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 labour disability claims, single mothers apply for government housing, or corporation managers maximize their commercial skills. Drawing on extensive fieldwork among practising brujos, this book presents a history and ethnography of Puerto Rican brujeria (witch-healing). Raquel Romberg explores how brujeria 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, brujeria has become an invisible yet active partner of consumerism and welfare capitalism.

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9780292771260

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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 ... --Anthropos, 100.2005 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

Overall, <cite>Witchcraft and Welfare is an excellent analysis of Puerto Rican Brujeria 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 <cite>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 brujeria 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

Author Information

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.

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