Staging transformation: Spiritist liturgies as theatres of conversion in Afro-Cuban religious practice

Of the religious formations to have crystallised during the transatlantic slave trade, Espiritismo continues to be among the most popular. While most previous studies of its Cuban and Puerto Rican-style ceremonies have approached them as either a type of health care or field of cultural resistance, this article analyses Spiritist services as theatres of conversion for those not already interpellated by Kardecist discourse and persuaded of mediums' authority. Drawing on research among African-American practitioners of Lucumí, often called Santería, it argues that Spiritist ceremonies have instructed participants in the reality of superhuman entities; the normative conditions of access to them; and the benefits of proper intercourse with the divine in both Yorùbá- and Kongo-inspired initiatory traditions. In contrast to scholarship that treats ritual as drama, this article distinguishes Spiritist liturgies from plays in crucial respects and asserts that they more closely resemble modern operating theatres and theatres of war. It aims thereby to furnish scholars from a range of disciplines with an ethnographically informed perspective on the potential of ritual to configure sensori-motor dispositions and affective states and thus to transform religious subjectivity.