Eliot on Crosson, 'Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad'

H-Slavery Eliot on Crosson, 'Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad'

Review published on Saturday, March 20, 2021

J. Brent Crosson. Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020. 328 pp. $30.00 (paper), ISBN 978-0-226-70548-4.

Reviewed by Lewis Eliot (University of South Carolina)Published on H-Slavery (March, 2021) Commissioned by Andrew J. Kettler (University of California, Los Angeles)

Printable Version: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=56397

In Experiments with Power, J. Brent Crosson departs from previous analytical treatments of obeah. Rather than consider its practice in predominantly religious terms, Crosson begins his assessment by thinking of obeah as “more like what most people conceive of as science or experimentation than a religious tradition” (p. 6). He believes that “science, experimentation, and work provided a language to talk about religious practice and the ambivalence of power beyond the moral-racial limits of religion” and he therefore focuses on “that alternate language as a way to retheorize the intertwined categories of religion, race, and justice” (p. 13). Obeah in the Trinidadian context, involving a polyglot union of “Hindu, West African-inspired, Catholic, and esoteric traditions,” therefore provides a framework for Crosson to ask “how spiritual work challenged the hegemonic limits of the category of religion itself” (pp. 5, 16).

Crosson divides the book into three parts. The first, “The Depths,” presents three chapters that consider the ethics, religious violence, and experimentation that the realm of obeah conjures. The two chapters of the second section, “The Nations,” reveal how spiritual work challenges the relationship between racial differences and religious categorization. The third, “The Heights,” includes a single chapter that examines obeah’s disruption of a delicate equilibrium of sovereignty, rationality, and science.

Chapter 1 examines the cultural response to police shootings in Rio Moro in 2011 and in doing so “looks at how these contested performances of obeah transform commonsense conceptions of the relationship between violence, religion, and law” (pp. 42-43). By questioning the liberal democratic dogma that religion “can be completely separate from harm,” Crosson presents obeah as both a vessel for communal comprehension of tragedy and an expression of protest against violent external forces (p. 44). Through this analysis of police violence, Crosson makes clear that “obeah, with its open recognition of the healing and harming power of law and religion, highlights the ambivalence of the rule of law in which racialized violence is inflicted in the name of order, security, and the moral redemption of society” (p. 64).

The second chapter continues the investigations of chapter 1 in more depth. Here, Crosson proposes “an alternative ‘experimental’ framework for religious practice” as opposed to previous structures that pursue “an exemplar past” in the name of tradition (p. 72). Crosson’s new framework reveals that “spiritual workers did not understand tradition and experimentation as mutually exclusive

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Eliot on Crosson, 'Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad'. H-Slavery. 03-20-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11465/reviews/7453121/eliot-crosson-experiments-power-obeah-and-remaking-religion-trinidad Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 1 H-Slavery modalities” and that they instead “reflected exoteric and esoteric dimensions of religious practice that were good for different situations of power” (p. 91).

Crosson concludes part 1 with chapter 3, where he pushes against “the notion that religion, in its most essential form, is a realm of duty ethics, enforcing taboos, or inculculating shared moral rules” (p. 96). His investigations make clear that “because power must have oppositional polarities to flow, spiritual worked engaged with contrasting ethical values to make justice through experiments with power” (p. 126). Obeah practitioners’ engaging in this more conversational approach to ethics led to both their vilification from “the civilizing mission of British colonialism in the Caribbean” and “took them away from the value-rational world of ideal-type religion and toward the world of knowledge and action they called science, obeah, experiments with power, or work” (p. 127).

Part 2, on the intersection between race and religion, opens with Crosson’s fourth chapter. Here, the author examines the ways Hindus and Christians in Trinidad have managed to distance themselves from the historical traditions of animal sacrifice in their own faiths, or “disentangle themselves from past and present violence,” and so reaffirm “the colonial making of (not-)religion and the projection of anxieties around violence onto obeah” (p. 137). Crosson argues that this has led to a concentration on cruelty, in particular the moment of animal death, at the expense of considerations of long-term practices of animal care which are similarly central to obeah practice. By following the literal and figurative blood lines of religious practice, Crosson explains that the rejection of animal sacrifice was not so much about “contrasting racial essences” but rather “the common logic of nonsacrificial religion that British colonial authorities used to define moral subjectivity” (p. 156).

In chapter 5, Crosson explains the influence of obeah’s spiritual practice on secular life in Trinidad. The demonization of obeah from (post)colonial society and its “exile from the category of religion” afforded its practitioners an avenue to influence nonreligious life in ways that traditional faiths could not (p. 162). Obeah allowed Trinidadians to work “the hegemonic polarities of these stigmas to produce counterdiscourses on power, mobility, justice, and rationality” and not remain “passive victims of colonial prohibition” (p. 192).

The third part, an examination of obeah as a disrupting force in scientific and religious notions of power, contains a single, sixth chapter. Crosson here explains that beyond science and religion, “secular modernity is missing a third term—variously described as ‘black magic,’ voodoo,’ ‘obeah,’ ‘superstition,’ or ‘witchcraft’” (p. 202). Further, the author clarifies that “science and religion attained coherence only by uniting against a common enemy of racialized and gendered false belief” (p. 202). By examining the spoiling nature of obeah in the whiggish dominance of High—“Western”—Science, Crosson shows that “rather than a theology of an invisible and otherworldly God that opposes a science of worldly matters of fact, science/obeah intimates pragmatic practices of living with impermanent invisibilities that have bodily effects” (p. 234).

Crosson concludes by connecting white historical responses to obeah practice to wider condemnations of violent belief systems, or what he refers to as liberal secular tolerance. Through both his case studies in Trinidad and broader considerations of rejections of Islam in the United States, Crosson argues that judgments on what constitutes acceptable religiosity have a genesis in the Caribbean. Formed through the cultural exchanges that accompanied African slavery and Asian indentureship, nonwhite actors in the Americas practiced religion in ways that countered white

Citation: H-Net Reviews. Eliot on Crosson, 'Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad'. H-Slavery. 03-20-2021. https://networks.h-net.org/node/11465/reviews/7453121/eliot-crosson-experiments-power-obeah-and-remaking-religion-trinidad Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License. 2 H-Slavery assumptions about faith. Continued suspicion of obeah practitioners, like anti-Islam ideologies, reveals the limits of liberal secular tolerance. As Crosson comments, this “is not simply invectives against the excesses of (not-)religion (i.e., fanaticism or superstition), but also a redemptive notion of what good religion really is” (p. 250).

In Experiments with Power, Crosson has tackled an oft-misunderstood subject and engaged with it in an innovative way. By muddling Western definitions of science and religion, Crosson reveals similarities in their practice and experimentation. A symptom of this original approach is that Crosson’s prose can be dense in parts, in particular in his analytical blending of oral interviews and previous scholarly works. His arguments and their well-stated broader relevance, though, make perseverance worthwhile. This is a book that cultural anthropologists, historians, and scholars of religion alike will find both thought-provoking and exciting.

Citation: Lewis Eliot. Review of Crosson, J. Brent,Experiments with Power: Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad. H-Slavery, H-Net Reviews. March, 2021.URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56397

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.