Ecstatic Encounters

Mattijs van de Port is an anthropologist and works at the University of Amsterdam and the VU University Amsterdam.

"Thriving in the gap between the sensuous fullness of life and the impossibility of its cultural representation, Ecstatic Encounters opens mind-blowing vistas for 'writing culture' in anthropology today."— Birgit Meyer, VU University Amsterdam. "This is a daring, beautiful book. Van de Port is an exceptional writer. But by praising his literary skill, I do not mean to imply that this is one more experimental, confessional,embarrassing autoethnography. Van de Port plays tricks with the ethnographic genre, but this vertiginous rollercoaster is not a hollow facade; it is full of content. This study is one of the more theoretically complex, and original contributions to Candombl´e and Bahia ever written." -- Roger Sansi Roca, Universitat de Barcelona/Goldsmiths University of London in Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology"Ecstatic Encounters is not the usual in-depth, anthropologist-becomes-initiate type of study, and in this sense it makes for a refreshing change. It constitutes more of a cultural history drawn through a series of essays that tangentially explore the theme of Candomblé in the public sphere. [=] the strength of Ecstatic Encounters is not so much as a convincing ethnographic detailing of other lives and worlds, but as a meditation on representation as a form of world-making and the limits of human meaning making." - Maya Mayblin, Anthropology of This Century Journal

• Preface, Introduction 1 On Immersion 2 Mysteries are Invisible3 Re-encoding the Primitive 4 Abstracting Candomblé 5 Allegorical Worlds 6 Bafflement Politics 7 The Permeable Boundary, Conclusion, Notes, Bibliography, Index.