Raquel Romberg currently teaches at Tel Aviv University in Israel. She taught previously at Swarthmore College and Temple University and was a Mellon Scholar in the Institute for Global Stdies in Culture, Power and History at Johns Hopkins University.

Gatekeepers and Heretics Disputing Sacred Territories
29

Nation Building and the Secularization of Spirituality
54

Spiritual LaissezFaire and the Commodification of Faith
81

The Technologies of Cosmic and Worldly Success
107

Brujos Saints or Brokers?
109

Spiritual Assets and the Entanglements of Power
142

The Global Bazaar of Spiritual Enterprise
172

The Moral Economy of Bureaucratic Providence
210

Advocates and Lawyers of Another Order
236

The Halloween Extravaganza
255

Notes 271

Bibliography
289

Index
305

Overall, Witchcraft and Welfare is an excellent analysis of Puerto Rican Brujería and other African diasporic religions. This book, however, is not only useful for students and scholars of Puerto Rican or Caribbean culture and religion. It is also, through its ingenious analysis of the influences of 21st century globalization on the processes of syncretization, a window on the macrocosm of future trends in world religion. (Jane Atchison-Nevel The Journal of Latin American Anthropology )

Witchcraft and Welfare is a delightful and insightful book, evocative and well-written, which unpacks the multilayered history of Puerto Rican folk beliefs and practices convincingly showing not only how brujería makes sense in people's everyday lives, but also how it is becoming institutionalised as an integral part of official Puerto Rican society, and indeed how beliefs and practices of this kind can be complementary, not opposed, to bureaucratic rationality. (Thomas Hylland Eriksen Anthropos 2005)

This book makes an important addition to the literature on magic and spirits in the modern world. . . . In comparison with other well-known anthropological works on magic and modernity, this stands out on account of its skill at evocation, at getting inside people and events and not merely using them as examples or 'case studies.' (Michael Taussig, Professor of Anthropology, Columbia University )