VERSIONS OF THE DEAD:Kalunga, Cuban-Kongo Materiality, and Ethnography

Abstract

The Cuban‐Kongo society of affliction known as Palo educates its initiates in the visceral apprehension of Kalunga, the vast sea of the dead. Kalunga is taught as unstable and unverifiable experience at the limits of sensation—chills, goose bumps, or a fluttering in the chest or stomach. Building on an account of this teaching from fieldwork, I draw from anthropology and philosophy to account for Kalunga's role in Palo materialism. In this article, I elaborate a writing strategy explicitly critical of “representation” and suggest the creation of a “foreign language within our own” as a way of handling ethnographic “content.” This “new language” for Kalunga is assembled from Palo terms, and from the turning of terms in the writing of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, G. W. F. Hegel, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. I arrive at a description of Kalunga as a paratactic discourse, and a “plane of immanence,” from which are assembled, and into which are dispersed, “versions of the dead,” including “objects,” and “subjects.”

Liquid sight, thing‐like words, and the precipitation of knowledge substances in Cuban espiritismo

“…The dead are not transcendent, like Santería's Cuban‐Yoruba oricha deites (whose truths are discerned through cowry‐shell oracles, cf. Holbraad ), but fully immanent (Ochoa ), visceral even. Indeed, some muertos even stake a claim to a person's selfhood, namely by comprising sets of guides (called a cordón espiritual ) that are thought not just to protect a person throughout the course of his or her life, but also to directly affect his or her personality and destiny (Espírito Santo ).…”

Plasticidade e pessoalidade no espiritismo crioulo cubano

“…Eles se comunicam por meio dos potes com água em um altar espírita, por exemplo; baseiam sua habilidade de existir em um plano humano por meio de bonecos, estátuas ou ícones representativos de espíritos, bem como pelas substâncias materiais (comida, flores, velas), que ao mesmo tempo prestam homenagem a favores concedidos e proveem munição para intervenções futuras; e de forma mais importante, são "representados" por e no corpo humano sensível -em sonhos vívidos, sensações, arrepios, dores, sintomas de doenças, clarões de imagens na mente, palpitações (cf. Ochoa 2007).…”

The bodily threat of miracles: Security, sacramentality, and the Egyptian politics of public order

“…According to anthropologist Robert Hertz's spatial orientation of moral order, the right represents beneficence and activity and the left, impurity and maleficence. For more detail, see Ochoa 2007. 8. The aroma issued from multiple fragrances, or al-h .…”