Spirits in the Material World: Variations on Cosmic Materialism in Afro-Cuban Spirit Practices

In my work on Afro-Cuban spirit mediumship religions, I have argued that matter – objects, offerings, such as consumables, tobacco, and flowers, as well as bodies – serve as vital technologies not to represent spirit worlds and cosmic relations, but to produce them (or catalyze them). In this perspective, we have a world of ontological continuities, discontinuities, and volatilities which must be actively harnessed and worked to yield power and spirit forms, and to activate vibrant things and create affectations. But we would be unwise to understand the dynamic between spirits and materialities and bodies in any single way. Rather, what I will argue in this seminar is that the “symmetrizing” impulse afforded to us by the ontological turn (Holbraad & Pedersen 2017, Goldman 2009) requires that we understand how our interlocutors stabilize their human and non-human cosmos at any given moment. These differences yield different heuristics, and thus unique conceptual structures that enrich anthropology. I give three examples of these variations: first, the notion of the extension of a self that develops outwards into/onto/as things, suggesting a non-essentialist version of the person; second, the idea of the assemblages of things, persons, and spirits in a kind of cosmic “glue”, which are confectioned for a specific purpose and can come undone, requiring a decentering of causation and the vitalization of matter; and finally, the countering of inertia, through divination rituals, for example, which mobilize and shift cosmology into particular oracular realities, or in practices of mediumistic speech, through which knowledge, as a substance, can appear.

ArgO-EMR Seminar Series Michaelmas Term 2026

Theme: Rethinking Spirit Possession in Anthropological and Historical Contexts

Wednesdays, 5.15pm, Pauling Centre, 58a Banbury Road, Weeks 1, 3, 5 and 7. Also On Teams.

Convened by David Mozina and Elisabeth Hsu.