Diana Espirito Santo

Doctora en Antropología Social, University College London

Correo: diana.espirito@uc.cl
Teléfono: +562 2354 1980

Soy licenciada y máster por la London School of Economics y doctora en Antropología Social por el University College de Londres. En mi tesis estudié las formas criollas cubanas de espiritismo y el papel de los muertos en la religión afrocubana. Hice mi postdoctorado en la Universidad de Lisboa (y más tarde, en la Nueva Universidad de Lisboa) sobre la plasticidad cosmológica en la Umbanda afrobrasileña, trabajando principalmente en Río de Janeiro, en colaboración con el Museu Nacional. En Chile he trabajado sobre tecnologías, historicidad e investigación paranormal en sitios traumáticos. La investigación en estos tres sitios ha dado lugar a la publicación de tres monografías y varios libros coeditados. Un proyecto más reciente ha llevado mis intereses al ámbito de las experiencias extrañas o absurdas en la ufología chilena y sus implicaciones para la teoría antropológica. Un libro sobre el absurdo y los límites del conocimiento antropológico será publicado por Routledge en 2024. Mi trabajo más reciente vuelve al trauma de la dictadura chilena y las formas de reorganizar el tiempo a través de la performance y el teatro.

English bio

I hold a BSc and an Msc from the London School of Economics, and a PhD in Social Anthropology from University College London. For my thesis I studied Cuban Creole forms of spiritism, and the role of the dead in Afro-Cuban religion. I did my post-doc at the University of Lisbon (and later, at the New University of Lisbon) on cosmological plasticity in Afro-Brazilian Umbanda, working mainly in Rio de Janeiro, in collaboration with the Museu Nacional. In Chile I have worked on technologies, historicity and paranormal research in trauma sites. Research at these three sites has resulted in the publication of three monographs and several co-edited books. A more recent project has taken my interests into the realm of bizarre or absurd experiences in Chilean ufology and their implications for anthropological theory. A book about the absurd and the limits of anthropological knowledge will be published by Routledge in 2024. My most recent work returns to the trauma of the Chilean dictatorship and ways of re-organizing time through performance and theater.

Libros como autora única

2015, Developing the dead: mediumship and selfhood in Cuban espiritismo, Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida.
2018, Fluid spirits: cosmology and change in contemporary Brazilian Umbanda, Coconut Creek, FL: Caribbean Studies Press.
2022, Spirited histories: technologies, media and trauma in paranormal Chile, Abingdon: Routledge
2024, UFOs, the absurd, and the limit of anthropological knowledge: imagining the impossible in Chile Abingdon: Routledge

Libros editados

In preparation, Aparecidos, volume edited with Miguel Algranti, Mariana Tello Weiss, & Mariana Eva Pérez, Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta.
On contract. Explorations in Temporal Cosmologies in the Anthropology of Religion: History, Cosmology and Spirits, edited with Ruy Blanes, London: Bloomsbury Academic.
2023, Other Worlds, Other Bodies: Embodied Epistemologies and Ethnographies of Healing, volume edited with Emily Pierini & Alberto Groisman, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
2022, The Dynamic Cosmos: Paradox, Movement, and Theoretical Experimentation in the Anthropology of Spirit Possession, volume edited with Matan Shapiro, London: Bloomsbury.
2021, Mattering the invisible: technologies, bodies, and the realm of the spectral, volume edited with Jack Hunter, Oxford: Berghahn Books.
2019, Articulate Necrographies: comparative perspectives on the voices and silences of death, edited with Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, Berghahn Books.
2015, Beyond Tradition, Beyond Invention: Cosmic Technologies and Creativity in Contemporary Afro-Cuban Religions, edited with Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, Surrey: Sean Kingston Publishing.
2014, The Social Life of Spirits, edited with Ruy Blanes, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
2013, Making Spirits: Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religions, edited with Nico Tassi, London: I.B. Tauris (Bloomsbury).

Artículos

2024, forthcoming. “The racial lives of Chilean aliens: prospective genetic hybridity in abduction and contact narratives”, Anthropological Quarterly.
2024, forthcoming. “Excesses, resisting interpretation, and the negative in three Latin American imaginaries”, in Religion and Society.
2023, “The land of forgetting: silence and resonance in the Chilean military dictatorship´s histories of violence”, in History and Anthropology, ahead of print: https://doi.org/10.1080/02757206.2023.2248161.
2023, “Playful aliens: deceit and antipodal narratives in Chilean ufology”, in Anthropology & Humanism, ahead of print: http://doi.org/10.1111/anhu.12499.
2023, “Afro-Cuban micro-mobilities: examining processes of movement, in other words”. Qualitative Market Research, ahead of print: https://doi.org/10.1108/QMR-12-2022-0177.
2023, “Ways of not-knowing in Chile: notes towards a dark anthropology”, co-authored with Marjorie Murray & Paulina Salinas, Social Anthropology, 31 (2): 1-18.
2022, “The route of Orion: towards a deconstructive history of alien contact in Chile”, History and Anthropology, Online First https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02757206.2022.2034623.
2021, “Residues of history, affect, and the molecular resonance of Revolutionary spirits in two Cuban forms of Spiritism”, Anthropologica: Journal of the Canadian Anthropological Society, 63 (1). https://doi.org/10.18357/anthropologica6312021277.
2021, “New media and the digitized paranormal: instrumentation, affective atmospheres, and the production of history in Chile”, article co-authored with Gonzalo Barceló, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute, 27 (2): 321-339.
2021, “Spectral technologies, sonic motility and the paranormal in Chile”, Ethnography 22 (2): 226-245.
2020, “The possible and the impossible: reflections on evidence in Chilean ufology”. Article co-authored with Alejandra Vergara, Antipoda: Revista de Antropología y Arqueología 41: 125-146.
2019, “The ontogeny of dolls: materiality, affect and self in Afro-Cuban Spiritism”, in Material Religion, 15 (3): 269-292.
2019, “Afro-Cuban Counterpoint: religious and political encompassments”, co-authored with Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, 24 (3): 727-745.
2018, “Assemblage-making, materiality and self in Cuban Palo Monte”, Social Analysis 62 (3): 67-87. Special Issue ed. Diego Malara & Maya Mayblin.
2018, “Telegraph spirits and muertos chinos: spiritual technologies of proximity and distance in the material commemoration of the dead in Cuba”, Journal of Africana Religions, 6 (2): 208:231.
2017, “Consciousness of possession, religious individualism and subjectivity in Brazilian Umbanda”, Religion, 47 (2): 179-202.
2016, “Clothes for spirits: opening and closing the cosmos in Brazilian Umbanda”, HAU: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, 6 (3): 85-106.
2016, “Spirits, spies and lies in Havana: unwitting and paranoid entanglements between ethnographer and field”, Journal for the Study of Religious Experience, 2: 87-104.
2016, “Recusivity and the self-reflexive cosmos: tricksters in Cuban and Brazilian spirit mediumship practices”, Social Analysis 60 (1): 37-55.
2015, “Turning Outside In: Infolded Selves in Cuban Creole espiritismo”, Ethos 43 (3): 267-285.
2015, “Liquid sight, thing-like words, and the precipitation of knowledge substances in Cuban espiritismo”, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 21 (3): 579-596.
2015, “Desagregando o espiritual: a fabricação de pessoas e de complexos espírito-matéria em práticas mediúnicas afro-cubanas”, Religião e Sociedade 31 (1): 216-236.
2015, “Algumas observações em torno da renovação na Umbanda urbana contemporânea”, Mneme: Revista de Humanidades 15 (34): 122-150.
2014, “Plasticidade e pessoalidade no espiritismo crioulo cubano”, Mana, 20 (1): 63-93.
2013, “Human substances and ontological transformations in the African-inspired religious complex of Palo Monte in Cuba”, co-authored with Anastasios Panagiotopoulos & Katerina Kerestetzi, Critical African Studies 5 (3): 195-219.
2013, “Observaciónes sobre la relación entre la “cosmo-lógica” y la construcción de la persona en el espiritismo cubano”, Ateliers d’anthropologie, 38, dossier “Practiques religieuses (afro-cubaines)”, URL : http://ateliers.revues.org/9368 ; DOI : 10.4000/ateliers.9368.
2013, “Fluid divination: movement, chaos and the generation of ‘noise’ in Afro-Cuban spiritist oracular production”, Anthropology of Consciousness 24 (1): 32-56.
2012, “Imagination, sensation and the education of attention among Cuban spirit mediums”, Ethnos, 77 (2): 252-271.
2010, ‘‘Who else is in the drawer?’ Trauma, personhood and prophylaxis among Cuban scientific spiritists’, Anthropology & Medicine, 17 (3): 249-259.
2010, “Spiritist boundary-work and the morality of materiality in Afro-Cuban religion”, Journal of Material Culture, 15 (1): 64-82.
2010, a commentary on The Mind Possessed: The Cognition of Spirit Possession in an Afro-Brazilian Religious Tradition (2007), Emma Cohen, Religion and Society, 1: 164-166.
2009, “Making dreams: spirits, vision, and the ontological effects of dream knowledge in Cuban espiritismo”, Suomen Antropologi (Journal of the Finnish Anthropological Society), 34 (3): 6-24.
2008, “The power of the dead: spirits, socialism and selves in an Afro-Cuban universe”, Fieldwork in Religion, 3 (2):161-177.

Capítulos de libros

Forthcoming, “Practices and practitioners: magic and the immanent space in Cuba”. In A Cultural History of Magic in the Modern Age (1920-present), Vol. 6 of the Series, edited by Jane Parish, Bloomsbury.
Forthcoming, “Scales of materiality: emergence and the exceeding of technology in paranormal Chile”, chapter for the edited book, Skill and Scale in Transnational Mediumship, Martin Zillinger, Ehler Voss, and Marcello Muscari (eds.), Springer.
2023, “Scales of techno-emergence: rethinking apparatuses in the light of ethnography”, chapter in the edited book, Ex-Machina: Theology and Artificial Intelligence, edited by Miguel Algranti et al, Wipf & Stock Publications.
2022, “Spirit possession and paradox: an introduction”, written with Matan Shapiro, in The Dynamic Cosmos, pp. 1-20.
2022, “The motion-power of the collective, or, how spirits come into view in Cuba”, in The Dynamic Cosmos, pp. 77-90
2021, “Introduction: on the materiality of unseen things”, in Mattering the Invisible, co-authored with Jack Hunter, pp. 1-24.
2021, “Radioaficionados and UFOs: the social life of radios in Chile”, in Mattering the Invisible, pp. 111-131.
2019, “Silent histories: deadly Chinos and the memorialization of a Chinese imaginary through Afro-Cuban religions”, chapter for Atlantic Perspectives: Places, Spirits and Memories in Africa, The Americas and Europe, edited by Ruy Blanes et al, Berghahn Books, pp. 17-32.
2019, “Introduction”, with Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, in Articulate Necrographies: comparative perspectives on the voices and silences of death, Berghahn Books
2019, “The making of spirit bodies and death-perspectives in Afro-Cuban religion”, chapter in Articulate Necrographies, Berghahn Books, pp. 85-105
2017, “Afterword”, in Christianity and the Limits of Materiality, edited by Minna Opas & Anna Haapalainen, pp. 249-258, Bloomsbury Press
2017, “Purgando a alteridade: muertos, visão e autorepresentação no sonho na religião afrocubana”, in Espiritualidade e espiritismo: reflexões para além da religiosidade, edited by André Ricardo de Sousa, Pedro Simões, Rodrigo Toniol, pp. 187-212. São Paulo: Editora Porto de Ideias
2015, ‘Introduction’, co-authored with Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, in Beyond Tradition, Beyond Invention: Cosmic Technologies and Creativity in Contemporary Afro-Cuban Religions, pp. 1-36, Sean Kingston Publishing
2015, ‘Pa’que tu me llamas, si no me conoces? Spiritist performative technologies in the creation of cosmology’, in Beyond Tradition, Beyond Invention: Cosmic Technologies and Creativity in Contemporary Afro-Cuban Religions, pp. 56-80, Sean Kingston Publishing
2015, “Purgando la otredad: muertos, visión, y self-scaping en el sueño dentro de la religión afro-cubana”, in P. Di Giminiani, S. Gonzalez Valera, M. Murray & H. Risor (eds.) Tecnologias en los Margenes: Mundos Materiales y Técnicas en Latinoamérica, Pp. 125-150
2014, ‘Developing the dead: an ethnographic account of spirits and selves in Cuban espiritismo’, in J. Hunter & D. Luke (Eds.), Talking with the spirits: Ethnographies from between the worlds. Brisbane: Daily Grail Publishing, Pp. 177-205
2013, ‘Introduction: on the agency of intangibles’, in The Social Life of Spirits, with Ruy Blanes, Pp. 1-32
2013, “Moralidade e materialismo: uma aproximação à cosmopolítica das relações entre espíritas ‘científicos’ e ‘cruzados’ em Cuba”, in Todas as Águas vão para o Mar: poder, cultura e devoção nas religiões, Silva Carreiro, Araújo Santos, Ferretti, and Lima dos Santos (eds.), São Luis: Editora da UFMA.
2013, ‘Introduction’ in Making Spirits: Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religions, with Nico Tassi, Pp. 1-32
2013, ‘Materiality, cosmogony and presence among Cuban spirits and mediums’, in Making Spirits: Materiality and Transcendence in Contemporary Religions, Pp. 33-56
2011, ‘Parcialidade e materialidade: a destribuição do ser e do saber no espiritismo cubano’, chapter in Outras Ilhas: Espáços, Temporalidades e Transformações em Cuba, edited by Olivia Gomes da Cunha, Aeroplano Editora, Rio de Janeiro: Brazil, Pp. 493-554
2010, ‘Process, personhood and possession in Cuban espiritismo’, chapter in Summoning the Spirits: Possession and Invocation in Contemporary Religion, Andrew Dawson (editor), I.B. Tauris, U.K., Pp. 93-108