Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

by Raquel Romberg

Overview

Persecuted as evil during colonial times, considered charlatans during the nation-building era, Puerto Rican brujos (witch-healers) today have become spiritual entrepreneurs who advise their clients not only in consultation with the spirits but also in compliance with state laws and new economic opportunities. Combining trance, dance, magic, and healing practices with expertise in the workings of the modern welfare state, they help lawyers win custody suits, sick employees resolve labor disability claims, single mothers apply for government housing, or corporation managers maximize their commercial skills.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork among practicing brujos, this book presents a masterful history and ethnography of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing). Raquel Romberg explores how brujería emerged from a blending of popular Catholicism, Afro-Latin religions, French Spiritism, and folk Protestantism and also looks at how it has adapted to changes in state policies and responded to global flows of ideas and commodities. She demonstrates that, far from being an exotic or marginal practice in the modern world, brujería has become an invisible yet active partner of consumerism and welfare capitalism.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292774605
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	05/21/2009
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	335
File size:	6 MB

About the Author

Raquel Romberg currently teaches at Tel Aviv University in Israel. She taught previously at Swarthmore College and Temple University and was a Mellon Scholar in the Institute for Global Stdies in Culture, Power and History at Johns Hopkins University.

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

What People are Saying About This

Michael Taussig

This book makes an important addition to the literature on magic and spirits in the modern world. . . . In comparison with other well-known anthropological works on magic and modernity, this stands out on account of its skill at evocation, at getting inside people and events and not merely using them as examples or 'case studies.'
— Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University

Editorial Reviews

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

Overall, 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 - Thomas Hylland Eriksen

Overall, 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 - Jane Atchison-Nevel