within and between “there and here worlds” (159). She argues that Pajé dreams and ritual language play a vital and complementary role in the Pajé belief system, in that both enable a “process of mutual learning” and socialization between religious adherents and encantados (177). Chapter 9 by Giumbelli traces the biography of one particular Amerindian spirit being of the Brazilian Umbanda religion: the Caboclo of the Seven Crossroads. Developing further the theoretical contributions of Roger Bastide and J. Lorand Matory regarding Afro-Brazilian religions, Giumbelli delineates the “spiritual economy” of Umbanda by outlining the multiple identities that constitute the Caboclo and “produce Umbanda in its excessive plurality” (197).
Susan Greenwood’s unique and provocative contribution to the volume in chapter 10 is the development of “an epistemology of imaginal alterity” that emerges from an autobiographical account of her relationship with a spirit entity she calls “the dragon.” Greenwood’s epistemology is founded on the notion of “magical consciousness”—a type of intuitive communication with immaterial beings that enables individuals to explore alternative perceptions. In that magical consciousness is a matter of perception and not questions of belief or the actuality of spirits, Greenwood proffers that such an epistemology could potentially aid ethnographers in overcoming dilemmas regarding belief (203-204).
Finally, Stephan Palmié concludes the volume by problematizing historical knowledge, in general, and anthropology’s brand of historicism, in particular. Drawing from his fieldwork on Afro-Cuban religious practices, Palmié demonstrates how the lives of spirits, as realized in ritual, defy conventional notions of an “actual past” and historical linearity (226). He argues for a new understanding of historicism “as a form of knowledge” capable of addressing such patterns (220).
The Social Life of Spirits is written by anthropologists explicitly for anthropologists. However, there is much of interest here to an interdisciplinary audience, and for those seriously interested in spirit beings of any kind, it is well worth traversing the often demanding terrain that lies within. Taken together these chapters make an important contribution to the study of supernatural belief; religious ritual and festival; theoretical understandings of invisible, intangible domains; and the development of phenomenological methods in anthropology, folkloristics, and related fields. Hopefully, the innovative theoretical and methodological approaches proffered by the volume’s editors and contributors will continue to be developed and explored.
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[Review length: 1186 words • Review posted on February 4, 2015]