Ecstatic Encounters

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

• Preface, Introduction 1 On Immersion 2 Mysteries are Invisible3 Re-encoding the Primitive 4 Abstracting Candomblé 5 Allegorical Worlds 6 Bafflement Politics 7 The Permeable Boundary, Conclusion, Notes, Bibliography, Index.

"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