Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean ed. by Maarit Forde and Yanique Hume

Abstract

Reviewed by: Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean ed. by Maarit Forde and Yanique Hume Ama Mazama Afro-Carribean spirituality, death, afterworld, rites of passage, mortuary rituals, ancestral worship, lwa, colonialism maarit forde and yanique hume, eds. Passages and Afterworlds: Anthropological Perspectives on Death in the Caribbean. Durham: Duke University Press, 2018. Pp. 312 + 22 illustrations. This edited volume presents research on mortuary rites observed in Trinidad, Jamaica, Haiti, Suriname, as well as among the Garifuna and Amerindian peoples. Nine chapters are divided into two main sections, Relations and Transformations. According to the introduction written by one of the editors, Maarit Forde, it is important to acknowledge that contemporary Caribbean societies were fundamentally shaped by death, given the bloody and violent encounters that took place as a result of the European invasion of the Caribbean, the extermination of its Indigenous population, and the [End Page 267] ever-increasing importation of Africans, whose life expectancy rarely exceeded seven years once enslaved on a Caribbean plantation. Furthermore, death allegedly continues to haunt postcolonial Caribbean societies, as many of them are plagued with lethal gang activity and social unrest, which renders life uncertain and the possibility of dying omnipresent. This edited volume is a result of a three-day workshop held at the University of the West Indies in Barbados in 2011 and focuses on the conception and treatment of death among diverse peoples of the Caribbean in order to do justice to a critical aspect of the Caribbean experience. Of particular interest to most of the contributors to this volume is not only the concept of death, but also the relationship that the living cultivate with their dead. This interest leads to the observation that most African-descended people in the Caribbean consider the borders between the world of the living and that of the dead to be quite permeable. As a result of such permeability, the living and the dead may communicate with ease, through specific modes and techniques. Also, the living perform many rituals to honor and placate their ancestors, whose support and guidance they continue to seek. This is evident, for example, in the descriptions provided by Hume about Jamaica and her grandmother's insistence that the author/editor salute the family's ancestors before entering the house, or van Wetering's and van Velzen's descriptions of the Njuka of Suriname, who start their day with honoring the group's ancestral spirits at communal shrines and consult the ancestral spirits at the time of a community member's death to determine to which spiritual category the newly deceased person may belong. Overall, the articles included in this book provide interesting, and, at times, vivid descriptions of mortuary rituals—be they funerals, mourning, wakes, transcendence, etc. This being said, the contributions included in this volume form a disparate whole, as they seem to be unified only by a common focus: death, and its attendant rituals in the Caribbean. To be fair, disparateness is the mark of many edited volumes, which often lack a clearly unified approach. However, despite their methodological and theoretical differences, most of the articles are united by the Eurocentric approach—they read as a conversation among and for Europeans or European-minded scholars. Indeed, Europe is almost constantly used as a reference point, to which the Caribbean experience is compared; even worse, at times the region is reduced to a "dark" or earlier variation of Europe. Constantino, for instance, insists that Vilokan, the mystical Vodou city where the lwa reside, is similar to "Mt. Olympus." It is not clear what that comparison adds to the study of Vodou's cosmology. What it subtly does, though, is introduce Europe as an older and thus [End Page 268] normative reference. The same remark applies to Santore's comparison of "Amerindian thought" with "our Euro-American philosophies" (62). Why can the presentation of "Amerindian thought" not stand on its own? Also, and this is quite disturbing to this reviewer, despite the editor's claim that Caribbean people should not be approached as the "Other," characterized as it is by delayed evolution, the specters of Tylor and Levi-Bruhl seem to still be haunting the authors...