Diana Espirito web

Diana Espirito Santo

Doctor en Antropología Social, University College London

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Teléfono: +562 2354 1980

Estudié psicología y filosofía en la London School of Economics antes de interesarme por la antropología, haciendo una maestría en la misma universidad. Como antropóloga he estado interesada en los fenómenos de posesión y mediación espiritual desde el inicio de mi carrera de investigadora. Escribí mi doctorado en la University College London (otorgado en 2009) sobre conceptos de sí-mismo (Self), conocimiento incorporado y desarrollo de la persona en el espiritismo criollo cubano, conocido como "espiritismo cruzado", así como el papel de los muertos en la religión afrocubana. Desde entonces, he ampliado mis intereses etnográficos para incluir imaginarios de la brujería, la experiencia de relaciones transgresoras de espíritu-persona, paranoia, sospecha y el desmontaje de la persona. Sigo volviendo a La Habana para dar seguimiento a estos temas a través de variados focos - sueños, la adivinación, biografías espirituales, y la política. Durante mi beca de investigación postdoctoral, en Lisboa (ICS-UL y CRIA-UNL), estudié la creatividad y transformación cosmológica en la práctica afrobrasileña de Umbanda, trabajando sobre todo en Río de Janeiro. Actualmente, trabajo como investigadora principal en el Proyecto Fondecyt Regular 1160046: Technologies of enchantment: the generation of evidence in contemporary spiritual-scientific imaginaries in Chile. También trabajo en la dirección del Proyecto Conicyt-Anillos PIA SOC180033: Aspiration and everyday life under neoliberalism: a multi-sited ethnographic study of self-making in Chile.
  • English Bio
    I studied psychology and philosophy at the London School of Economics before becoming interested in anthropology, after which I did an MSc, also at LSE. As an anthropologist I have been interested in spirit possession and mediation phenomena from the start of my research career. I wrote my PhD at University College London (awarded 2009) on concepts of selfhood, embodied knowledge and mediumship development in Cuban Creole spiritism, known as “espiritismo cruzado”, as well as the role of the dead in Afro-Cuban religion. Since then I have expanded my ethnographic interests to include imaginaries of witchcraft, the experience of transgressive spirit-person relations, paranoia, suspicion and disassembly. I keep returning to Havana to follow up these themes through varied foci – dreams, divination, spirit biographies, politics. During my postdoctoral research fellowship, in Lisbon (ICS-UL, and CRIA-UNL), I studied cosmological creativity and transformation in the Afro-Brazilian practice of Umbanda, working mostly in Rio de Janeiro.

Libros como autora única
  • 2022, Spirited histories: technologies, media and trauma in paranormal Chile, Abingdon: Routledge

  • On contract, UFOs, the absurd, and anthropological analysis: imagining the (im)possible in Chile Abingdon: Routledge

  • 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.

Libros editados
  • In preparation, Aparecidos, volume edited with Miguel Algranti, Mariana Tello Weiss, & Mariana Eva Pérez, Buenos Aires: Editorial Planeta.

  • In preparation, On Spirits and Histories: Explorations in Temporal Cosmologies, edited with Ruy Blanes.

  • 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
  • Forthcoming, “Playful aliens: deceit and antipodal narratives in Chilean ufology”, in Anthropology & Humanism.
  • Forthcoming (2023), “The land of forgetting: silence and resonance in the Chilean military dictatorship´s histories of violence”, in History and Anthropology.

  • 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

  • Forthcoming (2022), “Ways of not-knowing in Chile: notes towards a dark anthropology”, co-authored with Marjorie Murray & Paulina Salinas, Social Anthropology

  • 2022, “The route of Orion: towards a deconstructive history of alien contact in Chile”, History & Anthropology, Online First Forthcoming, “The route of Orion: towards a deconstructive history of alien contact in Chile”, History & Anthropology. (Link)

  • 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). (Link)

  • 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, Online First (Link

  • 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, “Spectral technologies, sonic motility and the paranormal in Chile”, in Ethnography, Online First, DOI: 10.1177/1466138119872519

  • 2019, “Afro-Cuban Counterpoint: religious and political encompassments”, co-authored with Anastasios Panagiotopoulos, Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology, Online first. (Link

  • 2019, “The ontogeny of dolls: materiality, affect and self in Afro-Cuban Spiritism”, in Material Religion, 15 (3): 269-292

  • 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)”. DOI: 10.4000/ateliers.9368. (Link)

  • 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

Cursos Dictados
  • Introducción a la Etnografía

  • Cultura y Mente

  • Antropología Médica

  • Cosmologías Afro-Americanas