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This article explores perceived changes in patterns of consciousness in relation to possession phenomena among a sector of urban practitioners of the Brazilian religion of Umbanda, and argues that these perceptions have been accompanied by the emergence of a more individualist approach to religious selfhood which aims to lay claim to a particular vision of Umbanda. These Umbandists understand their spirit universe in ontologically plastic terms, relativizing spirit identities much like Umbanda’s founders. The increasing emphasis given to conscious forms of possession tallies with a relatively new attention to the self and its awareness of tradition, thought to be lacking in previous generations. This article also defends that we can produce an anthropological understanding of possession as having cosmogonic rather than just expressive effects. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This article argues that in Cuban Creole espiritismo practices, ritually generated 'knowledge' has ontological, rather than just epistemological, effects, independent of the role of cognition. I will show that knowledge is experienced as a fluid, moving 'substance' external to the body that can accumulate, weigh down, hang suspended, and dissipate; it is also responsive to mediums' descriptive speech, becoming an object of vision-knowledge at the same time that it is seen and spoken of collectively. I will also show that the circulation of knowledge 'substances' should be seen not as metaphorical but as tied to processes of making people, and ask whether knowledge can figure not just as something intersubjective or relational but as something substantive, even physiological. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]