Gods in the Flesh: Learning Emotions in the Xangô Possession Cult (Brazil)
Résumé
Drawing on first-hand ethnographical data from the Xang"ô, an Afro-Brazilian Cult in Recife (Brazil), I defend that learning possession means in the first place to learn to identify and react to specific emotional states in accordance with cultural representations and expectations. This emotional learning would take place through two potential processes during ritual activity. On the one hand a powerful coupling process linking “uncanny” body arousals to mythological imagination captured by the highly evocative content of songs, invocations, objects and substances during ritual activity. Ritual features such as archetypality, rigidity, regularity, redundancy and spatial and temporal delimitation are propitious for eliciting and “boosting” this coupling process. On the other hand, a social referencing process through which emotional and behavioral reactions towards possessed persons act for novices as reliable indicators of how to recognize, interpret and regulate their own emotional states associated with possession. With growing familiarity with possession's conceptual and experiential background, their emotional reactions might evolve from largely undifferentiated arousal states to “orixa´-specific” somatic signature and novices might become more active towards their own possession. They also demonstrate an increasing sensitivity to isolated emotional elicitors of possession as well as a better control over their emotional reaction.