Developing the Dead is the first in-depth ethnographic exploration of the highly diffused and influential practices of contemporary Cuban creole espiritismo. Based on extensive fieldwork among espiritista mediums in Havana, as well as with practitioners of the other two dominant Afro-Cuban religious cults–Santería and Palo Monte–this book traces to its logical limit an indigenous understanding of a self in which persons are bound irrevocably to the multiple spiritual entities (muertos) with whom relations of mutuality and co-participation are constructed over time. These protective and family ... More

Developing the Dead is the first in-depth ethnographic exploration of the highly diffused and influential practices of contemporary Cuban creole espiritismo. Based on extensive fieldwork among espiritista mediums in Havana, as well as with practitioners of the other two dominant Afro-Cuban religious cults–Santería and Palo Monte–this book traces to its logical limit an indigenous understanding of a self in which persons are bound irrevocably to the multiple spiritual entities (muertos) with whom relations of mutuality and co-participation are constructed over time. These protective and family muertos are not simply symbols of times passed but actively brought forth into the lives of those who re-create their presence through the cultivation of particular forms of bodily and imagistic awareness, as well as through material homage-making and representation. As muertos are developed, learned, sensed, visually represented and dreamed, so they take on shape and effect in the constitution of extended, agentive selves, with dividends for prophecy, healing, and self-consciousness. This book also argues that creole espiritismo (known as “cruzado”) generates a model of self and cosmos in its environment that has far-reaching implications for an understanding of the Afro-Cuban religious complex more generally, implications that have been largely unexplored in the available literature.