American Religion 2, no. 1 (Fall 2020), pp. 186–188 Copyright © 2020, The Trustees of Indiana University • doi: 10.2979/amerreli.2.1.18 Book Review Pablo Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017) Katharine Gerbner University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, USA The word “religion” appears only seven times in Pablo Gómez’s extraordinary book, The Experiential Caribbean. Yet the paucity of references is, perhaps paradoxically, an indication that this brilliant study should be foundational to studies of American religion. Gómez, an historian of medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has written a book about healing and knowledge production that critiques the category of religion in practice, rather than in theory. The Experiential Caribbean explores the “healthcare marketplace” of the early modern Caribbean, focusing on Black ritual practitioners and health specialists. Goméz’s central argument, which is directed primarily at historians of science and medicine, emphasizes that these individuals were not merely “informers” who helped European collectors create the “New Science” of the seventeenth century. Instead, they were themselves responsible for an “experiential revolution ” that emphasized empirical knowledge production over “first principles” and tradition. While the category of “religion” is not Gómez’s central focus, his findings— and his argument—should be of interest to all scholars of American religion. The “ritual practitioners” and “health specialists” who are the focus of his book, after Katharine Gerbner 187 all, were called brujas, sorcerers, and witches by European authorities. In the archival records that Gómez explores, which include Inquisition records as well as a wide range of underutilized medical texts and recipe books, they are agents of “superstition” whose integration of Catholic rituals into their healing practices was suspect at best, and criminal at worst. Yet even as these practitioners were condemned by ecclesiastical authorities, they were widely sought out not only by Black and indigenous people in need of care, but also by Europeans, including church officials. Their integration of a wide range of material, ritual, and verbal practices proved to be effective and attractive within the competitive healthcare marketplace of the early modern Caribbean. Due to the fact that Black practitioners were marginalized as religious “others ” and excluded from histories of medicine, Gómez makes the conscious choice not to use religion-related terminology in his own narrative. Terms like “witch” and “shaman,” Gómez explains, “betoken the very language … used to condemn black ways of knowing” away from categories such as “rational” and “enlightened” (11–12). Instead, he opts for phrases like “ritual specialist” and “health specialist,” as well as Mohán, a term of Amerindian origin, to describe the Black healers who are the focus of his book. The first two chapters, “Arrivals” and “Landscapes,” set the stage and describe how Africans and their descendants made up the majority of the population in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. These individuals drew on African precedents and Amerindian examples as well as European traditions in order to create a “vibrant, if ruthless, cultural economy of healing and diseasing” (38). Implicit in Gómez’s description of this early modern world is a critique of traditional debates about African traditions in the Atlantic world, which tend to argue that Africans and their descendants either “retained” African culture or that they participated in a process of “creolization.” Gómez sidesteps this historiographical quagmire by arguing that Black practitioners gained expertise and authority through their travels. Chapter three, “Movement,” argues that in the competitive healthcare marketplace of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, incorporation was key to success , and healing traditions were not “enclosed” (85). In fact, the dislocation that characterized the seventeenth-century Caribbean weakened structures of power within the multiple healing and religious traditions in the region and “fostered the development of open, omnivorous epistemologies” (87). Significantly, Gómez also repositions the concept of movement away from the Atlantic, and towards interior mobility: the movement of ritual practitioners inland from cities like Cartageña on rivers and through diverse communities. On a related point, he critiques recent scholarship that has emphasized the transfer of knowledge solely from indigenous and Black practitioners to European collectors...
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Mar 5, 2024
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