Paper short abstract:

This paper explores the various kinds of spirits of the dead that make their appearance in Cuba, and more specifically within the Afro-Cuban religious milieu, and the way that they might afford us with novel understandings of materiality and personhood.

Paper long abstract:

Death in the Cuban ethnography has not attracted much attention. Especially in the context of Afro-Cuban religiosity, entities like 'the dead' (los muertos), although occasionally mentioned by researchers, have very rarely been brought to the fore (with noticeable exceptions such as Figarola, Palmié, Ochoa and Espirito Santo). An aspect of such a 'necrographic' void is the fact that when it comes to research in Afro-Cuban religiosity, there is an overwhelming predominance of the ritual complex of a putatively Yoruba origin, known as Regla de Ocha/Ifá or Santería, which, if treated in its own terms, seems to be placing the emphasis on the interaction between humans and deities (the orichas) rather than the dead. Yet, my fieldwork experience of almost 14 months in Havana, pointed to a rather different reality. Death, and more precisely the dead, seemed to be all over the place. Thus, this paper deals with this unexplored presence of the dead and what it might suggest about materiality and personhood, not only as an unfamiliar way of the former instantiating the latter, but also as something that might unsettle the very familiarity of the two. In the Afro-Cuban cosmos, after the demise of the body the person keeps walking on its destiny's 'path' (camino), but this is not qualitatively the same for everyone. I propose an initial distinction and classification of the dead into three categories: the 'alien', the nfumbi and the 'affine', and I explore what each involves.