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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

Gerbner, Katharine

Hardcover

Series: Religious Cultures of African and African Diaspora People

General Latin American HistoryGeneral Sociology

ISBN10: 147802903X
ISBN13: 9781478029038
Publisher: Duke University Press
Published: Oct 14 2025
Pages: 240
Weight: 1.08
Height: 0.69 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
In 1760, following the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Empire, the Afro-Caribbean word Obeah first appeared in British colonial law. In Archival Irruptions, Katharine Gerbner traces how British authorities in Jamaica came to criminalize Obeah, a practice that was variously seen as a healing method, an Africana religion, a science, and a form of witchcraft. Gerbner shows that in the years directly preceding its criminalization, for enslaved Africans and Maroons, Obeah was a prophetic practice tied to healing and death rites. Drawing on Moravian missionary archives, Gerbner theorizes these descriptions of African religious beliefs, rituals, and concepts as irruptions moments when Africana epistemologies break the narrative of a European-authored archival document. In these irruptions, we see European assertions of authority through the lens of Obeah. Moreover, we find that the modern category of religion is rooted in the histories of slavery, rebellion, and the criminalization of Black religious practices. Gerbner's search for archival irruptions not only creates an opportunity to write an alternative narration about Obeah; it provides a new methodology for all those conducting archival research.

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