Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad (Class 200: New Studies in Religion)

In 2011, Trinidad declared a state of emergency. This massive state intervention lasted for 108 days and led to the rounding up of over 7,000 people in areas the state deemed “crime hot spots.” The government justified this action and subsequent police violence on the grounds that these measures were restoring “the rule of law.” In this milieu of expanded policing powers, protests occasioned by police violence against lower-class black people have often garnered little sympathy. But in an improbable turn of events, six officers involved in the shooting of three young people were charged with murder at the height of the state of emergency. To explain this, the host of __Crime Watch__, the nation’s most popular television show, alleged that there must be a special power at work: __obeah__. From eighteenth-century slave rebellions to contemporary responses to police brutality, Caribbean methods of problem-solving “spiritual work” have been criminalized under the label of “obeah.” Connected to a justice-making force, obeah remains a crime in many parts of the anglophone Caribbean. In __Experiments with Power__, J. Brent Crosson addresses the complex question of what obeah is. Redescribing obeah as “science” and “experiments,” Caribbean spiritual workers unsettle the moral and racial foundations of Western categories of religion. Based on more than a decade of conversations with spiritual workers during and after the state of emergency, this book shows how the reframing of religious practice as an experiment with power transforms conceptions of religion and law in modern nation-states. "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 In 2011, Trinidad declared a state of emergency. This massive state intervention lasted for 108 days and led to the rounding up of over 7,000 people in areas the state deemed 'crime hot spots.' The government justified this action and subsequent police violence on the grounds that these measures were restoring 'the rule of law'. In this milieu of expanded policing powers, protests occasioned by police violence against lower-class black people have often garnered little sympathy. But in an improbable turn of events, six officers involved in the shooting of three young people were charged with murder at the height of the state of emergency. In 'Experiments with Power', J. Brent Crosson addresses the complex question of what 'obeah' - a special force credited with this act - is Contents 8 Preface 10 Introduction 16 Part One: The Depths 52 Interlude 1: Number Twenty-One Junction 54 1. What Obeah Does Do: Religion, Violence, and Law 56 Interlude 2: In the Valley of Dry Bones 80 2. Experiments with Justice: On Turning in the Grave 84 Interlude 3: To Balance the Load 108 3. Electrical Ethics: On Turning the Other Cheek 109 Part Two: The Nations 144 Interlude 4: Where the Ganges Meets the Nile, I 146 4. Blood Lines: Race, Sacrifice, and the Making of Religion 148 Interlude 5: Where the Ganges Meets the Nile, II 174 5. A Tongue between Nations: Spiritual Work, Secularism, and the Art of Crossover 176 Part Three: The Heights 208 Interlude 6: Arlena’s Haunting 210 6. High Science 214 Epilogue: The Ends of Tolerance 252 Notes 272 References 296 Index 324