UCLA

This Dissertation offers ethnographic exploration of Komfa, ritual engaged to “entertain the ancestors” that is central to the way of life of Spiritualists in Guyana. Komfa involves profound introspections and elaborate communal celebrations dedicated to “the Seven Nations” of spirits who represent colonial British demography. Practiced primarily by Guyanese women of African descent and considered an Africa-derived or -inspired tradition, Komfa worldview draws upon cultural inheritances of various Guyanese backgrounds. Embracing Komfa worlds serves as historical and genealogical inquiry into often indistinct, polysemous pasts, wherein ethnoracially identified and identifying spirit-guides lead devotees through emancipatory journeys of familial and personal (re)discovery.

In dance, drumming, altar-making, and spirit possession, devotees cultivate transformative relationships, including those reaching beyond the grave. Through this “Work” of deep relatedness, Spiritualists confront specters of ethnic and racial exploitations of the past—as well as their intersections with dynamics of gender and sexuality—that continue to haunt their everyday existences within pluralist postcolonial Guyana’s politics of ethnonationalism. In communion with the dead, mediums bring past-generational life experiences to bear on their manifestations of recuperated futures. Embodying long-departed presences has encouraged practitioners to repossess complexly layered, expansive selves based in intimately interconnected subjectivities, and to thus open themselves to the ambiguities of ethnoracial assemblages, “transgressive” gender identities, and “noncompliant” sexualities.

The study interrogates Komfa’s socially situated histories and contemporary meanings and value within practitioners’ lives. A key concern throughout is Komfa’s role in supporting Guyanese—specifically as descendants of colonized, enslaved, displaced, and indentured peoples of mainly African, Indigenous, and Asian heritages—in challenging and redirecting the basis of their subjugation under Europeans’ regimes of production that endeavored to commodify people as possessable property. As Guyana’s Creolese language term for “spirit possession,” Komfa has provided a ritual means through which Spiritualists have rejected and reformulated customary and legal dispossession of personhood through engendering multiplicities of being(s) whose humanities are not grounded in the labor of the plantation, but instead in the intersubjective Spiritual Work of social interrelatedness. For devotees, “Spiritual life,” after all, “is life with the spirits,” a social understanding that generally presupposes the humanity of the revivified dead, and one that also, inadvertently or not, tends to envision unending permutations of Guyanese ancestries at Work in the lives of their mediums and other members of their Spiritual families. Like all memory, spirits become manifest in the present moments of their re-membering—in ritual performance, divination, dreams, visions, prophecy, and everyday insights—and so the legacies they recall are fundamentally lessons for contemporary times.