Obeah

Abstract: Obeah has been a crime in much of the English-speaking Caribbean for more than two centuries, and remains so in many parts of the region. Despite the publication of many literary works that rewrite obeah as resistance or indigenous knowledge, and the work of respected historians, anthropologists, theologians, and critics demonstrating that obeah is and was often used for protection rather than to cause harm, many Caribbean states retain anti-obeah laws, and many ordinary people in the region understand obeah as a dangerous and hostile phenomenon.1 The continuing popular and official hostility to obeah suggests that arguments that work through demonstrating the inaccuracy of negative views of obeah can only go so far. Such arguments face the difficulty of trying to redefine the essential nature of a term that has historically been part of a complex and multifaceted system of signification rather than a singular thing.2 This article argues that colonial law-making and law-enforcing practices have made

Abstract: Previous analyses of the punishment of slaves in the British colonies have concentrated on the period after 1780. This article uses the mid-eighteenth-century records of the slave court of the parish of St. Andrew, Jamaica, to analyze the crimes for which slaves were prosecuted and the judicial punishments they received. Prosecutions concentrated heavily on a few offences, especially theft and running away. Punishments were severe and were largely concerned with the slave's body; they included death, flogging, transportation, and bodily mutilation. Some punishments made use of the cotton tree, which figured significantly in Afro-Jamaican cosmology, suggesting that the authorities were trying to harness or combat the power of obeah. The article compares the Jamaican slave court's practice to that of British courts in the same period, as well as to the experience of slaves under other jurisdictions. The slave court enacted rituals that both dramatized and sustained power relations, but rather than representing the supposed common discipline of all to a single rule of law, as did the contemporary British spectacle of trial and punishment, the Jamaican court's practice emphasized the difference between enslaved and free, valorizing the private penal power of the master under slavery.

Abstract: Describes the medical beliefs and practices of Barbadian slaves. Author discusses the role of supernatural forces in slave medicine, the range of beliefs and practices encompassed by the term Obeah, and how the meaning of this term changed over time. He emphasizes the importance of African beliefs and practices on which Barbadian slave medicine fundamentally rested. In the appendix, the author discusses the early use of the term Obeah in Barbados and the Anglophone Caribbean.