Ecstatic Encounters

Ecstatic Encounters takes its readers to the threshold of Candomblé temples in Bahia, Brazil, where – for many generations -- members of this spirit-possession cult and curious outsiders have been meeting to marvel at each other’s otherness. Having allowed himself to be baffled by Candomblé’s mysteries and miracle productions, the author explores the notion of ‘the-rest-of-what-is’: the excess that is the inevitable by-product of all reality definitions; the non-sensical that is the surplus of all culturally informed sense-making. Ethnographical insights in Afro-Brazilian mysticism are thus made to speak to anthropological forms of world-making, in a study that rejects the totalizing pretensions of all reality definitions, emphatically including those of academia. The theoretical importance of this book lies in its critical assessment of the constructivist paradigm that long dominates cultural and social anthropology. Adopting the Lacanian premise that the meaningful worlds we inhabit are lacking, and depend on fantasy and make-belief to be perceived as coherent, persuasive and incontestable, this study argues that the analysis of cultural forms should always include an exploration of the processes of cultural enchantment that endow man-made worlds of meaning with a sense of the really real.Ecstatic Encounters is written in an accessible, engaging, literary style. Philosophical issues are taken out on the streets, to be pondered in the face of everyday life; just as mundane dimensions of being are allowed to soil the conventional proprieties of academic text production.

"Thriving in the gap between the sensuous fullness of life and the impossibility of its cultural representation, Ecstatic Encounters opens mind-blowing vistas for 'writing culture' in anthropology today."— Birgit Meyer, VU University Amsterdam. "This is a daring, beautiful book. Van de Port is an exceptional writer. But by praising his literary skill, I do not mean to imply that this is one more experimental, confessional,embarrassing autoethnography. Van de Port plays tricks with the ethnographic genre, but this vertiginous rollercoaster is not a hollow facade; it is full of content. This study is one of the more theoretically complex, and original contributions to Candombl´e and Bahia ever written." -- Roger Sansi Roca, Universitat de Barcelona/Goldsmiths University of London in Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology "Ecstatic Encounters is not the usual in-depth, anthropologist-becomes-initiate type of study, and in this sense it makes for a refreshing change. It constitutes more of a cultural history drawn through a series of essays that tangentially explore the theme of Candomblé in the public sphere. [=] the strength of Ecstatic Encounters is not so much as a convincing ethnographic detailing of other lives and worlds, but as a meditation on representation as a form of world-making and the limits of human meaning making." - Maya Mayblin, Anthropology of This Century Journal

Mattijs van de Port is an anthropologist and works at the University of Amsterdam and the VU University Amsterdam.