todd ramÓn ochoa -- versions of the dead- kalunga, cuban-kongo materiality, and ethnography

CAVERSIONS OF THE DEAD: Kalunga, Cuban-KongoMateriality, and Ethnography

TODD RAMON OCHOAUniversity of California, Berkeley

ISIDRA

Isidra spoke in citations of herself, returning as often as not to words spokena minute ago, an hour ago, yesterday, before. Hers was a speech of returns, backagain to terms and phrases that captured her sense last time, or would the next. Inher engagements with me she sought authority through such loops of self-reference,which had the effect of making sure that in future conversations there would beno doubt about what she had said and that it was understood according to herinterpretation. Her anecdotes tended to become monologues in which she wouldrepeat momentary thoughts before finishing her statements, tarrying with themjust a second to make sure they didn’t contain some unexpected truth before shewent on. The repetition of her words produced a singular mode of emphasis. Buther authority to speak on the Cuban-Kongo society of affliction known as Palo, andher authority over me, rested on much more than this, regardless of how manytimes she returned to her words, or how poetically she made reference to priordeclarations.1 I admit, though, that it was in words first, and only through theirrepetition, that she hooked me on the dead.

On any normal day I would arrive at Isidra’s house, which occupied half of thefirst floor of a five-story apartment building in the El Cerro district of Havana. ElCerro is far from the Disneylike urban renewal of Old Havana and from the stillpetit bourgeois neighborhoods of El Vedado and Miramar; it is a district of people

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY, Vol. 22, Issue 4, pp. 473–500. ISSN 0886-7356, online ISSN 1548-1360. C© 2007 by

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reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/can.2007.22.4.473.

CULTURAL ANTHROPOLOGY 22:4

who lead everyday lives of hardship subsistence amidst Cuba’s now 17-year-longeconomic crisis. Knocking on her door was a matter of making oneself heard downthe hall of her apartment, where most of the sound from the street died on its wayto the back. She was usually at the rear of the house working in the kitchen or thetiny outside patio. Blackouts were common day and night, so there was no way fora caller to know if the doorbell wasn’t ringing. I eventually learned to rap on theglass panels of her front door with a key or coin, and this rude sound was to her thesignal that a friend was calling.

She would come forward, and we would talk in the sunroom that acted as aparlor at the front of her house. Its high walls of opaque glass set into a painted irongrid were the modernist ideal for Havana’s modest winters, but in the summer itbecame unbearably hot with the afternoon trapped inside. There were windows,but her years of healing people through Palo made her wary of them. Her work,like the work of healers in many places, had earned her the enmity of many and shepreferred not to leave her house open to sorcery or other ill will. Isidra disliked theheat and knew her guests did, too, and was always ready with a glass of cold wateror a clean cloth to wipe away the sweat.

In the bright, diffuse light of this room her brown face shown burnt orangeand took on dandelion hues. She had a smile of bright teeth that captivated mostpeople with its ready generosity. The rest of her face spiraled around her mouth,coming forth and fading back, one feature more prominent than the next dependingon the emotion she evoked or the stress she sought to lend a point. Her face washer principal device for creating an atmosphere of consequence in which her ever-repeating words weighed with self-evident importance. Her eyes were attentive justas they were unyielding in their scrutiny and concentration, and she was practicedat breaking the back of a lie with her stare. These eyes were distorted as she blinkedpast gold-framed glasses that magnified them as she looked around her into a worldshe saw clearly but that evaded me altogether. That was the world of the dead,which she inhabited in forms I would be long in learning. Only years later do I thinkI might understand her.

I arrived one morning at Isidra’s and she drew me immediately through thedoor. She was agitated and thinking fast and she sat me down to listen. This wasnot rare, and I settled in to follow her and listened carefully to her words. “There islittle I can do,” she said. “Everything I try either doesn’t work or the dead [Kalunga]warns me off. I promised Lucy that I would have a solution to her problems at work,at the Ministry of Agriculture, the maneuverings of her enemies. They’re workingPalo against her, but I’m frozen. I’ve tried a couple of things, but they haven’t given

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VERSIONS OF THE DEAD

her the result she’s looking for, and she’s dissatisfied and losing confidence. I toldher to come by this afternoon, and you can imagine I couldn’t sleep last night. I wasup in the middle of the night, you should have seen me sitting on the edge of mybed and pacing up and down the hall. It was one of those nights where I just movethrough the house, without thinking. I can’t sleep, so I get out of bed and wanderaround.”

Isidra paused for a second, looking at me sternly to make sure she had mycomplete attention. For such a stare there was no response except a hurried nodof assent, after which she continued. “You know, I don’t choose to get up. It is mydead [mis muertos] that have me, they who pull me. Then I was sitting on the edge ofthis couch, here in the sunroom. The dead led me here last night, where the onlylight was from the blue streetlight outside. You know my lamp burned out a weekago, don’t you? You said you’d bring a bulb. It doesn’t matter. I’m never on thiscouch at night, lamp or not, you know that, you know I like to be in the kitchen,but to this couch they brought me in the darkness and the streetlight, and I sat here.Everything was blue from the light outside, blue like shadows in the sea [Kalunga].Did you hear that? Like the shadows of Kalunga. And you know what? The solutioncame to me. It did, suddenly, just like that. It was the dead, the dead that wokeme and brought me here to think, and the dead that hinted at the answer to Lucy’sproblem, so that she will be convinced.”

Isidra smiled broadly when she got to this point, the point at which the deadarrived in the conversation to explain so much. It was that smile, the one thatsaid she was speaking the most obvious truth, which said I was a fool if I didn’tunderstand her. And I didn’t. What did Isidra mean when she said the dead draggedher out of bed and to her living room to give her answers to conundrums in herhealing practice? She gave me hardly a second to ponder this question before shewent on. Disquiet and delight marked her.

“The dead led me here last night, where the only light was from the streetlightoutside. You know my lamp burnt out a couple of weeks ago. I’m never on thiscouch at night, lamp or not, you know I like to be in the kitchen or down the hall,but here they brought me in the darkness and the blue shadows of Kalunga, and Isat here. And the solution came to me. It did, just like that. It was Kalunga thatwoke me and brought me here to think, and my dead that hinted at the answer. Iheard, felt [sentı], my mother, Cucusa, you know her, telling me what is hurtingLucy. Cucusa said to me, ‘The hen thought she knew everything so she slept onthe ground.’ That is what Cucusa said. And that is the answer, you see? Lucy isn’tseeing things clearly; her rivals are taking advantage of a blind spot. She thinks she

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knows everything, but someone is betraying her. She doesn’t know it; she doesn’tknow it. She isn’t looking around, her weakness is obvious to everyone but her,and she is going to lose her job at MinAg because of it. They’re pushing her out,retiring her, betraying her. She has trusted the younger people, trained them, butthey’re turning. All her years in the Party for nothing. So I ask Cucusa, I ask, ‘Whois it? Who is it? Who is working Palo against Lucy?’ And Cucusa is gone, nothing,and I sit here on the couch in the darkness and I wait in silence, because I can’tgo back to sleep, Kalunga won’t let me sleep. I can feel Kalunga right here, in mygut. It’s keeping me awake, you see, so I wait. I wait here on the couch, in thedarkness except for the streetlight through the glass; you know I never come downthe hall at night. Then I hear them [los siento] again, the dead [mis muertos], andthey say, ‘It won’t be your enemy that kills you, but rather a friend.’ And then Irecognize her, and it is Old Chacha, my great aunt Chacha, la vieja. And she saidto me, Chacha said, ‘It won’t be your enemy that kills you, but rather a friend.’That was one of Chacha’s parables, her terrible wisdom. Hard as it might be, it isjust like Old Chacha to make you look where you least want for the person whois hurting you, to make you look among your friends. Chacha said this to me lastnight—that among the people hurting Lucy is someone she confides in, this is whatChacha said, what the dead [mis muertos], said to me.”

Isidra did not stop, but continued in this mode for a long time with nothingfrom me but nods and little sounds of acknowledgment.

Such was the appearance of the dead in Isidra. The dead [Kalunga] appeared inher very sleeplessness and inhabited her body as the restlessness that woke her anddrove her to get up, just as her dead (mis muertos)subsisted in encounters with oldsayings and parables. Such were the dead as they came to populate her anecdotesand stories with instances of tension in her body and with voices and words sherecognized as responses from her intimate dead in moments of despair. And suchwas Isidra’s mode of “conversation,” her overwhelming presence in an exchange,her insistence that one receive her meaning in the way she intended. Taken together,this was Isidra’s language of the dead.

PALO

In this article, I seek to create, borrowing resources from anthropology andphilosophy, a language for Cuban-Kongo ideas concerning the dead and matter asthese are expressed in the practice of Palo. Isidra Saez Saez has been one of twoprincipal teachers of Palo for me for more than six years, and it is her words that

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orient this effort.2 It was she who introduced me to Palo, and provided me with itsbroad outline.

Had Robert Hertz (1960:92, 100) made Isidra’s acquaintance he would havedescribed Palo as the “left hand” of African-inspired religion in Cuba. Hertz, anearnest, at times pessimistic man, in the course of a short intellectual career literallymowed down by the machinery of WWI had a discernible influence on EmileDurkheim, whom he met as a 19 year old in 1900 and who was his doctoralsupervisor (Parkin 1996:2–3). Most significantly, it was Hertz’s work on collectiverepresentations of death, and his elaboration of right and left as regards the useof hands, that so marked Durkheim, his nephew Marcel Mauss, and the traditionthey inspired (Parkin 1996:76–79). Observing that the right hand “acts, ordersand takes” while the left hand is “repressed and kept inactive, its developmentmethodically thwarted,” Hertz then expanded his insights far beyond the strictlyphysiological (Hertz 1960:89, 100). The range of his interpretation extended tothe moral valuations produced by right and left in social life, such that to theright corresponds “the idea of sacred power, regular and beneficent, the source ofeverything that is good, favourable and legitimate,” while the left holds that whichis illegitimate, impure, unstable, maleficent and dreaded (Hertz 1960:100). Palowould have fascinated Hertz because of its position within African-inspired realmsof healing, especially relative to the better known and researched religion of Santo,

commonly referred to as [Santerıa].Palo is little known outside Cuba compared to Santo, the popular and pres-

tigious form of West African, specifically Yoruba, inspiration presently ascendantin Havana and in the Cuban Diaspora.3 Santo is perceived by those who teachand practice African inspirations in Cuba as a mode of “cooling” or “refreshing”relations between the living, the dead, and the divine, so as to heal those afflictedwith the vagaries of misfortune—disease, poverty, and loneliness.4 On the otherhand, inspired as it is by Central African, specifically Kongo slaves and their Creoledescendants, Palo inhabits an atmosphere of dread that is carefully cultivated by itspractitioners and those afflicted by Palo craft. Where Kongo-inspired forms haveemerged in the Americas, whether in Haiti as Petwo, in Brazil as Umbanda, or NewOrleans as the sorcery of Hoodoo, they are said to sustain relations with unambigu-ously negative powers, so as to perform the underhanded work of healing.5 Palois the heat and pressure Cubans fear among African inspirations—and what theyseek to release them from fates turned sour when all other healing has failed. Hertzwould have been drawn to this obvious but vexing discourse, just as he would havebeen to Isidra, who affirmed it.

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Much is made of what would have become of Hertz had he survived the war,including Evans-Pritchard’s comment that he might have become Durkheim’s equal,a paragon of institutionalized academic brilliance (Hertz 1960:24; see Needham1973:xi). It is likely that the interwar years would have seen him return to smoothcollaboration with Mauss and a life of disciplined academic production. Then again,perhaps the killing and death of the war would have set Hertz on a course away fromthe “major” tradition of university research, toward new, ethnographically oriented,academically transgressive responses to the war and the bourgeois imperialism thatgave rise to it. There is much in Hertz’s character that would have drawn him to thelikes of Andre Breton, a war survivor, and the Surrealist Revolution he inspired.Or, at the end of the 1920s and in the 1930s, he might have been attracted toa yet more “minor” collective, that of Georges Bataille and his gang of left-handsurrealists, who huddled abjectly and gloriously in the back rooms of bookshopscalling themselves “The College of Sociology” (Hollier 1988). It was Bataille andhis pirate surrealists, who included Michel Leiris, Roger Caillois, and the chthonic,shattering Pierre Klossowski, all of them electrified by Kojeve’s emphasis on thecoupling of desire and negation in the reading of Hegel, who transformed Hertz’swork. For them, the opposition of right and left, admittedly a stiff dyad, became theforceful artistic–philosophical–ethnological concept that for me yet better situatesPalo, that concept being the “negative sacred,” where attraction is connected torepulsion in sprawling concatenations of force, at once seductive and frightening.6

Now, the word “palo” has broad currency in Cuban Spanish. Strictly defined,it means stick. Palo may also refer to an entire tree in the Cuban vernacular, as in“un palo de mango” [a mango tree]. Derived from [stick], [palo] also means club, orcudgel. Extending from this, moving further into the vernacular, [palo] can refer toa strike, a blow, or a shot, as in “¡Le voy a meter un palo a la cabeza!” [I’m going toknock him on the head!] and “Un palo de ron” [a shot of rum]. Palo can also meanpenis or fuck.

The logic of “Palo,” when it is used to refer specifically to Cuban-Kongosocieties of affliction, lies in the artistry of pun and insinuation surrounding thisword in all of its Cuban Spanish iterations. The word [Palo] invokes the sticks thatare important among Cuban-Kongo substances for healing and harming. The sticks,palos, are prominently displayed in the cauldrons and urns, called prendas, whichare kept at the heart of Palo practice (Ochoa 2004:265).7 The sticks are used askindling to set fire to the fate of a healer’s rival or the burn out ill-intentioneddead permeating the body of a healer’s client.8 From this connection, it is easy toconceive of Palo as do Cubans of all stripes—as a dangerous “flame,” “heat,” or “fire”

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(“i la candela !”). [Palo] also refers to the hallowed power of sovereign trees deep inthe forest, which are praised in the songs and practices of Palo societies as the sourceof their volatile kindling, trees seen as dwelling place, more precisely as versions,of the dead. And, of course, [Palo] speaks to the blows Cuban-Kongo practicedelivers against the fortune of a healer’s enemies, and to the vaunted masculinityof Cuban-Kongo praise societies. Finally, but not insignificantly, [Palo] implies thefucking over of an enemy through cleverness and force.9

In each of these ways, Palo resembles the practice of Ngoma, the societies ofaffliction, “drums of affliction,” as Victor Turner (1968:15–16) and John M. Janzen(1982:3–23; 1992:1) call them, sustained by Central and Southern African peoples.In Cuban Palo, the BaKongo societies of Lemba and Nkita are directly cited, as aretheir practices of keeping potent medicines for healing and harming—medicinesto which the afflicted are offered as initiates and that receive elaborate praise,medicines that initiates then reproduce (Ochoa 2004:19–20, 24, 193–252). InPalo, these medicines are the prendas I have mentioned above, with their timbersticks and fire, which have sustained central African people enslaved and brought toCuba, and their descendants, and the initiates of their descendants, Isidra and herclients among them, through and beyond the misfortunes of centuries of boundlessservitude.

MINOR LANGUAGES, MATERIALITY, AND THE DISRUPTION OF

REPRESENTATION

Writing about Palo and its ideas of the dead and matter requires disruptinghabits of thought and writing in anthropology that are rooted in the Western philo-sophical tradition. Palo is too unexpected in its basic assumptions about the statusof matter, the dead, and the living, to be seamlessly assimilated into the prevailingethnographic modes of analysis as these are defined, above all, by their adherence toregimes of knowing organized under the signs of negation, identity, and being. AsFoucault has pointed out, following Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, these are thethree pillars of European knowing since the Enlightenment, and anthropologicalrepresentation submits to them to this day. A variety of methods might be devised toaccomplish such a disruption, and I develop one suggested by Deleuze and Guattari(1986) in their reading of Kafka, which carries methodological echoes in TheodorAdorno (1973). This is the method of creating a new language within our own forPalo. In this case, this new language will be composed of familiar terms found inHegel and Marx, now turned toward new understandings, and from not-so-familiarterms found in Nietzsche and Deleuze (Ochoa 2004:22, 49).10 This new language

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seeks to recreate Isidra’s language in wholly new terms, arrived at by reiterating inmy own way Isidra’s articulations and repetitions, which communicated the dead insingular fashion. A principal objective is to manage what Isidra did with her words,which is to assemble a language for Palo’s dead that is suffused with sensation,affected, in the way that Nietzsche wished language had the strength to be.11 Thiswould be a writing that was, in a most material way, “touched” by the dead.12

In our engagements she insisted, through repetition, that I learn her vocabularyof the dead by speaking her words back to her. Our growing rapport depended onmy words being reiterations of her own, so that before long I surrendered the termsof my research and together we spoke about the dead in her words alone. WithinSpanish, which we shared fluidly, Isidra spoke a language that was at once familiarand alien, ripe with sentiment, and formed to communicate the dead intellectuallyand viscerally at once. Its particularity came from Creole Kikongo terms that shelinked-up to redefined Spanish ones, and then charged with importance throughrepetition. My reiterations became functions of these repetitions, and she wasexquisitely sensitive to any deviation on my part, which she regularly corrected.Being disciplined into an alien language was uncomfortable for me, but this wascountered by the forceful sensation of the dead her words produced. I am explicitlynot engaging in a translation of Isidra’s language, as this would inevitably lose muchof what is powerful in them. Instead, what I seek to do is to create for Palo’s dead aforeign language within our own language, just as her Creole Kikongo, Palo Kikongo

I have called it elsewhere, was a foreign language within her own Spanish tongue, sothat Palo’s dead might survive its encounter with my text and continue to resonate,vibrate, with a force of its own.13

This notion of creating a foreign language within our language is Kafka’s,a Prague Jew torn between writing in Yiddish, Prague German, or Czech, andI see in this formulation not only a strategy for my writing about Palo’s dead,but also a suggestion for how as anthropologists we might overcome the notionthat ethnographic representation be thought of as a mode of translation, howeverdestabilized.14 In their book on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari (1986) pursue Kafka’ssensitivity to the precariousness of writing in any of the languages available to him,and especially his insights into the disruptive potentials of minor languages whenthey are grafted onto major, or “master” languages.15 I do the same with Isidra’sPalo Kikongo, and even more so with Isidra’s particular use of this tongue, whichbecomes a minor language within a minor language, and thus a nest of disruptions ofdominant codes. Finding terms that neither elevate nor amplify this minor tongue inEnglish-language ethnography requires some of the translator’s art, but it requires

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yet more of the subversive’s creativity, which is in part born in a willingness tocross planes of reference without regard to received expectations that translationtraverses (transcends) difference.

The stakes involved in creating this foreign language for Palo within our ownEnglish-language social science are the same as those involved in the primary ques-tions of discourse and power, of the generation (or preservation) of authority inand through representation, which are simultaneously the stakes involved in theprofoundly ethical questions regarding the continued existence, or not, of contentin its encounter with form, which is to say, of fieldwork in its encounter with thegenre (disciplinary) precedents of ethnography.16 This last consideration is a philo-sophical one, which I will address below. There are also political stakes in creatingthis foreign language; they are those of complying or not with the dominant codes,of allying with disturbances in dominant meaning-making regimes, and of creatingtexts that partially escape the machines of discipline Kafka so convincingly wroteabout. The political stakes are not at the least those of helping to coalesce, throughthe crafting of an idiosyncratic writing, a sensibility for Palo, and in the processcontribute to a new community of scholars, writers, and practitioners.17

I would like this foreign language for Palo both to describe and to make feltthe unstable substances that Palo prizes. It must have words for the volatile socialpotentials found in matter and terms to arrange what are normally considered dialec-tically exclusive classes, like “matter” and “spirit,” into mutually affirming couplingsand assemblages, paradoxical though these may seem (Deleuze 1990:35, 66–73).It must also have terms for a new materiality, including terms for morphogenicdynamisms immanent to matter itself.18 This language will operate by making useof philosophy, just as it makes use of narrative description, in its attempt to speaknewly, individually, unsettlingly, about Palo and its dead.

KALUNGA

I begin composing my language for Palo by engaging a single intensity in Isidra’swords. In their work on Kafka, Deleuze and Guattari describe an “intensity” as anaspect of a language that disrupts its dominant courses of deployment through theestablishment of an irreducible difference.19 She was not as fluid a user of PaloKikongo as others I worked with in Havana, but her Spanish was affected by it, andnowhere was this more apparent than in her use of the word Kalunga.

Isidra said, “The dead led me here last night, where the only light was fromthe streetlight outside. You know my lamp burnt out a couple of weeks ago. I’mnever on this couch at night, lamp or not, you know I like to be in the kitchen or

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down the hall, but here they brought me in the darkness and the blue shadows ofKalunga, and I sat here.” This was an art for Isidra, of seeking her dead amidst theflows of the broad and generic mass of the dead she described as alike to the sea.To find her dead, Isidra had to first negotiate the shadows and flows of Kalunga, forwithout Kalunga there could be no relation, neither between herself and her deadnor between the two of us.

Kalunga, as Isidra taught it through variegated reiteration, was the great,indifferent sea of the dead. At times she referred to Kalunga plainly as “el muerto,”“the dead” or, more precisely, “the dead one.” Kalunga is transposed from 19th-century BaKongo language and cosmology, in which, according to the missionariesW. Holman Bently (1887:288), Karl E. Laman (1964:207), and Wyatt MacGaffey(1986:43), the scholar of Kongo religion who has written on Laman’s work, itreferred to the sea, in the depths of which reside the dead. As Isidra used it,Kalunga was not only haunted by the dead, but was also composed of the deadand simultaneously constitutive of them; the dead were immanent to it, in thesame way a broth makes a soup. Kalunga, Isidra said, comprises all the dead thatcould possibly exist or have existed. It is ancient beyond memory, and within itthe dead exceed plurality and become instead a dense and indistinguishable mass.20

According to Isidra, the world and experience, all things available to perception andperception itself, are a series of condensations within this fluid mass of the dead.Kalunga, the sea of the dead, was in Isidra’s teachings much as it was in Kongothought: immanent to the living. The dead were to the living, in Georges Bataille’s(1992:23–25) words, “like water is in water,” dependent on no object and belongingto no subject.21 Immanent, as in saturating, as in suffusing, will be a strong term inthe language I wish to craft for Palo.

Isidra’s description of Kalunga held at its most basic that this sea, in saturatingand suffusing, had neither height nor depth but was an indifferent and infinite eventseething with as yet uncodified potentials.22 She and other Palo teachers beganthis lesson on Kalunga from the murk of visceral experience, at times powerfullymoving, at others fleetingly vague. In the course of fieldwork—the everydayness ofmeals shared, errands embarked on together, the interminable waiting for Havana’sbuses, conversation all the time—it was vague versions of Kalunga that were morecommon. They were also the more difficult to grasp for their swift and inconse-quential passing. These were moments when Kalunga, the vast sea of the dead, thedead one, actualized in fluttering turns of the stomach, in goose bumps behind myarms, and in barely perceptible sensations in my chest, my throat, and in the musclesaround my eyes. Over time I was instructed to acknowledge these everyday events

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in terms provided by Kalunga, the dead one. Because of the “minor” quality of theseevents, because they lack status as empirical measures in the human sciences, ittook me many months of working with Isidra before I could bring myself to givethem due place in my fieldwork, let alone my theoretical understanding of Palo.

Taken as a “set” or “series,” we can refer to these visceral events as did Isidra,as minor actualizations, or versions, of Kalunga.23 The indeterminateness of goosebumps, the poor reference to truth in a turn of the stomach, the instability indiscourse of tension in the chest, are best described as a kind of vibration or tonalshifting in the fluid vastness of Kalunga.24 Thus, Kalunga was tangibly learned asradically subjective perceptions at the absolute limits of sentience and credibility,felt subjectively yet collectively influential, and, in the case of Palo, recognized andtaught as significant turns of the dead. Kalunga, if it was to be grasped at all, had tobe felt first, as a gentle turn of the stomach.

As minor sensation, as passing vibration, Kalunga, Palo’s indifferent, ambientmass of the dead, is felt as vague, deniable sense experience before it is everconsidered intellectually. This experience, this viscerality if you will, once it isadmitted to thought, is then held by those who practice Palo as immediate to theliving, as the very definition of closeness itself. Isidra was insistent about this formany weeks after I started working with her, but her emphasis on butterflies in thestomach and other sudden but fleeting sense events in the body was lost on me, as Isought verifiable terms on which to build an ethnography of Cuban-Kongo ritual.But she was an emphatic and forceful pedagogue, and quick to subvert my flightsaway from her teaching, such that time and again she brought me back to affirmationsof ephemeral sensation as a privileged experience of Kalunga, the dead. In time,there would be yet other experiences, more versions of the dead to add to these,different—responsive dead who would speak to me, such as her aunt Chacha, andmaterial versions such as sticks [palos] and bones—although connected immanentlyto the ambiance of Kalunga and through which I would approach Palo. But this iswhere she chose to start with me.

Isidra’s teaching of Kalunga was explicitly materialist. It depended on senseexperience for its departures into exegesis and for evidence of its claims. In effect,Kalunga was the philosophical basis for Palo’s material practice, and was, in fact,the privileged term of a materialism, although not one we might recognize at once.Isidra used this word explicitly when describing Palo—that is, “materialism”—usually in contrast to the Cuban Revolution. “Cuban Socialism isn’t materialist!”she exclaimed, “They’re dreamers! Palo is materialist, it takes care of things here andnow, with ingredients from the forest, from the earth! How much more materialist

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do you get than that?” Isidra insisted on this through her tireless appeal to senseexperience, to Kalunga, the dead one, felt at the fringes of perception: the chills,the vibes. Feeling Kalunga, the dead one, so close—in her body and on her skin—Isidra insisted that the living and the dead float together. Growing voluminous,the fluid sea that is the dead rises—a tide surrounds the head and body. Herelaboration of Kalunga dissolved the expected opposition of living and dead so thatnot only did these two great ordering categories no longer stand in oppositionto one another, but at the limit of her characterizations became an indivisiblecoupling, mutually becoming one another at their limits. Placed within the context ofKalunga’s saturating immanence, the living are best understood as singular densitiesof the dead coagulating in a fluid at its saturation point.

Isidra’s notion of the dead as a fluid immanence that permeated and saturated lifehelped her advance the idea that the body is something shared with the dead. Withinthe immanence that is Kalunga, the body is less fixed, more like a membranouspeel constituted in any depth it might have only by the hydraulic fluctuations andrearrangements of the dead across and through its surface. This was the status ofthe body in Isidra’s formulation of Kalunga, the body becoming a form of the dead,and the dead becoming material in momentary coagulations we recognize as bodiesand objects. Palo thought holds Kalunga as an unlimited becoming, and bodies,saturated and permeated, as forever becoming unlimited (Deleuze 1990:9). Thisformulation is important for Palo craft because healing and harming, and the hands-on craft of sorcery, are understood as the work of creating or quelling turbulencesin the fluid immanence of the dead.

A MATERIALISM FOR KALUNGA: SENSE UN-CERTAINTY AND THE

AFFIRMATION OF “CONCRETE CONTENT” IN HEGEL

A less than familiar image begins to appear as Palo comes to inhabit a foreignlanguage of its own within our language. Over and again in the body and acrossthe lips of a Palo healer in Havana, Kalunga, the dead one, the ambient, saturatingmass of the dead, emerges as goose bumps and the chills, which in themselves areturns, versions, within a plane of immanence that is unlimited in its becoming, andintense in its potential to turn out bodies and senses.25 Two tasks remain in staging aforeign language for Palo within our own. They are to generate for it a materialismunique to its terms borrowing from the resources of Western thought, and to craftfor it terms that would speak the dynamisms by which it distinguishes the formswithin matter, so as to bring substances to life and in the same instant its practicesof healing and its harming.

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Now, the materialism in which I subsist as a scholar of anthropology, and inwhich Palo’s materialism subsists in Cuba, is Marx’s materialism, where modesof production, control of the means of production, and the forceful shape of thefruit of production—the commodity form with its mysterious powers—define theshape of social life.26 And although one might find terms for Isidra’s materialism andfor my language of Palo in Marx, especially in Marx’s passage on the fetish form,I look for the terms of this materialism in Hegel, which is, after all, where Marx(1978a:112–118) found his. It was in Hegel’s (1977) discourse on object status,which culminates in the allegory of the vexing relationship between the masterand the slave, and the ever-more vexing role of the slave’s object of labor in thedefinition of that relationship, that Marx (1978a:113–116) found both his place ofconnection and departure, his “line of flight” as Deleuze and Guattari (1987:3–4,24–25) would call it, from Hegel’s Idealism. And it is in Hegel, too, where I find aline of flight for Kalunga, a line not only out of Hegelian Idealism and dialectics, butalso out of Marxist materialism and the ethnographic limits traced by this. Kalunga,the vast sea of the dead, finds words in our language in those realms of experiencesystematically excluded from European philosophy since Plato, experiences thatsubsist only in the margins of philosophy through Hegel, until Nietzsche recallsthem to the light of day.27

As Hegel (1977:104–114, 115) writes it, the object exudes a charm over themaster, which captivates the master in an irrepressible desire and inspires in himimaginary landscapes in which his self-extension is unhindered. Marx (1967:76–87)recognized the intensity of this desire, and saw in the commodities of 19th-centuryindustrial capitalism contemporary versions of the slave’s object, which the masterso loves and that so warp reality. To the 19th-century’s Right Hegelians and Left, orYoung Hegelians, we can add Marx (1978b:147–156, 163) the first slave-side, orobject-side Hegelian, counter to all the rest who sided with the master regardlessof their theological partisanship. And in this lies Marx’s materialism, in his passionfor the slave and the slave’s all-too-worldly bond to matter she, or he, transforms.

Marx’s intervention precisely on the point of the object is hardly coincidental,as the object is the last shard of matter, of the “concrete,” left in Hegel’s Phenomenology

after the first chapter. It is the only resource Marx found in Hegel for the making ofa new, 19th-century materialism. But there are other materialisms to be turned outof Hegel, modes of connection with matter, or the “concrete,” in Hegel’s writingthat both predetermine the slave’s object, and escape the traps of the later chaptersof the Phenomenology into which Marx fell, determining him forever as a Hegelianmetaphysician.28 In devising a foreign materialism within a foreign language of

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Palo’s own, I find terms in Hegel (1977:116), too, in the experience he called“Sense Certainty”—before he negated it on the way to sovereign recognition andthe transcendence of Mind, just like he eventually negated the slave, and his object,in his coming to universal consciousness. Immediately following his preface andintroduction, as the first movement in his work on consciousness, Hegel (1977:58)proposed forceful sensation, “Sense Certainty,” he called it, as the first untruth hisPhenomenology would dispel. I show the importance of this first negation for Hegelin the pages that follow, as the whole of his idealism rests on this primary dispelling.Palo, and my writing about it, affirm rather than deny this forceful sensation, thiscontent of matter, Hegel necessarily expels.

Hegel characterized Sense Certainty as immediately given “sense knowledge,”and located its force in its claim to apprehend the “pure being” of objects. But sucha “pure being” of objects, which Hegel (1977:58) also called, tellingly, “concretecontent,” which is to say, the very stuff of the object, is an illusion if only because itleaves out the question of mediation, because it lacks, says Hegel, a complex processfor the mediation of content into conceivable objects (Hegel 1977:58). This is tosay, that Sense Certainty lacks a subject-who-negates to do the mediating, in Hegel’sterms to “divide and enter,” into the immediacy of sense experience, to create objectsof thought that can be effectively stabilized and controlled. Without positing sucha subject-who-negates, the “pure being of things,” says Hegel (1977:58), is but animpression, it is, in fact, the “poorest truth” of all. Sense Certainty is no affirmativeproposition for Hegel, but only an assertion to rebuff, reduce, and contain, withinthe unfolding philosophical imperative of a subject-who-thinks-through-negation.Sense Certainty is in fact for Hegel, “Sense [un-]Certainty.” I will keep this term,sense un-certainty, as it speaks to my encounter with Palo’s dead in just the way I wantmy new language to.

Before dispensing with “sense knowledge,” as Hegel does within a page ofstarting his Phenomenology, I look a little closer at the kind of “being” involved inSense [un-]Certainty, just prior to the appearance of the negating-reasoning subject.I do this because I propose that those who practice Palo, and those who are affectedby its modes of healing and harming, are in singular fashion constituted as “livingin the world” much as Hegel’s Sense [un-]Certainty defines experience.

In Hegel’s telling, Sense [un-]Certainty is felt as “boundless receptivity,” asan experience of the world only as it imposes itself, as it penetrates me with itsforce, and to which I don’t respond in kind. I only reflect this force in my body,apprehending it as (false) truth (Hegel 1977:58). What one apprehends as the resultof such receptivity is forces from which, in Hegel’s (1977:58) words, “nothing has

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been omitted.” This is not an experience Hegel is fond of, this knowing-as-receptive-penetration by over-full forces. Hegel (1977:59) is anxious about the immediateforce of matter, anxious about its visceral connection to the one suffused by it. Lifeas blur between forceful matter and a passive receiver unsettles Hegel so profoundlythat Sense [un-]Certainty becomes, for him, but a flawed instant, not of affirmedsensation, but of negated receptivity—un-certainty indeed.

There are gendered dimensions to this opening of Hegel’s, which, from theperspective of a 21st-century sensibility, appear remarkably cliched in staging re-ceptivity as a mode of experience hopelessly inferior to that of penetration, andholding separation and entering into as sovereign over fluidity, receptivity, andimmediacy.29 The gender formulations are predictably dialectical, with penetrationacting the part of negation in this sexual play that possesses Hegel. Penetration,the dividing gesture par excellence, is the language Hegel has for primary separa-tion and individuation in order to name “ur-difference,” what Derrida (1976:63–68;1982:3–27) and Deleuze (1994:209, 218), against metaphysics, would respectivelycall differance and differentiation. If one thing is worth conserving in this strange play,it is precisely what Hegel seeks to foreclose, namely the possibility of affirmingreceptivity or immediacy prior to, or outside, the stasis of dialectical stabilizationthrough primary penetration, as something that overflows, that cannot be captured,that saturates and consumes.30

Now Hegel would like to be moving along the path toward a stabilized, negat-ing, masculine European subjectivity, but I want to linger here in what I am calling“sense un-certainty,” which is to say, in Kalunga. Linger in this immediacy of senseexperience that suffuses those who practice Palo. Linger in the chaos, in infinite,“indefinite” nature, in the apeiron of European becoming prior to Hegel’s first nega-tion, prior to his first penetration, prior to the motion that initiates the GermanEnlightenment’s last unselfconscious attempt to constitute wholly stable objectsand wholly knowing subjects.31 Linger in this radical connection, or immanence, offorces and receivers, in the flux of limits implied by such an intimate connection,which is the Cuban-Kongo sea of the dead.

A problem is opened here, however, which is that of lingering in what appearsto be an impossible moment. For this intimacy that is Kalunga, Maurice Leenhardt(1979:20) calls it “participation” (in the world, with the dead, with the trees, andthese with us), can only be located, or signaled, in the instant before its inevitableinterruption by the subject-who-negates/penetrates mediates. Yet it is just thisinstant that interests me; to linger in it is to posit a kind of knowing outside ofnegation/penetration mediation, a knowing outside the dialectic, which in the

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Phenomenology places us in the instant immediately prior to the emergence of Hegelas Hegel—the trillionth of a second before the Big Bang of dialectical Europeanontology. How, then, to linger here, to build a knowing here, in such an infinitesimalspace? How to know Kalunga, through Kalunga?

Locating this moment has been difficult enough, involving many of the risksassumed is disregarding dominant codes, and now I want to extend our lingering,to repeat this instant again and again by affirming it serially, by affirming senseun-certainty again and again in its countless instantiations—the goose bumps, thebutterflies, and vibes that Palo prizes. In lingering through the repetition of theinstant just before the crank is turned on the engine of dialectics, I follow myteachers of Palo, but also Nietzsche and Deleuze, who would seek difference, whichis to say the basic architecture of concepts—of forms—not in negation, but ratherin affirming repetition, affirmed repetition, through a repetition that affirms.32 ButI linger here first and foremost because this is where Palo returns us, again andagain—to this connection between bodies, to the repetition of events that linkbodies, to this zone of bodies so receptive to minor sensation that their boundariesdissolve. And this was precisely Isidra’s teaching, that of bodies permeated by thedead, of bodies constituted by infinitesimal repetitions of forceful sensations, ateaching which valued the forcefulness of matter in-and-across-the-body preciselyas a privileged kind of knowing, as the sensual affirmation of Kalunga, the sea of thedead. Such a knowing is one wherein fleeting sensation is not negated, but ratherfelt as a play of forces that constitute a Cuban-Kongo life, a play of the dead thatsuffuses and makes the person who lives Palo.

VERSIONS OF THE DEAD—IMMANENCE, REPETITION, AND

BECOMING IN PALO MATERIALITY

My communication of Palo’s dead, Kalunga, depends on making felt this zoneI have been calling “sense un-certainty,” which owes its instability to instants offorceful sensation, and our immanent receptivity of such, in which we as scholarsfind it so difficult to linger. Without the stabilizing resources of negation, it is onlythrough repetition, serial repetition of the instant of sense un-certainty, that wecan linger here at all. Which is to say that the sense un-certainty that is Kalungais in effect a series of sense events, different in their repetitions but repetitionsnonetheless. Kalunga must be understood as a zone of sensation that generatesmany versions of itself, mutually coexisting and concurrently affirmed.

In this I am close to Isidra, who insisted that one sustain multiple (at timesdialectically exclusive) definitions of the dead, simultaneously. Affirmed repetition

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portrays, literally, the baffling proliferation of the dead in Palo’s teaching and craft—without sacrificing a necessary sensitivity, receptivity you might say, to their cosub-sistence, their nonexclusive difference, which refuses resolutions through opposedidentities. The method is to affirm each repetition, or version, of the dead, whilesimultaneously affirming all the others—the goose bumps along with the chills, thewakefulness along with as yet unspecified versions, like ashes, blood, and bones. Inone moment the dead is the undefined, pressing mass of Kalunga, the ambient dead,the blue-gray shadows that overtake Isidra in her parlor, and in the same momentthe dead are discrete responsive entities such as a deceased parent or an old auntwhispering to Isidra in the middle of the night. Kalunga, the dead, becomes thefeeling of anticipation that overtakes her and moves her to get out of bed, just asit is a chill along my hairline when Isidra brings a realization home for me withpoignancy and grace.

The difficulty in characterizing the dead with such variety is that instead ofnarrowing an understanding of the dead to an established identity, the logic of sensualaffirmation I was taught to pursue, and elaborate here, leads to a proliferation ofdefinitions, version after unstable, paratactic, version. The method sets up serialpresentations of the dead conjoined by an ever-returning and: Kalunga is the dead,and the dead is ashes, and a parable suddenly come to mind is Kalunga, and the deadare what arrive at the height of Palo feasts to take the bodies of the living and set theirlives ablaze. The paratactic and that distinguishes the discourse of the dead in Palo,with its characteristic affirmation of versions upon versions of the dead, excusesitself from the hypotactic subordinations and negations we are so accustomed to insetting up “arguments” and dialectically satisfied “conclusions,” subordinations thatlittle by little build up a depth beneath the feet of the progressively transcendent,vertically organized subject.33 Kalunga’s parataxis maintains a horizontal plane ofbecoming for the dead, which is ultimately limitless in its extension, neither astranscendental height nor subordinated depth, but as planar surface. The paratacticmethod Palo here imposes seeks neither height nor depth, but rather to “slide along”the length of this surface, juggling and assembling versions of the dead into a new,foreign language for Palo itself (Deleuze 1990:9).

The dead in Palo is best understood as an uncontainable spreading, each un-stable version becoming yet another, which stands not in opposition to its serialself-others, but alongside them, sliding along the a surface on the way to and fromthe limitless becoming of Kalunga. In this, Kalunga, the dead, resembles whatDeleuze and Guattari (1994:15–36) and Deleuze (2001:25–33) call a plane ofimmanence, sensual, preconceptual, and traversed by countless unequal forces,

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which are indifferent to their inequality. It was precisely the indifference to inde-termination of such a plane of immanence that so troubled Hegel, and which henegated as “Sense [un-]Certainty.” This indeterminate plane of immanence, whereintense flows stage difference through repetition, generates the virtual zone of Paloexperience, the zone from which its proliferating, countless, versions of the dead(its sticks, bones, soils, ashes, etc.), and by extension its sociality, emerge. Justas the dead turn, from one version to the next, so they return, eternally, in aseries of positive, mutually affirmed becomings—as what is felt as important inbodies, materials, songs, and words whispered to oneself.34 Such returns of thedead—distributed, collected, redistributed, and assembled—form arrangementswe might, in a different language, call “objects” and “subjects.”

Kalunga, the plane of immanence that generates version upon version of thedead, and from which “objects” and “subjects” emerge in inspired moments oftension and grace, is also the sea into which such versions and the “objects” and“subjects” they compose recede, to be formed anew. Being prior to valuation, theambient dead is indifferent to the forms it conceives and consumes and is as likelyto generate something new as to consume what is diminishing into its flows. Thispropensity to receive and transform what has form but is fading lends a futurequality to Kalunga, the dead. Forms such as sticks, bones, or subjects will not findstasis in Kalunga, but will continue to transform—emerging, actualizing, receding,dissipating, and repeating. What Palo’s dead generates will not necessarily persist ortranscend. The new and the singular born of events that “happen” in the immanentplane of the dead will likely begin to diminish just as they have taken shape. Kalunga,the ambient dead, is indifferent like the sea and is as such, in terms Nietzsche (1973)so loved, “beyond good and evil.” Echoing other teachers of Palo, Isidra repeatedagain and again one of those three or four word refrains that condense Palo teachingwhile simultaneously veiling it mystery, “Kalunga sube, Kalunga baja”—the searises, the sea falls.

Amidst these tidal shifts—inchoate, unequal, indifferent, forceful, intimate,and repetitive—it is the repetition of basic sensual forces that emerge as recognizableentities, “objects” and “subjects,” although I am doubtful that these terms are of valueto those who would act in Palo. Repetitions of forces that, like the swirling eddiesat the edges of a rush, constitute mimetic, contagious feedback loops of becoming,loops that, in complicity with others, subsist. Relatively stable in their repetitionsat the fringes of broader currents, these eddies turn in discrete directions, slowly,determining, precipitating, and aggregating forces immanent to the dead into theforms we recognize as static “objects” and static “subjects.” What is important to

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FIGURE 1. Turbulence: Kalunga, the ambient dead. Image by Isaac Held (Held et al. 1995).

recognize in this formulation is that “objects” and “subjects” are effects, versions,of these directions, these slow swirls at the margins of fast flows of the dead, whichturn, and overturn, the matter of sensation.35 (See Figure 1)

It is no coincidence that Deleuze (1994:218–221), in naming the dynamicprocesses that determine forms like “objects” or “subjects,” refers to these basicprocesses as dramas, and likened them at once to theater and dreaming, poignantlymentioning Artaud’s theater of cruelty along the way.36 By drama, Deleuze meansmaximum difference, difference at its fullest potential, which Deleuze also calls“intensity.” Artaud’s theater of cruelty refers not to gratuitous violence, but to theperformance of intense bodily involvement with the world around, involvement thatthrows players and public out of reified configurations of the self and arouses whatArtaud (1958:84–100) called the “passionate convulsion” of life. To this drama, andto the drama of dreaming, I would add the cruel drama of possession, as when a

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healer is stirred from her sleep, feels a sweat breaking then goose bumps down herback, and the dead are upon her.

CONCLUSION

The Cuban-Kongo dead, Kalunga, presents a significant problem for thosewho would seek to convey this teaching. Healers of the Cuban-Kongo society ofaffliction called Palo educate their students to discern Kalunga, the ambient dead, ininsignificant turns of the stomach, chills, and the otherwise unverifiable experiencesat the limits of sensation. Following Deleuze and Guattari, I have tried not so muchto represent Kalunga as to create for it a foreign language within our own language,something novel that would be as much presentation as re-presentation. Kalunga,the vast sea of Cuban-Kongo dead, ambient to life, moils through and around theliving. Its turbulent flows and the relation of bodies to them have much in commonwith the radical receptivity Hegel describes as Sense Certainty in his Phenomenology

of Spirit, which I have appropriated and affirmed as “sense un-certainty.” Elaborat-ing Kalunga as sense un-certainty has meant affirming the philosophical conceptof immanence in updated form, through reference to Deleuze’s philosophy, andreference to Leenhardt’s New Caledonian ethnography. It has likewise meant ar-ticulating a “space” for immanence, which I have designated as the space affordedby repetition. Kalunga determines forms through paratactic repetitions, which dis-perse along horizontally planar, nontranscendent lines. These forms, by virtue ofcondensing, congealing, or otherwise stabilizing through repetition, are consideredto be so many versions of the dead. “Objects” and “Subjects,” the privileged termsof normative social scientific discourse in anthropology, are such stabilized repeti-tions, and likewise versions of the dead. The consequences of such an understandingpoint to a new kind of materialism unique to Palo healing, and establish the basisfor analyzing Palo material practice, and the healing and harming that distinguish itamid Cuba’s formidable religious melange.

ABSTRACTThe Cuban-Kongo society of affliction known as Palo educates its initiates in the visceral

apprehension of Kalunga, the vast sea of the dead. Kalunga is taught as unstable and

unverifiable experience at the limits of sensation—chills, goose bumps, or a fluttering in

the chest or stomach. Building on an account of this teaching from fieldwork, I draw from

anthropology and philosophy to account for Kalunga’s role in Palo materialism. In this

article, I elaborate a writing strategy explicitly critical of “representation” and suggest

the creation of a “foreign language within our own” as a way of handling ethnographic

“content.” This “new language” for Kalunga is assembled from Palo terms, and from492


the turning of terms in the writing of Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari, G. W. F. Hegel,

Friedrich Nietzsche, and Karl Marx. I arrive at a description of Kalunga as a paratactic

discourse, and a “plane of immanence,” from which are assembled, and into which are

dispersed, “versions of the dead,” including “objects,” and “subjects.”

Keywords: religion, Cuban-Kongo, Palo, materiality, sensation, Deleuze,ethnography

NOTES

Acknowledgments. My version of Cuban-Kongo Palo is owed in great part to my engagements over theyears with Isidra Saez Saez, Rodolfo Herrera O’Farril, and other teachers of Palo craft in Guanabacoaand Havana, Cuba. This article would not have been written without the support of a University ofCalifornia President’s Postdoctoral Fellowship. A version of this article was presented as a paper tothe Department of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley, in October of 2005 and wasgreatly improved by the questions of faculty and students. Stefania Pandolfo was a critical interlocutorduring early stages of composition. Peter Skafish, a Ph.D. candidate in anthropology at Berkeley, hasbeen a rigorous interlocutor on Deleuze. Bill Hanks has been an important interlocutor throughoutmy time in Berkeley. Daniella Marıa Gandolfo and Richard Brownell Kernaghan both read a draft inits entirety and transformed it through their comments. I am grateful to Limor Darash, a VisitingFellow in the Department of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley, for reading a laterdraft. I am finally grateful to Mike Fortun and three anonymous readers for Cultural Anthropology forimportant critical insights and revision suggestions.

1. Those familiar with Victor Turner’s and John M. Janzen’s work on Kongo and Southern Africansocieties of affliction will recall Turner’s Drums of Affliction (1968) and Janzen’s Lemba (1982) andNgoma (1992). One might choose to substitute the term religion for society of affliction, although“religion” and its concomitant variants are ultimately inadequate to communicate Palo.

2. My acquaintance with Isidra Saez Saez (a pseudonym chosen by this teacher of Palo to honor hergrandmother in my writing) began in 1999 as part of my fieldwork on Cuban-Kongo practice.

3. Recent monographs on African-inspired religion in Cuba deal almost exclusively with Santo,also known as La Regla de Ocha, Lucumı, or, as a last resort, Santerıa, with Palo receiving minimalmention. See Brown (2003) and Hagedron (2001).

4. The “hot”–“cool” distinction, with Kongo inspirations implicated in heat and flames, and WestAfrican Yoruba or Old Dahomey inspirations connected with coolness, is a theme runningthrough black Atlantic self-understandings and thus in works such as Thompson’s Flash of the

Spirit (1983). It is likewise a theme in Ochoa (2004).5. This is consistent in Haiti, Brazil, New Orleans, and Cuba, in which Kongo-inspired practices

offer unique access to the dead and the healing and harming they effect, which is usuallyrecognized as witchcraft or sorcery. In the case of Haiti, Thompson (1983:181–183) is concise instating this point. In Brazil, Diana DeG. Brown (1986:68–69, 73–75, 90–92) describes spiritistdoctrine recombining with Kongo-inspirations in the coupling of Umbanda/Quimbanda, whichdecenters the divine in favor of the dead and the sorcery they perform. Zora Neale Hurston(1990:183–246) continues to enchant with her description of Creolized Kongo simbi powers,in the water, fire, lightning, root work, and bundle-making involving the dead of New OrleansHoodoo. In the case of Cuba, Stephan Palmıe (2002: 168–181) affirms that Kongo-inspirationslie behind accusations or claims of sorcery, just as does David H. Brown (2003: 326n 102) ina brief reference to Kongo-inpsired Palo in his impressive, encyclopedic treatment of [Santo.]

6. See Caillois (1959:35–38), Bataille (1992:36), and Leiris (1988:24–25); see also Bataille1988:121–123; 133–134; 324, 355). These authors were very familiar with Hertz’s work,

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and their notion of the “negative sacred” should be read as an extension and overcoming of hiswork on the left hand.

7. In general, treatments of the contents of Cuban-Kongo prendas seek explanations for thesematerials through a metaphor and metonymy analytic, echoing Frazer’s classic distinctionbetween sympathetic and contagious magic. This is the case with the most recent and mostcompetent treatment of these objects in Palmie’s (2002:168–171) work. In a similar vein,although updated through the eyes of art history, David H. Brown (1989) and Palmie (2002)share a formal appreciation of some of the substances contained in prendas, notably their sticks.Grounded in Brown’s training as an art historian, their method is one of working visual analogiesagainst historical narratives, arriving at the suggestion that the ring of sticks protruding fromthese objects are small-scale mock-ups of runaway slave fortifications. Palmie (2002:184–185),citing Brown, then concludes that prendas function in part as metaphorical agents of “mysticalwarfare.” My approach, to be elaborated in a forthcoming article dealing specifically with Cubanprendas, is to implicate their contents with practical applications in Palo ritual, seeking throughethnography an understanding of Palo substances that appreciates them as versions of the deadmobilized in pragmatic, empirical, healing, and harming work.

8. Encounters with prendas, always precarious events partly understood as encounters withdangerous fire, are often begun by aspirating cane liquor on the prendas, and uttering theSpanish-Kikongo phrase “¡sopla guira, llama noka, nunga, nunga, saca mundele!” [blow on thegourd (prenda), call the snake, fire! fire! burn out the whites!] (Ochoa 2004:267). MacGaffey(1991:142) describes a specific hunting nkisi, called Nkondi, which at the time of its collectionby the missionary Laman carried a large bundle of firewood on its back. MacGaffey cites Laman,who identifies the importance of the sticks in their weight, which are heaved on a victim withcrushing force. I here suggest that Cuban-Kongo prendas are in part kindling bundles with theircollections of sticks, which are used not to crush but, rather, to ignite fires, to set the bush (el

monte) ablaze so that prey will be driven forward and enemies burnt out of their positions ofadvantage. MacGaffey (1991:150; 2000:103) has recently emphasized the connection betweenfire and Nkondi.

9. Palo in actuality divides into four “branches,” four distinct societies of affliction. Isidra practicedthe Briyumba, or Villumba, version of Palo and it is “Palo Briyumba” that my work most concretelyevokes. The other branches are “Palo Mayombe,” “Palo Monte,” and “Palo Kimbisa.” Each branchof Palo nurtures a distinct “Palo Kikongo” vocabulary, distinct song and beat repertoires, anddistinct prenda-making and prenda-keeping aesthetics.

10. For the idea of a foreign language within one’s own, see Deleuze and Guattari (1986:26–27).11. Nietzsche, grown weary of “old tongues,” seeks to create a language strong enough to carry his

affect—his loneliness, his love, and his affliction. See Nietzsche (1982:196; 1973:186–187,201–202).

12. The work of finding for ethnography “new tongues” that can do more than represent, reduce,or translate, but that are rather turned by their encounter with the world such that they evoke,has been carried out by others to inspiring results. For me, Kenneth Read’s The High Valley

(1965), and Pierre Clastres’s Chronicle of the Guayaki Indians (1998) are important. I am gratefulto the CA editors for pointing me to Stephen A. Tyler’s “Post-Modern Ethnography: FromDocument of the Occult to Occult Document” with its articulate case for evocation againstrepresentation (1986:129–130; 134, 136–140). Michael Taussig has consistently addressed theepistemological incoherence of ethnographic representation and sought to refine this problemthrough practical engagements with written form, recently in pursuit of an “aroused” “sub-stantial language” that “runs along the seam where matter and myth connect and disconnectcontinuously” (2004:xviii; 129–137; 312–315).

13. My impulse here stems from my reading of Adorno (1973:31–33; 37–40; 140–143), andhis own profound concern for the world of thinking when objects come under the totalizinginfluence of concepts, especially as these are produced and mobilized by dialectics. Adornoenjoins us to a practice of thinking that disconnects dialectics from identity, and embraces thevertiginousness of a thinking that throws itself at objects a fond perdu. One would not normallyplace Adorno next to Deleuze and Guattari, or Latour for that matter, because Adorno’s

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allegiances to Hegel would seem to disqualify him from such company. But both Deleuze andLatour advocate encounters with the world that preserve its materiality against the crushingforce of representation. Deleuze and Guattari (1987:219) propose a thinking practice thattakes “subrepresentative matter” for its object, while Latour (2005:9, 16, 30) suggests the useof an “infra-language” of strictly meaningless terms, so that the matter that interests us is notrendered mute by our comfortable familiarity with dominant tongues. It is in this vein, also,that I propose creating for Palo a language of its own. For a recent linguistic treatment ofKikongo in “Palo mode” please see Fuentes Guerra and Schwegler (2005:92–110).

14. Rosalind C. Morris (2000), in her meticulously crafted ethnography of spirit mediumship inNorthern Thailand, has recently contributed to the now-established practice of anthropologicalself-understanding through reflection on the concept of translation. Her destabilization of thetranslation paradigm, which she refracts through Derrida and Benjamin, and thus through theconcepts of difference, time, deferral, loss, and materiality, is welcome within this practice.This said, Morris (2000:14–19, 41–42, 46–52) leaves representation itself intact as a frameof knowing and for organizing the production of ethnography. The creative, empirical, andpragmatic “writing of difference” (as opposed to “traversing of difference”) Deleuze and Guattaripropose in their reading of Kafka is glimpsed by Morris only as an excessive possibility beyondthe limits of translation as she understands it, as when she proposes the “production of afabulously hybridized English, something novel and manifold” to adequately convey the poetrywith which she opens her text. Talal Asad likewise detects the limits of translation, and proposes“dramatic performance, the execution of a dance, or the playing of a piece of music” (1986:159)as more up to the work of evoking difference.

15. Deleuze and Guattari (1986:16, 25) make this point for Kafka’s sense of Yiddish within German,especially the way it operated within the popular theater in Prague at the time.

16. See Foucault (1973:208–211) in Morris (2000:18, n. 10), and Foucault (1973:217–249).17. Deleuze and Guattari (1986:16–18) posit that minor literatures are inexorably political. For

Deleuze and Guattari, as for Kafka, “the political” is understood through its basic connotations,as in those of relation, association, or interconnectedness, especially the connection betweenthe intimate and the collective.

18. For “morphogenic dynamisms” in relation to Deleuze’s materialist realism see DeLanda (2002:6,10–13).

19. Deleuze and Guattari (1986:22–26) consider intensities in language as “deterritorializing”agents.

20. Canetti (1978:45, 63, 265–9) calls this mass “the invisible crowd.” He writes: “It could beargued that religions begin with invisible crowds. They may be differently grouped, and in eachfaith a different balance between them has developed. It would be both possible and fruitful toclassify religions according to the way in which they manipulate their invisible crowds.” Canettilater depicts the opposition of the crowds of the dead to the crowd of the living as essentialnot only for social cohesion but for despotism as well. He writes, “The two crowds keep eachother alive.”

21. For a characterization of immanence in relation to subjects and objects see Deleuze (2001:26).22. Deleuze (1990:4–11) begins his disassembly of Platonist Idealism trough Stoic materialism, and

its emphasis on “the unlimited” as the engine of becoming. He then focuses on the paradoxes thisintroduces to dialectics. A strong connection is established here with Bataille’s (1985:116–129;1988:19–41; 1991:13–24) exploration of excess and “erotism,” and Foucault’s (1977) devel-opment of this as regards human subjectivity after Nietzsche’s (1974:167–181) announcementthe death of God.

23. My use of the terms series and actualizations is connected to Deleuze’s (1994:221) workingthrough of the problem of immanence in philosophy, and the role he accords repetition in hisrefinement of this problem. My use of “event” is connected to Deleuze’s (1990) exploration ofStoic materialism.

24. The fluid metaphors were Isidra’s, and connected to her basic understanding of Kalunga asa fluid mass. This imagery, which will become essential to my characterization of Kalunga

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as “immanent,” or “ambient dead,” has echoes in Maurice Leenhardt’s (1979:20) concepts of“cosmomorphism” and “participation,” which he employs to convey the singularity of NewCaledonian, Canaque, experience. Leenhardt attempts to communicate a life invaded by themass of surrounding nature, and imagined as such in terms of physical dynamics as “flows,” andthe visceral apprehension of “the world’s pulse.” I am indebted to Drew Alan Walker for hislong-time interest in Leenhardt, which opened me to Stefania Pandolfo’s insistence that Palocould be fruitfully considered through Leenhardt’s Do Kamo (1979).

25. “Plane of immanence,” “sense,” “rhizome,” and “war machine” are among a series of terms thatruns throughout Deleuze’s (1990:66–73; 2001:66–73) and Deleuze and Guattari’s (1994:37)work to speak the “zone” from which forms emerge and into which they dissolve. Such a zoneis prior to codification and valuation, in Nietzsche’s terms “beyond good and evil.”

26. Since 1994, when the U.S. dollar was decriminalized and a new era of consumption initiated inCuba, the fetish form with the most fervent following on the on the island is the hard-currencycommodity (Marx 1967:76–87).

27. Foucault (1977:171, 176, 193) is articulate in this regard.28. Marx’s materialism does not escape the telos of these later chapters—the linear notion of

progress, the increasingly whole universe, the reconciliation of producers and the means ofproduction at the end of history (Marx 1978b:62–65, 490–491).

29. The heteronormative masculine gendering of Hegel’s discourse need hardly be pointed out,as heteronormative feminine sexuality, marked by penetration, is the first expelled from hisphenomenology. There is no true perception in being penetrated, or, perhaps better said, in“penetrated being.” Immediacy approximates the demonic as this is characterized by the loss ofdominating reason in the flows of penetrated desire.

30. Perhaps I am being too severe in my appraisal of Hegel by limiting my reading to the Phe-

nomenology. I am grateful one of my anonymous reviewers for directing me to Hegel’s Philosophy

of Nature (1970) in which, in the section entitled “The Plant Nature,” Hegel shows himselfa lover of plants, especially of flowers, and reveals a deep and unexpected sympathy for theimmanence and immediate exteriority of plant life (1970:305–312). There is no question thatHegel’s appreciation of plant being informs his depiction of the “pure being” of objects. Thatsaid, Hegel’s characterization of animal life, and ultimately of human being and consciousness,requires him to break starkly with his fields of east-facing sunflowers expelled out of themselveseach morning in their sensual connection with the sun (1970:306).

31. Apeiron, “infinite nature” (Barnes 1987:71), is attributed to Anaximander, among those pre-Socratics beloved by Nietzsche (1962:45–50) for their conception of life as “coming to be,” orbecoming, prior to the emergence of Being as the organizing principle of Western metaphysics.

32. Deleuze’s explicit elaboration of a repetition that affirms can be found in Deleuze (1983:48;1994:220).

33. I am grateful to Richard Kernaghan, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Yale program in agrarianstudies, for the suggestion that Palo’s dead be presented in terms of parataxis. The critiquePalo thinking on the dead provides of normative anthropological interpretation is echoed inBataille’s (1993:5–9, 20–23, 31) essays, such as “The Solar Anus,” “Big Toe,” and “Formless,”written against Hegelian epistemologies of transcendence that rely on the radical subordinationof base material from progressively purified systems.

34. Wyatt MacGaffey, in his outstanding study of BaKongo thought, refers to this proliferation as a“series” of the dead. Unlike his series, however, the proliferation I suggest for the Cuban-Kongodead is more resistant to the categorizations MacGaffey (1986:76) proposes for the dead amongthe BaKongo.

35. I am indebted in this observation in part to my exposure to chaos theory (Gleick 1987; Lorenz1993), especially as this grows out of studies of turbulence in fluid dynamics. “Objects” and“Subjects” generated by Kalunga might be fruitfully pictured as strange attractors, differentialequations of complex systems that pattern nonlinear dynamics. Latour (2005:12, 24) hasrecently noted the importance of updating our materialism so that it reflects the sensibilitiesof postrelativity physics, so that we are better able to deal with situations in which “things

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accelerate, innovations proliferate, and entities are multiplied.” U.S. anthropology connectedto Newtoninan mechanism via Marx organizes its materialism through a determinist physicsof state. But postrelativity physics has turned its attention to the boundary conditions betweenstates, and to the turbulences that define the becoming of apparently static matter. This isthe domain of nonlinearity, complexity, and chaos theory. A fine example of social critiquegrounded in such a materialism would be Antonio Benıtez-Rojo’s The Repeating Island (1992).

36. Deleuze, had he lived a little longer, would have loved Drew Alan Walker’s (1998:9–10) cou-pling of theater and dreaming in the concept of “dreama.” The playful concatenation of Walker’s“dreama” has influenced my understanding of Deleuze, and of perception, performance, andreality.

Editor’s Note: Like Ochoa, many CA authors have been centrally concerned with ethnographicwriting. See, for example Elizabeth Enslin’s “Beyond Writing: Feminist Practice and the Lim-itations of Ethnography” (1994) and David Samuels’s “ ‘These Are the Stories That the DogsTell’: Discourses of Identity and Difference in Ethnography and Science Fiction” (1996).

Cultural Anthropology has also published a range of articles on the Caribbean. See Bill Maurer’s“Due Diligence and ‘Reasonable Man,’ Offshore,” (2005), Deborah Thomas’s “DemocratizingDance: Institutional Transformation and Hegemonic Re-Ordering in Postcolonial Jamaica”(2002), Aisha Khan’s “Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as Master Symbol,”(2001), David Murray’s “Cultural Scripts of Language and Sexuality in Martinican Theater:The Improvisational Impasse” (1999), and Carla Freeman’s “Designing Women: CorporateDiscipline and Barbados’s Off-Shore Pink-Collar Sector” (1993).

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todd ramÓn ochoa -- versions of the dead- kalunga, cuban-kongo materiality, and ethnography

Documents

isidras house

andher authority

buther authority

words spokena minute

cerro district of havana

common day

normal day

rude sound