A fronteira abjeta: cartomantes, videntes, espiritistas e outras ofertantes de serviços espirituais

Abstract

In this anthropological work, I discuss aspects of the work of spiritual service providers who use the pasting of pamphlets on public lampposts as a way of publicizing their spiritual work. Based on archival analysis, I propose the concept of the abject frontier to understand how fortune tellers, somnambulists, psychics, spiritists, godfathers and godmothers among other denominations, emerge as elements that spiritism (comprising different lines) has sought to eliminate in order to consolidate its identity as a "religion", while persisting as its intimate constitutive frontier. This dynamic is revealed in a deeper way when we examine the formation of the stigma that falls on these subjects, from the formation of a normative body of repression, condemnation and categorization of mediumistic practices during the republican period, in response to the incipient provisions of the Penal Code of 1890 and the emergence of the category "low spiritualism". In addition, I provide ethnographic notes on the contemporary presence of fortune-teller advertisements in the city of Salvador, presenting not only certain social and political dynamics of their distribution, but also anthropological aspects linked to the notion of the person in these contexts, based on the way in which those mediums locate their professional activity within a deep relationship with the spirit world.