Danger of words: risk and (mis)comprehension in consultations with the spirits of the povo da rua

Abstract

Abstract Mediators between different realms, the spiritual entities known as the people of the streets can be taken as the very materialization of the principle of indeterminacy, being considered to be at once dangerous and powerful. Such indeterminacy acts upon processes of objectification and subjectification that unfold at the very heart of ritual. I turn my attention to the sessions of consultation, taking that encounter between clients and entities as a moment of instability, where the vulnerability of language - the danger of words - is at the center of ritual efficacy. If all human encounters involve a risk of un-understanding, such risk is certainly intensified in the session of consultations with the people of the streets, where instability is an implicit quality of the type of knowledge one seeks in such encounters, which are centered on issues of love, disaffections, betrayals and lived violences, all domains inherently unstable.