Keywords
Ritual stagecraft
Aesthetic emotions
Consultations
Afro-Cuban religions
How to Cite
Abstract
This article focuses on the emotional impacts of aesthetics in Afro-Cuban religions, with particular regard to the consultation séances organised by ritual specialists of Palo Monte, Santería, Ifá and Espiritismo to resolve their clients’ ailments. It demonstrates how each element of ritual stagecraft (interactive frameworks, decorative styles, material apparatus, instruments) leads the client on an emotional journey that constitutes the effective power of the séance. From this angle, each of these cults offers a unique emotional configuration, a kind of affective signature that distinguishes it unambiguously from the other religious modalities grouped together under the label of Afro-Cuban religion. An interesting notion at a time when certain researchers are questioning the sense in continuing to study these Afro-Cuban cults separately, given the porous overlap between them in terms of shared followers, concepts and cosmologies…
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Copyright (c) 2022 Katerina Kerestetzi
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