Society for the Anthropology of Religion

Oral Presentation Session

Mourning: An Afro-Caribbean Practice of Spiritual Travel and Ethnography

Presenter(s)

• JC

  J. Brent Crosson

  University of Texas at Austin

In the Trinidadian English/Creole, words can take on unexpected meanings. “Mourning” is one of those words, referring not simply to postmortem grief but to a practice of travel that is central to the Afro-Caribbean Spiritual Baptist faith. Mourning involves the blindfolding and seclusion of an initiate for multiple days. In this simulated death, the body remains immobile and blindfolded, while mourners’ spirits travel to various locations in the "Spiritual Lands" (with the more common destinations including the "Spiritual Nations" of Africa, India, China, or the Depths). Rather than an exercise in bridging the chasm between the living and the dead through memory (or accepting this chasm’s finality), mourning aims at cultivating an everyday awareness of the palimpsestic worlds of “the carnal” and “the spiritual” by teaching mourners how to separate spirit and body.

As mourners learn new languages, eat strange foods, and ingratiate themselves with the inhabitants of the Spiritual Nations, mourning uncannily echoes the stock themes of the ethnographer’s narrative. Ideally, these mourning encounters multiply the self, giving mourners “spiritual” selves that diverge from their “carnal” identities. This talk starts from this Afro-Caribbean practice of spiritual travel to interrogate the assertion that anthropology is the work of mourning (Briggs 2014: 335). If anthropology is the art of revealing that we live in “a world of many worlds” (De la Cadena and Blaser 2018), then a Spiritual Baptist sensibility of mourning might be a more fruitful source of inspiration than many anthropological or psychoanalytic works on grief and memory.