Description
Book SynopsisA masterful ethnography of Puerto Rican brujos, who advise their clients not only in consultation with the spirits but also in compliance with state laws and new economic opportunities.
Trade ReviewOverall,
Witchcraft and Welfare is an excellent analysis of Puerto Rican Brujería and other African diasporic religions. This book, however, is not only useful for students and scholars of Puerto Rican or Caribbean culture and religion. It is also, through its ingenious analysis of the influences of 21st century globalization on the processes of syncretization, a window on the macrocosm of future trends in world religion. * The Journal of Latin American Anthropology *
Witchcraft and Welfare is a delightful and insightful book, evocative and well-written, which unpacks the multilayered history of Puerto Rican folk beliefs and practices convincingly showing not only how brujería makes sense in people’s everyday lives, but also how it is becoming institutionalised as an integral part of official Puerto Rican society, and indeed how beliefs and practices of this kind can be complementary, not opposed, to bureaucratic rationality. * Anthropos *
Table of Contents
- Preface
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Ritual Alchemy
- Part I. Shifting Faces
- Chapter One. Gatekeepers and Heretics: Disputing Sacred Territories
- Chapter Two. Nation Building and the Secularization of Spirituality
- Chapter Three. Spiritual Laissez-Faire and the Commodification of Faith
- Part II. The Technologies of Cosmic and Worldly Success
- Chapter Four. Brujos, Saints or Brokers?
- Chapter Five. Spiritual Assets and the Entanglements of Power
- Chapter Six. The Global Bazaar of Spiritual Enterprise
- Chapter Seven. The Moral Economy of Bureaucratic Providence
- Chapter Eight. Advocates and Lawyers of Another Order
- Epilogue: The Halloween Extravaganza
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
