Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa

By Stephan Palmié

Book Overview

A comparative investigation of Afro-Cuban ritual and Western science that aims to challenge the rationality of Western expert practices.

Inspired by the exercises of Father Lafitau, an eighteenth-century Jesuit priest and proto-ethnographer who compared the lives of the Iroquois to those of the ancient Greeks, Stephan Palmi? embarks on a series of unusual comparative investigations of Afro-Cuban ritual and Western science. What do organ transplants have to do with ngangas, a complex assemblage of mineral, animal, and vegetal materials, including human remains, that serve as the embodiment of the spirits of the dead? How do genomics and "ancestry projects" converge with divination and oracular systems? What does it mean that Black Cubans in the United States took advantage of Edisonian technology to project the disembodied voice of a mystical entity named ecu? onto the streets of Philadelphia? Can we consider Afro-Cuban spirit possession as a form of historical knowledge production?

By writing about Afro-Cuban ritual in relation to Western scientific practice, and vice versa, Palmi? hopes to challenge the rationality of Western expert practices, revealing the logic that brings together enchantment and experiment.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0226825949
• ISBN13: 9780226825946
• Release Date: October 2023
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.15 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 8.9"