Spiritual Politics in Caribbean History

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The Caribbean has for centuries been imagined in Europe and North America through its African-oriented religious forms, from Jamaican 'Obi' on British and North American stages in the early nineteenth century, through Haitian 'Voodoo' on Hollywood screens of the 1940s, to the wide range of Caribbean religious and healing phenomena available on the internet today. While the word 'obeah' is no longer widely known outside the Caribbean and Caribbean diaspora, in the late eighteenth century it or the term 'obi' (which meant the same thing) was a common reference point in discussions of Caribbean slavery and Caribbean culture, appearing in serious polemical tracts, in novels and poetry, and on the London stage. In the British colonies in the Caribbean and the independent states that succeeded them, it has remained a significant term. Legally defined as a form of witchcraft, obeah has also been understood as a kind of spiritual healing, a term for power, an element of Caribbean religion, and an aspect of the region's culture that is particularly connected to Africa. The main purpose of this fellowship is to enable me to complete a book entitled Spiritual Politics in Caribbean History: Religious Culture, Obeah, and the State 1760-1980, and to develop relationships with people outside academia in order to communicate the research more widely. The book reconstructs the history of obeah across the Caribbean from the eighteenth century to the 1970s, focusing on the relationship between representations of obeah, which were frequently used to make particular political cases, and the people who were practicing what was described as obeah, who often understood their own practices in other ways. Rather than seeking precise and stable definitions of obeah, it emphasizes that the meanings of the term changed over time and difference in different places. The research will examine the changing and locally specific meanings of the term and the way practices that have been described as obeah--though often not by those conducting them--have been interpreted and used. It will investigate the criminalization of obeah and the various reformulations of the law against it, the enforcement of those laws, and the way in which obeah featured in a series of important debates about the Caribbean and Caribbean people: about the ending of the slave trade; about the abolition of slavery; and about decolonization from the 1930s to 1960s. I have collected details of hundreds of cases from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when people in Jamaica and Trinidad were prosecuted for obeah and other religious crimes (including breaches of the 'Shouters Prohibition Ordnance' in Trinidad, which made the practice of the Spiritual Baptist religion illegal). Analysis of these cases is an important part of the research and will form a substantial part of the book, alongside analysis of material collected from the papers of missionaries, anthropologists, colonial officials, and slaveowners, and from published books, pamphlets, official reports and newspaper articles. The project is designed to pay attention to discussions of obeah in official and unofficial political and cultural channels, to on-the-ground practices termed obeah, and to the practice of law enforcement, including policing and prosecution. Moving between these different levels of analysis produces a more complex kind of historical writing than either traditional social history, or traditional cultural and political history which focuses on discourse and/or high politics.In addition to working on the book, I will devote part of my time to producing a website which will make information about, and case studies from, the project more widely available. I will also run two workshops for non-academics who have a role in communicating history to a wider public, and will write an article for the newspaper the Jamaica Gleaner.