Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa Palmi Stephan
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…
Specifikacia Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa Palmi Stephan
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 proto-ethnographer who compared the lives of the Iroquois to those of the ancient Greeks, Stephan Palmi 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 assemblage of mineral, animal, and vegetal materials, including human remains, that serve as the embodiment of the spirits of the dead? How do genomics and "ancestry projects" converge with divination and oracular systems? What does it mean that Black Cubans in the United States took advantage of Edisonian technology to project the disembodied voice of a mystical entity named ecu