Paper short abstract:

This paper offers an account of the very peculiar articulacy that the dead in Cuba may exhibit and how this creates a kind of affinity with the living.

Paper long abstract:

In Cuba, despite official discourses, the dead may display an intense kind of articulacy, most commonly through talented mediums. This very peculiar kind of articulacy focuses on biographical elements, concerning both those of the dead while in life and of those living individuals that the dead get 'attached' to by way of affinity. In their extremely transformative state of being, the articulacy of the dead is a crucial element of how the living build their own destiny and biography and how spirits of the dead slowly transform into and become ones. Drawing from Wilerslev's rendition of perspectivism, I attempt to show that the perspectives and biographies of the dead (their necrographies, as I call them) point to a necessary and dialectical relation between partial identifications and partial differentiations with the biographies of their living 'affines'.