Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad

Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad
ISBN-10
022670548X
ISBN-13
9780226705484
Category
Religion
Pages
328
Language
English
Published
2020
Author
J. Brent Crosson

Description

"J. Brent Crosson's Experiments with Power opens in Trinidad in 2011 with the declaration of a state of emergency. Arguing that the nation's dramatic upsurge in violence was due to "thugs" and "demons," the government arrested thousands of people, mostly black men from lower-class neighborhoods. Under martial law, the police and military enjoyed near-total impunity and yet, to everyone's surprise, six of the seven police officers involved in civilian deaths were actually arrested for murder. The single-word explanation, in the words of a TV host, was obeah, sorcery. Crosson uses this episode to set up an illuminating ethnography of Trinidad's complex religious ecosystem. Obeah is a pejorative term to describe the activities of Afro-Caribbean spiritual workers, ones long associated with retributive force. Obeah was only decriminalized in Trinidad in 2000, and it remains a crime in much of the rest of the Anglophone Caribbean. Crosson examines obeah as a category and interrogates legal, religious, and popular definitions of the work, including those generated by the spiritual workers themselves. In describing their own justice-making practices as work, science, and experiments with power, obeah practitioners challenge the moral and racial foundations of the Western category of religion and offer a way of reframing religious practice as a critique of the exclusionary limits of religion in modernity"--

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