Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa

A comparative investigation of Afro—Cuban ritual and Western science that aims to challenge the rationality of Western expert practices.

Inspired by the exercises of Father Lafitau, an eighteenth—century Jesuit priest and protoethnographer who compared the lives of the Iroquois to those of the ancient Greeks, Stephan Palmié embarks on a series of unusual comparative investigations of Afro—Cuban ritual and Western science. What do organ transplants have to do with ngangas, a complex assembl...