Other spiritualities

Chapter 3 : Other Spiritualities Fetishism: Other possible versions that would not be the father’s : Taking a term from another language to designate something from one’s own language is not without a politics of appropriation. And this is compounded when the chosen term will designate – after the appropriating gesture – negative connotations for the culture of arrival. Epistemic racism or raciality of the episteme. If we add to this that in this case, fetishism will come to designate a sexual “deviation” or “aberration” with respect to the heteronorm, the intersection and overlap of oppressions that intersectionality warns about in the dissident field expands to include a less visible colonial dimension. Why Olodumare is not God. Work in progress . Step one: The return of the oppressed : America was never completely Catholic, despite the hegemonic claim of this religion – which also claimed to be true – and which represented the spiritual conquest of indigenous peoples and those brought into slavery. Little is said about spiritual coloniality, which relegates to the background a dimension without which little could have been “conquered”. The analysis of other modes of the spiritual allows us to make visible the constitution of other subjects that cannot be assimilated to the modes of subjectivation of the West. Non-existence of the subject, transcorporeality, and other entanglements : Due to my personal history, I was able to learn about the ritual practice of the so-called Afro-Umbandist religions, of Yoruba origin, which, through syncretism, keep African traditions and cosmogonies alive. From this perspective, it becomes quite evident to me that, if, as Jean Allouch and others suggest, spirituality is the matrix of subjectivation of subjects, when dealing with spiritualities that are not centered on the subject and/or that do not even possess the very idea of the subject, we find ourselves faced with another reality that must not be ignored. There are researchers, mainly in the anthropological field ( Goldman, 1985 ), who are led to think of a complexification of the notion of the person, constituted ritually and in hybridisation with non-human entities, in a long initiatory process. Now, if any of this carries a subjective truth, the very notion of the person does not seem to hold up very well.