Introduction -- Part One: The depths -- Interlude 1: Number Twenty-One Junction -- What Obeah does do : Religion, violence, and law -- Interlude 2: In the valley of dry bones -- Experiments with justice : on turning in the grave -- Interlude 3: To balance the load -- Electrical ethics : on turning the other cheek -- Part Two: The nations -- Interlude 4: Where the Ganges meets the Nile, I -- Blood lines : race, sacrifice, and the making of religion -- Interlude 5: Where the Ganges meets the Nile, II -- A tongue between nations : spiritual work, secularism, and the art of crossover -- Part Three: The heights -- Interlude 6: Arlena's haunting -- High science -- Epilogue: the ends of tolerance.
Summary:
"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"-- Provided by publisher.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.