Making Spirits ― Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religions

Academic analyses of religious phenomena have often placed an emphasis on beliefs and ideologies and prioritized the understanding of religious symbols over the material of symbolization. Through the ethnographic analysis of a variety of contemporary religious forms, Making Spirits questions the presumed separation of spirit and matter, and sheds light on the relational dynamics between spiritual and material domains, on the mechanisms and techniques through which they 'make' each other. Such reciprocal interactions and transformations between the spiritual and the material are evident across spirit mediums, fetishes and ritual objects in Cuba, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Brazil, Bolivia, Japan and Central Africa. With new insights that challenge the taken-for-granted categories of materiality and transcendence, thing and spirit, this book will be invaluable for scholars in religious studies, comparative religion, anthropology and sociology.

Diana Espirito Santo is a postdoctoral researcher in social anthropology at the University of Lisbon's Institute of Social Sciences. She is also visiting research fellow at the Museu Nacional (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) in Brazil, where she is developing a project on learning in the urban religious practice of Umbanda. Her doctoral thesis (University College London, 2009) focused on Cuban forms of spirit mediumship and ideas of person. She has published several articles and book chapters on the themes of materiality, selfhood, possession, knowledge, and dreaming.

Nico Tassi is a research associate of the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore of La Paz, Bolivia and research assistant at University College London, where he obtained a PhD in anthropology in 2008. He has dedicated most of his academic work to the study of Bolivia's indigenous highlanders specializing in religion and political economy, materiality and transcendence, anthropology and epistemology. He is author of several articles and a monograph in Spanish on urban Aymara of Bolivia's capital city.