Book Club Society of the Dead by Todd Ramon Ochoa

[glaive]

Hi all. I found this book at a secondhand shop near me and uploaded it from Anna's Archive to here in hopes of having more people to discuss it with! I'm about halfway through and think it is really interesting, though I am curious how paleros/paleras or anyone with a background in ADRs would find it.

Basic overview: Ochoa is a cultural anthropologist who was initiated in a Palo Briyumba house in Cuba. In his words, Society of the Dead

is an ethnography of a Cuban-Kongo society of affliction, and its healing-harming practices at the turn of the 21st century. In that book I describe the materiality of the dead in Cuban-Kongo life, and ask readers to consider the concrete, creative, and collective efforts required to shape fate. Society of the Dead is an engagement with anthropology’s rendering of sorcery, and an exploration of sensation, transformation, and redemption in the African Diaspora.

I thought the way he talks about the dead was especially interesting. Here are some quotes from ch. 2, Kalunga: The Ambient Dead where he describes learning about the Palo understanding of the dead through his godmother Isidra.

In some part, my difficulty in grasping Isidra’s experience of the dead was
grounded in habits of thought ancient to my learning, bad habits left by the
dead and assumed as original or essential by the living. Of these, the most
vexing was the one that told me an experience could not be visceral and intellectual
at once. This lesson was as old in me as learning itself, absorbed in
the interminable series of the yes- and- no questions of first language. Language’s
secret content is equivalent to the basic premises of dualist thought
as laid down by Plato and affirmed again and again in the rote responses of
the Enlightenment tradition. A dualist mode of being posits a relation between
viscera and intellect that is mutually exclusive because these are related
to one another only through negation. In Isidra’s explanations, viscera
and intellect were mutually affirmed without contradiction. [...]

Viewing the dead as a felt overlap of visceral and conceptual sensation
is critical to understanding the overall spread and ubiquity of the dead in
Cuban-Kongo thought. This overlapping is the dead prior to the identification
of a source to which the experience of the dead might be attributed.
Though she described the dead to me as people dear to her who had died and
who continued to exist with her, Isidra maintained that the dead was “more
than individuals,” more than the appearance in her body of her mother or
aunts. [...]

To Isidra, the dead at its most basic was neither height nor center, but
an indifferent and infinite event seething with yet uncodified potentials.
Isidra used another water metaphor in trying to make this understanding
clear to me. Using one of the tight phrases common to Palo sacred speech,
a mix of Spanish and Palo Kikongo often condensed into three or four
words riddled with allusion, she said, “Kalunga sube, Kalunga baja— the Sea
rises, the Sea falls.”
It is no coincidence that she would equate the dead with the sea. This is a
distinctly central African motif that Isidra often used, the realm of the dead
residing in the depths of Kalunga, the sea, for BaKongo people. Kongo cosmology
emphasizes the dead as an important force in the world of the living,
and its explanations situate the dead not only as residing beyond the
sea, but as prolific and excessive, much like the sea in its vastness. The dead
were in Palo cosmology and in Isidra’s teachings much as they were in
Kongo thought: immanent to the living, infusing and surrounding them.
The dead were to the living, in Georges Bataille’s words, “like water is in
water,” dependent on no object and belonging to no subject, rather everywhere
within these at once. [...]
The dead as generic ambiance, insinuated into ubiquity by Isidra, offers
only a contingent coherence of explanation for Palo thought and teaching.
In the same moment one begins to ground Palo in the dead, as it should be,
the dead then denies itself as ground because as a concept the dead glories
in the paradox and contradiction of its multiple definitions. The dead is generically
multiple, immaterial, and ubiquitous in the matter of our bodies— the
dead is concept and experience at once

I liked how he spoke of grappling with Isidra's teachings because he was raised in the rationalistic, post-Enlightenment Western tradition that makes these frameworks and experiences so hard to talk about, and nevertheless still did his best to explain - as well as affirm the Kongo thought tradition that undergirded it. As someone with a religious studies degree who nevertheless - or maybe because of it LOL - has a difficult time talking or writing about my own spiritual/magical experiences, I know I will be mulling over the ways he chooses to discuss them.

From ch. 3:

I would like, then, to write about spirits for a moment— a term more familiar
to anthropology than the ones I have been using until now. I have
carefully avoided the terms “spirit” or “spirits of the dead” for a variety of
reasons; most importantly, few times if ever in my work with Isidra and
other practitioners of Palo (or Ocha/Santo for that matter) did I hear the
word “spirit” [espíritu] uttered to describe the dead.1 Following Marx’s
example, I have chosen as literal a translation of the dead as possible, thus
exiling “spirit” to a marginal position. Displacing the word “spirit,” essentially
prohibiting myself its use when writing of the dead in Palo, has made
me painfully aware of the Christian and Western philosophical influences,
especially Platonic and Hegelian, in most thinking and writing about the
dead in the lives of people in the world. Such a conception of spirit is limited,
constrained within a Western episteme that adheres to a logic that
does not admit affirmation unto excess as a valid ground for logic. Negation
must always accompany excess as its Apollinian minder. This is the
step that distances many of those writing about the dead in terms of spirit
from the people who live the dead in the materiality of their lives each day.
For just this reason I have sought to write about the dead in a language
that seeks routes around spirits.