Pentecostal exorcism and Afro-Cuban endorcism: ‘Radical participation’ and the proliferation of symmetries

Abstract

In this article, we discuss personal moments of our respective ethnographic research on Guatemalan Pentecostalism and Afro-Cuban religiosity. Through our own involvement, we expose the approaches of the two religious forms, the former working by way of exorcism and the latter by way of endorcism. Guatemalan Pentecostal exorcism works by a radical expulsion of the previous non-Pentecostal past to strictly convert the person. Afro-Cuban endorcism, on the other hand, endorses the past, present, and future, as it accepts a simultaneity and multiplicity of ‘influences’. No ‘demon’ is perceived, as in the case of Pentecostalism, no ‘idolatry’ is detected and, instead of conversion, what occurs is a cumulative incorporation of multiple initiations. Our approach, we argue, as also inspired by theories of ‘radical participation’ and ‘symmetrisation’, affords a useful vantage point to engage with fine ethnographic nuances of a proliferation of comparative symmetries in the study of religiosity.

Introductions (endorcisms) and exoductions (exorcisms)

The present article is a comparative and contrastive approach between the experiences and ethnographic learnings of two anthropologists, something which permits them to put in a ‘symmetrizing’ framework Guatemalan Pentecostal exorcism (Cantón Delgado) and Afro-Cuban polytheistic endorcism (Panagiotopoulos). ¹ Exceptional moments of our respective research are chosen wherein the anthropologist is as much observed and a participant as an observer. The comparison, thus, is not so much of an exhaustingly representative Guatemalan and Cuban context, but of distinct religious experiences wherein the context stares and talks back to the researcher, as it were. Rather than burying such moments under the ethnographer’s notebook, we wish to bring them forward and draw analytical mileage from them.

The rapid and solid expansion of Pentecostalism in Guatemala, as in other parts of the world, is accompanied by a radical expulsion of the previous ‘demonic’ (i.e. non-Pentecostal) past of the to-be-converted subjects. The strict exclusiveness of Pentecostal conversion demands, almost by default, a kind of exorcism of the ‘demon’ so that the Holy Spirit may then sit comfortably in its proclaimed uniqueness and universality. Afro-Cuban religiosity, on the other hand, with a high degree of polytheistic inclusivity, does not make similar demands but works as a spiritual sponge, so to speak, able to absorb and incorporate diverse influences and entities. Thus, its default approach is not exorcism but ‘endorcism’ (Molinié, 1979), a sort of metaphysical homoeopathy that may endorse even the ‘non-believer’ or the anthropologist in this case, without having to necessarily convert him or deem him as doomed and possessed by the ‘demon’.

We discuss the methodological and analytical implications of these two distinct ethnographic instances affecting more directly the anthropologists, although not in a straightforward way. We also consider the notions of ‘radical participation’ and ‘symmetrisation’ as expounded by Jeanne Favret-Saada (1980), in her study of witchcraft in France, and Marcio Goldman (2008, 2013), and his research of Candomblé and politics in Brazil, respectively. The symmetrical and reflexive comparison between Guatemalan Pentecostal exorcism and Afro-Cuban ‘endorcism’ creates a ‘proliferation’ of symmetries, both within each context, their comparison and beyond them too, something which we explore at the last section of the article.

We make explicit and enliven a quintessentially anthropological stance of comparison, since its foundations (Frazer, 1993; Mace and Pagel, 1994), and we show how its ethnographic dynamism, excluding neither similarities nor differences, can offer a research sensibility for both contextual contingency and more general analytical observations. We thus open a broad research field that makes explicit methodological and contextual nuances relevant to a disciplinarily ample, multiple, and interconnected comparative perspective when it comes to issues of religiosity and conversion (Buckser and Glazier, 2003; Whitehouse and Laidlaw, 2004), or its lack thereof, through the notion of ‘endorcism’. Both ethnographic cases draw from personal research moments around the theme of conversion, offering an apparently oppositional contrast. But our broader framework and reflection, through this ‘proliferation of symmetries’, complicates things on an analytical level and we aim at showing their dynamic intricacies.

Pentecostal exorcism

There was an incident many years ago, of which I (Cantón Delgado) was a witness as well as a protagonist and which I hardly made reference to somewhere else. It took place at the height of my ethnography, undertaken in various parts of Guatemala and Southeastern Mexico (Chiapas) during the first half of the 1990s. My intention was to grasp the trends of religious change in Guatemala and the extraordinary socio-political and cultural impact of the large and small Christian-Protestant organizations present in this Central American Republic since the early twentieth century and reinforced, from the 1970s, by the entry of North American neo-Pentecostalism (the most politicized modality of Pentecostal evangelism). Since the 1980s, the Guatemalan Catholic Church had been gradually displaced, in rural and urban areas, by the advance of various Pentecostalisms. But my original goals were quickly shaken because the field experience was increasingly turning my attention to the relationships and complicities between Evangelism and political violence. Neo-Pentecostal churches had come to be established and proliferate in a radicalized ethnocidal ideology and social cleansing. At the same time the scenario showed a rapid diversification, in the years of my fieldwork, of organizational spaces and theological tendencies of evangelical affiliation, which made my own ethnography a permanent exercise of ‘emergence’ (in the sense of Michael Agar, 1992) and heteroglossia, that is, a constant encounter with alterity and effort to come to terms with it. This constant internal diversification was symmetrical to a multiplication of ethnographic interlocutors and perspectives, a polyphony which sought a relative balance of an unstable and changing ethnography.

Impossible to function as a scrupulous external observer, I was suddenly involved in a multiple and complex relationship with my research subjects, and driven to explore the specular relationship between science, ethnographic writing and introspection. All this made it increasingly difficult to erect the great coherence fiction that the scientific ideal, structural thinking and dualistic reason required for ethnographic work a few decades ago. Thus, I gradually turned to an anthropology of violence and social suffering, and the constant reflexive and critical adjustment of my own field experience. The title and my own thesis (Cantón Delgado, 1998) explored a pun that slipped the senses from the ‘baptism in the tongues of fire of the Holy Spirit’ typically Pentecostal, to the real fire of civil and military clashes during the long war and still much later, as well as the organized repression of the army on the indigenous municipalities located in the so-called ‘conflict areas’. Before arriving on the field, I had imagined my work in a less problematized or more naive way: processes of cultural change resulting from massive conversions to Protestantism of American origin. The scenarios of social suffering, originally intended to serve as a mere backdrop, became absolute protagonists of my research. They marked with crudeness my experience of ethnographic dislocation in these Central American lands, upsetting and transforming any sense of original planning: violence, suffering, terror, impunity and everyday death jumped in my face, and I looked for ways to connect all that with the processes of religious innovation and creativity. Violence was also incorporated in religious cults and was staged in rituals, speeches, and actions defined from urban neo-Pentecostalism to manage the scenarios of violence for the political benefit of the powerful upper-middle-class evangelical organizations. The various manifestations and overflows of violence began to govern my preliminary budgets and research objectives, leaking into my experience and my ethnographic perception of the churches in which I worked. They declared themselves enemies of all traditionalism, understood as indigenous clothing and pre-Hispanic ritual practices, indigenous worldviews, brotherhoods, the traditional cargo-cult system, which offended God, and the Catholic processions led by the Spanish conquerors. All this was part of a ‘geography of the sin of the Guatemalan nation’, a nation that had challenged the power of God by surrendering to idolatry. Conditions like these, which I describe very briefly, shake the ‘ethnographic encounter’ itself until it becomes an extreme and very corporal experience. I am also a woman and of unequivocally European features. Being Spanish, I come from the country that brought Catholic idolatry to Guatemala, according to the Pentecostal iconoclastic perception, all of which became a constant alarm in these indigenous contexts. I became someone who was part of Satan’s hosts. This is, briefly, the context within which the present episode is inscribed.

Two devote women from the Príncipe de Paz church in Guatemala City invited me, after a lengthy conversation, to kneel and stretch out on the threadbare carpet of a modest neo-Pentecostal house. They wanted to perform the liberation of demons on my own body. My two interlocutors from that neo-Pentecostal church told me about it all in a language full of symbolism, and they kindly laid me down on the carpet. My first reaction was to try to get out of it by using several excuses, but I must confess that I ended up agreeing without much insistence on their part. The strength of their determination and my curiosity, mixed with paralysing consternation, did the rest. I lay down on the carpet and half closed my eyes. They started talking to me, first in whispers and a bit later in a louder voice and they started to rhythmically massage my belly, neck, and temples, chanting prayers and chants, crying and speaking in different languages, with an increasing intensity, exhorting Satan to abandon my body and intending for me to vomit out the demons. During those never-ending moments I feared losing not only control of the situation but also control of my research. Contradictorily, I wanted to escape from there as much as I wanted to see, if only for a moment, what they were seeing: someone obscure who ‘was weaving thread in my feet preventing me from accepting Jesus Christ as Lord and Saviour’. Or to find out whether they were acting, and what acting could mean in their circumstances. I needed to know how they would do it, how they would deal with those forces. It was something I did not know. I had not attended many liberation sessions.

I wanted to know, not to fight against that wish to know whatever the consequences and, at the same time, that wish was doubly disturbing because everything was taking place at the same time: as my ethnography and on my body. I wanted to communicate with them without the fear of losing control of the research, the credibility of my informants, and that of the academic community. I also wondered what I would do with all that experience; Register it? Analyse it? Would I be able to write about it, talk about it, expose myself to it? I have never worried about demons since away from that threadbare carpet, they ceased to exist. But that episode, among other less spectacular ones, showed me that there are many fieldwork situations which lead to an insidious state of disassociation. In fact the experience of dislocation is maybe at the basis of ethnography: in order to communicate via unusual channels with beings that are neither familiar nor quotidian, a disposition to vulnerability is needed – a disposition to change one’s being and our own certainties into something which we can extract from inside, put on our hand and look at with the astonishment of someone who does not know how to deal with it. It is not so much a question of turning it into a working hypothesis or an intentional game, but rather a question of being able to live it seriously and come back to tell the tale.

In my case, I understood that exorcism was not an event as exceptional as my previously more ethnocentric lens viewed it. I also understood the experiential intensity, even fear (from my part) or cold strictness (from my interlocutors’ part), that could be involved. I understood that exorcism could be an understanding mechanism in itself; that anthropology could be taken as a practice of sense in epistemic continuity with the practices upon which it reflects (Viveiros de Castro, 2002: 115, 128); that demons are something normal, that they walked between the living room and the kitchen; and that exorcisms could be not an experience which happens between believers in rapture and a cold and distant anthropologist, but rather something which happened exactly the other way around.

Radical participation (Favret-Saada) and symmetrical ethnography (Goldman): the limits of representation in Witchcraft study

In her work on witchcraft in the Bocage region (Northwest France) at the end of the 1960s, Favret-Saada demonstrated the weakness of an anthropology cantered on symbolic analysis and representational study which, while recognizing the place of affects in the human experience, does so with the aim of either: (a) demonstrating that they are merely the products of ‘cultural construction’ and that they have no consistency outside this construction (Anglo-Saxon version) or (b) reduces them to ‘representations’ and so leads them to their own disappearance (French and psychoanalytical version) (Favret-Saada, 1980, 2005). However, it is precisely the notion of ‘affect’ which allows an apprehension of a fundamental dimension of the fieldwork and, in the specific case of the French anthropologist, a rethinking of the anthropology of the therapies that is revealing, Favret-Saada points out, that therapeutic efficiency, when it happens, is the result of work carried out on the non-represented affect. For this type of ethnography, observation and participation are insufficient, but rather what is required is direct experimentation on the researcher’s part and a sceptical predisposition in the face of ethnographic methodological conventions. In her fieldwork, Favret-Saada ‘allowed herself to be affected’ by witchcraft practices, allowing her own experiences to act as a guide for ethnography, and at the same time she came up with a methodological device which allowed the subsequent elaboration of a certain knowledge.

This mechanism excluded fieldwork mantras such as the common notions of participant observation and empathy. The first of them, participant observation, limits participation to a mere ‘being there’ which makes observation possible. This kind of observation has also been partial, because in the case of witchcraft it has usually been limited to accusations (see, for instance, Evans-Pritchard, 1976), the only ‘facts’ that an ethnographer can ‘observe’, Favret-Saada argues (1980: 9–12). ‘To accuse’ is a ‘behaviour’ and it ends up being the behaviour par excellence of witchcraft as it is the only one which is empirically verifiable; the others are errors, distortions, and products of the natives’ imaginations. If speaking is not an act which is susceptible of being observed, and if the truth is what is real and what is real is only what is observable, and if what is observable is in addition what is empirically verifiable, the truth ends up being a knowledge independent from the natives’ statements, which end up being part of a universe of error, the imaginary, and the unobservable. The word of the native is disqualified in favour of the ethnographer’s word (Favret-Saada, 2005: 156–157).

Favret-Saada’s work posed questions that were not new to religious anthropology; however, even in the exceptional case of Evans-Pritchard these questions were addressed laterally, despite admitting that the consulting of oracles with the natives before the hunting days did not come into contradiction with his own beliefs, and despite the fact that Evans-Pritchard himself recriminated his Africanist colleagues on their inability to understand non-Western religions due to their ‘atheist prejudices’ (Llera Blanes, 2006: 224). Favret-Saada’s was, besides, the first that recorded the contemporary existence of witchcraft in French society. In the 1960s, different studies denied the existence of rural witchcraft in contemporary France, an error which, according to the author, could only be due to the insistence on continuing to support the ‘great division’ between them and us, protecting the ethnographer from any contamination from belonging to the same world as the object of their study, a world of intellectual errors and imaginary fallacies (Latour, 2007: 148). The peasants of the Bocage knew that in that great division they represented backwardness and ignorance while knowledge, science, truth, and reality corresponded to the ethnographer. As a result, they only agreed to speak about witchcraft on the condition that the researcher allowed herself to be affected by this witchcraft, showing that it had real effects on her which started to become evident as the first reactions out of her control began to happen (Favret and Saada, 1980: 11–12).

Her lucid critique of academic topics led Favret-Saada to maintain that her experience cannot be qualified as ‘participation’ in the classical sense, but she adds that neither should it be understood as a knowledge operation based on ‘empathy’, on either of its two meanings: not in the sense of experimenting vicariously the feelings, perceptions, and thoughts of others, as that definition implies distance; nor in the sense of empathy as affective communion, based on the instantaneous nature of communication, because that identification ignores the identification mechanism and focuses only on its result. In fact, being affected has nothing to do with the affects of the other but rather with one’s own affects, and with one’s biography, something that this article takes on directly, as both authors deal with this kind of ‘affective’ self-reflexive ethnography in issues of religious initiation and conversion.

This ethnographic type of reflexivity depends on a willingness to be open to the native word which does not restrict itself to the telling of other people’s stories, nor to projecting ourselves on to their concepts, to suppressing or clarifying them for our benefit, or to denying them by putting the theoretical tale before other people’s experiences. Rather, it would consist of saying something different to what the natives are saying without intending to say more than what they say (Goldman, 2008), of symmetrizing and establishing partial connections (Strathern, quoted by Goldman, 2008), in an anthropology understood as a philosophy which works with other people’s philosophy, bringing it together with their own, neither having to convert nor reducing the native’s point of view into a representation and, ultimately, a category mistake. Consider Ingold’s (2014: 393) words: Anthropology is ‘philosophy with the people in’, that is, ‘an Enterprise energized but the tension between speculative inquiry into what life could be like and a knowledge, rooted in practical experience, of what life is for people of particular times and places’. It is philosophy, because its concern is with the speculative; it is ‘with the people in’ because its concern is also experiential. Taking people out of the definition, if we dispense with their practices in different places and times, we will have only academic philosophy. Marcio Goldman, in line with Roy Wagner and Bruno Latour, states that anthropology cannot renounce the universality of mediation nor reduce the meaning to beliefs, dogmas, and certainties, therefore having to choose between the native meanings and one’s own. Getting his inspiration from Favret-Saada, he maintains that we can only think in the conditions of fieldwork by multiplying involuntary communication situations. And finally, by invoking the fourth way of the still recent post-social anthropology, Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy, Goldman rejects the possibility of maintaining any relativism which extols the virtues of the so-called cultural differences. Rather, we are dealing with different shapes of an intensive multiplicity, made up of rhizome and singularity, and the main task would start by recognizing the difficulty in establishing the exact point where the borders, ‘sinuous and uncertain’, of differing cultures cross over (Goldman, 2008: 9–10).

Goldman asks himself why we take the informants seriously when they tell us about orixá, that is, about religion; Candomblé in his case, and we cease to do so when they tell us about democracy, that is, politics; Brazilian in his case (see also Goldman, 2013) within the same ethnographic context. This is probably due, Goldman explains, to the fact that we know that orishas does not exist; therefore, nothing of what its believers say can confront our knowledge. However, we believe that democracy exists. When Goldman went back to Ilhéus (south of Bahía, Brazil) in order to study politics and not religion (Candomblé), he sensed a reversal of the roles: the anthropologist was now the gullible one (he trusted the virtues of democracy), and his informants were the sceptical ones (they doubted its real existence). Then, what effect would that inversion have on the study of institutions, values, and processes which the society the anthropologist belongs to, considers to be core? What would happen if we planned an experiment where everything occurs as if the natives were fully qualified to speak about democracy, in such a way that the anthropologist has something to learn from them about the workings of the democratic system in the same terms in which he learnt about the logic of the orixá within the candomblé system? That revealed that his interlocutors were able to perceive aspects of the workings of democracy which we do not see, precisely because of an excess of commitment. The main task is, therefore, that of symmetrizing their knowledge with the dominant knowledge (Goldman, 2008: 6–8, 2009).

When dealing with what he prefers to call anthropological symmetrisations rather than symmetrical anthropology (Latour, 2007: 138), Goldman suggests that the discourse of a Candomblé devotee tends to be considered false, or, at the very least, it is thought that it states a truth that is not our truth, so that it possesses a potential for destabilizing our way of thinking which anthropology must explore through that ‘involuntary communication’ Favret-Saada refers to. The main characteristic of anthropology then would be the study of human experiences from a specific experience – that of the ethnographer’s, who faces other people’s certainty in their own statements, beliefs, actions, and wonders to what extent the ethnographer can tolerate it, take it seriously, and to what extent the ethnographer can promote his own transformation amid those experiences, which has nothing to do with agreeing with them or making them agree with us. Taking these performers of practices seriously, those theorists with whom we speak and from whom we learn (and to whom Harold Garfinkel made reference in similar terms in 1968, half a century ago) would then be the only quality criteria available to our discipline (Garfinkel, 2006: 20; Goldman, 2008: 6–7; Ingold, 2014: 388–389; Latour, 2007: 152; Viveiros de Castro, 2002: 127). The recent ontological opening which displaces epistemology (knowledge problems on the part of the subject) in favour of ontology (concerns about the nature of reality, radical alterity, and/or recursivity) makes up an essential part of this discussion (González-Abrisketa, Carro-Ripalda, 2016; Holbraad and Pedersen, 2017; Latour, 2007; Viveiros de Castro, 2002). We also draw inspiration from theories on embodiment (Csordas, 1993), agential recognition of the invisible entities (Bubandt, 2009), the limits of the purely rationalistic, epistemological, universalistic, symbolistic, and intellectualistic approach to spiritual phenomena (Stoller, 2013).

Afro-Cuban endorcism

Afro-Cuban religiosity has been the principal field of my (Panagiotopoulos’) research since 2007. I lived in Havana, Cuba one whole year for the purposes of writing up my doctoral thesis. It is almost a truism, at least in the anthropological circles, that nothing can really prepare you for all the spontaneous twists and turns of what unravels to be the field. In my case, previous review of the existing non-anthropological literature on Afro-Cuban religiosity had not been able to give me a vivid image of its contemporary situation, nor of how exactly it moved and breathed within and beyond the Cuban society. The then-existing anthropological literature covered a lot of ground for this, but, still, on arriving and living on that ground was what determined the nuances of my ethnographic and analytical take. Afro-Cuban religiosity has a quite ambivalent place in Cuban society. While it has been historically placed in a marginal and extraofficial position, it has also developed as the most rooted and extended form of vernacular religiosity, with also broad transnational networks (see Ayorinde, 2004).

One of the main characteristics that was ‘revealed’ to me during the field and which not even the anthropological literature had been able to transmit in its entirety, was that Afro-Cuban religiosity was so popular precisely not as an official religion but as an underground, ever-present but not exclusive network of everyday advice and support. Afro-Cuban religiosity is formally classified under various distinct religious traditions, the most common of which, at least in the western part of the island, are the Regla de Ocha/Ifá or, else, Santería, the Regla Conga or, else, Palo Monte and Espiritismo. Although this formal classification is valid and reflects emic understandings, especially when it comes to a talk on distinct origins and actual ritual specializations and levels of priesthood, things become much more organically bound when it comes to the popular adherence to and conviviality with them. A broad inclusive plasticity hovers over these classifications, wherein what is sought and instantiated is a magically and oracularly-imbued confrontation of everyday life-situations, whether these concern health issues, relationships in the family, social and labour environment, material needs, emotional balance, aspirations, fears, intuitions, unexpected calamities and miraculous coincidences, among many others.

The attraction Afro-Cuban religiosity exerts is precisely this magical and oracular offer it makes to be able to refer to and intervene in everyday life and for very personal, even intimate, matters. I soon realized that each distinct Afro-Cuban religious tradition was, in large part, a specialized field of oracular perceptibility and sensibility with its own developed magical ‘techniques’ of reference and intervention. Just as for the specialized priesthood as for the lay people, it makes absolute sense to draw from all this wide and deep ritual reservoir, because the common denominator is the harnessing of non-institutionalized networks of highly personalized support. These networks are just as structured as spontaneous, so, for instance, divination is something one can equally seek or be sought by it. I, thus, started to follow it, by following the people who were seeking it, those who were offering it and those more collective and/or spontaneous moments and places it happened to occur. Although it also started following me, as it can very well happen when crossing paths with a previously unknown person at a public or private space, I had consciously decided not to explicitly seek it for my own personal consultation in the duration of that doctoral one-year visit of mine to Cuba. Only towards the end of my stay, after having acquired ample familiarity with the context, established solid contacts and reached a certain level of mutual trust with some of them, did I decide to ask for receiving oracular consultations for myself with all the various existing Afro-Cuban religious specializations (santeros, babalawos, paleros and espiritistas, often more than one of these being concentrated in one person).

Each consultation had its own flavour, not only because different angles of my life were illuminated and touched upon, but also because each diviner, depending on the particular Afro-Cuban religious tradition he or she was drawing from (or the combination among them), had a distinct oracular methodology, so to speak. A babalawo would employ a chain with eight pieces of coconut attached to a thin chain (called okpuele or ekuele), invoking the deity of divination Orula or Ifá. A santera would throw 21 cowrie shells (dilogún or los caracoles) on a floor mat invoking the deities known as the orichas, partly depicted as royal ancestral figures and partly as forces of nature. A palero would concentrate in front of his iron cauldron (called nganga or prenda) which hosts several entities, spirits of the dead (nfumbi) and wild forces of nature (mpungos). An espiritista, not depending on any material oracle, would perceive the presence of spirits of the dead (muertos) and their messages would translate into her messages to you, part of them including muertos perceived by her as following and belonging to yourself.

A babalawo told me that I would never face serious economic problems in my life but that I would neither enjoy material excess. A santera told me that I liked to collect seashells and other objects from nature, like wood and stones, but that I did not know the deep reasons behind my attraction to them, which were my bond to the orichas. A palero told me that I should be aware of jealousy among my peers, that I was good at my work, but my well-meaning character could sometimes make me vulnerable and even the object of exploitation. An espiritista told me once, on the phone, that my grandmother back in Greece had died with an unfulfilled wish to see her two daughters make peace again out of a conflict of which my grandmother herself had been of a decisive part. All consultations were making references to my own personal life and those significant characters, whether human or not, who peopled it. It was impossible not to see the oracular messages through a notion of ‘truth’ (Holbraad, 2012) and a dose of awe for the apparent supernatural methodology of extraction of these oracular utterances, that is, of their otherwise non-normative approach. Whether one leaned towards truth and awe or untruth and banality is a different story (although not irrelevant), the common ground was (is) this oracular quality of highly personalized, non-idealistic, non-moralizing, down-to-earth messages, which, among people of your surrounding environment, involved the active participation of deities and spirits of the dead.

One thing did prevail and was shared in all the consultations. In all there was detected a general scepticism and defensive approach from my part towards the rich Afro-Cuban polytheistic cosmos. In fact, one espiritista once told me that my scepticism was largely due to the fact that in my spiritual constitution (that is, all the spirits who were accompanying me), there was the spirit of an intellectual who had been sceptical while in life. At the same time however, such cosmos was not demanding a great degree of my involvement in and initiation to these traditions. My life-course or ‘path’ (camino), as it is often depicted, was in a positive track, no urgent need for deeper involvement arose, although that was referring to the specific period the consultations coincided, all made sure to clarify. The sceptical anthropologist was being endorsed by the oracles and their entities and his scepticism and lack of need for deeper involvement was a sign of the smooth, although not conscious and ritually explicit, relationship I had unwittingly been developing with the Afro-Cuban metaphysical cosmos. No oracle hinted the need for initiation or conversion, if one would like to employ a more monotheistic term, although the former is inclusive, encompassing and endorsing; it embraces and incorporates. The latter requires exorcism, the former allows for endorcism.

Exorcism vs endorcism

As anthropologists were both confronted with the subjects of our research in a quite direct way. Our anthropological approach of inevitably and willingly interacting with living subjects, without fully adopting a stance of personal commitment, became a matter of reflection by the ethnographic context itself. Hence, our initial decision to analytically compare them. The conclusions drawn from such reflection in each case were different. As already said, Guatemalan Pentecostalism demanded exorcism, while Afro-Cuban polytheism allowed endorcism. The two Pentecostal women saw an anthropologist in her ambivalent but clearly ‘non-believing’ position. On one hand, the very decision of the anthropologist to study Pentecostalism was a strong sign of a kind of unconscious calling from her part, at least as a promising future possibility for conversion. On the other hand, the anthropologist’s Spanish and nominal Catholic background, as well as her unwillingness to fully submit to the Pentecostal acceptance of the Spirit, made the two women not only reflect upon a ‘non-believing’ person, but also perceive the ‘demon’ weaving thread on her feet and made them progressively chant more intensely, up to the point of ‘speaking tongues’. The anthropologist, on her part, lay on the floor and let the women follow their initial steps of exorcism, but did not go further far from that point. She did not vomit the ‘demons’ out, she did not receive more exorcisms subsequently, and she did not convert from an anyway merely nominal Catholicism to a wholehearted dedication to Pentecostalism.

In the Afro-Cuban case too, the anthropologist’s decision to study Afro-Cuban religiosity as well as other behaviours of his (such as the collection of stones, wood and seashells) were also variably perceived as a latent attraction from his side of what the Afro-Cuban cosmos was made up of. But no ‘demonic’ threads were perceived, and no exorcizing vomits were induced. On the contrary, but not by necessity, the anthropologist’s scepticism was embraced and encompassed by a more general indication which coincided by many different consultations that the camino was on the right track. Beyond and despite the anthropologist’s scepticism, a peculiar ‘truth’ rang welcomingly to his ears, as he positively judged this repetitive coincidence by all oracles. One is expected to welcome the coincidence of various oracle consultations only if he leans towards the acceptance of them as valid mechanisms of information production. But here was the anthropologist with a grin on his chins every time he came out of a consultation. All this, at least, provided him with the understanding that the rest of the people who consulted the oracles had similar expectations. He turned his research towards questions of multiple consultations and the complex verification procedures involved in them. A large part of the people affected by these oracles did not either fully accept or fully reject their utterances, they were drawn and attracted to them and this made them a significant point of reference.

Guatemalan Pentecostalism initiated its spiritual work by a process of radical extraction and elimination. The ‘demon’ had woven its threads around the body of the anthropologist, something which impeded a liberated movement towards the one and only Pentecostal path. The threads had to be unwoven, while the more interior impediments had to be vomited. One’s whole past had to be vomited in a sense. The Afro-Cuban polytheistic approach was different. Not only scepticism became part of the Afro-Cuban cosmos, but, more importantly, non-initiation too, although, concerning the specific case. This made also clear that there are no unconditional and universal oracular messages; they are all contingent to the consultation and the object of consultation. What holds for one may not hold for another. Even in the case of initiations, there is no allergy to the past. The present and the future come to complement the past, not to erase it by vomiting, exorcisms, and conversions. Involvement in the Afro-Cuban cosmos does not demand radical extractions and replacements. It is, on the contrary, a process of cumulative introductions into one’s body of different entities and sub-traditions with an always open possibility for more in the future and not necessarily perceived as explicitly Afro-Cuban. There is a tendency to attract and to be attracted by multiple, infinite in theory, metaphysical ‘forces’. One’s camino is consisted of multiple and simultaneous paths, which are constantly endorsed and endorcised.

The contrast can be extended to the nature and degree of organization and social positioning of each religious context. The monotheistic and exorcizing foundations of Guatemalan Pentecostalism also seem to be intimately accompanied by a relatively strict organization, with a high degree of institutionalization, bureaucratization, and the existence of public temples. On the other hand, polytheistic Afro-Cuban ‘endorcism’ seems to be accompanied by completely antithetical organizational features. Along and partly due to a historical marginal position of Afro-Cuban religiosity, there is a great lack of institutionalization, centralization, and formal public temples. It rather spreads throughout a complex, underground, home-based ritual network of multiple and relatively independent centres of initiation and attendance, the so-called ‘religious families’ (familias religiosas).

In sum, Guatemalan Pentecostalism entertains a single narrative of ‘good and evil’, being centrally and universally emitted to apply equally to an ideal of total conversion through exorcism. On the contrary, Afro-Cuban religiosity endorses and ‘endorcizes’ multiplicity and contingency, without producing a single prophetic and proselytist narrative but a personally tailored oracular and religious path, crossed with various centres of emission, ritual attention, and idiosyncratic entities, simultaneously beneficent and harmful, depending on the continuous oracular, initiatory, and propitiatory interactions with them.

Proliferating symmetries as a broad framework in the study of religiosity

The starting and main point of our symmetrical approach has been the reflexivity afforded by the exceptional ethnographic instances (Goulet and Miller, 2007) of ‘radical participation’. Both instances referred to the reflexivity afforded to us anthropologists from the reflexivity provided on our personal commitment by the respective religious contexts under study. Each environment reacted in a completely different way to our otherwise similar stance of agnostic participation, that is, deep and personal immersion, on one hand, but without willingness of ‘conversion’ or ‘initiation’, on the other.

Why did we choose to expose some personal moments of our research? Out of a confessionary need for transparent self-reflexiveness? Not so much so. First, we find a methodological interest in it, which precisely does not have to lead to more conventional understandings of ethnographic self-reflexivity (see Bourdieu, 2004). It is, rather, a methodological stance of open senses, bodies and affects to grasp the ‘ritual atmospheres’ (see Ospina Martínez, 2017; see also Escolar, 2010; Pinto, 2010) of our research contexts. In this sense, we also share some common ground with, although we do not reproduce, approaches of a ‘collaborative’ and ‘reciprocal’ cut (of shared authorship) which proposes non-hierarchical relationships between ethnographers and collaborators (Gay y Blasco, 2017). Also treated as ethnographic mutuality (Maskens and Blanes, 2016), as equalitarian and empathic reciprocity or, even, ontological commitment (Ingold, 2014), it is defined as the process by which ethnographers incorporate into their own texts the critical perspectives of their collaborators (informants), extending the polyphonic dimension of the dialogue from the field to the writing phase (which is generally monologic) (Lawless, 1993). Second, because it is through these moments that we not only managed to draw some anthropological conclusions, but also bring them to a comparative light, one that created the grounds for an ‘Exorcism vs Endorcism’ framework. We proposed a comparative framework which highlighted the contrasts between the two compared phenomena. If initially a first level of symmetry was created, within each context internally, between the object of study and the researcher, a second level of symmetry through comparison and contrasts was subsequently offered. In this last section, we shall be stretching the implications of such comparative framework, proliferating the symmetries as it were, to such an extent as to finally, even if suggestively, go beyond the specific ethnographic contexts and insert it in broader debates of comparative sociological and anthropological studies of religiosity.

Out of the ‘exorcism vs endorcism’ framework we draw some broad lines of religious commitment and behaviour, seemingly antithetical as they appeared to be throughout the text but, as we conclude, not necessarily so. A broad analytical view permeates our proposition. First, that an open comparative approach is as much interested in similarities as in differences. Second, that differences, even if antithetical, may coexist within the same context or framework, presenting us the need for sensibility to dynamism and contingency (Holbraad, 2019).

Let us start with some similarities and elaborate on the social positioning of each tradition, as we referred to in the end of the previous section. Even though Guatemalan Pentecostalism may seem far more organized and institutionalized when compared with Afro-Cuban religiosity, it still presents itself as much more decentralized and grassroots, when compared with other Christian, even Protestant, denominations. If anything, it is local based rather than responding to a foreign centre – for a broad sociological overview in Latin America, see Freston (1998). In both contexts, ‘priesthood’ is not a matter of an absolute divide between itself and the lay people. It presents itself as a much more accessible position, based more on the ritual ‘charisma’ or the ‘talented’ expertise of its membership, which, sociologically speaking, more often than not comes from the same class or social group as that of the lay people (overall lower to middle, although in Guatemala there is a strong tendency for an elite base). Although the narrative of Pentecostalism may seem more dogmatic and with universal aspirations, it too is ‘felt’ through the somatic and visceral experiences during ritual, even though such experiences may have the more monolithic and dualist sources of the Holy Spirit or the Devil. Due to all these commonalities, it is of no surprise that Pentecostalism often competes with indigenous or of African origin religious traditions throughout the whole of Latin America (see Freston, 1998: 348–349). Their already mentioned contrasts may create the grounds for a quite antagonist competition, especially from the side of Pentecostalism, adopting the completely dominant colonial view and with even less tolerance (as compared with Catholicism, for instance) of these religious traditions being ‘primitive’, ‘fetishist’, and ‘idolatrous’ (see Matory, 2018), even though it lacks a racist or elitist exclusivism, at it goes against the practices themselves and not the social status of their potential membership.

Analogous symmetrical contrasts to those between the two ethnographic contexts may proliferate, on different levels, within each one. For instance, in Guatemalan Pentecostalism, as just mentioned, there is an antagonist and even aggressive relation to indigenous creeds and practices, this being particularly brought into the surface in cases of conversion of the indigenous population. Despite the a priori harsh attitude of Pentecostalism towards the religious Other, similar to that evinced in the exorcizing and converting efforts towards the anthropologist, it has been observed from the latter that many lay people getting close to Pentecostalism do not necessarily replicate a faithful Pentecostal ideal. Some have been keeping, in parallel secret fashion, religious behaviours, often indigenous and/or Catholic, that a strict Pentecostalism would deem incompatible and unacceptable. At the same time, some officiants were eager to show some tolerance to such behaviours, themselves becoming part of the secretism. In other cases, lay people may have shown a faithful converted Pentecostal attitude, but after a long non-Pentecostal biography and, perhaps, sometimes leaving aside Pentecostalism afterwards. Abandonment, or at least atonement, was often based on precisely the perceived rigid demands of Pentecostalism, a perception manifesting itself both as a more conscious and mental decision and as an existential difficulty in keeping up with Pentecostalism’s strict moralist demands. This means that even if implicitly and even if the gap between priesthood and lay people is reputed to be small, contrasts similarly symmetrical to the one of ‘exorcism versus endorcism’ appear within the Guatemalan context. And by a diametrical way of symmetry, they also appear in the Afro-Cuban one.

Cuban Catholicism has historically developed a relation of diplomatic tolerance with Afro-Cuban religiosity, as this can be evinced in all Catholic Latin American and Caribbean countries. Such is this relation cemented that the tolerance often manifests itself as something more than diplomatic, almost organic. This is especially evinced in how the lay people view it and put it in practice. To frame it schematically, the ethnographer will hardly meet any constant mixed feelings of contradiction or guilt in people going on a Sunday mass, after having sacrificed a chicken and being possessed by an Afro-Cuban spirit on Saturday. Nevertheless, if a deeper ethnographic exploration focuses on the biographical life-courses of many a people, there arises a latent contrast, not between the different religious traditions, but within the same person. Just as much as newly arisen participation in Afro-Cuban religiosity is often framed as a discontent for the too distant and abstract participation of divinity in people’s lives, a dissatisfaction that is precisely superseded by the involvement in the proximate and down-to-earth multiple Afro-Cuban divinity, equally the complete inverse may arise.

The anthropologist has met many a people, who have distanced themselves from Afro-Cuban religiosity expressing an overwhelming sense of everyday, multiple demands, antagonisms between ritual experts, a constant and tiring, according to many, suspicion of ‘witchcraft’ (brujería), excessive materialism, a general sense of spiritual dispersal and instability, that is, all that is at other times deemed as the positive characteristics of Afro-Cuban religiosity. This contrast is often framed as a need to ‘calm down’ (tranquilizarse) or ‘cool down’ (refrescarse), terms which are anyway employed internally in Afro-Cuban religious praxis, as a counterbalance to ‘heated’ rituals, the practitioners’ ‘heads’ and bodies and the possessing entities. Outside the Cuban religious environment, there can be evinced an interesting symmetrical contrast between Afro-Cuban religiosity and the highly centralized and institutionalized praxis of the Cuban Revolution, which has striven to forge an encompassing destiny and revolutionary identity for the Cuban citizenry (see Panagiotopoulos and Espírito Santo, 2019).

In conclusion, the contrasting and proliferating symmetries that our ‘radical participation’ sparked can be extended beyond the Guatemalan and Cuban contexts, as we have detected some basic broad elements of religiosity which, through a careful examination of their historical and cross-cultural dynamism, can be found in diverse combinations, intensities, and fluctuations. These have been the exorcizing or ‘endorcizing’ approaches, as these are related (not in a linear or straightforward fashion) with issues of centralization, institutionalization, the nature of divinity (dualistic or pluralistic, distant or proximate), orthodoxy and orthopraxis, and the general religious path or narrative that is forged.