Discovering The Spirit Book

I loved this collection of papers that covers a period from the early modern, when Portuguese trading posts were first established along the African coast, to the last decade. We get translations of the most current research from leading scholars in Brazil and Cuba.

Sansi and Pares introduction is exceptional, addressing the concerns of the research area, the ways various historiographies have determined the direction of the field, and its renaissance that began in the 80's. They utilize the topics of each of the papers included in the volume to good illustrative purpose while also giving a sense of which may be of particular interest to you.

Each paper is presented in more or less chronological order, which help understand the formative effect discourses of modernity have had upon our understanding of sorcery, particular those styles having an African origin. The utilization of Enlightenment narratives, both to purposes of white supremacy, normalizing slavery, and the stratification of class relations is examined. The geographical diversity represented here helps clarify that these processes and their effects are in no way straightforward, with very different results appearing between Angola, Brazil and Cuba.

As a polytheist, Patricia Birman's piece "Sorcery, Territories and Marginal Resistances in Rio de Janeiro" was particularly distressing, as it records one woman's abandonment of her inherited Candomble practices, one of the last three in her neighborhood. This situated against two accounts of conversions to Pentecostalism, and an overview of Pentecostal strategies for capturing territories in RdJ supplied insights into what the historical process of Christian domination of European territories was probably like. Finally, it was deeply saddening to read an account of someone abandoning their Gods for reasons orthogonal to Christian activities, not caused by social threat or promises of community.

As in any collection, some papers will be of more interest that others, but the editors maintained a unusual (in my experience) level of quality across all of their selections.