Abstract
In the Afro-Cuban religious practice of Palo Monte, speaking of spirits or entities is often speaking of composites, assemblages of materials, substances and forces that are neither reducible to Christian notions of an integral soul or agent nor to a dualist concept of matter. As an assembly and disassembly technology, Palo Monte annihilates any simple formulation of social personhood, producing spiritual forms whose contours are not just given by their creator’s intentions but can become aggregated parts either of his victims or of those who are protected by them. In this article, I analyse the dividends of these notions and offer an ethnographic comparison to Cuban Creole Spiritism.
Keywords
substances; assemblages; personhood; Afro-Cuban religion; Creole Spiritism