Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing

Each and every chapter of Obeah and Other Powers is a gem in its own right, and yet this splendid collection is also much more than simply the sum of its parts. Indeed, the volume achieves an impressive level of sophistication in Caribbeanist historical anthropology and Black Atlantic religious studies, and its release — along with the publication of Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby’s Enacting Power: The Criminalization of Obeah in the Anglophone Caribbean, 1760 – 2011 — makes 2012 something of a watershed moment in the study of the dynamic and rather unruly set of spiritual beliefs and ritual practices so often glossed as obeah in Afro-Atlantic studies. Obeah and Other Powers grows out of a cutting-edge conference at Newcastle University in 2008 involving primarily anthropologists and historians, whose rigorous case studies have been lovingly edited and insightfully introduced by historian Diana...