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Seized by the Spirit 231

dwellings in an upper middle-class residential area of the city. With her
and the two other sisters intently gazing through the windows at one rela-
tively lightless house after another, trying to identify whether or not they
were actually abandoned, I remember slowly cruising in my jeep through
the dark, quiet streets and avenues of the upper middle-class neighborhood
thinking to myself that a taboo was being broken in my presence. It was as
if, seized by the (neoliberal) spirit of a certain capitalism, I was about to
witness the sisters moving into a brave new world that, thus far, had eluded
the grasp of the Prosperity Gospel to which, in all of its incremental possi-
bilities, they are so religiously devoted—a Gospel, I might add, for which
endlessly consuming commodities, accumulating wealth, or seizing terri-
tory are nothing less than “ends in itself.” 8

A Haunted Landscape

At this point one may wonder about the kind of circumstances under
which these events can be possibly happening. Because even if it is true
that Spirit has a tendency to wander, unimpeded by any material obstacles,
when it is no longer a matter of simply moving about with supine disregard
for all worldly partitions but of actually seizing vast chunks of space the
material and the spiritual can no longer be separate. They must, that is,
once again enter into a mutually contaminating commerce where neither
can be said to emerge unscathed. Here this means mostly two things. One,
it means that, eager to carry out its designs while obviating all “religious”
mediations, under such circumstances Spirit passes directly into matter,
availing itself of a wide panoply of bodies and other material implements—
guns, crowbars, or hammers—capable of bringing down whatever obsta-
cles crosses its path. It also means that when this occurs, the material world
itself fills with Spirit swelling with the powerful, aggressive winds that
swiftly course through it, blowing right from above.
As Michel de Certeau has argued for Reformation and
Counterreformation Europe, for Spirit to be able to so thoroughly do

away with all religious and political institutional mediations these must
have already been considerably weakened by debilitating circumstances.
Only then, in all of its power, can Spirit blow right through the living,
directly imprinting itself on the body of the believers (de Certeau 1995).
If in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries it was the melting away of
the world’s institutions and partitions that paved the way for the Spirit’s
coming, something similar happened recently in Venezuela. Briefly, it all
has to do with the establishment of the Chávez regime in 1999 following