Experiments with power : Obeah and the remaking of religion in Trinidad / J. Brent Crosson.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Crosson, J. Brent (Jonathan Brent), author.

Series:

Class 200, new studies in religion

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Obeah (Cult)--Trinidad and Tobago--Trinidad.

Obeah (Cult).

Trinidadians--Religion.

Trinidadians.

Religion and sociology--Trinidad and Tobago--Trinidad.

Religion and sociology.

Justice--Religious aspects.

Justice.

Religion.

Trinidad and Tobago--Trinidad.

Physical Description:

xiv, 322 pages : illustrations ; 23 cm.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : The University of Chicago Press, 2020.

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.

Contents:

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.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9780226705484

9780226700649

022670064X

022670548X

OCLC:

1117900904

Publisher Number:

99984967188