Witchcraft and Welfare

Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

Häftad, Engelska, 2003

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Beskrivning

Persecuted as evil during colonial times, considered charlatans during the nation-building era, Puerto Rican brujos (witch-healers) today have become spiritual entrepreneurs who advise their clients not only in consultation with the spirits but also in compliance with state laws and new economic opportunities. Combining trance, dance, magic, and healing practices with expertise in the workings of the modern welfare state, they help lawyers win custody suits, sick employees resolve labor disability claims, single mothers apply for government housing, or corporation managers maximize their commercial skills.Drawing on extensive fieldwork among practicing brujos, this book presents a masterful history and ethnography of Puerto Rican brujerÍa (witch-healing). Raquel Romberg explores how brujerÍa emerged from a blending of popular Catholicism, Afro-Latin religions, French Spiritism, and folk Protestantism and also looks at how it has adapted to changes in state policies and responded to global flows of ideas and commodities. She demonstrates that, far from being an exotic or marginal practice in the modern world, brujerÍa has become an invisible yet active partner of consumerism and welfare capitalism.

Produktinformation

Utgivningsdatum:2003-07-01
Mått:152 x 229 x undefined mm
Vikt:454 g
Format:Häftad
Språk:Engelska
Antal sidor:335
Förlag:University of Texas Press
ISBN:9780292771260

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Mer om författaren

Raquel Romberg currently teaches at Tel Aviv University in Israel. She taught previously at Swarthmore College and Temple University and was a Mellon Scholar in the Institute for Global Stdies in Culture, Power and History at Johns Hopkins University.

Recensioner i media

Overall, Witchcraft and Welfare is an excellent analysis of Puerto Rican Brujería and other African diasporic religions. This book, however, is not only useful for students and scholars of Puerto Rican or Caribbean culture and religion. It is also, through its ingenious analysis of the influences of 21st century globalization on the processes of syncretization, a window on the macrocosm of future trends in world religion. (The Journal of Latin American Anthropology) Witchcraft and Welfare is a delightful and insightful book, evocative and well-written, which unpacks the multilayered history of Puerto Rican folk beliefs and practices convincingly showing not only how brujería makes sense in people’s everyday lives, but also how it is becoming institutionalised as an integral part of official Puerto Rican society, and indeed how beliefs and practices of this kind can be complementary, not opposed, to bureaucratic rationality. (Anthropos)

Innehållsförteckning

PrefaceAcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Ritual AlchemyPart I. Shifting Faces Chapter One. Gatekeepers and Heretics: Disputing Sacred TerritoriesChapter Two. Nation Building and the Secularization of SpiritualityChapter Three. Spiritual Laissez-Faire and the Commodification of FaithPart II. The Technologies of Cosmic and Worldly Success Chapter Four. Brujos, Saints or Brokers?Chapter Five. Spiritual Assets and the Entanglements of PowerChapter Six. The Global Bazaar of Spiritual EnterpriseChapter Seven. The Moral Economy of Bureaucratic ProvidenceChapter Eight. Advocates and Lawyers of Another OrderEpilogue: The Halloween ExtravaganzaNotesBibliographyIndex