Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves: Embodiment and Transformation in an Afro-Brazilian Religion

By R. Seligman

Spirit possession involves the displacement of a human's conscious self by a powerful other who temporarily occupies the human's body. Here, Seligman shows that spirit possession represents a site for understanding fundamental aspects of human experience, especially those involved with interactions among meaning, embodiment, and subjectivity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Sep 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781137409607

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Possessing Spirits and Healing Selves

EMBODIMENT AND TRANSFORMATION IN AN AFRO-BRAZILIAN RELIGION

Rebecca Seligman

POSSESSING SPIRITS AND HEALING SELVES

Copyright © Rebecca Seligman, 2014.

All rights reserved.

First published in 2014 by

PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®

in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,

175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.

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ISBN: 978–1–137–40959–1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Seligman, Rebecca.

Possessing spirits and healing selves : embodiment and transformation in an Afro-Brazilian religion / Rebecca Seligman.

    pages cm

Summary: Spirit possession involves the displacement of a human’s conscious self by that of a powerful other – a spirit, god, or demon – who temporarily occupies the human’s body. To many, spirit possession is quintessentially exotic, a novelty, an example of the ways in which others are fundamentally different. In this book, Seligman shows that, far from being exotic and other, spirit possession mediumship represents a privileged site for understanding a number of fundamental aspects of human experience – especially those involved with interactions among meaning, embodiment, and subjectivity. Using a diverse set of ethnographic, psychological, and biological data gathered during fieldwork among spirit possession mediums of the Candomble; religion in Northeastern Brazil, she explores how everyday and religious practices and meanings shape and interact with the bodily experiences and psychophysiological states of Candomble; mediums, both before and after their initiations, and how such interactions shape their experiences of selfhood— Provided by publisher.

ISBN 978–1–137–40959–1 (hardback)

 1. Candomblé (Religion)—Brazil. 2. Blacks—Brazil—Religion. 3. Spirit possession—Brazil. 4. Spiritual healing—Brazil. 5. Healing—Brazil. 6. Ethnology—Brazil. 7. Ethnobiology—Brazil. 8. Brazil—Religious life and customs. I. Title.

BL2592.C35.S44 2014

299.6′730981—dc23                                  2014009195

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.

Design by Newgen Knowledge Works (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.

First edition: September 2014

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

For Thom, Nate, and Imogen

Contents

List of Tables

Series Preface

Acknowledgments

Appendix: Methods

Notes

Glossary of Candomblé Terms

References

Index

Tables

1.1 Mean number of symptoms on the Questionario de Morbidade Psiquiátrica dos Adultos (QMPA), a Brazilian screening instrument for anxiety and depression

3.1 Results of semi-structured interview questions for three comparison groups within Candomblé

3.2 Types and examples of affliction suffered by mediums prior to initiation

Series Preface

Psychological anthropologists study a wide spectrum of human activity: child development, illness and healing, ritual and religion, selfhood and personality, political and economic systems, to name just a few. In fact, as a discipline that seeks to draw the lines connecting persons and culture, it would be difficult to come up with examples of human behavior that fall outside the purview of psychological anthropology. Yet beneath this substantive diversity lies a common commitment. The practitioners of psychological anthropology—and in particular the authors in this series—seek to answer broad questions about how peoples’ inner worlds are interwoven with their outer ones. And while psychological anthropologists may focus on emotions or human biology, on language or art or dreams, they rarely stray far from the attempt to understand the mental and physical possibilities and limitations that ground human experience.

Professor Rebecca Seligman’s study of possession—of how believers in the Candomblé religion come to be inhabited, taken over by spirits—takes us deep into the heart of one of the enduring mysteries about human beings, the relationship between the mind and the body. Seligman gets to know believers on a personal level, to understand their lives and their concerns, and she also studies their health perceptions and physiology. By combining these diverse forms of evidence, she is able to synthesize a powerful account of the ways in which experiences of possession help believers not only to reframe their emotional and physical conditions in less disruptive ways, but also fundamentally reshape their bodily experiences. This profound account of healing has wide-ranging implications for our understanding both of religion and therapeutic processes, and indeed for our very conception of the relationship between the body and the mind.

Acknowledgments

I owe thanks to a great many people for their contributions large and small, direct and indirect, to the writing of this book. To begin at the very beginning, I thank my parents for instilling in me an intellectual curiosity, sense of reflexivity, and great love and respect for words. I thank my sisters for their unconditional love and support, especially Leah who has always always been there when I need her. I owe a great deal of thanks to my dissertation committee, Carol Worthman, Robert Paul, William Dressler, and Drew Westen, for helping to shape the barest seed of an idea into a dissertation project, which became a dissertation, and finally, a book. I am grateful to each of them for their wisdom and intellectual generosity in mentoring me. I owe special thanks to both Carol and Bill for their ongoing mentoring and friendship. Thank you to Laurence Kirmayer for his wonderful mentorship and for teaching me how to think critically about psychopathology while still taking seriously peoples’ suffering. I am also grateful to Laurence for printing my very first article about this research in Transcultural Psychiatry. Parts of that article appear by permission in chapter 3 of the book. Parts of chapter 5 first appeared in the journal Ethos, and I am grateful for the opportunity to expand upon both articles here.

I thank all of my colleagues at Northwestern University for providing such a supportive and dynamic place to work, especially members of the Department of Anthropology and the Institute for Policy Research (IPR). Scholarly and financial support from IPR have been instrumental in facilitating my work on this book. Special thanks are due to Jessica Winegar and Mark Hauser for their invaluable feedback on an earlier draft of one of these chapters. I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to Megan Crowley-Matoka for being my one-woman writing group during the most intense period of the book’s development. Without her smart, thoughtful, and always gentle critiques, this book would probably be unreadable.

Many thanks to Rebecca Lester for her unflagging support, for genuinely wanting this manuscript for the Culture, Mind, and Society Series, and for her insightful feedback in the early stages of writing. I am eternally indebted to Peter Stromberg for his hand-holding, careful and thoughtful editing, dynamic scholarly feedback, and most especially, for his wonderful friendship since the moment we met many years ago. I owe thanks to the graduate students and undergraduates in my medical and psychological anthropology seminars at Northwestern and to the students and faculty involved in the Clinical Ethnography Workshop at the University of Chicago, for feedback on my articles and earlier chapter drafts that have influenced the shape of this book. I am grateful to the National Institutes of Health (fellowship number F31AT00065–01) and the National Science Foundation (BCS-0075796) for funding the field research that was the basis of this work.

I am deeply indebted to my Brazil husband, Heather Shirey, for her companionship, knowledge, and support in the fieldwork adventure and her thoughtful insights into Candomblé belief and practice—especially for drawing my attention to the aesthetic aspects of the religion. I am extremely grateful to her for sharing her wonderful photographs of Candomblé objects, one of which graces the cover of the book. Most of all, I am thankful for her deep and abiding friendship. The most voluminous thanks are owed to my husband Thom, for his support, encouragement, and patience throughout the writing process. He deserves thanks both for his feedback as a colleague in the field of anthropology—over the years every idea in this book has probably been bounced off of him at some point—and for his efforts to smooth the way for my writing in myriad practical ways. He has picked up the slack at home as I scrambled to complete this manuscript, by being a spectacular, present, and loving father to our children. I gave birth to this book and my second child almost simultaneously, and although it has been challenging, I like to think that balancing the demands of my writing with caring for an infant has enriched both projects. Both of my children inspire me everyday and keep me firmly tied to reality. To use the terminology of the book, they have made me a whole self—infusing my life with the kind of joy, humor, and frustration that make life worth living.

I cannot adequately thank Mae Tiana and Pai João for opening their terrieros to me, and for their mentoring and spiritual guidance. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to the filhas and filhos de santo who shared their stories and their friendship with me. I have tried to do justice to both.

Chapter 1

Introduction: Stepping into the Supernatural World of Candomblé

On a blistering hot day early in my year of fieldwork in Salvador, Brazil, I set out to have a ritual divination performed on my behalf. I had come to Brazil to study spirit possession mediumship in the African-derived religion Candomblé, and motivated by curiosity and the desire to make connections within this spiritual community, I had made arrangements to have a spiritual leader¹ perform a divination for me that would reveal to which of the Candomblé deities, known as orixás, I belonged. In Candomblé, every human being belongs to, or is the filho (child) of, a pair of orixás. These two deities share responsibility for both the personality characteristics and the destinies of the humans who belong to them. In order to discover who one’s orixás are, a divination, which involves throwing a set of cowry shells and reading the pattern in which they land, must be performed by a qualified spiritual leader. Before the day I had the cowries thrown for me, I did not realize the potential that such identification might have to transform experience.

I had arranged to meet with Mae Tiana, the leader of a small congregation to which I had been introduced several weeks before, at her house, which also served as her terreiro, the Candomblé equivalent of a church or temple. The house was in a working class neighborhood made up of other colorful concrete houses and cramped storefronts, and full of the noise and activity of hundreds of people, stray dogs, cars, and buses. In this chaotic setting it was hard to believe that Mae Tiana’s tiny, nondescript house was also a place of worship.

The largest room of Mae Tiana’s house served as the barracão, the space where ritual events are staged. It was a bright, open room sparsely furnished with several long benches for spectators and a few large, regal-looking chairs where the mae de santo and other senior initiates sat during festas (public rituals). When I arrived for my divination, however, Mae Tiana did not take me to the barracão. Instead, she ushered me into her dark, cramped living room, where I perched awkwardly on the edge of a lumpy couch. Mae Tiana, a very small, somewhat round woman in her mid-sixties with her grey hair in a knot on top of her head, and wearing a loose-fitting house dress and a pair of mules, was not exactly an imposing figure. With very little ceremony she took out her bag of cowry shells and, muttering something under her breath, she shook them onto a small woven mat on the low table between us. In spite of the informal setting and lack of ritual trappings, as Mae Tiana began to study the shells dispassionately, I realized I was excited and a little bit nervous about the revelation she was about to make. After studying the shells for several more moments, she gathered them back up, threw a few of them again, nodded to herself, and announced the owner of my head: it was Iansã, a female warrior goddess (and her own patron deity). My second-in-command, she went on to reveal, was another warrior, the male deity Ogum. I belonged to not one, but two warrior deities!

As Mae Tiana listed the qualities typically possessed by children of these two orixás, I was surprised by the little surge of pride I experienced. Filhos of these warrior deities are known for their fierce strength, confidence, adventurousness, and passion.² What, if anything, I wondered, did it say about me that I was identified with not one but two such gods? Did I possess some inner power or vitality of which I was not even aware? Perhaps I should try harder to cultivate these attributes. I straightened a little in my seat just thinking about it.

When I had had a chance to reflect on it further, I realized that the experience of having my orixás identified was like being offered a supernatural guide to my self—it was like having someone look inside me and pronounce with a kind of cosmic certainty, These are the characteristics that you possess. But how was I to understand Mae Tiana’s role in making this identification? Was this simply what the pattern of the cowries indicated, or had Mae Tiana’s perceptions of me influenced her reading? I had always aspired to be strong and confident—there seemed an uncanny fit between my aspirations and Mae Tiana’s divination. It was as if she had performed some kind of personality analysis on me that included not only my existing personality, but aspects of my desired self as well.

The more I thought about it, the more I came to see the powerful implications that this experience had for what anthropologists call subjectivity—the basic modes of perception, thought, and emotion that inform our fundamental, and not necessarily conscious, sense of who we are (Holland and Leander 2004; Ortner 2005). I had responded to Mae Tiana’s divination by embracing the traits it revealed, by identifying with and incorporating them into my sense of self. In other words, the divination process had caused me to not only measure and reflect on my own sense of self, but also adjust it in relation to the attributions presented. There was thus an inkling of something transformative in this experience. What is more, I began to realize that this hint of transformative potential extended beyond a shift in the ideas I held about my own personality characteristics. As I sat in Mae Tiana’s living room thinking about how I might possess the strength, confidence, and adventurousness of my patron deities, I changed my posture. A shift in my sense of self had brought about a momentary shift in my default way of using and experiencing my body.

This tiny gesture thus drew my attention to an important link between ideas about who one is and the experience of one’s body. I had arrived in Brazil prepared to investigate whether the bodies of mediums differ from those of other Candomblé participants in ways that predispose them to experience trance and possession. I had come armed with high-tech medical equipment capable of gathering data on the internal workings of mediums’ bodies by measuring their psychophysiological functioning, hoping that this would be the innovative methodology to shed new light on trance and possession. But this early participant-observation pointed toward different ways of thinking about the role of the body in Candomblé mediumship. It suggested important links between bodily experience and subjectivity, and hinted at the potential for Candomblé participation to be transformative in ways that include the reshaping of both body and self.

It is worth noting, however, that not everyone immediately experiences a sense of connection and transformation upon having their orixás divined. Several people mentioned to me that their first divination had identified them as the filhos of orixás with whom they felt no sense of connection. Because the pantheon of deities in Candomblé includes many different types of gods––warriors, hunters, nurturers, those who are gentle and fierce, wise and vain––there are a wide variety of characteristics and combinations of characteristics with which Candomblé devotees may be associated. Filhos of the hunter god Oxossi are known to be calm and controlled, intelligent and loyal; those of Omolu, the deity associated with infectious disease and healing, are shy and pessimistic, hard-working, and orderly; those of the patron goddess of motherhood and the sea, Iemanjá, are calm and sensuous, strong, protective, and arrogant. When the characteristics of the orixás named through divination fail to resonate with either the existing or desired selves of a devotee, rather than motivating him or her to cultivate particular qualities, the process can instead be somewhat alienating.

It was not unusual in these cases for the individual to have a second divination performed by the same or a different spiritual leader, in hopes of a more satisfactory result the second time around. Such misfires, understood in spiritual terms as confusion resulting from multiple orixás battling for control over the individual’s head, are probably inevitable in what is surely a delicate process of matching orixás to the extant and desired selves of particular individuals. Breakdowns in this process may have to do with the ability of the spiritual leader to read particular individuals or the willingness of individuals to identify with characteristics that might diverge from their core sense of who they are. Variations in the receptiveness of individuals to these divinatory identifications may also have to do with the lived social and emotional contexts they occupy at the moment of divination. In other words, the success of this process might have to do with the subjective state of an individual at the time of his or her divination.

My divination experience, for instance, had come at a moment when I was feeling vulnerable and full of self-doubt, priming me to be particularly receptive to its transformative possibilities. Did Brazilian Candomblé participants, particularly those who would become spirit possession mediums, join the religion and begin to embrace the influence of the orixás at their own moments of vulnerability? Knowing that many Candomblé mediums are low-income Afro-Brazilian women, I wondered if there were ways in which these individuals were primed, perhaps by the effects of their life experiences and social positionality, to embrace the subjective implications and transformative possibilities of Candomblé beliefs and practices. As one of my medium friends later put it, there has to be a potent motivation for immersing oneself in this "mundo sobrenatural" (supernatural world).

It was striking to me that even in my mild state of vulnerability, and even without a conviction that the identification of my orixás was channeled through the mae de santo straight from the gods themselves, my sense of self was affected by the divination experience. But how much more powerful would this experience be for someone both more deeply in need and more deeply steeped in the Candomblé cosmology? And what about those who not only know these supernatural beings and the universe in which they exist intellectually, but who know them experientially through their embodiment of the deities in the context of spirit possession?

In spirit possession, the medium’s consciousness is suspended while her body takes on the characteristics of the orixás or other spirits who possess her. If the identification of my orixás had been enough to affect my bodily experience even momentarily, then the potential for spirit possession to transform the bodies of mediums was immense. This form of religious participation might therefore be a means of reshaping bodily ways of being along with self-understandings.

And so I came away from my divination experience with a sense of how potent the convergence of religious beliefs and meanings with bodily experiences and practices could be. What is more, I began to appreciate the powerful impact such convergence could have on subjective experience. With the tools I had brought to the field with me, I was uniquely positioned to trace the effects of these processes on the minds and bodies of mediums. Using ethnographic methods, I could offer a close examination of the lived experiences of mediumship, while the tools of psychophysiology would allow me to use measurement of autonomic nervous system regulation over cardiovascular activity as a window inside mediums’ bodies.

What might the processes through which meaning and bodily experience converge look like in peoples’ lives and in their physiologies? And what might the effects of such convergence be for individuals who became involved in Candomblé mediumship at moments of vulnerability? Could the transformation of subjectivity and selfhood through religious belief and practice act therapeutically for vulnerable individuals? These were the questions at the center of the research I conducted during a year of fieldwork among Candomblé spirit possession mediums in Brazil. The aim of this book is to answer them.

The Argument

Spirit possession involves the displacement of a human’s conscious self by that of a powerful, immaterial being—a spirit, god, ancestor, or demon—who temporarily animates the human’s body while he/she is in a state of trance. Spirit possession mediums enter into long-term relationships with these powerful others, becoming regular vehicles for their materialization in the human world. Mediums thus regularly experience what to many of us would seem like dramatic shifts in our relationship to self and body––their everyday self-awareness becomes suspended, while their bodies continue to operate without a sense of volition. The medium typically has no memory of the events that take place, yet she knows that her body has performed under the direction of some other consciousness, in ways that are not obviously linked to her own sense of identity and intention. To many people, these seemingly radical transformations of subjectivity make spirit possession appear quintessentially exotic––a novelty or example of the ways in which others are fundamentally different from us.

While intimate, sensory experiences of God have become common in some forms of contemporary Evangelical Christianity (Luhrmann 2012), many of us simply do not have a frame of reference for these kinds of subjective transformations. Even hearing God speak in vivid ways would represent an extraordinary experience for many of us, yet mediums appear temporarily to become one of their gods. This is why such experiences are so frequently understood in terms of analogy to what are commonly understood as pathological alterations in consciousness associated with dissociative disorders³––the most extreme version, known as dissociative identity disorder (DID), involves the experience of multiple, discrete identities housed within a single person. On the surface, possession trance looks a lot like DID. Both involve violations of the Euro-American cultural expectation that people’s memories, identity, and awareness should form a single coherent self. Faced with such exotic phenomena, questions inevitably arise about the authenticity of trance states, whether possession is real or merely performance, and whether it is a form of pathology. Above all, questions arise about what might motivate individuals to seek out or endure such extraordinary experiences.

Through the close examination of the experiences of Candomblé spirit possession mediums offered in this book, however, I will demonstrate that far from being exotic and other, this form of spirit possession mediumship represents a privileged site for understanding important aspects of our shared human experience.

Spirit possession is particularly valuable for drawing our attention to the ways in which individuals are shaped by and embody elements of their lived contexts. In particular, spirit possession is an ideal context in which to investigate the effects of meaning on the body—in which to undertake a close examination of the processes and mechanisms through which ideas, beliefs, and discourses can actually shape and transform the states and dispositions of people’s bodies.

The effects of meaning on the body have recently become the subjects of increasing attention in both the social and clinical sciences, as it becomes more and more clear that peoples’ interpretations and attributions about their experiences can have powerful effects on their health and well-being. Thus, while an analysis of spirit possession may seem far removed from research on the ways in which things like discrimination, stigma, social support, loneliness, and positive regard affect mental and physical health, I will show how spirit possession can actually help