Interviews with the dead: immanence and apotheosis in Cuban historical consciousness

• In Event: What spirit possession “does”: the production of cosmology and change in Afro-Latin religions II

Abstract

How does spirit possession impact the workings of the historical imagination in Cuba? How does the immanence of the dead and deified inform widespread Cuban historicizing practices, both within and beyond the domain of popular religion? The late Cuban historian Joel James Figarola’s intriguing study, La Muerte en Cuba, discusses Cuban popular religious engagements with the dead alongside literary and patriotic invocations of death. His work suggests a connection between the Revolutionary state’s apotheosis of its heroes and religious devotion to saints and muertos. Here, I draw inspiration from James and ethnographic material from fifteen years of fieldwork on religion, race, folklore, and historical consciousness in Santiago de Cuba. I develop Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope, or “time-space” to unite semiotic and perspectival accounts of the convergence of the living and the dead. Moments of spirit possession and mediumship are the most dramatic instances of what many religious practitioners experience as ongoing interactions of agencies both spiritual and material. And so I trace chronotopes of immanence in two oral history interviews I conducted, one with Spiritists and the other with folklore society members. In one, my interviewees sing the spirits into co-presence, and in the other, they sing themselves into apotheosis with their heroic predecessors, who fought for Cuban independence more than a century ago. The Cuban Revolution has passed its 50th anniversary, and with the changes anticipated in 2016, a better understanding of ordinary Cubans’ experiential, affective, and moral commitments to time, place, and history is critical.

Author

• Kristina Wirtz, Western Michigan University