Deirdre de la Cruz_"God's Magicians: Philippine Centers of the Global Occult"

Abstract: In the historiography and anthropology of the Philippines, heterodox Christianity has almost always fallen under the category of “folk religion” and assumed to be the syncretic blending of local, precolonial traditions and Spanish colonial Catholicism. My current book project presents a different genealogy of heterodoxy by looking at Filipino Christian spiritism, a modern religious movement that took shape in the late nineteenth-century Philippines through the entry of the codified philosophy of French pedagogue Allan Kardec and the translation of his oeuvre into Spanish, Tagalog, and other Philippine languages. Centered on the belief in a hierarchy of spirits and in the ability to channel them—often to therapeutic effect—Filipino Christian spiritism evolved over the long twentieth century as both product and producer of “occult,” “paranormal,” and “metaphysical” discourses and phenomena worldwide. This talk will trace Filipino Christian spiritism through a few episodes in modern Philippine history, showing how spiritism’s practices and imaginaries provided vehicles for the articulation of political ideals and authority, disrupted certain historical and historiographical teleologies, and forged new vectors in the relationship between the Philippines and the world.

Deirdre de la Cruz is a historian and anthropologist whose work examines global formations and global relations from the historical and cultural vantage point of the Philippines. Her first and second books (Mother Figured: Marian Apparitions and the Making of a Filipino Universal [University of Chicago Press, 2015] and God’s Magicians: Philippine Centers of the Global Occult [in progress]) trace the discursive, material and performative processes through which the Philippine emerges as a major spiritual and religious center over the long twentieth century. For the last several years, de la Cruz has also served as co-PI of ReConnect/ReCollect: Reparative Connections to Philippine Collections at the University of Michigan, an award-winning and collaborative project of public scholarship that seeks to repair historical harm by creating models for more ethical and equitable Philippine colonial collections that advocate for Filipino and Indigenous agency in their stewardship. De la Cruz is Professor and Chair of the Department of Asian Languages and Cultures and Professor of History at the University of Michigan. She is also an award-winning teacher, and with U-M undergraduates has been building The Philippines and the University of Michigan, an online exhibit of student-led original research and writing on the history of the relationship between the Philippines and the University of Michigan.