Chapter 4 extends the argument on the ‘duplex’ form of revolutionary personhood by exploring the shapes it takes in people’s relationship with Marxist-Leninist ideology. The analysis draws its material from heated public debates that raged in the Cuban public sphere throughout the 1960s, regarding the merits and demerits of using Soviet and other textbooks (‘manuales’) as the prime tool for bringing the rudiments of communist ideology to the masses. Comparing this with classic anthropological accounts of the power of ritual in bringing transcendent orders to life, the chapter develops an alternative to meaning-based theories of ideology, which focus on questions of its truth-value and legitimating powers, by focusing instead on ideology as a relational form, configuring people in relation to ideological texts and the ideas that they contain. The contrasting positions taken in the controversies over textbooks in Cuba, then, are shown as different ways of configuring the relationship between people and ideas. Duality and how best to negotiate the ruptures it creates, including temporal rifts between the past and the present, will once again be a central theme of this morphological discussion.

Chapter 5 focuses on the state system of food provision, which continues to supply Cuban families with essential food and other household goods in heavily subsidised prices. State goods operate as concretions of the revolution’s moral project, embodying its frugal ethos metonymically, and taking it deep into people’s homes and ultimately, through ingestion, their bodies. Here too, however, the duplex personhood elaborated earlier comes into play, this time due to the fact that people gain access to these goods only by virtue of their bureaucratic designation as ‘citizens’ of the revolution. While this appears to be a version of the role/person model developed in Chapter 3, it also turns the model on its head since here the role of citizen is associated with what is deemed as the deepest level of people’s existence, namely their ‘basic needs’ as biological organisms. This puts a paradox into the heart of the state rationing system, which can be parsed out morphologically as the constitutive mismatch between a state system that purports to cater to people as whole, flesh-and-blood people, but only actually meets a small part of the needs they feel they have. The chapter builds a model of this part/whole paradox with reference to the ethnography of the system’s operation at neighbourhood level.

This chapter substantiates ethnographically the claim that the Cuban revolution has a cosmogonic character. With reference to revolutionary discourse, and not least the pronouncements of protagonists such as Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, the chapter’s purpose is to get the conceptual measure of the idea that the revolution’s raison d’etre was to mark a break with the past in order to build a new and better world for Cuba and its people. This includes detailing the manners in which the revolutionary project was pursued in an array of areas, from the role of self-sacrificial violence and the hyperactivity of legal reform in the first years of the revolution, to the sweeping scope of land-reform and the hubristic attempt, in the end of the 1960s, literally to transform nature into culture by rendering the whole of the Cuban rural territory arable. Importantly, each of these historiographic discussions is oriented with reference to the analytical coordinates established by the problem of cosmogony. The upshot is an explicitly morphological conceptualization of the revolutionary project organized around the twin shapes of totality and containment , as well as the caterpillar-like shape of its forward-moving thrusts, configured as an interplay between potential change (meta-change) and its ever-partial realizations. Operating together, these three formal elements (totality, containment and motion) mark out the coordinates for what I call the ‘transcendental’ character of the revolution’s project – its concerted effort to become not just a feature of people’s lives, but their underlying condition of possibility.

Prefaced by an extended ethnographic account of Fidel Castro’s charisma as it emerged in the days of national mourning that followed his death in 2016, Chapter 9 concludes the book’s morphological argument by drawing out its implications for two forms of comparison that contribute to its development. The first concerns the analogies and contrasts between political and religious concepts and practices, which feature throughout the development of the book’s morphological analysis and are viewed here in relation to the broader discussion about ‘political theology’. The second returns to the comparative anthropological framework with which the book begins, namely the varied ways in which the distinction between nature and culture can be made, locating revolutions in this comparative frame.

This chapter furthers the book’s morphological analysis of the revolution’s relationship to people by examining it as a relationship of care. The ethnographic context here is housing, focusing on the way in which the revolutionary state’s all-embracing involvement in the infrastructure of people’s lives acts as another prime avatar of its moral concretion. The chapter recounts the story of Clarita, for whom her state-built house embodies her own sense of being a revolutionary, though, as she says, ‘in her own way’. Getting an analytical handle on Clarita’s sense of commitment to the revolution involves showing the ways in which the state’s transcendental project of care is supplemented by relationships that are intimate and personal. This happens through the myriad ways in which personal relationships – with family, neighbours and workmates – are enlisted in order to bring to fruition the state-sponsored scheme that provided her with the means to build a new house. The revolutionary state is credited with providing houses as habitable wholes, and in this way is able to incorporate under its aegis of care the myriad ways in which nonstate resources and relationships are necessary in order for this to happen. Crucially, this centripetal dynamic renders the intimate ambit of personalized sociality a constitutive (albeit unacknowledged) feature of the revolutionary state’s project of care, traversing the distance that separates its institutional structures and procedures from the day-to-day sociality of people’s lives.

Deploying the spatial metaphors that are constitutive of a morphological approach, we may note that, so far, our effort to adumbrate the shape of revolution in Cuba has operated in two dimensions. One, which may be thought of as vertical, has thematized the revolution in relation to the person. In view of its totalizing, all-containing ambitions, how does the revolution encompass people? How deep does that run? Having conceptualized totalization and containment as a figure/ground reversal between life and revolution, with the revolution taking on the position of transcendental condition for life itself, the core of our answer has been the distinction between role and person. Realizing itself above all through the state, the revolution is able to encompass people insofar as they devote parts of themselves to its state-designated roles.

Chapter 8 tells the story of Lázaro, whose home collapsed and is now stuck in a long-term struggle to get the state authorities to assist him in rebuilding it. Here the focus is on the dire failures of the revolutionary state apparatus, though the twist is that, rather than cynically lamenting them, Lázaro maintains a steadfast conviction that the state will solve his problem. The reason for this, as we shall see, upends the whole framework of the revolutionary state’s relationship with people, since the source of Lázaro’s conviction in the state’s powers is not the revolutionary state itself, but rather certain spirits with which Lázaro has developed deep and abiding relationships, and who guide him through life, including in his interactions with the state authorities a propos his collapsed home. The chapter shows that the spirits’ mediation does not merely supplement Lázaro’s relationship with the revolutionary state, but rather upends its overall coordinates, drastically changing its shape. The signature ontological constitution of spirits is that they collapse dualist separations between spirit and matter, transcendence and immanence, ought and is – precisely the distinctions that mark out the coordinates within which the revolutionary project takes its shape. In so doing, the spirits present an altogether startling political possibility: a revolution able to deploy the transcendental structures and processes of the state in a way that somehow, per impossible, relates with people immanently in the intimate key of personal care.

This chapter introduces my research questions, framework, and main findings. It begins with two striking vignettes to engage the readers and outline the significance of the two basic questions that motivate this book and intersect at children's social cognition: How do humans learn morality? How do we make sense of fieldnotes? The chapter situates the book in intellectual history, including the Wolfs’ original research, its connections to the Six Cultures Study, and its legacies. It then presents a new framework of cognitive anthropology distinctive from the behaviorist paradigm that motivated the original research. I situate the book in three broad streams of discussions: (1) theoretical conversations between anthropology and psychology on morality; (2) cross-cultural research on childhood learning; (3) studies of Chinese kinship, families, and childhood. I explain why it is important to study children to understand morality, human relatedness, and cultural transmission. I also make the case for reanalyzing historical fieldnotes. I then lay out a methodology that incorporates computational approaches into ethnography, summarize my main arguments, and outline the book structure.