Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History

In his chapter concluding Diana Paton’s and Maarit Forde’s important essay collection, Obeah and Other Powers: The politics of Caribbean religion and healing, Stephan Palmié points to the epistemological problems that obeah posed for contemporaries as well as for modern-day scholars. As a late eighteenth-century Barbadian source observed of obeah practitioners, “Of their arts, we know nothing” (316). Palmié argues that historians and ethnographers who aim to study obeah and similar ritual practices must deal with a “truly transcontinental palimpsest of inter-articulated occult modernities” (317). The source material is a “record of negativity,” and the practices and individuals they purport to describe draw from ideas rooted in diverse geographic and temporal locales; the very vocabulary employed is “hopelessly contaminated” (317). The contributors to this excellent collection, many of whom have previously produced significant studies of Caribbean history and society, do not shy away from the challenges described by Palmié. In essays addressing the island and mainland areas of the Caribbean as well as the Caribbean coast of Central America and ranging over several centuries, they explore the varied ways that obeah and other spiritual practices have been represented and used. In the process, they greatly advance our understanding of Caribbean history.

The chapters in the collection explore the production and reproduction of these varied spiritual practices and their intersection with diverse “powers,” including those inspiring specialists as well as the political, economic and ideological powers that shaped the context in which they functioned. Some of these “powers” reflect larger world historical forces such as colonialism and slavery whereas others deal with more mundane concerns, including the construction and enforcement of laws governing their practice. But the “power” of Caribbean people themselves are also of interest to the contributors, as Diana Paton and Maarit Forde note in their fine introduction. As practitioners and consumers as well as adversaries of these practices, Caribbean men and women helped shape their representation. Indeed, Paton and Forde see their book as part of scholarly efforts to analyse religions in this part of the world “within historicized understandings of Caribbean societies” and to think about them less in terms of “origins” and more in terms of “issues of power” (11).

The language used to represent these spiritual practices travelled widely and was, as John Savage observes in his contribution, highly “malleable.” Savage shows that in early nineteenth-century Martinique, for example, planters used the term obeah or “obi” to refer to the sorcery they blamed for a “wave of intensive poisoning activity” (164). That these French planters chose to employ this word, which is more commonly associated with the English-speaking Caribbean, indicates its utility. In her excellent chapter examining the enforcement of anti-obeah laws in early twentieth-century Jamaica, Diana Paton describes obeah as “a discursive construct.” Colonial elites used it as a “sign of Caribbean people’s position on the margins of ‘civilization’” (190). This was despite the role of non-elite Jamaicans in the enforcement of obeah (prompted by financial and other considerations) and their resulting contribution to “official and elite understandings” of it (173).

The essays in this collection emphasize the significance of the mobility of Caribbean people in determining the ways in which obeah and other practices were used. It became a common language that could be used by individuals from various locales and ethnic and linguistic backgrounds in an effort to cope with daily hardships. As Lara Putnam shows in her excellent contribution to this volume, diversity was at the core of obeah which she sees as modern and innovative: “innovations and borrowing were the order of the day” (245).

Another of the strengths of this collection is its inclusion of studies that reflect on more recent patterns, especially in the realm of art. Kenneth Bilby, for example, explores representation of obeah in popular music such as reggae and dancehall, and Katherine Smith examines the creation of...