Thinking with Ngangas

"Inspired by the exercises of Father Lafitau, a Jesuit priest and proto-ethnographer of the "New World" who compared the lives of the Iroquois to the ancient Greeks, Stephan Palmiâe embarks on a series of unusual comparative investigations. 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 spirits of the dead? Where do genomics and "ancestry projects" converge with divination and oracular systems? What does it mean that Black Cubans in the US took advantage of Edisonian technology to project the disembodied voice of a mystical entity named ecuâe onto the streets of Philadelphia? Can we consider Afro-Cuban spirit possession as an extreme form of historical knowledge production? By writing about Afro-Cuban ritual in relation to Western scientific practice, and vice versa, Palmiâe hopes to challenge the rationality of Western expert practices, revealing the logics that bring together enchantment and experiment. Throughout, Palmiâe is also levelling a specific anthropological challenge: he takes issue with the much-discussed "ontological turn," especially with those thinkers who promote notions of radical alterity and utter incommensurability. Instead, Palmiâe suggests that radical comparison with "boundary objects" can offer something new to the ethnographic enterprise"--

Stephan Palmié is the Norman and Edna Freehling Professor of Anthropology at the University of Chicago and the author of Wizards and Scientists: Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition and The Cooking of History: How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion, the latter also published by the University of Chicago Press.