Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft

Joan Dayan, well-known ethnographer of Vodou and politics in Haiti, once asked why the Haitian people who had managed to free themselves so successfully from plantation slavery would invent a religion with a set of spirit [End Page 102] masters (lwa) who would possess and control them (cited in Chapter 8, 208–9). This question is arguably at the heart of Paul Christopher Johnson’s excellent collection of essays that, as the title suggests, turns toward an examination of the “materials” by which spirits—and thus possession—are made viable and possible in Afro-Atlantic religions, as well as of the spiritual “animations” of materials themselves. Johnson’s proverbial answer to this question is not one of ethnopsychology or cosmology but of historical configurations. This book does not just bring spirit possession back into contemporary academic currency, but proposes to do so from a distinct standpoint, one that seeks to understand not just how “possession” emerged in a Western historical imaginary but that is preoccupied with the pragmatics of the material culture of such manifestations, evident also in a recent volume by the same publisher.¹ In concentrating on the semiotics of spirit possession, this volume also “flies in the face” of the so-called “ontological turn” in the recent anthropology of religion, which has been accused of emphasizing ontological specifics as if they were historically pristine.²

One of the editor’s fascinating arguments in the Introduction is that, as an embodied technology of history making, “spirit possession events aid their practitioners in building a notion of personhood from out of the wreckage and body count of Atlantic slave history” (7). For Johnson, the “possessed” help construct concepts of a “proper” person: individual, contract-worthy and civil. As he shows in the Chapter 1, the architecture of “spirit possession” in the West emerged precisely from the nomenclature of Christian demonology (25), peaking with famous mass possession at Lourdes in France, among others. But “property” itself preceded possession, as did notions of religion, which, now divorced from other aspects of social life, denoted a “buffered, impenetrable, self-possessed being . . . one that could then freely believe in God” (24). The beginnings of ethnology gained considerable traction from categories such as possession, which was now rendered part of a “primitive” stage in social and cultural evolution, fodder for comparative analysis between the various colonies. In other words, spirit possession as an analytic was pushed overseas, entangling other contexts with Western ideas of humans, bodies, ownership, property, gods, magic, and objects. Anthropology reified possession as primitive to the extent that in many places in Latin America it [End Page 103] came to signify backwardness and antimodernity, associated with communities of African descent, among whose symptoms were “fetichism,” the wrongful attribution of power to objects. Thus, according to Johnson, spirit possession is an occidental category, one premised on the notion that people can be a kind of property. But, to follow this, he argues that it also emerged out of an analogical relation with material possessions and lands, since Western law depended on the existence of the individual person, free and autonomous, rather than on a soul or body (37). This means that to the West, he concludes, spirit possession signaled a lack of a bounded proper Self, made so evident in “African” societies. However, how universal are these propositions?

What Johnson’s volume wishes to do is less of an in-depth ethnographic portrayal of the contexts at hand and more of an in-depth genealogy of native and elite discourses of and on possession, including how it becomes “transduced” (8), as he says, into forms of material and sensible reality. But, as Michael Lambek so aptly shows in his Afterword, this is not exactly what the volume ultimately does. As an experienced anthropologist of Malagasy and Mayotte possession phenomena, Lambek takes issue...