The Social Life of Spirits ed. by Ruy Blanes, Diana Espírito Santo (review)

What kind of thing is a spirit? How do we understand at once the intensely parochial nature of spirits, their seeming cultural specificity, and their remarkable self-identity, their biographical consistency across time and space? Further, what is to be made of the powerful effects that they have on the lives of those who, willingly or unwillingly, come into contact with them? Blanes and Santo argue that to answer these questions persuasively, we need to begin by thinking of spirits as more-than-conceptual entities; as real, though intangible, things that have lives of their own beyond those of their human interlocutors. Though drawing on the so-called “ontological turn” in anthropology, their introduction to the volume contains no grand philosophical statement about “where” spirits live, nor sweeping, programmatic statements about how to do the biography of spirits. Instead, they are most keen to lay out the stakes of their investigation, arguing for the need to move humanistic inquiry beyond its ocularcentric preoccupation with essentially visual evidence. Refreshingly, they are content to let the individual contributors get down to the highly particular business of charting the trajectories of concrete entities, laying out both their own affects and their effects on human lifeworlds. Taken as a whole, however, the volume offers a fresh perspective on long-standing debates about how to understand the relationships that people build with intangible others. Blending historical and anthropological approaches, the contributions provide both food for comparative thought and portable theoretical insights that would enrich any inquiry into magical practice, mystical experience, or traffic with spirits. Several of these stand out as particularly relevant to the readership of this journal.

Some chapters are full-bore investigations of the ontological systems underpinning social intercourse with spirits. Thomas Kirsch’s chapter, for example, commits itself to paying sustained “attention to the wondrous ways in which the Holy Spirit is experienced to locate itself in and move through space” (36). In charting how this force moves through and helps to structure the “socio-spiritual communities” (34) of Zambian Pentecostals, Kirsch offers a productive analysis of the Spirit on its own terms; that is, not as a “reflection” of the ongoing social dynamics of these communities, or as the product of an essentially symbolic “idiom” or way of thinking about sociality, but rather as a lively, agential entity in its own right. Occasionally, this approach can strain credence, but most often productively. In describing Pentecostal baptismal practices, to choose an example, Kirsch engages quite earnestly in a series of arguments about the possible ontological relationship between Spirit and water during river baptisms such that, for example, farmers downstream or those attending who are incidentally sprayed with holy water aren’t accidentally baptized. While perhaps pushing up against parody, the line of inquiry inaugurated by such taking-seriously of the intangible reality of spirits ends in surprisingly fruitful conclusions about the usefulness of methodological individualism and the nature of global pneumatic Christianity.

Other chapters are less focused on the ontological frameworks underlying particular forms of enchanted sociality, and instead more directly address the question of epistemology, or rather, of how specific modalities of knowing produce or develop around contact with spirits. Grégory Delaplace’s contribution, “What the Invisible Looks Like,” brings together the ontological and the phenomenological in its analysis of Mongolian ghost stories, asking this question with reference to the senses. Delaplace argues that these stories generally turn on peculiar sensations that, though the product of a culturally specific ordinary, might nevertheless shake the perceptual faith that undergirds that ordinary, opening up experience onto a world of invisible, intangible, spooky others. Kristina Wiritz, in her discussion of Cuban folk religion, frames it in different register, asking how quotidian contact with spirits is maintained through discursive-material circulation of objects and texts imbued with spiritual...