Paper short abstract:

Cuban spirits, like their mediums, are pragmatic.Unconcerned by notions of belief or representation, they ask to be made present in a tangible social environment. Can we conceive of the 'possessed 'self', as Cuban spiritists do: transcending the boundaries of its body, yet made evident within it?

Paper long abstract:

In Cuba, spirit mediums, known simply as espiritistas, are individuals whose unique relationships to their muertos (their spirits) enable them to receive, discern and interpret valuable information from the spiritual world for the benefit of others. Learning to be a medium here involves learning to be attuned to the ways in which this manifestation occurs, trusting the senses and the imagination as tools of insight, and cultivating a relationship with one's body as it becomes an increasingly controlled instrument and marker of spiritual presence.

But spirits are far from 'other' to a medium's consciousness. They are part of her very constitution, and self, for they come with her, much like a pre-existing blueprint. Developing an awareness of herself as a medium implies an acknowledgment of her own multiplicity: of her capacity to be other to herself, but only in as much as this otherness is also intrinsic to her. Spirits embody the stories and images of an ethnically, religiously and culturally diverse Cuban past, simultaneously representing and enabling alternative avenues of behaviour and expertise through the enactment of such knowledge relations, in the present.

An anthropological understanding of possession in this context must engage with such indigenous notions of extended self and agency, and with the scope of individual creativity in her own self construction and understanding. In ths paper, I attempt to move away from purely mentalistic or functionalist views of the spirit-person dynamic and consider the value of processual, enactive, social behaviourist and distributed cognitive approaches to such phenomena.

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