In Obeah and Other Powers, historians and anthropologists consider how marginalized spiritual traditions—such as obeah, Vodou, and Santería—have been understood and represented across the Caribbean since the seventeenth century. In essays focused on Cuba, Haiti, Jamaica, Martinique, Puerto Rico, Trinidad and Tobago, and the wider Anglophone Caribbean, the contributors explore the fields of power within which Caribbean religions have been produced, modified, appropriated, and policed. The "other powers" of the book's title have helped to shape, or attempted to curtail, Caribbean religions and healing practices. These powers include those of capital and colonialism; of states that criminalize some practices and legitimize others; of occupying armies that rewrite constitutions and reorient economies; of writers, filmmakers, and scholars who represent Caribbean practices both to those with little knowledge of the region and to those who live there; and, not least, of the millions of people in the Caribbean whose relationships with one another, as well as with capital and the state, have long been mediated and experienced through religious formations and discourses.
Contributors. Kenneth Bilby, Erna Brodber, Alejandra Bronfman, Elizabeth Cooper, Maarit Forde, Stephan Palmié, Diana Paton, Alasdair Pettinger, Lara Putnam, Karen Richman, Raquel Romberg, John Savage, Katherine Smith
- Contents
- Foreword - Erna Vrodber
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction - Maarit Forde & Diana Paton
- Part I - Powers of Representation
- 1. An (Un)natural Mystic in the Air: Images of Obeah in Caribbean Song Kenneth Bilby
- 2. ‘‘Eh! eh! Bomba, hen! hen!’’: Making Sense of a Vodou Chant - Alasdair Pettinger
- 3. On Swelling: Slavery, Social Science, and Medicine in the Nineteenth Century - Alejandra Bronfman
- 4. Atis Rezistans: Gede and the Art of Vagabondaj - Katherine Smith
- Part II - Modernity and Tradition in the Making
- 5. Slave Poison/Slave Medicine: The Persistence of Obeah in Early Nineteenth-Century Martinique - John Savage
- 6. The Trials of Inspector Thomas: Policing and Ethnography in Jamaica - Diana Paton
- 7. The Moral Economy of Spiritual Work: Money and Rituals in Trinidad and Tobago - Maarit Forde
- 8. The Open Secrets of Solares - Elizabeth Cooper
- Part III - Powers on the Move
- 9. Rites of Power and Rumors of Race: The Circulation of Supernatural Knowledge in the Greater Caribbean, 1890–1940 - Lara Putnam
- 10. The Vodou State and the Protestant Nation: Haiti in the Long Twentieth Century - Karen Richman
- 11. The Moral Economy of Brujería under the Modern Colony: A Pirated Modernity? - Raquel Romberg
- Afterword - Other Powers: Tylor’s Principle, Father Williams’s Temptations, and the Power of Banality - Stephan Palmié
- Contributors
- Index
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