Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa
Stephan Palmié
Published:
2023
Online ISBN:
9780226825939
Print ISBN:
9780226825922
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Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa
Stephan Palmié
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Stephan Palmié
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101–138
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Published:
October 2023
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Palmié, Stephan, 'Thinking with Abakuá about Early Analog Acoustic Technology and the “Dialectics of Ensoniment”', Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa (
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Palmié, Stephan. "Thinking with Abakuá about Early Analog Acoustic Technology and the “Dialectics of Ensoniment”." In Thinking with Ngangas: What Afro-Cuban Ritual Can Tell Us about Scientific Practice and Vice Versa University of Chicago Press, 2023. Chicago Scholarship Online, 2024. https://doi.org/10.7208/chicago/9780226825939.003.0005.
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Abstract
A 1908 newspaper report about a Philadelphia storefront church headed by two black Cubans who evidently used Edisonian technology to project “spirit voices” onto the street leaves no doubt that the leaders of this temple had drawn inspiration from (or were members of) the male esoteric sodality Abakuá. Focusing on Abakuá’s conception of the disembodied voice of a mystical entity named écue, and its multiply mediated reproduction and transmission, chapter four aims to cast new light on an auditory modernity that, in appearing to make the voices of the dead accessible to the sensorium, radically reconfigured the ontology of early 20th century western societies. Once one conceives of the biotechnological assemblages that allow for the unmediated presence of écue’s voice in contemporary Abakuá ritual as a sonic mask, the choice of Edisonian technologies of phonic transduction by the leaders of the Philadelphia temple becomes clear: given the role of similar mergers of the human and the technological in the discovery of tympanic transduction, the leaders of the Philadelphia temple, Bell and Edison, and spiritists in search of “direct voice manifestations” inhabited one and the same structure of a technotheological conjuncture.
Keywords: Abakuá ritual and myth, analog phonography, mediation, auditory modernity, Edisonian technology, spiritism
Subject
Social and Cultural Anthropology
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