WHEN DONA MARIA DESCENDS TO TAKE CARE OF YOU:

CABOCLOS AND AFFECTIVE INTERCONNECTEDNESS IN

TAMBOR DE MINA

Matan Ilan Shapiro

Abstract

Trance-possession in the Afro-Brazilian religion Tambor de Mina temporary epitomizes

affective connectivity between divine and social orders. I argue that possession gradually

becomes a situational interjection within the totality of given affective relations contriving

the medium as a social person. Simultaneously it gains a privileged space as relation in and

of itself between the medium and his or her caboclos.

Keywords: Possession; Tambor de Mina; Affect Theory; Caboclos

Resumo

Possessão numa religião Afro-Brasileira denominada Tambor de Mina representa uma

conecção afetiva provisória entre uma ordem divina e uma ordem social. Nesse artigo,

argumento que possessão, progressivamente, se torna uma interjeição na totalidade das

relações afetivas caracterizando pessoas sociais. Simultaneamente possessão alcança um

espaço privilegiado como uma relação exclusiva entre o medium e seus caboclos.

Palavras Chave: Possessão; Tambor de Mina; Teoria de Afeto; Caboclos

Introduction

Tambor de Mina is an Afro-Brazilian religion mainly practiced in the states of

Maranhão and Pará (Eduardo, 1948[1966]). It is an initiatory religion based on the

exchange of sacrifice, food, alcohol and presents with a hierarchic order of divinities

during possession-trance ceremonies (Prandi, 1997). Religious sessions in Mina - usually

referred to as passages (passagens) or festive (festas) - draw mainly on caboclos, spiritual

entities who manifest through practitioners' bodies by temporarily possessing them (M.

Ferretti, 1994).

Through recurrent manifestation particular caboclos generate continuous affective

relationships with terreiro visitors. This includes a wide range of nurturing practices and

bestowals. Sometimes caboclos even marry flesh and blood wives/husbands or accept

responsibility over babies as their godmothers/fathers. However, whereas the dynamics of

dancing and chanting usually correspond to more or less familiar scenario whereby the

practitioner summons his or her caboclo to manifest, at times caboclos burst unexpectedly

into the world, far from the terreiro or ritual context. In such cases possession is described

as unwitting, dangerous and often violent.

In this paper I argue that possession in Mina – whether during demarcated religious

ceremonies or mundane action – epitomizes networks of affective connectivity within the

scopes of both divine and social orders. During possession emotions literally descend

through practitioners' and affiliates’ bodies to emphasize their relationships with both

human kin and spiritual entities. Possession thus gradually becomes a situational

interjection within the totality of given affective relations contriving the medium as a

social person, while simultaneously gaining space as relation in and of itself between the

medium and his or her caboclos.

The Phenomenality of Possession: Affect and Bodily Susceptibility

In Mina cosmology the body functions as hub of and for the passage of these

‘enchanted’ forces, which cross through or flow within it. Possession is generally described

as an affective conjunction with a divine order, to which people refer as falling (cair). The

entity is said to be ‘on top’ of the medium and the possessed person is referred to as the

horse (cavalo) on which the entity rides. Sometimes the possessing entity actually

dislocates the medium’s personality and literally resides inside his or her head (S. Ferretti,

1996). Pai de Santo Carlos describes the phenomenality of possession:

…It is like you fell into a bottomless pit, no light, nothing, as if your heart

is about to explode from so much acceleration. But at the same time, after this pain

goes away, you feel peace, you feel as if you have taken a woman to bed… Then

you feel that thing, that pleasure, that relaxation… It is like the floor has been cut-

open, as if you try to touch the wall and it turns into water, everything escapes from

you… it always begins with dizziness which just gets stronger and stronger. When

this happens that thing has already taken you, and then it goes by the stages until

you are totally possessed.

Entities possess most easily persons with an open body (corpo aberto) - a

debilitating affective state of exposure to spiritual and physical dangers (Prandi, 1997;

Stoller, 1997). It may be caused by preconditioned mediunic inclination that has not been

addressed; temporal emotional fragility characterized by sadness or negative thoughts; and

by destructive life-style habits such as heavy drinking or drug use (Ferreira, 1987).

Menstruation is considered a state of ‘open body’ and while having their period women are

not allowed to enter the terreiro for fear of sudden and violent possession.

Closed body (corpo fechado), on the other hand, is the term used to describe

affective situations by which the body is protected or becomes intact to the extent it may

not be penetrated by malignant energies (Mayblin, 2010). Persons may close their own

body by marking a cross on their chest before entering a dangerous place (for example,

water ponds and lakes, which may contain mãe(s) d’agua). Pais and mães de santo also

perform ceremonies dedicated for closing a person’s body.

This way or another, when possessing chosen individuals, entities usually demand

the fulfillment of certain obligations from both practitioners and their kin. These include

the appropriation of certain alimentary regulations, ritual duties and routine integration into

religious life cycle.

The somatic immediacy of emotional and otherwise affective interchange with

spirits - including the ways that it is imagined to suddenly capture persons - suggest the

preconceived susceptibility of the human body in Mina cosmology to certain emotional,

sensuous and carnal transformations that I group here under the analytic category of affect

(Vilaça, 2005). By affect I mean the physical and emotional seismography that is primarily

felt as sensuous or embodied experience and is contingent on the bodily capacity to act and

be acted upon (Massumi, 2010, 54; Thrift, 2007; conclusion of this paper).

In local terms, contagious affective discharge concerns the passage of benevolent or

malevolent energies within and across bodies. For example, babies are known to be easily

affected by the evil eye (mau olhado, quebrante) and other spiritually contagious illnesses

merely by spoken words or greedy gazes (Eduardo, 1966; Brandes, 1981). Babies who

have been admired consequently wake up the next day soft (mole), crying, and often with

fever. This is cured by a blessing from a benzedeira, usually an older women living nearby

and/or a midwife (parteira), who purifies the baby from the malignant flow of energy

(Mayblin, 2010).

Consequently, the transfer of affective discharge at times simply happens to people

without them provoking it in any particular way. For example, during a passagem I

attended at a terreiro in the capital of Maranhão one of the spectators approached the main

door to have a better view of the dancing that were going on inside. She stood there for

several seconds before flying backwards through the air, falling on her back. Her fists then

clenched forcibly and she began shaking and twisting, her eyes closed. It took her several

hours to get back to her senses. Later I was told she was temporarily possessed by a

mermaid who suddenly arrived from the world of the encantaria (enachantment).

Possession far from the terreiro is considered particularly dangerous because it

represents unstructured reciprocal relations with whole families of entities – usually

caboclos – that must be reworked publically. This particular constellation of negative,

harmful or distressful affective aggregations must be enhanced as new affective association

(or alliance) with both kin and spirits. Possession therefore locally signifies

interconnectedness with certain spiritual entities that (1) may happen thoroughly

unexpectedly, and (2) always temporally destabilizes a person’s physical and emotional

integrity (Lovell, 2002).

Possession and Affective Interconnectedness: The Way it Captures You

Deities in Mina are classified into several lines (linhas) or nations (nações) of

descent. Each line stretches hierarchically from African Orixás and Voduns at the top;

through Catholic saints and enchanted European noblemen called gentils; to different

typologies of spirits of the dead (eguns) and caboclos at the bottom (M. Ferretti, 2000).

Each of these categories in itself is ramified to include complex internal kinship clusters.

Once an entity has chosen a medium as her horse (cavalo), her entire family is permitted

passage (passagem) through that medium whenever they desire to do so. Deities – and

especially caboclos who manifest most frequently - thus form what practitioners relate to

as interconnected chains (correntes) cutting across descent lines.

Mina practitioners and affiliates hold that possession initially captures people rather

than being endorsed by them – entities choose you rather than you choose them. “It is not

about believing”, my friend Rui once said, “it is (about) how it gets you”. Long periods of

unwitting and persistent possessions by the medium’s povo therefore almost always

precede official initiation. Carlos’s initiation into Mina highlights this. Carlos was born in

the interior (hinterland) of Maranhão in the mid-1980s and from a young age suffered from

various diseases. He attests that his sickliness was caused by entities, who insisted early on

that he grows to serve them:

In reality, when my mother became pregnant with me, the people say that

my pregnancy-belly was monitored by a vodum. When I was inside her it was the

vodum who took care of me… because her pregnancy was complicated, it was a risk

pregnancy. I was supposed not to be conceived at all, because my father’s semen

wasn’t strong enough to generate me. When I was born I almost died, had many

health problems that appeared from one hour to the next. In reality I was affected by

the question of spirituality, I was already receiving entities at the age of 1 and 2

years. My vital energy was very weak since I was only a baby, and they had vital

energy much powerful than mine. This affected my body, the function of my

organism.

Carlos was thus sent to live with his parental grandmother Dona Silvanda in São

Luis, who arranged his baptism at the Mina terreiro in which she served as filha de santo

(an initiated dancer). Julio Curador (Julio the Healer), the local Pai de Santo, consequently

propagated a service (serviço) that stabilized Carlos’ health problems. As a child he spent

much of his time at Julio’s terreiro, mainly as a batazeiro, a drummer. He conversed with

entities and testifies he had always felt their presence when they manifested.

At the age of 7 Carlos experienced his first recorded possession by an entity. He

asked for blessing (tomar benção) from Seu Manezinho Legua, one of the most notable

caboclos of Maranhão (M. Ferretti, 1994), as he usually did when the entity visited the

festa. When Seu Manezinho touched Carlos’s hand to bless it, however, the boy was

suddenly ‘joined’ by another caboclo from the Legua family and fell down trembling. This

was totally unexpected due to the fact that the blessing was supposed to “give us power

and open our paths”, as Carlos notes, “many people think that to take blessing is just a

commitment that you have, but it is not – when you go and ask blessing from orixá, from caboclo,

from vodúm, or from anybody else – that which he has got with him, that energy, that positive

thing, that good thing, some of it also passes-on to you”.

The underlying assertion, then, is that possession requires a trigger, which as in the

case of Carlos is often described in terms of contact with contaminated or ‘charged’ artifact

or environment. Such contact precipitates possession and ultimately brings about radical

transformations in poise and tact.

Take the following story for example. One day my friend Rui received an urgent

call from a friend, who had taken her husband to Igreja Universal after she caught him

trying to strangle their baby-girl. In church the man refused to let people come near him

until Rui arrived. Rui approached and pressed the man’s right hand while making an

oração (a communication with the divine). As he did that the man’s body suddenly twisted

uncontrollably and he collapsed on the floor. Rui asked some questions and discovered that

a woman who tried to commit suicide that morning had thrown a knife full of blood into

the couple's back yard. The man saw the knife, picked it up and threw it out to the street.

Soon after he got a headache and the possession crisis emanated1.

That night Rui says he felt down. He could not fall asleep and when he did he had

nightmares. Even Wallison, his younger brother, woke up. At 5 in the morning Wallison

walked out to the garden and suddenly passed-out. Their mother saw what had happened

and cried out to Rui, who ran to the garden, performed CPR to Wallisson and rushed him

to hospital. The explanation given was that the entities wanted to be orated for (receive the

oração, here homologous to benção), and hence accompanied Rui to the house. They

ultimately achieved access to his oratory capabilities by possessing his brother.

Possession is here projected as the material reincarnation of the irregularity

inflicted into the possessed man’s body by an evil spirit. Rui managed to cure that

irregularity and drive the spirit away by the power of his oração but he was ultimately

affected by it since he touched the contaminated possessed man, which means that

somehow he acquired some of the malignant ‘energy’. Possession, in other words, is not

the problem but a symptom that indicates the conjuncture of affective forces that ‘capture’

people in specific situations.

Elaborate healing rituals within Mina and its closely related practice of Pajelança

(or cura) (Pacheco, 2004) often begin with involuntary possession2. They are always

devised to treat medical or spiritual problem shrouded under it (Lambek 1981). Take the

elderly Dona Formosa from Guaretá, a village in the interior of Maranhão where I

conducted parts of my fieldwork, who once got a stomachache in the middle of the night.

The initial symptoms were utterly corporeal - sweat and diarrhea - but then, when she was

lying there half-unconscious, Dona Formosa heard a spirit whispering from a distance -

“Who is the good Pajé that will raise Formosa from here? Not a Pajé and not a Doctor!

There is only one! It is only God and Our Lady (Nossa Senhora) who are able to bring her

back!”

Dona Formosa’s common-law husband then called neighbors and friends to the hut.

He gave Dona Formosa a mourning candle, since she was sure she was going to die. She

told one of her comadres who gathered there that she was going to tour the world, an

indication for ethereal deathbed travel in the luminal world of encantaria. Somebody

called an ambulance, though, and Dona Formosa was driven to a hospital in the nearby

town, where she received some medicine.

When she returned to the village Dona Formosa called a famous Pajé to inspect her.

The Pajé summoned one of his caboclos to manifest at her presence and confirmed that a

jealous neighbor had sent her caboclo to try and kill Dona Formosa. This resulted in a

healing ritual which lasted 8 days and included seclusion at the Pajé’s household, during

which Dona Formosa was only allowed to communicate with the person who prepared her

meals. Eventually the Pajé closed her body and Dona Formosa she was free to go home.

Possession ultimately becomes the site for emotional, visceral or otherwise

affective transitive relations with divine or spiritual entities, which operate certain

transformations on body and mind. Within ritual practice this is enacted self-consciously,

as the medium summons his or her entities to manifest. Beyond the demarcated zone of the

terreiro, however, this is described as a dangerous event. In both cases bodies and persons

are integrated into higher orders of natural and supernatural truths, which directly influence

them or at least present a mirror image of their truthful, concealed, stakes.

Under these terms affective forces literally circulate through and between persons

during possession in order to both emphasize prior relations and agitate them. The anguish

of the woman who tried to commit suicide thus penetrated Rui’s friend’s body, the rage of

a jealous opponent materialized in Dona Formosa’s stomach and the love of the vodun who

nurtured Carlos-the-fetus eventually kept him alive.

Metonymy: The Motile Agency of Caboclos

It can be asserted that possession is not an isolated occurrence nor is it an

exclusively individual experience. Rather, it comes across as situational passage-way to

particular contestations and turbulences characterizing the totality of relationship in this

time and place. When you are possessed you have already been transformed by passages

of new emotional intensities through and within your body, which also inevitably signified

that something had changed in the whole set of affective connections that locally contrive

you as a social person. Caboclos maintain a metonymic relation to the very set of

relationships they interrupt. This point requires further elucidation.

As with other divinities, Caboclos are grouped into whole families finely

differentiated by name, ‘national’ origin, kinship relations, tenure in the world of

encantaria and even individual qualities (see M. Ferretti, 1994). The more a caboclo/a

works – namely, the more magic they perform - the higher he or she advances in the

hierarchy of the encantaria. The more tenure, the more respectful they become and the

more powerful are their magical capabilities. Through time caboclos could become voduns

(although never an orixá) thus gaining status, wealth and better quality of living.

Mundicarmo Ferretti (2000, 74) defines caboclos as:

Spiritual protectors of an inferior hierarchic level to the voduns and gentis

that are never confused with these latter entities or with Catholic saints. Caboclos in

Mina are neither considered to be indigenous spirits (indios) nor spirits of the dead

(eguns) although they have had terrestrial life and, sometimes, have links with

indigenous groups. Although many of them are of a noble origin they are generally

associated with the aldeias and are known as ‘outsiders’ to the palaces

Since Caboclos pertain to the bottom of the hierarchy of the encantaria, they

conceptually become an intermediary category between humans and spiritual entities.

Their manifestation signifies the permanent incorporation of a particular medium to a

particular chain (corrente) of entities - a designated flow of caboclos, gentis, índios and

voduns. These then become that medium’s people (povo). The medium therefore not only

‘gives passage’ for caboclos to manifest; during possession he or she also inevitably

become an intrinsic part of the chain. Subsequently, the medium is not only a horse for the

entities but also affiliated to them as their respective son or daughter (filho/a de santo).

Carlos and others indicate that Mina practitioners thus learn to know their entities

better and better the more they practice possession during festas (Goldman, 2007).

Learning basically signifies mutual relationship between this world and the world of

encantaria, rather than unilateral expression of certain mundane tensions. Possession

epitomizes that two-folded connection in two ways.

Firstly, it is well accepted that in the first few years the medium encounters

difficulties in controlling the energies of his or her entities and that the entities themselves

will be suspicious at their medium. They only very rarely speak through young mediums

and it takes them months on end to begin communicating with other visitors or

practitioners of the terreiro.

When caboclos feel comfortable enough, though, they make alliances. Although

some of the caboclos are known to be tricksters, malevolent, vengeful or manipulative,

most of them end-up proving that they are fun loving and friendly since they usually stay

in festas after the voduns have already ‘ascended’ back to the encantaria. They walk

between the visitors, greet, speak and laugh, sometimes drink or smoke, and altogether

“pay compliments to their assistants in a more affective mode and less formal than that of

voduns and gentis” (M. Ferretti 1997, 5). Caboclos thus acquire or earn relationships rather

than impose them, and they present themselves in an egalitarian fashion.

Second, and consequently, those seemingly egalitarian relationships are never

unidirectional but utterly reciprocal. Seu Manezinho Legua, for example, is known to be

reckless and vulgar but while he manifests ‘on top’ of Carlos he is quiet and restrained.

This is so, as Carlos indicated, simply because Seu Manezinho knows Carlos ‘doesn’t like

these things’. Carlos exclaimed that “Everything exists in Mina, but everything depends on each

head (cabeça), each person, each Orixá. If there is a caboclo right here he could descend (dscer)

through another person and be completely different, to like completely different things”.

This suggests that relations between humans and divinities are just as historical and

contested as the relationships between humans and humans. Moreover, both these kinds of

relations are measured by their affective aspects – lighthearted conversation, play

(brincadeira) and somatic interchange. One obvious example for such dependence on

affectivity is magic, as a certain Pomba-Gira once told me during a session dedicated for

trabalhos of black-magic. Her point was that she could not make magic out of sheer

aspirations. She could not, for example, influence a movie actress fall in love with me

because I have never encountered that actress in person. In case there has been some prior

affective interchange between us in the real world, however, ranging from just mutual

gazing to physical contact, she could generate the spell.

Ultimately, entities and humans invest affects in one another in ways that enable the

divine to divulge itself through the mundane just as much as the mundane can enunciate

itself through the divine. Just as much as humans adjust to the caprices of caboclos, the

latter also adjust to the caprices and idiosyncrasies of humans. This leads back to the

assertion that the manifestation of caboclos during possession is metonymic to the sets of

relations it interrupts (Holbraad 2008). This is so for two main reasons.

Primarily, the relationship medium-caboclo makes part of the larger scope of

relations between the medium and his or her peers as well as those between caboclos and

caboclos. Once Caboclos are energized into motion they thus flow across mundane and

divine contexts freely, which instantiates a channel of connectivity between these worlds.

Second, relationships between the medium and his or her caboclos does not just replicate

or mirror or work in a ‘similar’ way to relationships between the medium and his or her

human kin and kindred. Rather than being analogous to one another, medium-kin relations,

medium-caboclo relations and caboclo-caboclo relations belong to the same template of

affective interchange, with their own contested histories, memories and gradual mutual

recognition of intimate familiarity.

Consequently, each of these sets of relations is simultaneously located within the

larger structure of interconnected sets of affective relations while containing this entire

structure metonymically within itself.

Structuring Relations Through Metonymy

Since he was a child Carlos had suffered from intermittent (and at times violent)

possessions. When he was 15 this had become so frequent that he had had to stop working.

At 19 Carlos was drinking heavily and had by then left his teenage wife with two babies to

take care of. Then his life changed:

At that time I was very crazy (doido), I didn’t know what I was doing. One

day I left the house and went roaming through the streets of the city center like a

madman. I had no destination. I stopped in front of a house… and a person [who

stood there] told me – ‘I will take you to a house of one person there’. So I went to

the house of the person who is today my Padrinho de Santo – Arão. There was an

entity on top (acima) of him, called Maria Légua. She told me – ‘I have been

waiting for you here’… Then she told my whole life story since I was born until the

time I arrived there to the house… she said I had a ‘cargo’ (carga), I am a person

that have a position (posição), and I need to look for a pai de santo to make an Orí.

Orí is an initiation ceremony that both reveals and delineates the main entities

responsible on the medium’s destiny, personal characteristics, future worship obligations

etc. (Bastide, 1978). It is conducted to organize the medium’s head (cabeça) and heighten

his/her capacities to receive (receber) entities. A head is owned by 3 main orixás; various

kinds of voduns (who represent aspects of the orixás’ personalities and serve them through

the enactment of magic); and an infinite number of caboclos (M. Ferretti, 2000). After it

was enacted, Orí formally incorporated Carlos to a designated flow of caboclos, gentis, and

voduns (viz. chain, corrente), which has become his people, his povo.

Noticeably, Carlos’ pre-initiation possessions were merely omens which

culminated in a moment of lucid revelation, after which the structuring of more elaborate

ritual practices had become possible. Carlos has already been viscerally transformed by

passages of emotional intensities through and within his body, which also inevitably

signified that something had changed in the whole set of affective aggregations that locally

contrived him as a social person. Carlos’ earlier possessions thus uncovered sets of

relations that have always-already been there, yet they remained concealed until initiation

‘organized’ them into intelligible relational structures. By institutionalizing his recurrent

possessions Carlos managed to transform a particular constellation of negative, harmful or

distressful links to productive ones:

…I used to arrive home and she used to come (Dona Maria Légua-MS) to

give me instructions how to do the baths. Sometimes she arrived in my dreams,

sometimes when I was half-awake. She used to wash my head with coconut-water,

with herbs, making all the baths. That is how my chains (correntes) became

aligned, my people (meu povo) began taking the right path, they started working!

In fact, Carlos’ people worked so well that three years after his initiation he

managed to build a terreiro of his own at Dona Silvanda’s garden. Carlos says it was all a

plan of the caboclos. It began with Dona Maria Pomba-Gira, who was always ‘on top’ of

Carlos during his sorcery sessions (serviços, trabalhos), and therefore was the one who

received money and gifts from Carlos’s clients. She stored them away from his conscious

reach. Later, cabocla of the Légua family called Dona Teresa possessed Carlos and

revealed the $BRL 3,600 accumulated to that point. Dona Teresa then passed the money on

to Carlos’ kinsfolk and ordered to begin the construction. Every morning she continued

possessing Carlos to instruct the builders and even personally travelled to purchase

materials in building stores.

Within 3 weeks the terreiro was erected. During my fieldwork in 2009-10 it

included 5 filhos (sons and daughters) de Santo who Carlos himself has initiated into Mina;

3 irmãs (sisters) de santo, who followed Carlos from the last terreiro in which he was

initiated; several helpers and one mãe de santo (Carlos’s paternal grandmother Dona

Silvanda). Many of the visitors of his festas were Carlos’s neighbors and relatives, whose

great majority live in the same street of the terreiro. More importantly, all of the neophytes

and dancers were directly ‘caught’ in the web of relationships surrounding Carlos’s life

inside and outside Mina.

Janaina is one of them. She was Carlos’ second-wife’s daughter, who towards her

15th

birthday acquired what she designated as depression. She was feeling down, did not

want to go to school anymore and was very sad. In that period she began suffering from

strong headaches. One day she visited Carlos’s terreiro and ‘fell’. While possessed, her

caboclo revealed that Janaina’s mother promised to ‘give’ her away to a particular vodum

before she was born. The caboclo demanded that now has arrived the time to fulfill this

obligation. Janaina chose to be initiated and began dancing regularly at the festas.

Janaina’s mother Claudiane accompanied her during most of the sessions – often as

frequent as twice a week - even though she did not speak with Carlos’s current partner –

Irací - who was her comadre and used to be one of her best friends. As the story goes, Irací

lived with Claudiane and Carlos for several years at Claudiane’s house and secretly

maintained a romance with Carlos. At some point Carlos chose to leave the house and

move back to his adoptive mother Dona Silvanda, where he eventually established his

terreiro. Irací moved out with him and was still living with Carlos during my fieldwork,

although officially they were not ‘together’ anymore. Claudiane told me various times how

angry she was with Irací – whose youngest daughter Claudiane was bringing-up as a

substitute mother (mãe de criação) – and how hard it was to see Carlos so often in the

festas.

This last case demonstrates my point – complex sets of bestowals, contested

memories, amorous involvement and relations with deities all mix and overlap within and

through one particular point of connectivity with the world of encantaria, which is the

temporalities of Janaina’s possessions. Claudiane did not speak with Irací at the time of my

fieldwork, and she minimized her contacts with Carlos to the absolute necessary in and

around Jananina’s involvement with religion cycle in the terreiro. Yet, during these

sessions Claudiane contributed work, money and food, as well as exchanging occasional

conversations with Carlos’ and Iraci’s entities while these were ‘on top’ of their mediums.

More strikingly, Claudiane was regularly seeing Dona Marias Pomba-Gira for nightly

sessions whereby she was venting out her difficulties and receiving advice from the entity.

These sessions occurred when exclusively when Pomba-Gira was on top of Carlos.

Ultimately, both these metonymic connections - between the medium and the spirits

as-well-as between the medium and his or her immediate social others - become visible

and accessible during possession. This activates relationships in both these social settings

simultaneously in ways that continue to defy their own structured moralities. Possession

becomes an anecdotal situation that represents the active flow of a transforming force, by

which both the given array of social relations available at hand (with humans and spirits

alike) and their violent disruption, become mutually inclusive. As opposed to the

traditional employment of the term axé, practitioners almost always used the word ‘energy’

to describe this force of transformation. As Carlos described this:

...It is an energy that Man cannot dominate. He can dominate electric energy, atomic

energy, solar energy – but the energy of the cosmos, the energy of spirituality, it is something that

Man will never dominate, will never be able to transform. It is an abstract thing, not concrete, it

lives here – in the air around us – it is like wind that always blows here and there. You will never

be able to see that if you do not have the sight for that, and you will never feel it if you are not

ready to feel it, if you are not born with that endowment of feeling, of seeing …

Caboclos as Emotions: The Ontology of Energetic Flow

Possession in mina mediates between - but also simultaneously encompasses - the

internal relationality of 3 main sets of relationships around a particular terreiro. They can

be outlined as medium-spirit :: spirit-spirit :: medium-kin. These become mutually

commutable. Following my research interlocutors I claimed here that what makes such

commutability possible is that all sets are fueled by the circulation of energy of the same

type, which can be seen as channel of interconnectivity between conceptual and emotional

universes. This energy and its circulation are ultimately contingent on the affective

capacities of bodies; without ‘seeing’ or ‘sensing’, a medium cannot be possessed, without

precedent affective interchange caboclo cannot enact magic.

This poses a major problem to the interchangeability of sets of affective

relationships around Mina terreiros due to the fact that spiritual entities have no bodies.

Their canonical pictures may be drawn by practitioners (often inspired by catholic images

of saints) and they may even sometimes acquire human wives or husbands (which also

suggests that they have sex); but their original carnal shapes have not yet been materialized

in everyday reality (Cunha, 2011). How could caboclos experience affective transactions if

they essentially have no bodies, which initially enables those transactions?

I suggest taking seriously the fact that Mina practitioners characterize the passage

of caboclos in terms of ‘energy’ because it might imply that caboclos and other encantados

do not need a body. If cabolcos are pure emotional energy, whatever actually ’flows’

between persons is the interchangeability of predisposed affective connectivity in its own

right. If caboclos motivate a culturally organized exchange in the same way particular

emotional styles do (e.g. the jealousy of Dona Formosa’s neighbor, Caludiane’s anger),

and if both are seen to travel in the air through objects and bodies, they could may well be

one and the same thing (Crapanzano 1992, 231; Hewitt 1902).

Emotions, like caboclos, are essentially disembodied agents that engender or

disaggregate persons by consistently creating (or destroying) dependencies and

independencies. Sometimes emotion/caboclo produce dependencies grounded in the

imagination of physical or biological discontinuity (e.g. the geopolitical dependency

between the ecantaria and current-day physical reality) and sometimes it may produce

independencies grounded in the imagination of social or affective continuity (e.g. the idea

that caboclos do not depend on provocation to possess practitioners).

Whatever joins these dependencies and independencies to a network of relatedness

are local modalities for differentiation of types of affective and emotional linkages (Reddy

1997). Carlos indicated, for example, that there is a strict incest taboo on sexual relations

between pais and mães de santo and their filhos, which also extend itself to other first-

grade ritualized kinship ties such as irmãos-irmãs (brothers-sisters) and padrinhos-

afilhados (godfathers or mothers and their godsons or daughters). Such interdicts are not

direct consequence of overriding ritual processes that mold and change the ways emotion

is supposed to be felt, but a reaction to the ways energetic forms may suddenly and

unexpectedly capture you (Lyon 1995; Boddy 1994).

Conclusion: Affect Theory and the Efficacy of Possession

Thinking about possession as antonymous to everyday conduct, a situation of

extreme otherness, displaces structure from process. On the one hand there are relations,

templates, holism and stable rules from without. On the other, actions, sentiments, partial

truths, and ephemeral flexibility from within. Elaborating one of these polarities ostensibly

demand neglecting the other (Strathern 1982). Scholars have recently been trying to go

beyond such dualism through the invocation of the category of ‘affect’, combining

collective taxonomic frameworks with real-life emotive and visceral felt seismography of

mundane encounters (Forgas et al 2006):

Affect is an impingement or extrusion of a momentary or sometimes more

sustained state of relation as well as the passage (and the duration of passage) of

forces or intensities… Affect is found in those intensities that pass body to body…

in those resonances that circulate about, between, and sometimes stick to bodies and

worlds, and in the very passages or variations between these intensities and

resonances themselves. Affect, at its most anthropomorphic, is the name we give to

those forces – visceral forces beneath, alongside or generally other than conscious

knowing, vital forces insisting beyond emotion – that can serve to drive us toward

thought and extension, that can likewise suspend us across a barely registering

accretion of force-relations (Seigworth and Gregg 2010, 1, original brackets).

The political dimension of affective transfers in everyday life is thus seen as a

process of contagion by which certain interconnections are made manifest (Thrift, 2007).

The ethnographic scope of this interconnectedness is all encompassing. It ranges from

syncretic (sic) oscillation between the virtual and the material, in ways that defy tourist

escapade in Las Vegas Casinos (Shields 2011); through the utilization of documents

among Turkish-Cyprian migrants as “material objects of law and governance… capable of

carrying, containing, or inciting affective energies when transacted or put to use in specific

webs of social relation” (Navaro-Yashin, 2007, p 81); to “how imagination of the

commodity is being captured and bent to capitalist means through a series of ‘magical’

technologies of public intimacy” (Thrift 2010, 290, original quotes, italics omitted).

I use the term affect to group together sentimental or otherwise emotional energies

of the sort here elaborated. This is for two main reasons. Primarily, affect accounts

comparatively and analytically for those intense somatic passages on which Mina

practitioners report as palpable and highly transitive social forces. Affect allows treating

these forms of transfer and contingency beyond positivism, to include such fuzzy zones of

social interaction as mood, gut-feeling, intuition, telepathy, threat, daydreaming, magical

efficacy and premonition. These types of affective force relation go beyond the cultural

construction of gendered emotional modalities (Rosaldo 1984; Lutz and White 1986) or the

predominantly discursive efficacy marking the notion of shared “emotional styles” (Reddy,

1997) as idiomatic emotives. Most importantly, they are present in everyday practice of

Mina religious and kinship exchange patterns.

Second, as opposed to semantically related concepts such as embodiment or

intersubjectivity – which presume causal relation between individuated and social action -

affect signifies neutral interconnectedness (Seigworth and Gregg, 2010, p.10). This is so

since affect dismisses the possibility that the social is a derivative sphere of

intersubjectivty, as well as the imagery of unified, autonomous and intentional subjects (cf.

Griffiths, 1997). Rather, affects are there before action, within and after it has been

completed. They capture the immanence of movement while still grounding it onto

essential halts that concretize meanings as ethical transactions. Park et al (2011, p. 5)

argue:

The concept of affect fuses the body with the imagination into an ethical synthesis

that bears directly on the micro-powers inherent in everyday interactions. How

these are negotiated builds not only on individual temperament but also a persona

and habitus, which are as much individual as they are a social style and regime of

living. Affect is furthermore a flux that is always in context – immanent – and thus

draws on a situational ethics and therefore on the social and spatial milieu.

In line with this framework, I here concern both the means by which zones of

interconnectedness come into being during possession in Mina (namely, the constant

projecting and absorbing of affects upon/from human bodies); as well as the operations

affects complete in the world (namely, the experiential indication that reality has been

transformed ad-hoc, pinpointing that a certain subtle change – emotional or other - has

already occurred). Rather than merely enhance the anthropomorphic emotive and corporal

(which often encourages paternalistic description), or thinking-schemata and norms (which

often encourages a distant cybernetic design); I prefer using affect as one and the same

transactional process of mutual inter-penetration, inter-connection and persistent

intimation.

Nonetheless, affect cannot be mistaken for endless, autonomous, freedom.

Affective transactions are often organized along well-defined racial and gendered linchpins

(Ahmed, 2004). In everyday life people engage in such transactions under contextual

political tensions (rather than as liberated meta-analytical anthropological textual devices).

Janaina’s case demonstrates this. Bodies and their transmutable affects are thus suffused

with preconceived structured precisions (Hemmings, 2005, p. 562) and stereotypes, as well

as with the constraints of micro power-relations marking perceived limitations of any

social situation (viz. “idealization” in Goffman, 1997[1956]). Subjects employing affective

projection, consciously or inadvertently, are (almost) always also the objects of affective

ostracism (Shapiro 2011).

In order to characterize this subject-object conjointment I treated both caboclos and

humans as sharing one affective template. I here mainly follow recent interpretations of

Spinoza, which characterize affect as bodily property (Massumi, 2010) and motile

interconnectivity of ontological essences (Deleuze, 1981). In this way I hope to avoid the

traps set by notions of flow and motility (Latour, 2004; Holbraad, 2007), which convey the

implicit assumption that fixity, the position of being-stuck, or the intimation of grounded

familiarity are inherently negative (Blackman 2008, p. 43; Hannertz, 1997).

The quasi-monistic process of interconnectedness I sought to describe - which

consisted in the recursive conjoining and disjoining of social persons by ways of the

transfer and impasse of the force-relations associated with caboclos – necessitated the

theorizing of grades, levels or otherwise tangible measurements by which persons

heuristically and internally differentiate kinds and types of vernacular affective linkages

(Gell, 1999, Strathern 2001). This remained beyond the scope of this article. I hinted that

one way to identify such “interdictions” (Wagner, 1977, 627) directly concerns kinship

regulation and the on-going classification of intimate linkages across networks of

relatedness in the household, neighborhood and the encantaria.

Instead of thinking about emotions analytically as private feelings of bounded

individuals that are channeled and expressed exclusively within ritual context (i.e. the

ritual enables or encourages the release/expression of such emotions); it is thus possible to

take the ethnography of possession in Mina as an example for alternate emotional

phenomenology by which a flow of emotional energy is what enables the ritual. In these

terms possession indeed still counts as ritual, which is predicated upon local sets of

relationships; but its function is to merely absorb, tame or deflect the affective

interconnectedness that already circulates in the world rather than generate it from the

ether of social togetherness (Durkheim 2001).

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Notes

1 Igreja Universal do Reino de Deus (IURD) is a charismatic Pentecostal church that performs public

ceremonies against the evil eye and black magic, including exorcism. Rui is not a Mina or evangelical

practitioner, but he is considered to be able to practice spiritual healing

2 Pajelança is pragmatically syncretized with Tambor de Mina in Maranhão, the former considered an

‘indigenous’ religion and the latter an ‘Afro’ religion. Pajé is equivalent to Mãe or Pai de Santo.