What Obeah Does Do

What Obeah Does Do:: Healing, Harm, and the Limits of Religion
Author(s): J. Brent Crosson

Source: Journal of Africana Religions , 2015, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2015), pp. 151-176
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.3.2.0151
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What Obeah Does Do:
Healing, Harm, and
the Limits of Religion
j. b re nt c rosson
New York University
Abstract
Obeah, which colonial ordinances defined capaciously as “any
assumption of supernatural power,” was a crime in Trinidad until
2000, and the law continues to make Obeah a punishable offense
in most of the anglophone Caribbean. Scholars have noted that
contemporary attitudes toward Obeah—a hard-to-define term—are
largely negative, implying spiritual harm. My fieldwork in a region
of Trinidad regarded as the island’s capital of Obeah, however,
revealed polyvalent, context-contingent attitudes toward the term.
Using ethnographic examples, I offer alternatives to scholarly
approaches that have explained away Obeah’s harm as evidence
of colonial false consciousness. My interlocutors took shifting,
even contradictory stances toward Obeah that depended on tac-
tical contexts of power. By examining attempts to intervene in
the justice system through spiritual force, I argue that Obeah is
a justice-making technology and that, like all systems of law, the
potential for harm is part of its power. In the final part of the paper,
I argue that rather than conforming to a definition of religions as
mutually exclusive confessional communities rooted in collective
avowals of belief, Obeah models a counterdiscourse on social rela-
tions that I call “altered solidarities,” challenging regnant concep-
tions of religion as the basis for legal recognition in modern states.
Keywords: Obeah, Caribbean, religion, law, witchcraft
Journal of Africana Religions, vol. 3, no. 2, 2015

Copyright © 2015 The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, PA

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152 jour na l of a f r ic a na r e l ig ion s
My fieldwork in a region of Trinidad known as Rio Moro from 2010 to

2012 was marked by two events that focused national media attention on
a place generally assumed to exist, as those who did not live there some-
times said, “behind god’s back.”1 In the first event, groups of ten to thirty
female students at the local secondary school yelled obscenities and spoke
in what seemed to be men’s voices, resisting police officers and breaking the
straps of stretchers with a force that seemed to exceed their thirteen- and
fourteen-year-old frames. For two consecutive years, in the weeks surround-
ing All Souls’ Day, these disturbances closed down the school on a number
of occasions. In the second incident, seven police officers gunned down a car
containing two unarmed young women in the front seat, sparking a series
of protests and roadblocks in Rio Moro. The police had made no attempt
to stop the vehicle; by most accounts they had simply opened fire without
provocation, and adjacent security cameras later confirmed that this was
the case.2
While these two events raise some very different questions that are
beyond the scope of this article, the representation of Rio Moro in both inci-
dents hinged on my field site’s reputation as the island’s capital of Obeah.
A hard-to-define term, Obeah can, in one breath, connote religious heal-
ing, spiritual harm, African tradition, cultural mixture, herbal medicine,
legal intervention, and illegality.3 Obeah, which colonial ordinances defined
capaciously as “any assumption of supernatural power,” was a crime in
Trinidad until 2000, and the letter of the law continues to define Obeah as
a punishable offense in most of the independent states of the anglophone
Caribbean.4
While both events foregrounded the supposed prevalence and power
of Obeah in Rio Moro, the two incidents provoked seemingly contradictory
responses from residents themselves toward the term. During the secondary
school disturbances, dubbed “mass demonic possession” or “mass hysteria”
in the national media, residents often denied the prevalence or existence of
Obeah in Rio Moro and disavowed the stigmas of atavism and spiritual harm
that the word often carried. While Trinidadian newspapers published articles
attributing the affliction of the school’s female students to the continuance of
Rio Moro’s supposed “Obeah tradition,” residents located Obeah in a variety
of elsewheres, whether in the buried past or in the urban centers of the nation.
Nine months after the initial school disturbances, Obeah remained a source
of potential harm during the protests against the police shootings, but this
spiritual harm was positively claimed by protesters as a justice-making threat
against the impunity of the police. Protesters publicly avowed the power of

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153 J. Brent Crosson Healing, Harm, and the Limits of Religion
Obeah in the region, threatening riot police with the refrain “Them police don’t
know what Obeah does do.” At both moments, Obeah remained associated
with spiritual harm, but this harm was differently valued and avowed.
This article addresses the relationship between Obeah and harm, an associa-
tion that has proved a stumbling block for scholarly approaches to the term and the
efforts of cultural activists to garner state recognition for Obeah as a legally pro-
tected religion.5 Most scholars have read this association with harm as the product
of the colonial state’s stigmatization and prohibition of Obeah, implicitly or explic-
itly casting the overwhelmingly ambivalent attitudes of contemporary persons in
the anglophone Caribbean toward the word as the internalization of colonial dis-
course. I call this approach to Obeah’s association with harm the “colonial false
consciousness model.” As implied or explicitly stated by a number of authors, this
model asserts that Obeah is not really what many contemporary Caribbean people
seem to think it is—a potentially harmful force—but that it actually represents
African-inspired practices of healing and protection, which were positively val-
ued before their colonial denigration (and might perhaps reattain this meaning if
scholars and cultural activists insist on Obeah’s moral value). In many ways, this is
almost certainly the case, and it would be a mistake to underestimate the effects of
colonial stigmatization and prohibition on contemporary attitudes. Nevertheless,
this approach can oversimplify the attitudes of my interlocutors, overlooking the
diversity of values that Obeah holds within different contexts.
Rather than making a chronological distinction between positive and
negative or precolonial and postcolonial attitudes toward Obeah, I assert that
persons often hold polyvalent, even contradictory, stances. The meanings of
Obeah, as Dianne Stewart has astutely observed, are “simultaneously dissonant
and harmonious, contesting any unidimensional interpretations.”6 My interloc-
utors’ attitudes, in other words, are not unitary but depend on social contexts
of power: with whom one is talking and toward what ends Obeah discourse
is mobilized. I compare the starkly contrasting attitudes toward Obeah during
the school possessions and the protests against police brutality in Rio Moro to
illustrate ethnographically the potentials that these apparently contradictory
attitudes afford for rethinking regnant concepts of religion, law, and juridical
power in the Caribbean.
While attention to this polyvalence disrupts overly simplified accounts
of Caribbean people’s attitudes toward Obeah, it does not necessarily diverge
from the general thrust of the “colonial false consciousness model.” The
internalization of colonial discourse, one might argue, created a kind of double
consciousness in which two distinct value systems (usually identified in the
Caribbean with Europe and Africa) are inhabited by subjects at different times.

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154 jour na l of a f r ica na r e l ig ion s
Indeed, the idea that Caribbean societies are structured around dualisms that
the colonial encounter of opposed value systems generated has been the prem-
ise of much social-scientific theorizing about the region.7 Thus, Stewart notes
that contemporary “Jamaican Christians” (who represent the overwhelming
majority of the island’s population) maintain “anti-African” ideologies by day,
even though they might consult Obeah practitioners “in desperation” by night.8
In the face of these contradictory sentiments, Stewart remains “perplexed . . .
by the cognitive dissonance in the attitudes of Caribbean peoples toward the
African roots of their religious cultures.”9 These attitudes thus signal an inter-
nalized conflict between the false consciousness of anti-African colonial logic
and the positive embrace of African-inspired religious practices. This conflict
prevents public identification with the practice of Obeah, occasioning the fur-
tive consultation of so-called Obeah practitioners and public circumspection
about these practices.
I share Stewart’s concern with these ambivalent attitudes toward Obeah
in the anglophone Caribbean and the virulent anti-African sentiments that
often accompany them. In this article, however, I would like to emphasize
that the circumspection of my interlocutors in Trinidad toward Obeah is a part
of the word’s power in discourse and practice. In fact, both their contrasting
disavowal and their adoption of the term in the two ethnographic examples
that opened this article were premised on Obeah’s potential relation to harm.
Drawing on the social theorizing of spiritual workers in Trinidad, I argue that
in many cases—particularly instances where one must confront state and inter-
personal violence—the harm associated with Obeah can become an important
tool for healers concerned with counteracting the afflictions of their clients.
Although Obeah remains a morally stigmatized practice in the anglophone
Caribbean, associated with harm in the minds of many, this apparent stigmati-
zation is also integral to the practical power of the term, as the mobilization of
Obeah in the protests against the police shootings illustrates.
Perhaps more importantly, the line between healing and harming, pro-
tection and injury, or legitimate and illegitimate force is not as clear as the
colonial false consciousness model might imply. Like my interlocutors’ diver-
gent appraisals of Obeah’s value, the delineation of force as harming or
healing is often situated and contingent. For the police officers that killed the
young women in Rio Moro, the affliction of the dead was a harming force;
for those that loved the dead, this affliction was a potentially healing and
justice-making influence. An ethnographic consideration of Obeah thus affords
a more complex view on power, whether spiritual or political, in which moral
polyvalence is inherent in the exercise of force. Such an approach to power

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conceives of social fields as contested terrain in which the healing-harming

ambivalence of certain forces is integral to their efficacy in redressing situa-
tions of violent injustice.
Each of the ethnographic examples with which I opened this article pro-
vides a vivid instantiation of interpersonal or state violence, and the term
Obeah itself bears an inextricable relation to the violence of state law in the
Caribbean through which Obeah was codified and prosecuted. In their attempts
to interpret the violent behavior of the young women at Rio Moro Secondary,
school officials and relatives often identified these students’ particular experi-
ences of sexual and domestic violence as causes for their “demonic possessions.”
During one such conversation, the voice of the schoolteacher was intermit-
tently drowned out by a reminder of state force, as military helicopters landed
on a nearby football field after completing marijuana eradication missions in
the interior. The police shootings nine months later also illustrated the harming
potential of state law in Rio Moro, a violence that could take the form not just
of police brutality but of extended pretrial incarcerations for up to a decade in
abysmal jail conditions or of state attempts to eradicate and criminalize the for-
est marijuana crops that provide the region’s primary source of income.
While the law is an authority charged with protection and justice-making
in regnant models of liberal governance, state law continues to inflict grave
harm on subaltern persons in modern states. In the face of this contradictory
valence of law, one of the principal tasks of spiritual workers I knew was inter-
vention in the criminal justice system to either vindicate clients or incite an
often-unresponsive legal system to take action in a matter. Obeah is thus an
ideology and practice of justice-making and law, and, like all forms of law,
potential harm is a constitutive feature of its power.10 In other words, even
though colonial stigmatization has most certainly shaped contemporary atti-
tudes, we need not purify Obeah of harm to decolonize or revalue the term. By
attempting to make Obeah a morally univalent practice of healing and protec-
tion, one overlooks a constitutive feature of this technology of power. By insist-
ing on this moral univalence, one might even enact a peculiarly Euro-Christian
project of moral purification and redemption—a project that continues to
inform the imperial thrust of Euro-American liberalism, whereby discourses
about the minimization of harm (human rights, democratic reform, humanitar-
ian interventions, or the rule of law) obscure and enable the continued rela-
tionship between geopolitical power and violence.11
In claiming that Obeah represents a technology of power and law concerned
with the messy instabilities of force in everyday worlds, I am by no means deny-
ing that Obeah is religion. Practices that can be labeled Obeah are as worthy of

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the name “religion” as any state-sanctioned confessional community. Despite

the efforts of cultural activists and scholars to write Obeah into the legitimizing
categories of religion or cultural tradition, however, the hard-won rights and
privileges accorded to other formerly criminalized African-inspired spiritual
practices in Trinidad have eluded Obeah.12 The challenges in decriminalizing
and achieving state recognition for Obeah, I suggest, foreground the inherent
biases of a certain post-Reformation model of religion that arbitrates common-
sense and state understandings of what religion is. Obeah’s relationship to harm
foregrounds three important limitations of this concept of religion: the ostensible
separation of religion from juridical power, the anchoring of religion in an inte-
rior disposition of belief, and the delineation of religions as mutually exclusive
confessional communities. The final sections of this article consider the ways
that these definitional limits are the product of a specific Euro-Christian politi-
cal history, one that often works to exclude a variety of practices—including
“political Islam,” indigenous religions, and Caribbean spiritual work—from
conventional liberal politics, legal protections, and state recognition. Rather
than attempting to make Obeah fit the regnant norms of a post-Reformation
confessional community, I ask how Obeah productively queries the boundaries
of religion as an arbiter of state and legal recognition, affording important coun-
terdiscourses on juridical power, relationality, and religious identity.
For the purposes of this article, I am less interested in what Obeah is and
more concerned with (to use the words of the Rio Moro protest song) “what
Obeah does do.” I will not focus, therefore, on locating a definitive ground zero
of Obeah in colonialism or West African genealogies, a worthy project admi-
rably executed by other scholars.13 Rather than attempting to establish what
Obeah is, whether a set of African practices, a “consummately creole” amalga-
mation, or an effect of colonial lawmaking, I approach Obeah as relational.14
Like the black boxes of actor-network theory, Obeah does not bear a single,
fixed essence but is made through the networks of social relations in which
the term is mobilized.15 Obeah, however, also transforms these social relations.
As protesters in Rio Moro mobilized rites and rumors of Obeah as a source of
retributive justice, they sought to transform a social field within which police
were above the law and the justice system was more often an implement of
harm than a source of redress for subaltern Trinidadians. Indeed, to a certain
extent, this working of power relations is what Obeah, as a discursive and
ritual practice, does do.
These conclusions are based on twenty-one months of field research
conducted in Rio Moro, for short stints between 2007 and 2009 and for a lon-
ger period between late 2010 and early 2012. I thus undertake an ethnographic

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approach toward Obeah, a project that Bilby and Handler have called for as a
corrective to the overwhelming focus of Obeah scholarship on archival mate-
rials.16 Drawing mostly on records of courtroom proceedings and accounts of
cases in which persons defended themselves against Obeah as criminal accusa-
tion, this archive yields a particular discursive frame for Obeah. While Obeah
certainly functions as an incriminating accusation outside of courtrooms, it is
also other things within the complexity of lived social contexts, as I hope to
show in what follows.
“Who Knows What Is Obeah Really?”
When I returned to Rio Moro for a period of extended field research in late
2010, stories about a spate of disturbances at the local secondary school had
inspired a series of articles on Rio Moro’s “tradition of obeah and witchcraft.”17
While similar disturbances had, in fact, happened at other schools in the nation,
the secondary school’s location in Rio Moro, stigmatized as the national epi-
center of the supernatural, ensured that these incidents became a media spec-
tacle pitting the science of government psychologists against the Obeah that
supposedly existed at the limits of the national body. The combative behavior
of teenage girls also attracted Pentecostal and charismatic Christian pastors
from around Trinidad, eager to engage in what they called “spiritual warfare”
against non-Christian African spirits on the battlefield of Trinidad’s supposed
capital of Obeah.
These popular and media representations consistently placed Rio Moro
in the past and at the periphery of the nation: a rural, out-of-the-way place
still steeped in atavistic beliefs. As such, they replayed a persistent stereo-
type of Obeah as existing in the rural margins of Caribbean nations, where
African traditions supposedly persisted in a purer form. This premise underlies
not only popular representations of Obeah as the rural, folkloric, and African
past, encountered in Trinidad’s Best Village competitions or Tobago’s Heritage
Festival, but is also found in some of the seminal anthropological studies of the
region. When Melville and Frances Herskovits came to Trinidad in search of
what they called “African retentions,” for example, they bypassed the urban
environs of the capital, where the practice of Rada- and Yoruba-inspired reli-
gion modeled the kind of “Africanisms” they sought, in search of the rural, sup-
posedly isolated village of Toco. They thus assumed that rurality and isolation
equated with Africanisms, reproducing a troubling opposition between moder-
nity and African-inspired cultural practice. They only met the Africanisms they

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were searching for, in what was then known as the “Shango cult,” when they
passed back through the capital on their way out of Trinidad and encoun-
tered descendants of West African indentured laborers who had settled around
Port of Spain. Nevertheless, their 1947 study, Trinidad Village, focused not on
these urban locales of African religious practice but on the rural village of
Toco, which they represented as freer of European and South Asian cultural
influence.18
Within the context of these (mis)understandings of Africanity, Obeah,
and modernity, readers of Trinidad’s daily newspapers reacted to depictions
of the secondary school’s “demonic possessions” by asking, “Why these sort
of things don’t happen in developed countries?” “I am really very surprised,”
another respondent stated, “that in the twenty-first century people still place
belief in the supernatural.” “Only in Rio Moro!” one reader exclaimed, while
another had thought that such events “only happened in Haiti.” Residents
of Rio Moro were fully aware of these sentiments, which had persistently
positioned Rio Moro in a folkloric or atavistic past encapsulated in “Obeah.”
These stigmas were more than mere words for my interlocutors, as these
perceptions had often rendered Rio Moro outside visions of national “devel-
opment,” leading the region to be passed over when it came time to distrib-
ute government funds. Against such placements of Rio Moro in the past,
residents, when asked about Obeah’s role in the “demonic possessions” by
reporters, instead placed Obeah itself in the past. “They all died out,” was
the stock response to these reporters’ inevitable questions about the region’s
ostensible prevalence of Obeah practitioners. In private conversations, this
reversal of Obeah’s stigmas could be taken further, turning the chronotopes
of past and present, urban and rural on their heads. A fifty-one-year-old resi-
dent named Arnold, for example, told me the following when I asked him
about the demonic possessions:
Now let’s get into the real history of Rio Moro. There was an incident
in the Rio Moro Composite [school] a couple weeks ago and it was
highlighted throughout Trinidad and Tobago that Rio Moro is Obeah
[laughs]. But let me explain this Obeah business to you. People from
Port of Spain, Central, San Fernando [Trinidad’s urban centers] come
to Rio Moro to look for Obeah. Rio Moro people doesn’t go and look
for Obeah. . . . I personally know these things.
So I think people should rephrase themselves, when saying that
Rio Moro is Obeah. Who knows what is Obeah really? Who knows
more Obeah than the people in the Port of Spain area, in Central, and
San Fernando? Who knows more Obeah than these people?

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Arnold asks what Obeah is but asserts that this knowledge of Obeah exists
in the urban, “modern” regions of Trinidad where people, in turn, suppose
that Obeah exists (or is more prevalent) in Rio Moro. Within this context,
Obeah is a relation of presumed alterity, between past and present, rural and
urban, backwardness and development, but the term also turns these relations
on their head and exposes the constitutive play of fantasy involved in such
dynamics. Later in this article, I will return to the notion that the term Obeah
enacts power and meaning through relations of alterity to draw some different
conclusions. For now, I simply want to highlight the overwhelming sentiments
of disavowal that Obeah provoked within the context of the “demonic posses-
sions” at Rio Moro Secondary in order to highlight the stark contrast between
these attitudes and the invocations of Obeah during the protests against the
police shootings.
What Obeah Does Do
“Them police don’t know / What Obeah does do,” was the refrain of one of the
most popular protest songs that crowds chanted at the roadblocks in Rio Moro
in 2011. Given the general repudiation of the practice of Obeah in Trinidad, a
public attitude noted in the rest of the Caribbean, it might seem surprising that
during the protests Obeah was publicly claimed and positively valued as a source
of power.19 This power, as the protest song asserts, allegedly exceeds or circum-
vents the knowledge of the police and the authority of state institutions. Since
no police officer had ever been charged in the many instances of improper use
of lethal force, a human rights violation that has consistently topped Amnesty
International reports on the country, the powers of the state justice system had
to be supplemented and influenced by other powers, instantiated in mass pro-
test and intimations of Obeah.20 As a cousin of one of the women slain by the
police stated a few months after her death, “If justice does not take its course,
Obeah will.” Elsewhere I have discussed the justice-seeking funerary rites that
this talk of Obeah referenced, material practices that incited spiritual powers to
afflict the police officers involved in the murders.21 In this article, my focus is not
on the details of these material practices but on the ways these justice-making
interventions exemplified the polyvalence of attitudes toward Obeah, showing
how Obeah’s force, like the power of the law and its representatives, is often
inseparable from its potential harm.
That Obeah should play a pivotal role in a protest movement, however, is
nothing new. Obeah appears in the historical archives as the ostensible inspira-
tion and organizing principle for the largest slave rebellions of the eighteenth

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16 0 jour na l of a f r ica na r e l ig ion s
century in the anglophone Caribbean; Obeah is often understood in such con-

texts as an extraordinary power that protected rebels from bullets or bound
them together by oath.22 The British legally prohibited Obeah, initially follow-
ing Tacky’s Rebellion in Jamaica in 1760. In laws that spread throughout the
anglophone Caribbean, Obeah became a catchall term for any “assumption
of supernatural power” and is still illegal in much of the region today.23 As I
noted above, contemporary attempts by scholars and activists to revalue Obeah
as a positive tradition of healing and protection have often run up against
negative popular attitudes that see Obeah as a dangerous, morally ambiva-
lent phenomenon.24 Paton, for example, argues that such attempts to vindicate
Obeah can only go so far, in light of these pervasive stigmas in the present-day
Caribbean.25
In this article, however, I want to suggest that the decriminalization and
legitimation of Obeah need not be premised on negating or explaining away
its popular moral ambivalence. Even when Obeah was publicly invoked as
a source of power during the protests in Rio Moro, it retained this potential
ambivalence for many residents. A close relative of one of the slain women, for
example, complained that the spirit of the dead woman, who had been ritually
incited to afflict her murderers, had caused physical injury to her pregnant
daughter, and the relative asked for the reversal of the spiritual work per-
formed to keep the dead on earth. “I say whatever they did in the cemetery,
[the slain woman] not resting so please undo it,” she told me. “It affecting my
family. And let the law handle it now.” At different moments, therefore, pro-
testers saw both Obeah and state law as a potential source of justice-making
power and as the cause of grave affliction.
While inextricably bound to colonial and postcolonial experiences of gov-
ernance, Obeah thus signals something else in addition to a colonial legal cat-
egory or an internalized legacy of the post-Enlightenment opposition between
religion, reason, and superstition. Obeah discourses, I suggest, express a gen-
erative ambivalence of power, noted as a pervasive theme in religions inspired
by West and Central African practices, while also reflecting the experience of
law and governance in the Caribbean as pharmakon, which has both protected
and harmed, liberated and oppressed.26
If Obeah is, among other things, an alternative system of law as some
scholars have argued, then the harming force of Obeah seems very similar to
the potential violence on which effective law is arguably premised.27 Obeah,
as I have argued, is not simply opposed to the law, but represents an ideology
of justice and power.28 Obeah, however, is not then simply a “folk” system of
law that the “modern” legal apparatus of the state comes to regulate and sup-
plant. Rather, Obeah reflects a centuries-long and constitutive interaction with

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state law in which the exercise of legal power has both harmed and protected
subaltern peoples and in which justice has been made through power rather
than objective and transparent procedures. As Michael Lambek has noted, the
truth-making technology of the state—“modern law”—produces truth perfor-
matively, much like religious ritual.29 Within this framework, what makes jus-
tice is not access to unmediated truth but the knowledge of transformative
procedures that ritual specialists, whether lawyers, spiritual workers, or police
officers, embody and perform. This work of mediation between hard-to-access
powers and lived experiences of affliction is an integral part of what Obeah
does do.
What Bad Is Good For
Incited by the ritual actions of spiritual workers to remain with the living, the
spirit of one of the women slain by the police was a morally polyvalent force
whose ability to make justice depended on her ability to enact healing harm.
Like Obeah, the healing and harming value of this force implied a constitutive
relation to the violence and unresponsiveness of state law. One healer of the
Afro-Christian Spiritual Baptist faith, an African Trinidadian who went by the
moniker Baba Khan, pointed to this unresponsiveness as a central reason for
clients to seek the assistance of an Obeah practitioner:
[The relatives of the slain women in Rio Moro] said let we take care
of we problem. You understand? Because they fighting against the
police, they don’t see themself getting any recourse, any kind of jus-
tice. So you fight them with spirit. Attack the police. Attack they fam-
ily. When people angry they not going to follow the tenets of the
Bible. . . . If you oppressed you turn your cheek away and bam! [claps
hands together] You know, [you] follow that ideal that they follow.
Otherwise they call you evil. But when people angry they not going
to follow the tenets of the Bible. God say that he will take vengeance,
but when you feeling pain, that kind of pain . . . you going to go by
the Obeah man. You understand? [We laugh] You going to go by the
Obeah man. He will give me my justice. . . . You see, Black people
don’t have the courts. Black people don’t have the court system. . . .
So that is what we have—Obeah—that is our . . . our justice system.
The racism of the justice system, which discriminates against persons whose
Blackness is determined by both class position and racial phenotype in

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Trinidad, thus occasions the justice system of Obeah. This justice system exists
in seeming contradistinction to the moral limits of Baba Khan’s avowed reli-
gion, the Spiritual Baptist faith, which upholds the authority of the Christian
Bible and its injunction to “turn the other cheek” if one is harmed. According
to a regnant, post-Reformation model of religions as moral communities united
by shared beliefs and authoritative texts, Baba Khan would not wish to openly
violate the tenets of the Bible. Khan’s “belief” in these moral tenets, however,
depends on contexts of power that can exceed the limits of religions as morally
prescriptive communities.
After focusing on the experience of police and legal violence, Khan began
to speak about Obeah’s relation to another form of injustice that he was often
employed to redress as a spiritual worker—the intimate harm of rape. Despite
being a different kind of injustice, sexual violence also authorized the use of
spiritually harming forces. He compared the moral ambivalence of the justice-
making spiritual entities that he used in these cases to the power of a well-known
Hollywood character: “Remember the Godfather. A man daughter was raped, and
he went to the Godfather. . . . The Godfather is an evil man. You know what I’m
talking about? He was an evil man. He kills people. But when the man wanted
justice it was him he went to. He said, ‘Godfather, we want justice. My daughter
raped. Take care of this problem for me. We don’t want to know how it done.’”
When I asked Khan why he would want to cultivate relations with spiri-
tual entities who were, like the Godfather, “evil,” he responded that “bad is
still good for certain things.” In this way Baba Khan employed a markedly dif-
ferent idea of moral polarity than that evidenced by Euro-Christian practices.
In Khan’s view, moral oppositions were not figured as millenarian battles of
overcoming, as in the “spiritual warfare” that the Pentecostal and charismatic
Christian pastors waged against the perceived evil of Obeah at Rio Moro’s
secondary school. Rather, these moral antinomies were generative polarities
that produced forces whose value depended on situations of power rather than
predetermined oppositions between good and evil.
Baba Khan’s view of moral antinomies was not simply idiosyncratic but
emerged from a Spiritual Baptist concept of “the heights and the depths,” a ver-
tical cosmological ordering partially shared across African-inspired religious
formations in Trinidad. The heights and the depths bear marked similarities
to Euro-Christian models of heaven and hell, yet the approach to this relation
of antinomy is markedly different. While the depths are indeed peopled by the
fallen angels of Christian demonology and other entities who exist in an often-
unfriendly relation to humans and possess the ability to enact grave harm,
a knowledge of the depths is inextricable from a knowledge of the heights.

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Thus, the popular Spiritual Baptist maxim, “deeper depths for higher heights,”
asserts that the extent of one’s knowledge of the depths mediates the extent of
one’s knowledge of the heights. While referencing Euro-Christian moral antin-
omies of good and evil, the heights and the depths mobilize these oppositions
as generative polarities in which bad is still good for certain things.
Part of my larger argument is that the practices that count as Obeah are
often so hard to define within a post-Reformation concept of religion because
they operate through this ideology of force in which moral antinomies (bad
and good, healing and harm) are sources of power to be worked rather than
contradictions in need of transcendent resolution. It would be a grave mistake
to assert that the wide variety of practices that could be called Obeah are
simply “bad” or “good,” but it is a somewhat more benign mistake to assume
that what is often denigrated as morally bad is not good for many purposes.
Within this view of moral antinomies, the apparent stigmatization of Obeah as
a potential source of harm takes on polyvalent, contextually contingent values
and meanings. In the final sections of this article, I ask how this association
of Obeah with forms of juridical harm and protection queries two other key
exclusionary limits of the post-Reformation concept of religion: the supposed
separation of religion from state power and the identification of religions with
confessional communities.
Obeah, Juridical Power, and the Contradictions of Religion
In 2006, the Canadian Supreme Court upheld the Ottawa Court of Appeal’s
ruling that a Jamaican Canadian’s confession of his crimes to an Obeah practi-
tioner was not protected under constitutional guarantees of religious freedom
and the confidentiality of religious leaders’ consultations with congregants.30
Central to the reasoning of the court was an idealized post-Reformation
conception of religion as separate from juridical power and defined by what the
Supreme Court called “a sincerity of belief.”31 This specious reasoning asserted
that consultations were properly religious only if they confined themselves to
the moral conscience of the accused—what in Christian terminology might be
called the confessional repentance for one’s sins—rather than the interven-
tion in juridical systems of power. As the accused had ostensibly consulted
the Obeah practitioner to seek protection from the legal and juridical forces
that pursued him rather than to seek what the Supreme Court called “spiritual
penance” or “religious redemption,” the court ruled that this interaction was
not properly religious.32 In this case, a specifically Euro-Christian concept of

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sin and salvation structured the exercise of legal power and state protection
and thus actually refuted the very premise of these protections—the excep-
tion of religion from the bounds of juridical power—by showing that certain
Euro-Christian religious ideas deeply underpinned the exercise of law.
The court represented the concept of religion, authenticated by an internal
disposition of “sincere belief,” as a cross-cultural universal, but this concept
emerges from a specific Euro-Christian political genealogy. While the exercise
of disciplinary power and juridical force was a recognized function of medieval
Christianity, a complex series of historical transformations attempted to limit
the power of both the divine monarch and the Catholic Church, culminating in
the discursive purification of secular power from religious practice during the
Enlightenment. After this period, religion increasingly became a universaliz-
able category defined by the concept of belief—an ultimately private matter
of conscience—that was supposed to be distinct from the vicissitudes of politi-
cal power. This ostensible separation occluded the ways that Euro-Christian
norms of religious practice have continued to organize political power and
group identities in liberal democracies, underlying the very category of reli-
gion through which state recognition of communal rights has been realized.
The Canadian Supreme Court’s exclusionary definition of religion as defined by
“sincerity of belief”—a sincerity supposedly nullified by Rowe’s consultation
of an Obeah practitioner for legal protection—clearly derives from this post-
Reformation genealogy of religion.33
In this court case, the exclusion of Obeah from the category of religion on
the grounds that it is more concerned with legal power than religious belief
actually clarifies the entanglement of the court’s concept of belief with state
law. In fact, as Marisol de la Cadena has noted in a different geopolitical con-
text, the concept of belief has been integral to the exercise of state power
and the exclusion of a variety of practices from the realm of politics.34 An
idealized post-Reformation concept of religion assisted the colonial state’s
attempts to monopolize the legitimate use of force in the Caribbean by sanc-
tioning some subaltern practices as “belief” (whether as “culture” or “reli-
gion”) but denigrating other practices as excessively irrational or threatening
superstitions.
A principal thrust of both the Enlightenment project in Europe and the
colonial project abroad was this reformatory separation of religion from super-
stition.35 Despite these attempts to delegitimize a realm of superstition, the
criminalization of Obeah in the Caribbean revealed the inextricability of colo-
nial law from the very “superstitions” that it ostensibly sought to eradicate.
While these nineteenth-century antisuperstition ordinances insisted that Obeah

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was only the “pretended assumption” of healing and harming powers properly
assumed by the realms of science, law, or medicine, the very criminalization of
Obeah simultaneously recognized it as a force that threatened the hegemony
of these colonial regimes of knowledge. Rather than eradicating Obeah, these
state laws arguably made it a lingua franca for the exercise of healing and
harming power across the anglophone Caribbean and its diasporas.36 In this
way, the instability of colonial discourse between recognition and dismissal
sought to suppress and supplant Obeah even as it infused the term with juridi-
cal powers. These powers, whether possessed by the state legal apparatus or
alleged Obeah men and women, were ultimately authenticated by the pos-
sibility of both enacting punitive harm and offering protection from harming
forces.
In Search of a Community
While the persistent association of Obeah with potential harm has proved a
stumbling block in scholarly approaches and attempts to achieve legal rec-
ognition for Obeah, Obeah’s apparent lack of an identifiable constituency
has been an equally powerful impediment. While other formerly prohibited
and stigmatized African diasporic religious practices in Trinidad, such as the
Orisha and Spiritual Baptist faiths, now have a national holiday, state-funded
schools, or grants of government land for their religious associations, Obeah
has received no equivalent forms of state recognition. In part, this is because
there seems to be no identifiable organization to recognize and no apparent
community of avowed believers that politicians can woo and mobilize as a
potential constituency.
The majority of the spiritual workers I interviewed were well aware
that their neighbors referred to them as Obeah men and women but were
reluctant to call their practices of healing and protecting Obeah. Throughout
my fieldwork, I encountered only two healers and one visual artist who
explicitly claimed to be practicing Obeah. Despite a typical lack of open
hostility toward Obeah in our private conversations, the majority of my inter-
locutors spent considerable effort publicly denying that they practiced such a
thing, choosing to identify themselves with other terms—as spiritual workers,
scientists, Hindus, Orisha devotees, Shakti pujaris, Spiritual Baptists, Muslims,
or some combination of the above. There are also no identifiable churches
or temples of Obeah in Trinidad and no religious organizations that identify
themselves with the term.

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16 6 jour na l of a f r ic a na r e l igion s
As Paton has argued, the difficulty of writing Obeah into the category of
religion, and thus writing it into legality and state recognition, has much to do
with the creation of Obeah as a category of criminality that isolated certain
aspects of Caribbean religious practices that did not fit into a Western model of
religion.37 A central tenet of this model was the assumption that religions were
mutually exclusive confessional communities of identifiable believers who con-
gregated in public places of worship and collectively assented to certain propo-
sitions of belief. This Abrahamic bias in the constitution of religion was also a
means through which religions could be regulated and governed through state
recognition under modern secular regimes. If state power could not isolate
a community and locate its institutional manifestations, then the legal rights
and state recognition that the category of religion conferred did not apply. In
this way, the Western dichotomy of magic and religion, in which, as various
anthropologists and scholars of religion affirmed, magic is an individual pur-
suit and religion a group one, formed the basis for the stigmatization and prohi-
bition of practices that did not align with this model of religious community.38
While it is most certainly the case that Obeah’s association with harm has
to do with its creation as a category of illegality and its colonial stigmatization,
this very association with harm forms a counterdiscourse on law, power, and
justice. In this way, colonial discourse does not simply suppress, supplant, or
mask the truth of subaltern traditions but also becomes part of their counter-
discourses on power and moral action. Counterdiscourses, as Foucault noted,
do not exist outside of the regnant terms of hegemonic discourses but incubate
in the instabilities and contradictions of the exercise of power. I would like to
argue something similar with regard to Obeah’s apparent lack of a constitu-
ency, which constituted Obeah as outside the bounds of religion. This apparent
lack has to do with Western dichotomies of magic and religion as well as with
the criminalization of Obeah, which obviously discouraged public affirmations
and avowals of the term. Certainly, the tendency to maintain a degree of
circumspection concerning Obeah points toward the colonial prohibition of the
term, as many authors have noted. I do not disagree with this assessment, but
there are other important forms of social relation that Obeah affords precisely
because it does not yield the identitarian model of a confessional community
inherent in the conception of religions in modern nation-states. To go one
step further, in current efforts to decriminalize or valorize Obeah, the identity
claims that have formed an important part of social movements under state
multiculturalism—that is, public avowals of stigmatized identities by minori-
tarian groups—might not provide the only effective strategy. It might also be
necessary to conceive of other forms of relation and collectivity that are not
premised on the identitarian claims of confessional communities.

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I want to suggest that Obeah—as a discursive and healing practice—

already provides some alternate models of relationality and social solidarity.
Through its very misalignment within hegemonic models of religious commu-
nity, Obeah potentiates a counterdiscourse on social relations, where differ-
ences of race and religion, as well as shared values and beliefs, form the basis
for what I have elsewhere called “altered solidarities.”39 My contention is that
Obeah’s association with harm, particularly intimate forms of harm, can yield
relations that the modern concept of religions as mutually exclusive confes-
sional communities obscures.
This counterdiscourse on social affinity helps explain a particularly vexing
observation that I encountered during fieldwork. Residents of Rio Moro insisted
that the clientele of those Afro-Trinidadian healers who they commonly called
Obeah men and women had been largely Indo-Trinidadian and Hindu for as long
as they could remember.40 Thus, Philip, an Afro-Trinidadian labor union activist
who lived in Rio Moro, noticed that the clientele of his “Obeah woman” neigh-
bor, Mary, were largely Indians, an observation corroborated by my interviews
and conversations with her. “When I look around to see the experience of my
neighbor there,” Philip stated, pointing toward Mary’s house, “ninety percent of
the people you see [going by her] is Indian people. When I check the experience
of Treadwell in Moreau or Mother Clara in Petit Riviere,” Philip said, invoking
the names of other well-known Afro-Trinidadian “Baptist” spiritual workers in
his area, “it is the same thing. You know [Hindu] pundits is very good in this
thing. Pundits are very good spiritual healers too. But you find that East Indians
comes to Africans because they don’t want to expose their business to their own
kind. They prefer to expose it to the African.”41 Through the observation of the
interracial traffic connoted by Obeah, Philip concluded there was “something
in our society” that allowed Africans and Indians to sometimes trust each other
more than their “own people.” Philip concluded that this was “a cultural thing”
that “we don’t ever look at . . . when we talk race in this country.” Philip began
to notice the same dynamic between Africans and Indians in relations of business
and labor organizing, but he first came to these conclusions through his observa-
tion of neighboring spiritual workers.
Philip’s neighbors echoed these observations in his largely Afro-Trinidadian
section of Rio Moro. In the eyes of these residents, however, the powers of their
spiritual-working neighbors were subject to continual scrutiny, doubt, and cri-
tique. Philip felt that his neighbor Mary was a charlatan because she lacked the
“learning and knowledge” to correctly pronounce the Hebrew names that the
exercise of effective spiritual power required. He went into his house to find
his copy of The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses to show me some of the eso-
teric Hebrew names of God, angels, and demons one would have to correctly

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pronounce to perform potent spiritual work. For Philip and many of his neigh-
bors, the powers of his own people were in doubt, and only outsiders would
trust in their efficacy. Effective spiritual power, as I noted in the context of the
disturbances at the secondary school, often seemed to reside elsewhere, in a
constitutive relation of alterity.
The Trinbagonian anthropologist J. D. Elder is one of the few scholars to
remark on this tendency. In an unpublished 1971 lecture, he notes: “Persons
needing supernatural assistance travel out of their own locality, village, or
island to engage the services of look-men [spiritual workers]. The local experts
are viewed as ineffective in their own city or town or island. The Tobago seeker
travels down to Moruga Road [in southern Trinidad], while the Trinidadian
goes over to Les Coteaux [in Tobago] or even to the Warau [sic] or the Bucks
[Amerindians] of Guyana to obtain a bottle of maleng or la raison.”42 While
Obeah, in popular representations, has typically connoted rural isolation—a ste-
reotype that informs perceptions of Rio Moro as the island’s capital of Obeah—a
more accurate history of the spiritual work of healing and justice-making
reveals constant, semiclandestine movements. These are not simply the longer-
distance mobilities that scholars have studied in the intensive intra-Caribbean
and circum-Atlantic labor migrations of Caribbean peoples.43 These are also
smaller-scale mobilities that did not necessarily lead to lasting residency and
were conducted in some degree of secrecy, owing both to anti-Obeah laws and
the desire to conceal whatever acute social conflicts and personal afflictions
brought them to a spiritual worker who was not one of their “own people.”
While these clients’ afflictions could often be attributed to problems with
institutional powers—particularly the justice system, the police, and work-
place supervisors—spiritual workers often diagnosed these cases of social suf-
fering as the result of the envy or ill intentions of those who were closest to
the client. Thus, during my fieldwork, healers often located the source of a
client’s affliction in the envy, or “bad mind,” of neighbors, family members, or
lovers.44 This envy motivated both semiconscious forms of harm (maljo, or evil
eye) and intentional acts of injury (a neighbor allegedly contracting an Obeah
practitioner to perform spiritual harm against the client). Indeed, the envy
of social familiars was the most pervasive explanation that spiritual workers
offered as the motivation for others engaging in the harming forms of spiritual
work (known simply as Obeah) that they sought to counteract. These intimate
forms of harm were seen to motivate clients to travel outside of their mundane
social circles for assistance and healing.
Against the common sense of ethnopolitical rivalry and antipathy between
Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians, this counterdiscourse modeled the ways these

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dominant lines of racial and religious difference could form the basis of trust
and healing, as well as division.45 These altered solidarities most certainly
point toward the violence of colonial racialization and the ways that categories
of subaltern racial difference between Indian and African laborers formed the
basis of plantation labor management.46 Yet these forms of relation undo the
presumption that these categories of difference are necessarily divisive and
conflictual. While Obeah does indicate shared ethnoreligious traditions, its
identification with both harm and the healing of harm can also produce rela-
tions that are not necessarily premised on shared beliefs or publicly avowed
religious identities.
Obeah not only provides a different way of thinking through law and jus-
tice in the Caribbean but also presents a counterdiscourse on race relations
between the groups of enslaved and indentured laborers that came to the region
from West and Central Africa and South Asia. These forms of altered solidarity
neither negate the Africanity of Obeah nor necessarily lead to a syncretic mix-
ture of religions. As scholars have noted, West African and African diasporic
religions have not operated through a closed logic of ethnoracial essence, but
through the incorporation of difference as forms of spiritual power.47 A similar
logic of incorporation, conducted through forms of spirit manifestation and the
aggregation of divinities, has been attributed to South Asian practices of knit-
ting together disparate geographical and religious traditions.48 These logics,
while incorporating forms of difference in the very body of a religious practi-
tioner, do not erase lines of alterity, gender, status hierarchy, and power but
instead often operate through these lines of difference.
In a similar way, Obeah’s relations of healing and harm do not necessar-
ily lead to forms of creolizing mixture as these hermeneutics of incorpora-
tion might seem to imply. Hindus who are healed by Afro-Christian Spiritual
Baptists would most often continue to identify as Hindus, and mixture would
imply the muting of the very differences that help to make relations possible
between many healers and clients. Obeah thus suggests a generative space
between the dominant models of syncretism and ethnoracial tradition that
have tacitly determined the authorizing limits of religion in the Caribbean. My
aim in this section has been to sidestep this tendency to delimit Obeah with ref-
erence to the idea of a bounded geographic region or shared essence, whether
mixed or monoracial. Rather than being seen in the identitarian mold of a
Euro-Christian religion, Obeah can be more productively viewed as a diasporic
technology of relation, power, and ritual practice. Again, Obeah’s relation to
potential harm, particularly intimate forms of harm, occasions this rethinking
of the boundaries of religion and recognition.

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Conclusion
While I would most certainly not like to downplay the harm that the colo-
nial degradation of African religions enacted, it would be a mistake to reduce
the attitudes of contemporary Caribbean persons toward Obeah as mere inter-
nalizations of this colonial logic. In holding polyvalent, sometimes contradic-
tory attitudes toward Obeah, my interlocutors exhibit a keen understanding
of any power as potentially healing and harming, a force whose shifting
moral valence is determined by relational contexts and human intentions.49 As
Foucault noted, all discourses, no matter how hegemonic, contain within them
instabilities that can help to create counterdiscourses on power.50 He called
this the “rule of the tactical polyvalence of discourse.” This polyvalence means
that Obeah can imply distinct, even contradictory meanings in different tacti-
cal situations and that subjects can evidence a multiplicity of attitudes toward
it in different social contexts.
The “mass demonic possessions” at Rio Moro Secondary and the brutal
police assassination of unarmed young women represented very different tacti-
cal fields in which the discourse of Obeah played a key role. In both of these
contexts, Obeah’s instantiations hinged on its associations with harm. Harm,
however, is not exclusive of justice, and the line between healing and harm-
ing remains perspectival and context contingent. State law, while purporting
to offer justice and order in both colonial and postcolonial contexts, is very
often an implement of grave harm and violent injustice for subaltern peoples.
The relatively high number of injuries and deaths sustained at the hands of
the police in Trinidad point toward the violence of law in the Americas, where
convergences of class, race, and criminality structure the legitimacy or illegiti-
macy of force. As colonial histories attest, the state’s contested monopoly on
the “legitimate use of force” has always been founded on extralegal violence,
dispossession, and genealogies of illegitimacy. Obeah, I have argued, instanti-
ates this tension between potential harm and desired justice, representing a
discourse on power and a means of working power’s constitutive ambivalence.
Obeah’s association with both harm and healing also occasions what I have
called “altered solidarities,” forms of affinity and association that challenge the
authorizing limits of modern Western concepts of religious community and cul-
ture. That Obeah remains illegal in much of the anglophone Caribbean testifies
to the real effects that these limits exert in authorizing practices that look like
religion and delegitimating those that look like magic. This opposition depends
on modern dichotomies between community and individual and between devo-
tion and instrumentality, but it ultimately depends on asymmetries of power

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in defining what counts as religion and state-recognized cultural tradition.

While we must pay attention to the effects that these colonial purifications
of religion and magic have exerted, it would be an oversimplification to read
subaltern subjects as simply determined by these discourses. Rather than being
passive victims of colonial prohibition and the demonization of Afro-diasporic
religious practices, subaltern peoples in Trinidad have worked the hegemonic
polarities of these stigmas to produce counterdiscourses on power, justice, and
relationality.
One important way to counteract the effects of colonial stigmatization
is to focus on the historical construction of Obeah, insisting either that colo-
nial lawmaking created Obeah as a category or that it transformed an origi-
nally positive or neutral term into a negative one. Somewhere in the past,
these approaches often imply, we might find a point of origin—in either
colonial construction or homeland traditions—that will reveal the truth of
what Obeah really is, thus explaining (and explaining away) Obeah’s persis-
tent associations with forms of harm. These interventions perform important
work, yet they may risk subordinating the tactical polyvalence of present
uses of Obeah to an authorizing past event, denying the contingent and
shifting entanglements of justice and harm in lived contexts. Far from deny-
ing the connections between contemporary instantiations of Obeah and the
figures of colonialism, slavery, indenture, and homeland tradition, I advo-
cate for an investigation of the ways these links between past and present
are made and unmade in tactical situations of power.51 Rather than look-
ing for what Obeah is—whether African tradition, creole agglomeration, or
effect of colonial lawmaking—I suggest that scholars look ethnographically at
“what Obeah does do” in lived contexts, paying attention to the contingent,
tactical, and sometimes contradictory values it exerts as a technology and
language of power relations.
Notes
1. I refer to the site of this research with the pseudonym Rio Moro and include redacted
citations in these notes to protect the anonymity of my interlocutors.
2. As this incident is the subject of an open court case, I am unable to comment on the
possible reasons for this unprovoked shooting or the spectral connections between
some elements of the police services and organized crime that these shootings
evoke. I have also omitted some of the identifying details of the case to maintain
anonymity and protect the integrity of the legal proceedings.
3. For work on Obeah as principally implying Africanity see, for example, Jerome
Handler and Kenneth Bilby, “On the Early Use and Origin of the Term Obeah in

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17 2 jour na l of a f r ic a na r e l ig ion s
Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 22 (2001): 87–100;
and Dianne Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey: African Dimensions of the Jamaican
Religious Experience (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). For work that ren-
ders Obeah a “consummately creole” phenomenon instantiating cultural mixture,
particularly of West and Central African, South Asian, and European elements,
see Aisha Khan, “Darks Arts and Diaspora,” Diaspora 17, no. 1 (2013): 40–63. For
work on Obeah as an ideology of law, justice, and power, see Mindie Lazarus-
Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters: Law and Society in Antigua and Barbuda
(Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1994). For an exegesis of Obeah
that focuses on colonial ordinances and policing in the making of the term, see
Diana Paton, “Obeah Acts: Producing and Policing the Boundaries of Religion in the
Caribbean,” Small Axe 13, no. 1 (2009): 1–18.
4. Of the independent anglophone Caribbean states, only Barbados (in 1998) and
Trinidad and Tobago (in 2000) have repealed their anti-Obeah ordinances.
5. For more on contemporary efforts to decriminalize Obeah in Jamaica, see Balford
Henry, “Senators Push for Decriminalisation of Obeah,” Jamaica Observer, February
19, 2013. For more on Caribbean cultural activists’ efforts to vindicate Obeah’s sta-
tus as religion and valuable cultural tradition, see Earl Lovelace, “Working Obeah,”
in Growing in the Dark: Selected Essays, ed. Funso Aiyejina (Trinidad and Tobago:
Lexicon, 2003). See also Leroy Clarke, “My Work Is Obeah,” in Healing Cultures, ed.
Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisni-Gebert (New York: Palgrave,
2001), 203–10. For an example of scholarly efforts to argue against the idea that
Obeah is not a religion, see Aisha Khan, “Isms and Schisms: Interpreting Religion in
the Americas,” Anthropological Quarterly 76, no. 4 (2003): 761–74.
6. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 36.
7. For examples of the use of dualisms to explicate Caribbean societies, see Peter
Wilson, Crab Antics: The Social Anthropology of English-Speaking Negro Societies of
the Caribbean (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1973); and Daniel Miller,
Modernity—an Ethnographic Approach: Dualism and Mass Consumption in Trinidad
(Oxford: Berg, 1994). For a hugely influential theory of nested yet distinct value
systems structuring African diasporic religion (the “masking model”), see Arthur
Ramos, As Culturas Negras no Novo Mundo (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira,
1937).
8. Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 181.
9. Ibid., 184.
10. See Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters.
11. For more on Euro-Christian notions of moral antinomy in the interpretation of
Obeah, see also Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 11. For more on the ways that
violent interventions are realized through humanitarian imperatives, see Erica
James, Democratic Insecurities: Violence, Trauma, and Intervention in Haiti (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2010); and Talal Asad, “What Do Human Rights Do?
An Anthropological Inquiry,” Theory and Event 4, no. 4 (2000).

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12. Spiritual Baptist and Orisha organizations, for example, have been able to garner
limited state financial support, grants of land, legal amendments to marriage laws,
and a commemorative national holiday in Trinidad and Tobago.
13. See Paton, “Obeah Acts,” for an examination of Obeah through colonial law making,
and Handler and Bilby, “On the Early Use and Origin of the Term Obeah in Barbados
and the Anglophone Caribbean,” for a revisionary West African etymology of Obeah.
14. Khan, in “Dark Arts and Diaspora,” asserts that Obeah is a “consummately creole”
phenomenon, combining strands of African, South Asian, and European ethnoreli-
gious practice.
15. See, for example, Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-
Network-Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); and John Law and
J. Hassard, eds., Actor Network Theory and After (Oxford: Blackwell, 1999).
16. See Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby, Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah
in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760–2011 (Kingston, Jamaica: University of the West
Indies Press, 2012).
17. I have redacted references to specific newspaper articles on the secondary school
possessions to protect the anonymity of my field site.
18. Melville Herskovits and Frances S. Herskovits, Trinidad Village (New York:
Knopf, 1947). For a detailed critique of this tendency to conflate Obeah with
rurality in the work of the Herskovitses and others, see Diana Paton and Maarit
Forde, “Introduction,” in Obeah and Other Powers, ed. Diana Paton and Maarit
Forde (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2012), 18.
19. For detailed examinations of negative attitudes toward Obeah in the contemporary
anglophone Caribbean, see Kenneth Bilby, “An (Un)natural Mystic in the Air:
Images of Obeah in Caribbean Song,” in Paton and Forde, Obeah and Other Powers,
45–79; and Paton, “Obeah Acts,” 1.
20. See Amnesty International, 2012 Annual Report: Trinidad and Tobago, www
.amnesty.org/en/region/trinidad-amp-tobago/report-2012; and Juhel Browne,
“Police Killings a Serious Rights Problem in T & T,” Trinidad Express, May 24, 2012.
21. J. Brent Crosson, “On Turning in the Grave: Obeah, Law, and the Lash of the
Dead” (paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological
Association, San Francisco, November 18, 2012).
22. See Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 39–43; Khan, “Dark Arts”;
and Diana Paton, “Witchcraft, Poison, Law, and Atlantic Slavery,” William and Mary
Quarterly 69, no. 2 (2012): 235–64.
23. See Kenneth Bilby and Jerome Handler, “Obeah: Healing and Protection in West
Indian Slave Life,” Journal of Caribbean History 38 (2004): 169–72.
24. See, for example, Paton, “Obeah Acts,” 1.
25. See Paton, “Obeah Acts.”
26. For a discussion of this theme of the generative polyvalence of power in Africana
religions, see Ivan Karp, “Preface,” in African Systems of Thought, ed. Ivan Karp and
Charles Bird (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1987), xv; Sidney

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Mintz and Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “The Social History of Haitian Vodou,” in Sacred
Arts of Haitian Vodou, ed. Donald Consentino (Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum,
1995), 123–47; and Stewart, Three Eyes for the Journey, 177–84. For more on the
idea of law as pharmakon, see Theophus Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations
of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
27. For assertions that Obeah represents an alternative ideology of justice, see Lazarus-
Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters; and Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law:
Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004).
28. For a similar position, see Lazarus-Black, Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters, 45.
29. Michael Lambek, “Facing Religion, From Anthropology,” Anthropology of This Century,
no. 4 (May 2012), http://aotcpress.com/articles/facing-religion-anthropology/.
30. I provide only the most cursory discussion of this case here. For a thorough, astute,
and detailed analysis, see Khan, “Dark Arts and Diaspora.”
31. Marlon Rowe v. Her Majesty the Queen, Supreme Court of Canada, Court File No.
31600 (2006), 5.
32. Ibid.
33. See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity
and Islam (Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 28–29. For more
on how religion as a category of cross-cultural comparison was not separate from
power but was deeply entangled with the exercise of colonial governance, see
David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern
Africa (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996). For more on the emer-
gence of religion as an ostensibly universal category that actually preserved Euro-
Christian exceptionalism, see Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions:
Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2005).
34. For a nuanced analysis of the way that the concept of belief has excluded indigenous
practices from conventional politics, see Marisol de la Cadena, “Indigenous
Cosmopolitics in the Andes: Conceptual Reflections beyond ‘Politics,’” Cultural
Anthropology 25, no. 2 (2010): 334–70.
35. For more on how colonialism and modernity were reformatory projects that
centered on the separation of religion from superstition, see Webb Keane, Christian
Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Missionary Encounter (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2007).
36. For more on how Obeah became a lingua franca for healing and harming power in
the Central American and U.S. centers of Caribbean migration in the early twentieth
century, see Lara Putnam, Radical Moves: Caribbean Migrants and the Politics of Race
in the Jazz Age (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).
37. Paton, “Obeah Acts.”
38. For examples of this seminal distinction between magic as individualistic and reli-
gion as communal, see Sir James Frazer, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and
Religion (New York: Macmillan, 1922); and Bronislaw Malinowski, Magic, Science
and Religion (1925; Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1954).

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39. J. Brent Crosson, “Own People: Race, Altered Solidarities, and the Limits of Culture
in Trinidad,” Small Axe 45 (2014): 18–34.
40. For archival evidence of interracial borrowing and traffic in spiritual work, see
Maarit Forde, “Obeah and the Production of Difference: Legacies of Colonial
Government of Religion in the Caribbean” (paper presented at the Annual
Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Montreal, November
16–20, 2011).
41. “Baptist” here refers to the Spiritual Baptist faith rather than the other denom-
inations of Independent or London Baptists in Trinidad. While strongly African-
inspired (with readily apparent West and Central African influences), Spiritual
Baptists have incorporated material and ritual elements of Indo-Trinidadian Hindu
practice since the early 1900s. The Spiritual Baptist religion was outlawed from
1917 to 1951 in Trinidad, and despite the recent marking of the repeal of these laws
as a national holiday, the group is still stigmatized and associated with “Obeah” for
many Trinidadians regardless of race.
42. J. D. Elder, “Folk Beliefs, Superstitions, and Ancestor Cult Activities in Relation to
Mental Health Problems” (lecture given at the Nurses Training School, St. Ann’s
Mental Hospital, Trinidad, January 15, 1970).
43. See, for example, Putnam, Radical Moves.
44. “Bad mind” is a synonym for envy less commonly used in Trinidad than in other
parts of the anglophone Caribbean.
45. For more on the ways that ethno-racial divisions between Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians
have structured politics and belonging in Trinidad, see Bridget Brereton, “‘All ah
we is not One’: Historical and Ethnic Narratives in Pluralist Trinidad,’” Global
South 4, no. 2 (2010): 218–38; Crosson, “Own People”; Aisha Khan, Callaloo Nation:
Metaphors of Race and Religious Identity among South Asians in Trinidad (Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2004); and Selwyn Ryan, The Jhandi and the Cross:
The Clash of Cultures in Post-Creole Trinidad and Tobago (St. Augustine, Trinidad and
Tobago: Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Research, 1999).
46. For more on the ways that colonial regimes of labor discipline enforced relative
racial segregation between Afro- and Indo-Trinidadians, see, for example, Bridget
Brereton, Race Relations in Colonial Trinidad, 1870–1900 (London: Cambridge
University Press, 1979); Khan, Callaloo Nation; and Viranjini Munasinghe, Callaloo
or Tossed Salad? East Indians and the Cultural Politics of Identity in Trinidad (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001). For a rebuttal of aspects of these historical
narratives of racial segregation, see Crosson, “Own People.”
47. See, for example, James Lorand Matory, “The Many Who Dance in Me: Afro-Atlantic
Ontology and the Problem with ‘Transnationalism,’” in Transnational Transcendence,
ed. Thomas Csordas (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 231–62; and
Andrew Apter, Black Critics and Kings: The Hermeneutics of Power in Yoruba Society
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992).
48. See, for example, Alf Hiltebeitel, ed., Criminal Gods and Demon Devotees: Essays on
the Guardians of Popular Hinduism (Albany: State University of New York Press,
1989).

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49. See Mintz and Trouillot, “Social History of Haitian Vodou,” for an elaboration of the
constitutive ambivalence of superhuman force in Haitian Vodou, an ambivalence
that is worked and revalued by human practitioners.
50. I am referring here to Foucault’s use of counterdiscourse to explore the ways that
any authoritative discursive formation is inherently polyvalent, producing the terms
of its own instability. Foucault uses the example of discourses on homosexuality to
illustrate this point. As homosexuality became a discourse of medical disorder and
an identity of deviance, it also became the focal point for a politics of recognition.
See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction (London:
Allen Lane, 1979).
51. See David Scott, “That Event, This Memory: Notes on the Anthropology of African
Diasporas in the New World,” Diaspora 1, no. 3 (1991): 261–84, for a resonant cri-
tique of the reliance on an authenticating past event in studies of diasporic practices.

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What Obeah Does Do

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What Obeah Does Do:: Healing, Harm, and the Limits of Religion

Author(s): J. Brent Crosson

Stable URL: http://www.jstor.com/stable/10.5325/jafrireli.3.2.0151

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Keywords: Obeah, Caribbean, religion, law, witchcraft

Journal of Africana Religions, vol. 3, no. 2, 2015

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My fieldwork in a region of Trinidad known as Rio Moro from 2010 to

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conceives of social fields as contested terrain in which the healing-harming

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the name “religion” as any state-sanctioned confessional community. Despite

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“Who Knows What Is Obeah Really?”

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