Title: Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing
Abstract: Each and every chapter of Obeah and Other Powers is a gem in its own right, and yet this splendid collection is also much more than simply the sum of its parts. Indeed, the volume achieves an impressive level of sophistication in Caribbeanist historical anthropology and Black Atlantic religious studies, and its release — along with the publication of Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby’s Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760 – 2011 — makes 2012 something of a watershed moment in the study of the dynamic and rather unruly set of spiritual beliefs and ritual practices so often glossed as obeah in Afro-Atlantic studies. Obeah and Other Powers grows out of a cutting-edge conference at Newcastle University in 2008 involving primarily anthropologists and historians, whose rigorous case studies have been lovingly edited and insightfully introduced by historian Diana Paton and anthropologist Maarit Forde. They are to be saluted not only for having brought historical and anthropological inquiry into more fruitful synergy but also for putting into conversation materials from all areas of the Caribbean, thereby revealing colonial and linguistic regional boundaries as the porous and protean zones that they in fact are.The Anglophone term obeah is a linguistic transculturation from a West African source, yet there is no scholarly consensus regarding its etymology (many have pointed to Akan, while Handler and Bilby argue for Igbo and Ibibio). Whatever its ultimate provenance, obeah and its terminology have been used to refer to various modalities of occult Afro-Caribbean spirituality involving healing, magic, and sorcery. These modalities may or may not overlap with or operate in relation to other Black Atlantic traditions of popular mysticism, trance performance, and spirit mediumship such as Vodou, Regla de Ocha (Santería), or Spiritual Baptism — the “other powers” invoked by the volume’s title. Whatever the case, obeah has long functioned as a colonial term of derision associated with deep patterns of sociocultural marginalization and — in many contexts — explicit criminalization. The negative connotations of the term, in addition to the congeries of practices to which it refers, have therefore given it an array of elusive and ambivalent meanings throughout the region. Practitioners of these subaltern ritual arts have faced and continue to face institutional as well as informal hostilities. Thus they do not necessarily use obeah as a term of reference or self-identification: this depends on context and the circumstances at hand, as the case studies in this volume so powerfully demonstrate. For example, the Maroons of Surinam and French Guiana, ancestors of slaves who escaped into the interior of the northeast Amazon centuries ago, have traditionally spoken of obia without any pejorative connotation, though this is now starting to change a bit with the recent advent of Pentecostalism in this area. In a very different vein, some “conscious” artists and activist practitioners throughout the West Indies now embrace identification with obeah as a token of postcolonial ethnic revitalization and spiritual recuperation.Investigating this area of religious experience and ritual expression is a complicated endeavor due not only to the dynamic nature of the practices involved and the fact that such practices have historically been conducted in ways rather inaccessible to outsiders but also to the recursive and polyvalent layers of discourse concerning obeah on the vernacular, locally official, and scholarly levels, all subject to heteroglossia and contestation. The volume’s case studies all highlight how scholarship is problematically dependent upon densely intertextual regimes of signification that do not — indeed, cannot — accurately describe the practices they represent. As Stephan Palmié observes in his scintillating afterword, this leaves us with a historiographical version of Heisenberg’s dilemma, whereby “every attempt to pin down the object of inquiry obscures the path of its historical morphing and vice versa” (p. 316). The volume’s materials vividly demonstrate how relentlessly translocal and globalized obeah’s polymorphous discourse has always been, regularly crisscrossing oral and textual registers. Indeed, popular Afro-Caribbean religious practices have drawn upon and responded to widely circulating transatlantic knowledges and discourses about both obeah and other religious systems — African, creole, Christian, European, occult, indigenous, Oriental, etc. — in a rhizomatic matrix of bricolage that has nonetheless always operated in the shadows of capitalism and state power. Lara Putnam captures the situation most pithily in her contribution, characterizing obeah as magic of and for a modern mobile world: “a multi-stranded ritual complex created by, for, and about people on the move” (p. 245).This volume is an intellectual feast, with colonial and postcolonial materials spanning the late eighteenth to the turn of the twenty-first century from Cuba, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Jamaica, Martinique, Trinidad and Tobago, Surinam, French Guiana, and beyond. It is a critical contribution not only for specialists and regionalists but also for the history and anthropology of religion, race, capitalism, globalization, and modernity.