Spirits without Fatherland: An Analysis of the “Religion of Travel” in the Cape-Verdian Islands
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From the discovery of the islands in the 15th century, the Cape Verdean spirituality builds itself on a double movement where the forced conversion of the African slaves to Catholicism goes together with the Europeans’ familiarization to the African systems of thoughts. In the course of the centuries, this crossbreeding creates a popular catholic imaginary where the “ finado” – the spirit of the deceased – settles as one of the society’s cements. By its symbolic control on the fate of these migrants’ families stuck between here and there, the spirit of the deceased becomes the common denominator between the native and the migrant, the young and the elderly, the popular and the intellectual, the Catholic and the Protestant, the continental and the islander, the African and the European. Whether he’s “wandering” – inferior – or “luminous” – superior –, the spirit of the deceased is also the entity convoked in the Christian rationalism in order to re-create link. It is not surprising as this spiritualistic doctrine born in Brazil in 1910 has spread abroad mainly through the Cape Verdean Diaspora. Its "irradiations" and sessions of psychic “cleansing” and “duplication” directed to the whole world, make it a delocalized spirituality, able to connect the human fates beyond the geopolitical borders.
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