Witchcraft and Welfare: Spiritual Capital and the Business of Magic in Modern Puerto Rico

By Raquel Romberg

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 labor disability claims, single mothers apply for government housing, or corporation managers maximize their commercial skills.

Drawing on extensive fieldwork among practicing brujos, this book presents a masterful history and ethnography of Puerto Rican brujer?a (witch-healing). Raquel Romberg explores how brujer?a 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, brujer?a has become an invisible yet active partner of consumerism and welfare capitalism.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0292771266
• ISBN13: 9780292771260
• Release Date: July 2003
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Length: 335 Pages
• Weight: 1.10 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 6.4" x 8.8"

Customer Reviews

Engagingly written ethnography and history of brujeria

This volume offers an engagingly written ethnography and history of brujeria (witch-healing) as practiced on the Caribbean island of Puerto Rico. Romberg argues convincingly that brujeria is not a marginal or exotic practice, but an active partner of contemporary Puerto Rican consumerism and the welfare state. The book concludes with an insightful discussion of the nature of magic and an exposition on the quest for "authenticity"...

The life an times of Puerto Rican Brujas. Witches.

This is probably the first and single most important book on Puerto Rican Espiritismo and Brujeria (Witchcraft) as it is practiced on the island. The book does not just only give you an anthropological look into Brujeria, but also the history on how it probably started out on the Island as well as how Taino, African and Spanish Catholic influences has changed the face of Brujeria and Espiritismo in Puerto Rico. The book...