Raquel Romberg
Glocal Spirituality: Consumerism and Heritage in Puerto Rican Brujería1
Prepared for the Penn 40th Conference April 2-3, 2004
Over the span of five centuries, various layered histories originating in distant places
have shaped the practices of Puerto Rican brujería (witch-healing). In this tortuous
history brujería has incorporated at different periods the gestures of popular Spanish
Catholicism, French Spiritism (encoded by Allan Kardec as Scientific Spiritism or
Espiritismo Científico), folk American Protestantism, and Cuban Santería. These
religious practices met as the result of political, economic and social conditions brought
by colonialism, slavery, nation building, and migration. After centuries of gradual
change, the practices of brujería have recently changed again as a result of colonial
relations that tie the US mainland with the island under the commonwealth status. These
ties, which began with the American invasion of 1898, are ideological and cultural, not
only economic; they have transformed Puerto Rican modes of production and
consumption under free trade and consumerism, helped forge a particular form of cultural
nationalism, as well as changed the institutional and ideological role of the state,
operating under the commonwealth system of welfare capitalism.
With the recent intensification of the circulation of ritual experts and commodities, folk
religions such as Puerto Rican brujería have entered a transnational arena of ritual
experimentation and eclecticism. Concomitantly, the politics of identity, operating at
local-political and global-commercial stages, have propelled the search for origins and
the production of essential identities, leading to the revitalization and orthodoxy of folk
religions as well as their folklorization, following a local—though globally pervasive—
heritage discourse. Why glocal spirituality? My main argument is that both these
forces—the actual insertion into global circulations that promote a high degree of ritual
eclecticism and the local demand for an essential Puerto Rican national identity that
promote orthodoxy work in tandem, creating a complex set of esthetic ecologies
intimately connected to economic and public spheres of action that provide the choices
for vernacular ritual practice and meaning.
1
This essay is based on a chapter forthcoming in Contemporary Caribbean Societies and
Cultures, edited by Franklin W Knight and Teresita Martínez Vergne, North Carolina
University Press. An earlier version, “Glocal Folk Religions: Eclecticism and Orthodoxy
in Puerto Rican Witch-Healing,” was presented at the panel “Cultural Circulations:
Fetishes, Phantasms, Idealizations and Other Instabilities” at the 2003 AFS meeting in
Chicago. I want to thank Amy Shuman for organizing the panel and suggesting an
exciting problematic, and our discussant, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, for her
insightful and passionate comments. My appreciation also goes to Margaret Mills for
providing the opportunity and encouragement for my initial thoughts on future
contributions of folklore to globalization theories and methodologies at a forum she
organized at a Political Science symposium at Penn in 1996, and to Roger Abrahams,
whose work and conversation have been a constant source of inspiration.
How can these apparently contradictory processes—extreme deterritorialization and
circulation of ritual experts, commodities and practices, and the re-centering of these
practices within nationalist agendas— be theorized within folklore studies? How can we
theorize the simultaneous rupture and revaluation of the emblematic connection between
land, people and lore? By means of a historic-pragmatic perspective to ritual and an
intimate ethnographic account that traces the encounters between practitioners, clients,
and suppliers of ritual goods I show how these two apparently opposing processes work
in tandem: the homogeneity produced by consumer capitalism, and the end of the nation
with globalization—theoretical fictions. That is, without an a-priori recognition of brujos
(witch-healers) in the public sphere as repositories of Puerto Rican wisdom (in the
context of the unresolved neocolonial political status of the island), the fame and
celebrity that enabled the open incorporation of African based rituals, of bureaucratic
gestures and interventions, and transnational religious commodities could not have been
viable. Also, the entrepreneurial aspect of this form of spirituality has lead to a strategic
integration of transnational deities and healing and magic rituals, all the while brujos
were gaining an unprecedented revalorization in the public sphere as representatives of
“our nation.” This did not prevent, however, clients from rewarding brujos who had
proved their success and professionalism by tapping into a transnational area of ritual
expertise in line with, not opposition to, both mainstream consumer and multicultural
ideologies.
Critics of the culture industry and consumerism (and also some trends within folklore
studies) tend to suggest that commercial forces inherently taint the authenticity of culture,
and in this case would taint the spiritual effectiveness of brujería. For practitioners and
clients, however, material and spiritual progress not only are not at odds but also are
intimately connected. Indeed, practitioners are driven by the attainment of “blessings”—
defined by material success as well as spiritual power—which presume the spirituality of
commodities and the thinghood of spirituality. Especially in a world guided by capitalist
modes of production and the sensuous insatiable consumption of life styles and selfimages, brujos and their clients take advantage of the opportunities opened up by the
ideology of multiculturalism and identity politics. They openly expand the pantheon of
spirits as well as their ritual expertise, protected by the idiom of heritage—yet outside of
its constraints—showing that more than endangered species they are active participants in
these glocal forces, speaking to them in their own particular modern yet spiritual idiom.
This ethnographic reality—which is not unique to Puerto Rico in its totality, nor
exclusive in its glocality to religious practices or the present —points to the complex
interface of various, even contradictory sets of practices (e.g. here, guided by discourses
of consumerism and heritage), which—to complicate matters even more—operate at
various individual, commercial and public circuits. The challenge for folklorists today is
to integrate previous scholarship traditions on each of these levels of inquiry (for instance
in this case, but not restricted to, consumerism, nationalism, heritage, performance) in
moving along and in-between these ecologies; to trace the emergence of glocal sites
equipped with a particular methodology and lens for each; and lastly, to entertain new
theoretical formulations that might cross-over (for lack of a better word) conventionally
unconnected theoretical traditions.
Raquel Romberg is the author of Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and
the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico, University of Texas Press, 2003.
Currently, she is assistant professor of anthropology at Temple University.
rromberg@temple.edu