Paper short abstract:

Afro-Cuban religious traditions overwhelmingly ‘horizontalize’ living-dead relations, bleeding both conceptual and ontological boundaries. In this paper I harness my ethnographic data to explore the ways in which life and vitality are indissociable from the gifts of death and the dead among practitioners.

Paper long abstract:

Ethnographies of dying, death and the dead flaunt the arguably 'Western' notion of death as a punctual affair; rather, it is often portrayed as socially and biologically processual, cosmologically regenerative, precisely through the ruptures and transformations it engenders. Death may be polluting and dangerous, a source of disorder and ambiguity, a threat to the fabric of society, but it is generally seen to be so because it implies transition, growth or life in other forms. But what of ethnographic instances where death is immanent to life, where the living must come to terms not with the dead's transitions from one ontological strata or state to another but with the implication of their ever-presence in the constitution and nurturing of their own selves, in real-time? The Cuban Revolution is no stranger to the reaffirmation of political destinies through the evocation of dead martyrs. But in religious realms this entertwining of biographies is literal. Afro-Cuban religious practices overwhelmingly 'horizontalize' living-dead relations, bleeding both conceptual and ontological boundaries. The priests of the divination cult of Ifá consider themselves 'dead'. In the Bantu-Congo practices of Palo Monte, the dead breathe life into magical recipients and bodies, becoming, in this way, non-dead. And in the pervasive cult of espiritismo the person is imbued with the attributes of his or her dead protectors. In this paper I harness my ethnographic data on Afro-Cuban religion to explore the ways in which life and vitality are indissociable from the gifts of death and the dead.