Kamari Maxine Clarke BEYOND GENEALOGIES:EXPERTISE AND RELIGIOUS KNOWLEDGE IN LEGAL CASES INVOLVING AFRICAN DIASPORIC PUBLICS

which the question to be posed was not so much Abstract that of religion as object and its systemic function This article considers the way genealogical in society, but instead that of religion as a product approaches to religion have not been able to take of knowledge and power through which subjects into account how the production of knowledge, are shaped. Yet, as groundbreaking as Asad’s including religious knowledge, affects global politics. genealogical approach to religion was in destabiliz- Specifically, it is concerned with the production of ing analytic assumptions about religious objects of expert testimony, which is used to provide the evi- anthropological study, a culture of expert testi- dentiary basis for a new industry of civil and human mony, in the 1990s, and an industry of refugee rights claims and protections. I explore how lawyers and claimants and US and Canadian con- genealogical approaches to religion offer a way to stitutional reforms around religious freedoms were see that the constructs we understand to be religion concurrently underway. These industry experts were produced and rendered legible through the for- sought various knowledge foundations through mation of contemporary constructions of knowledge which to procure equality and rights for subaltern — classes. They drew on essentialist definitions of and power. I demonstrate that through these 1 approaches—in order for religious protections to be religion grounded in symbolic anthropology. This acknowledged in legal domains, they also need to be essay is concerned with how Canadian and Ameri- rendered visible and legible to the law. Ultimately, I can mainstream legal systems, as well as particular argue that the production of these knowledge prac- tenets of the anthropology of religion, have cre- tices into portable knowledge packages enables ated a condition of illegibility of non-Western, courts to assess issues that have resulted from the especially African diasporic, religious subjects. migration of ethnic and religious groups; but they Such examples of definitional illegibility of African diasporic spheres span from Orisha Voodoo to also tell us a lot about the limits of genealogical approaches in understanding fully the complexities Obeah Santerıa and Candomble. of Black Atlantic religious practices. [genealogies of Beginning with a consideration of Talal Asad’s religion, obeah, Yoruba religion, law, Santerıa] seminal reframing of religious contexts through a “genealogical” trajectory, the essay argues for a fuller understanding of how law, anthropology, and colonialism can work together to erase reli- INTRODUCTION gious subjects and practices. In doing so, it In 1993, Talal Asad published the essay, “The demonstrates the ways that modernist taxonomies, Construction of Religion as an Anthropological including the tools used in expert testimonies, such Category” in his book, Genealogies of Religion,as as “technocratic productivity,” also contribute to a way to reject essentialist definitions of religion the creation of legibility and illegibility of African and to articulate the extent to which the legibility diasporic religious practices. We see that in order of religion itself is a product of historical and dis- for religious protections to be recognized in legal cursive practices. By rethinking Clifford Geertz’s domains, they must also be rendered visible and popularization of religion as operating within a legible to the law. It is more important than ever symbolic field, Asad’s intervention asserted a criti- to recognize that the religious claims before North cal break from symbolic anthropology of the American courts today are artifacts of the schol- 1980s to a Foucauldian poststructuralist one in arly imagination being excavated and rendered leg- ible within the lens of empirical certainty. For

Transforming Anthropology, Vol. 25, Number 2, pp. 130–155, ISSN 1051-0559, electronic ISSN 1548-7466. © 2017 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. 130 DOI: 10.1111/traa.12101. example, the aforementioned African diasporic seen as “uncivilized” and demonic. In the case of religious practices are made legible in legal pro- African diasporic religions, the demonized associa- ceedings through the category of “the occult.” tions and designations of the occult have had a sig- This rendering of anthropological theory into legal nificant impact in everyday criminality and have categories raises new questions about the ways played a legitimizing role in legal proceedings. that social science knowledge has the power to Indeed, these formulations of religious categories produce packages of history and assemblages of and histories require that we take into account the culture that are disconnected from the conditions particularities of modernity, race, and inequality of their making and eventual circulation. The as they relate to the interpretive field of expert implications of this packaging are key to clarifying knowledge and its impact on rendering particular the contemporary nature of knowledge production practices legitimate or illegitimate. As I explore and the limits of genealogical approaches in under- here, symbolic anthropological definitions of cul- standing fully the complexities of Black Atlantic ture embedded in essential social system theory religious practices. from the 1930s to 1970s were being mercilessly For many invested in poststructuralist analy- revived by legal experts as a way to produce por- sis, genealogical approaches to religion offered a table knowledge packages and a type of Christian way to see that the very constructs we understand revivalism that celebrated itself against other reli- to be religion were produced and rendered legible gious traditions perceived as “occult.” through the formation of contemporary construc- Asad would view these knowledge practices, in tions of knowledge and power. We understood their construction as occult, as driven by institu- that religion itself is not a thing—a knowable tions of knowledge and power. They were being entity that remains untouched and unchanged and deployed to enable courts to assess the nature of that one simply converts into or claims in con- those “occult” religions, deemed occult, and the tradistinction to secular knowledge. Following range of related issues that resulted from the regio- Michel Foucault, what Asad demonstrated nal migration of persons from the ethnic and reli- through deconstruction is that the production of gious groups fleeing war or persecution, or seeking religious knowledge emerged with a concept of the better life opportunities. As a result of their mobi- secular that normalized particular “behaviors, lity and the growth of diverse challenges, increasing knowledges, and sensibilities in modern life” (Asad measures were taken by governments to understand 1993, 24), and “invisibilized” their alliances with the proliferation of religious claims as well as deter- contemporary Christianity. This construction of mine the limits on those freedoms (see also the secular as social knowledge, behaviors, and Richardson 2015 and Ingulli 1985–1986).2 The for- sensibilities—deemed absent of religious influences mats ranged from refugee commissions, human —shaped Asad’s point of departure and made an rights commissions, local regional civil and criminal important contribution to a growing set of schol- cases, to Supreme Court hearings throughout arly debates on the topic (For example, see Feld- North America, Europe, and Australia, and man 2005; Mahmood 2015; Taylor 2007; Weber engaged in the management and regulation of par- 1992 [1930]). ticular religious practices. These formations fos- However, even as this genealogical approach tered a new culture of experts with cultural and to religion and secularism emerged alongside post- religious knowledge tools engaged in the evaluation structural and postmodern interventions, a new and assessment of the practices under scrutiny (see industry was underway whose adherents needed Fortman 2012; Ridler 2010). desperately to derive from anthropological and But if the rise of genealogical approaches sociological expertise a particular knowledge highlighted the place of knowledge and power in domain that contained the very cultural and reli- shaping contemporary religion, this new industry gious spheres being deconstructed. Although con- of experts and their religious-cultural knowledge ceptualizations of secularism emerged against the tools emerged alongside the radically transforming production of explicit religiosities, what also public discourses that would reshape the contours emerged were new innovations around Christian of contemporary religiosity (see Jackson 2013; Ste- practices that made the presence of new Christian wart and Shaw 1994). A language of religious practices more pronounced, more visible but rights and protections promoted forms of entitle- dialectically tied to particular religious aka occult ments that shaped the way religion and tradition underworlds. These otherized occult religious were becoming popularized. What prevailed with worlds were defined against Christianity and were this new turn were individualized justice claims

Kamari Maxine Clarke 131 and protections propelled by new forms of legal- These three shifts—the procurement of reli- ity. These ranged from the rise of constitution- gious expertise, the emergence of religious legal ally procured discourses to the emergence of a protections, and the reverse missions propelling a language of legal protections by which particular new public face of innovative Christian practices— forms of identifiable religions were pursued by have complicated the contemporary analytic ter- its users. The inherent ethical challenges that rain in which religious theory has lived up until emerged were concerned with the functioning of now. This is because in the contemporary period political-legal domains in relation to the ethics reverse missions from the Global South to the of inequality. Global North and legal expertise have become If the rise of a new culture of experts and their central to the making of religious subjects, and tools was not enough to rock the way Christianity these formations are leading to an assemblage of was constructed as against secular norms, another African postcolonial religiosities that require new tenet of change radically reshaped the discourses formulations in the way we map genealogical his- through which Christianity became more pro- tories of contemporary Christianity. These formu- nounced in seemingly secular spaces. The reality lations of religious histories require that we take was the reverse mission of Christian Pentecostal- into account the particularities of modernity, race, ism—from the Global South to the Global North and inequality as they relate to the interpretive into spaces previously deemed secular, like civil field of expert knowledge and its impact on ren- court hearings and tribunals—and its transforma- dering legitimate or illegitimate particular prac- tion of indigenous spirituality into spaces of reli- tices. gious disrepute (see Barreto 2010; Bertolino 2010; Beyond Christianity and Islam, religious prac- Olupona and Gemignani 2007). The celebration of tices such as Obeah and Santerıa were deemed his- Christianity in juridical settings exploded with the torically “non-religious,” outlawed during rise of Pentecostalism in Africa and the Caribbean. plantation slavery in the Americas, and rendered What prevailed in this new turn were born-again invisible to public scrutiny and records. We see testimony, spiritual awakening, and profound that genealogical approaches have their limits. For forms of individualism for inner transformation. while colonial records (especially Spanish colonial What transpired was the re-signification of Chris- records) document the existence of African Dias- tianity through new ways of constituting African pora religions for the sake of taxonomizing them,3 diasporic religions, such as Obeah and Santerıa, as studying the formation, subversion, and re-emer- not simply unintelligible through the explicit stan- gence of particular religious practices rendered ille- dardization of Pentecostal Christianity but as gitimate allows us to map the evolution of backward, unenlightened and demonic. As reli- particular knowledge forms through various laws. gious forms that are a product of innovation in However, such study does not help us to under- the Atlantic world, Obeah and Santerıa involved stand aspects of those practices hidden from the religious cosmologies that were seen as tools of public eye and rendered negatively visible in domi- protection and warfare against deeply violent plan- nant discourses through words like “voodoo” or tation labor circumstances (Gilroy 1993; Glissant “Obeah” or “Santerıa.” Rather, to study the gaps 1995; Khan 2003, 2004, 2008; Mintz and Price and the silences—those hidden aspects—helps to 1976; Price 2001; Trouillot 1998; and Whitten and make sense of how law and democratic publics Szwed 1970; Ortiz 1995[1947]; Gruzinski 1993; and engage in the practice of rendering particular (reli- Bastide 1972). gious) practices unintelligible. The explosion of Evangelical Pentecostalism The foregoing considers the changing nature was dialectical and fostered a repudiation of tradi- of religious sociality. It offers a way to rethink a tional religious practices deemed demonic and genealogical approach to the study of religion that uncivilized. The association of newly innovative goes beyond the making of religious subjects. Christian enlightenment tropes with tensions over Through a series of case examinations I will show what has been called the occult underworld pro- that particular practices related to the perception duced new innovations in contemporary religious of religious interaction and discursive structures practices that remain unaccounted for in Asad’s are admissible only insofar as the perceived prac- genealogical account. The reality is that African tices are recognizable by courts as legitimately reli- diasporic lineages, like all lineages constructed gious, read: legitimately “social.” The role of through genealogies, cannot be traced through lin- religion as a form of sociality is central, as is the ear taxonomic cartographies. relevance of evidentiary rules that shape the ways

132 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(2) religious practices are rendered legible through the recognizability of some religious claims but particular forms of legal epistemology. I rethink not others. In Canada and the US, these cases, the ways that religious knowledge as artifacts of from lower courts, provincial and state courts, and the imagination circulate and result in new cultural constitutional courts, as well as Refugee Boards products of their own, sometimes in ways that and Homeland Security cases, concern religious escape straightforward genealogical accounts. In practices that hail from many parts of the world. part, I suggest that a new form of religious social- In Canada, “religious freedoms” are popularly dis- ity is transforming the terrain of the visible and cussed as being protected in the Canadian Charter requires that we consider not just how ontological of Rights and Freedoms through which it protects frameworks are relevant to anthropology, but also “freedom of conscience and religion.” In the US, how new institutional legal practices are producing the notion of “religious freedom” is popularly the terms through which such frameworks are ren- articulated in relation to the First Amendment to dered legible (also see Butler et al. 2011; Butler the Constitution that asserts the free exercise of 1993). A new domain of religious production and religious freedoms through its prohibition of mak- consumption is establishing the conditions under ing laws to impede the free exercise of religion, which new cultural products, created by expert freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and so witnessing and legal challenges, are being found on. In internationally recognized spheres of gover- legible to law. nance, the most authoritative documents on reli- I examine a number of high profile socio-reli- gious freedom are those under the United Nations gious legal cases in the US and Canada that raised rubric—The Universal Declaration of Human questions of evidence and intelligibility as ways to Rights, the International Covenant, for example. resolve for multiple publics the meanings of reli- Despite these various discussions about protec- gion in relation to expectations of state accommo- tions, however, the very notion of religious free- dations of religious difference. I begin with dom is fundamentally about the exercise of Obeah,4 a folk magic or form of sorcery and reli- difference in complex spheres of inequality. For gious practice derived from Central African and the challenges in guaranteeing freedoms have West African origins and manifest in the Americas always involved questions over determining when in different forms. Obeah has followed a syncretic and how to restrict those freedoms or how to tradition, but its roots have grown out of the his- accommodate various religious claims. At the base torical Ashanti culture in West Africa. As Africans of the controversies opened up through the cases were enslaved and transported to different islands under examination ahead are questions concerning in the Caribbean (i.e. Jamaica, Suriname, Virgin the role that the state should play in the legal pro- Islands, Trinidad, Tobago, Guyana, Belize, Baha- tection of individual religious rights and what mas), what has come to be known by its practi- should be its limits. What do these controversies tioners as “Obeah religion” assumed different tell us about the nature of new forms of religious forms, eventually merging with religions practiced sociality today, especially as it relates to what leg- by colonialists. Some commonalities in the religion ally counts as religion; who is qualified to inform remained, while regional and transnational differ- these judgments; and how do such legal determina- ences emerged5 (Erskine 1981, 2005, 2014; Henry tions serve to marginalize or shape the ways that 1983, 2003). I then move to Santerıa—or as it is practitioners organize their religious claims? How also referred: “La Regla de Ocha” or “Lukumi.” are inequalities of practice and prestige unfolding Like Obeah, Santerıa is a Black Atlantic religion in a horizontal axis between practices such as embedded in the making of modernity. It emerged Palo, Santerıa, Obeah, Candomble, Umabanda, as a product of the transnational trade of African and Espiritismo?7 captives, but is known to have originated in Cuba While we will see how notions of “religious and incorporates core religious beliefs of the Yor- freedom”—and following Asad—“religion” are uba, members of a region of Southwest Nigeria, misnomers, products of our making, I am arguing and the worship of Catholic saints.6 that the contemporary modernity of religion repre- At a time when the exponential increase of sents a domain in which expertise is playing a key Pentecostal Charismatic and Islamic fundamen- role in the adjudication of state accommodations talisms have radicalized the face of religious pub- of a range of practices—including religious and lics globally, these cases highlight the urgent need cultural practices. In these case studies under ques- to protect religious freedoms at all costs. The tion, it is scholarly experts who are being (and issues under examination highlight the problem of have been) called on to define the scope of

Kamari Maxine Clarke 133 acceptability as they relate to religious practice. I made by the defendant to an Obeah priest during end by considering the rise of the category of the an “Obeah sting.” The defendant had established scientific expert in the formalization of British a relationship with the Obeah priest and disclosed common law and the consequent emergence of to him information about an armed bank robbery Anglo-American law and its eventual adoption of in which he was involved. The statement included juries, particular rhetorical practices involving a confession that the defendant had accidentally hypothetical questioning, and the use of scientific murdered a bank employee during the robbery. experts. What we see through these formations are With the goal of evading capture, the defendant ways to highlight the centrality of anthropological told the Obeah priest of his plans to commit a expertise in shaping categories of religion and their bank robbery. After the robbery and murder, the consequent meanings. Obeah priest, in the quest to collect a reward for In the twenty-first century, definitions of reli- tips for criminal activity, faked a ritual context by gion are not simply being shaped through mecha- donning a ritual robe and head covering in a dark nisms of scholarly and religious knowledge made room lit by candlelight and chanting various legible through institutions of power. They are words (Smart 2012). He then asked the defendant also being actively shaped by various rhetorical to recall the bank robbery, which was covertly formulations during litigious processes involving video-recorded by the priest and turned over to religious adherents, as well as other spaces in the police by the Obeah priest. Rowe was con- which “religious subjectivity” is produced, such as victed in a jury trial in the Superior Court of through practices popular in the public sphere like Ontario. Christian declarations against Obeah and voodoo Rowe’s appeal raised three issues as matters of as evil witchcraft. The reality is that some religious national importance. These included “Whether the conceptualizations are being revived in the name employment of an Obeah religious and spiritual of legal and religious certainty while others are advisor as a police agent to secure a confession being shaped through what Jacob Olupona (2007, from a suspect, by exploiting his religious and Olupona 2014) has popularized as “reverse mis- spiritual beliefs, is a ‘dirty trick’ as described by sions.” The idea of reverse missions highlights the this Court in Rothman v. The Queen, [198] 1 decline in traditional Anglo Saxon Christian popu- S.C.R. 640, and subsequent cases.”8 “A dirty lar worship in the West. It describes the new phe- trick,” in legal parlance, would be “the type of nomenon of immigrants from the Global South to conduct which justifies exclusion of the evidence the US, Europe, Australia, and so forth, who have thereby obtained...whereas less offensive conduct become the new face of popular Christianity and which amounts to a mere ‘trick’ will be admissi- the face of defendants in court who lay claim to ble.”9 At issue for the Court was the relationship African and Black Atlantic religions. The tension between Mr. Rowe and the Obeah priest, which that exists involves inquiries into how subjects are was intended to facilitate criminal activities (com- constituted by institutions of knowledge and mitting crime, facilitating escape) rather than to power and how they constitute themselves through seek religious counseling. No evidence of Rowe’s new public personalities, refashioned, and re-Afri- sincerity of belief in Obeah was established; his canized values. This reality returns us to the crises communications with the Obeah priest were secu- at the center of anthropological theory—that reli- lar in nature. The police in this case did not act in gion today has far exceeded the limits of systemic bad faith, as the bogus Obeah priest came to the definitions popularized by Emile Durkheim (2001 authorities in order to report a crime and to offer [1912]) and Clifford Geertz (1966) but is not his assistance in bringing the perpetrators to jus- adequately resolved through the genealogical tice. approach advocated by Talal Asad (1993). Related is the question of whether the police should be free to impersonate priests or other spir- PRODUCING SUBJECTS THROUGH itual practitioners, as long as they present them- KNOWLEDGE AND POWER: OBEAH AND selves as “corrupt” by holding out to the suspect THE SCHOLARLY IMAGINATION some hope of material advantage. In R. v. Pinnock In R v. Rowe, a case heard before the Supreme and Welsh, the Peel Police Service learned that the Court of Canada in 2006 related to gang activity mother of two murder suspects was a believer in and the death of a local drug dealer, the Court Obeah. Relying on the decision of the trial judge, upheld the conviction of the lower court—the they sent an undercover police officer into the field Superior Court, which had admitted statements posing as an Obeahman named “Leon,” His

134 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(2) mission was to establish a relationship with the because of the extent to which religious rights are suspects’ mother, convince her of his spiritual actually tied to the exercise of democracy and as powers, and exploit her spiritual beliefs to obtain such participate in the production of knowledge inculpatory evidence against her children. The products that are being increasingly managed and undercover officer prepared for his role as an rendered visible to the state and its economy. Obeahman by reviewing the videotapes of Mr. A review of the testimony in R v. Rowe and Rhyll Carty’s meetings (the Obeahman in Case I) the taped conversation between Carty and the with the Applicant and Mr. Campbell (Case II), defendant highlighted the understanding that and it is apparent that many elements of his per- Obeah is a belief system embracing a variety of formance were directly modeled on Mr. Carty in religious traditions widely shared by persons which he struck up a relationship with the mother of Caribbean origin; that one of the core beliefs of of those who would be the defendant in Case II, Obeah adherents is that the spirits of the dead Ms. Robinson, and convinced her, also through inhabit the living and control their daily lives and various tricks and staged demonstrations, that he that these spirits can be exorcized by Obeah ritu- possessed great spiritual powers; persuaded her als; that the defendant believed that Carty was an that she and her sons were possessed by an evil “Obeahman,” and Carty encouraged this belief; spirit that was, among other things, causing her to and that based on that belief, the defendant went suffer from migraine headaches; advised Ms. to Carty for help. The request for help was based Robinson that the evil spirit was capable of using on Carty’s claim that (1) the defendant was pos- the criminal justice system to harm her and her sessed by the invasive spirit of the deceased, and sons; and promised to protect her and her sons that (2) Carty could remove this spirit if, and only both from the evil spirit and its manipulation of if, the Applicant related everything that had hap- the justice system but only if they were entirely pened during the shooting. That condition, and truthful with him and gave him all the information the Applicant’s acceptance of it, was the founda- he required. Having won the trust of Ms. Robin- tion of the entire confession. Yet, also central to son and, through her, one of her two sons, the the impersonation and entrapment that was at undercover officer held phony Obeah sessions with play was the use of various stereotypes about them and one of their friends (the third accused), Obeah that live in the popular diasporic imagina- which incorporated many of the religious elements tion, especially in relation to the religion’s rela- and rituals seen on the videotape of Mr. Carty’s tionship to crime and wrong doing. meeting with the Applicant and Mr. Campbell. But for purposes of the legal case, the lack of During these sessions, Ms. Robinson’s son made a recognized Obeah religious public sphere both in inculpatory admissions. Canada and elsewhere rendered its religiosity ques- In both cases I and II outlined here, the tionable. This was the evidentiary challenge—the notion of “religious rights” did not outweigh state hardship of getting beyond Judeo-Christian stan- strategies. The court recognized that there were dards of religion as publicly articulated through a limits on how far the state can go in attempting to “church” or “congregation.” Such institutional acquire evidence. As this case shows, the basic ele- considerations of religious sociality return us to ments of Obeah are not granted equal religious some of the general foundations of religion in the status in Canadian law. The key issues at play are social sciences, part of the cultural and intellectual about striking an appropriate balance between inheritance at the core of issues now facing the religious rights and the limits of cultural accom- court—Emile Durkheim’s 1912 definition of reli- modations. But as we see, it is not about the pro- gion in relation to his conception of the church or tection of religious freedoms alone. Many issues community as a central component of a religion.10 related to religious freedoms remain unresolved or Here he argued that, unclear; this is where the knowledge of sociologists and anthropologists is brought to bear on the A religion is a unified system of beliefs and technocratic production of cultural knowledge. practices relative to sacred things, that is to Academics are called on to document practices, say, things set apart and forbidden—beliefs and offer opinions, write reports, and testify to the leg- practices which unite into one single moral com- ibility of particular practices and their relevance to munity called a Church, all those who adhere to various claims. This is not only because of the rec- them. The second element thus holds a place ognizability of cultural difference in the articula- in my definition that is no less essential than tions of those practices to be protected but also the first: In showing that the idea of religion is

Kamari Maxine Clarke 135 inseparable from the idea of a Church, it con- living from the spirits of the dead found in many veys the notion that religion must be an emi- religions. Mr. Carty’s “moral admonition” to the nently collective thing. (Durkheim 1912, 44, Applicant that what he had done was “very, very emphasis added) wrong” made the proceedings which followed “a religious phenomenon.” This definition establishes what Durkheim Dr. Frederick Case, an expert on Caribbean calls Church—namely, the collective or communal and African religions, said that Obeah was not, in aspect of religion that is central to the community- his (minority) view, a “religion” but a form of making component of religious practice. Like the spirituality in which there is “absolute belief in the earlier intellectual traditions of religious legibility, world of spirits.” This belief extends to the exor- religion cannot be in the heart, in the realm of cism of “duppies”—spirits capable of haunting a individual belief. This contributes to its evidentiary place or a person. Carty’s practices—candle-light- illegibility. The problem was that these anthropo- ing; baths; oils; and the laying on of hands—are logical notions of sociality have over-determined common in Obeah, as is Carty’s use of the appel- what was allowed to be deemed “religion” in such lation “brother.” Dr. Case gave evidence that it legal domains. It is Christianized secularity—that was important in Obeah practice to be truthful to which also further renders Christianity as tran- the Obeahman if the rituals were to be efficacious, scendental, which sets the framework for that defi- and that clients would expect anything they told nition. As a result, the court had an expectation the practitioner to remain confidential. that its religiosity had to be publicly verifiable Finally, in a written report prepared for the through a statement of religious observance. It Crown but put into evidence on the voir dire by had to be public and open. To address this gap, the defense, Dr. Frances Henry, professor emeritus the court interrogated a range of expert witnesses of Anthropology at York University and an expert on the definition of religion in order to establish in Caribbean spiritual practices, pointed out the the legitimacy of Obeah as a religion.11 widespread belief among Obeah adherents in the A lengthy pre-trial motion was held to deter- existence of duppies and their daily influence in mine the admissibility of Mr. Campbell’s state- the natural world. She viewed the Applicant, on ments to Mr. Carty as religious. Four expert the tape, as convinced that he was “in the hands witnesses provided evidence that the sessions con- of an Obeah practitioner” who was attempting to ducted by Mr. Carty were, in their essence, reli- remove a duppy from him. In cross-examinations gious. Father Thomas Lynch, a priest and of these experts, the Crown emphasized that the University of Toronto Theology professor, testified Applicant had sought protection in advance for that Mr. Carty’s actions suggested a “syncretistic” his crimes; that he had hoped to escape legal pun- religious rite of “undoing” the Applicant’s wrongs ishment for what he had done; that he hoped to —a kind of forgiveness. He viewed Mr. Carty’s be able to commit further robberies; and that he back room, with its altar and artifacts, as “a did not renounce his criminal behavior. The expert sacred space” comparable to a small church or witnesses acknowledged these features of the rela- chapel. The exorcism of evil spirits, evident in the tionship but denied that they removed the Appli- exchange with Mr. Carty, had a parallel in Catho- cant’s exchange with Mr. Carty from the religious lic practice. In cross-examination he pointed out sphere, noting the widespread Caribbean spiritual that a heartfelt expression of remorse for sin was belief that one’s temporal well-being is closely con- not required of a Catholic penitent and that escap- nected to, and influenced by, the presence of the ing temporal punishment by flight from the coun- spirits of the dead. try was “not necessarily exclusive” of a genuine Despite the scholarly evidence of the religious desire for forgiveness. nature of Obeah religions, the Ontario Court of Dr. Abrahim Khan, an expert in Caribbean Appeal upheld the conviction of the trial court, religions, also said that Mr. Carty was purporting and disallowed the defendant’s appeal that the to practice a form of religion, drawing on “a clus- Court review the evidence that the fake rituals and ter of phenomena that we’ve got some rough police surveillance of the defendant constituted a names for such as Santarea, Pokamania, Oresha dirty trick and offended the sanctity of religious and Shango.” He, too, viewed the practice as relationships between the client and the priest “syncretistic”—combining rituals from various (Johnson and VanVonderen 1991). Key here is other religions. Khan stressed the rituals apparent that unlike the Supreme Court which recognized in the videotape and the theme of protecting the the religiosity of Santerıa and protected the

136 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(2) religious interests of its adherents against govern- with sacred oral texts such as Ifa or the informa- mental interests that might undermine the free tion revealed during a trance become “evidence.” exercise clause, the Canadian court disallowed the To consider those religious practices that emerge free exercise of religion, citing their decision to not from American or European Christian cosmolo- recognize Obeah as a religion and not to recognize gies as the norm in court hearings is to superim- the disguise of the priesthood as a “dirty trick.” pose Western epistemologies upon different yet Marlon Rowe was convicted of first-degree impactful ways of knowing. Moreover, it causes murder. the Court to predetermine what counts as viable Where experts, such as anthropologists, are evidence within cases dealing with African and called by courts to serve as cultural mediators, it is African diasporic religion. But because of the important to make sense of the ways that these Court’s current assumptions about reality, Evol mediators articulate religious and cultural defini- Robinson and Ruben Pinnock’s lawyer can argue tions, as well as the ways that courts translate that, “the impossibility of any harm actually these social science concepts in their attempts to occurring through the mechanism of prayer or decide cases. Ultimately, these experts are part of spells in the real world precludes a finding of [un- the making of these subjective states and in that lawfulness or conspiracy]. Harm or obstruction by process they, too, shape the legibility or illegibility ‘spell’ is an imaginary crime not encompassed by of how we come to constitute Black Atlantic attempts or conspiracy to commit a crime. There orisha, Obeah, and voodoo practices that—by is no likelihood in the material world of it causing their very histories of trans-Atlantic slavery—have harm.”12 This claim would falter if the Court con- been driven underground and rendered secretive, sidered legitimate the African worldviews inherent especially in North American multicultural con- within Obeah, because what constitutes the “real texts. Such forms of translation or cultural media- world”—its limits, mechanics, and agents—would tion highlight the limits of the law in making sense suddenly denominate the defendants’ prayers as of the subjective states of actors, especially in rela- possible evidence of intended harm. The burden of tion to their religious worlds and religious experi- proof would lie with the Defense to indicate that ences, and they also reveal the role of experts in their client’s spiritual intentions did not correlate shaping new forms of governance and the conceal- with an attempt to cause an unlawful outcome. ment of genealogies of religious formation. What is interesting here is that the efficacy of reli- The legal limits are connected to the inability gion has been complexly addressed. There are a of law and legal actors to know or demonstrate a range of examples where divination has been used point via evidence. Thus, certainty is based on evi- as a form of legality in African systems—where dence. When Western epistemologies, especially spiritual harm has been considered a crime, where modern science and philosophical definitions of the practice, for instance, of making zombies was reality, become the court’s presumed worldview, outlawed in Haiti13 or Obeah convictions enforced “evidence” includes solely those objects or argu- historically in Jamaica14 and quite recently in Tri- ments verifiable within a North American or Euro- nidad.15 pean intellectual framework. This approach This reality of the making of religion in partic- renders an Obeah worldview unintelligible because ular ways through its erasures or invalidations it emerges from various indigenous African episte- highlights the role of the technocratic manufacture mologies which take seriously the concept of a of religious practices in relation to what consti- spirit world whose permeable border with our spa- tutes religion and why. This technocratic process cio-temporal realm enables innumerable spirits to raises questions about how expert witnesses grate interact with and influence the outcome of human against or compliment the Court’s intellectual his- endeavors (also see Ochoa 2010; Santo 2015; tory. For instance, the expert witnesses in the Matory 2009; Beliso-De Jesus 2015). Prayer, ritual, R. v. Rowe case presented conclusions about the and herbal remedies become efficacious for healing religiosity of the Obeah session recorded by the and, if so designed, for harm. Furthermore, Afri- police that concurred with the definition of reli- can epistemes often include geomantic and/or gion produced by a Western intellectual history. mediumistic divination, oral resources that remain Abrahim Khan, a professor of religious studies, untenable within Western paradigms but are the found that the recording demonstrated the exis- primary means for verifying truth in African tence of a religious setting but his conclusion worldviews. Indeed, within autochthonous African involved comparing Carty’s interaction with the knowledge systems, the results from a consultation client’s to confessionals between a Catholic priest

Kamari Maxine Clarke 137 and a parishioner. This comparison upholds Dur- used to marginalize Obeah, thereby designating it kheim’s framework presupposing that religion as a non-religion. The contrasts between Clarke required a church. In this way, though Khan sug- and Beverly’s approaches to the Obeah question gests Obeah is a religion, his methods still uphold and that of Khan and Henry’s illustrates how a particular Western intellectual definition of reli- expert witnesses actually participate in the (re)con- gion. Similarly, anthropologist, Francis Henry struction of religion. Expert testimony on topics noted the lack of “ritual behaviors” in the record- facing the Court intends to clarify something that ing, but claims there are elements of Obeah prac- remains unclear, to intervene and certify a fact. tice. It seems that Henry agreed with Durkheim’s Yet the Obeah case clearly shows that the moment assumption that ritual conduct is at the core of all of intervention often becomes a site of construc- religious practice. In effect, neither Khan nor tion. What we also see are attempts to re-establish Henry’s analytical process challenged the Court to the distinction between the secular and the reli- step beyond the bounds of its intellectual inheri- gious—that is, how the designation of something tance. Rather, the law was presumed to be absent as religious reifies the sacred/profane landscape of of cultural religious biases while also deeming the courtroom and law. This is akin to upholding Christian frameworks in which religion involves a the primacy of law of Man versus law of God church community, as potentially universal. The within theological arguments. tensions at the core of this issue emerged because The case study of R. v. J. Welsh, E. Robin- the prosecution argued that Obeah could not be son, and R. Pinnock illustrates the challenges of credited as a religion as it has no buildings, com- religious freedom for adherents of Obeah. This munities, or pre-established liturgy. Yet, the case was first heard before the Ontario Superior defense team insisted that it is precisely this type Court of Justice in August 2007 and involved the of religion that follows a different cosmological admissibility of evidence obtained from Obeah order that is most in need of protection. adherents by a police officer impersonating an In an attempt to pinpoint the unintelligibility of Obeah priest, in a case of alleged homicide. Here Obeah as a religion when forced to define it in rela- the disguised police officer approached the defen- tion to Judeo-Christian intellectual cosmologies, I dant and a family member with the goal of elicit- now turn to my expert testimony from the related ing criminal confession. The defendants sought to case of R. v. J. Welsh, E. Robinson, and R. Pin- have statements made to a police officer imper- nock, referred to earlier, that grated against such sonating an Obeah priest declared inadmissible Judeo-Christian biases at the foundation of Western on the grounds that the police behavior consti- definitions of “religion.” My attempt to challenge tuted a “dirty trick,” conduct defined as egre- the biases within the works of key thinkers such as giously offensive and antithetical to religious Durkheim and Geertz aimed to encourage the rights. Building upon the success of the Obeah Court to reconsider its perceived objectivity through sting in Rowe, the police used a police officer pos- which different conceptualizations of Obeah as a ing as an Obeahman as a vehicle for eliciting religion could be considered. Similarly, Dr. Beverly criminal confession. The defense claimed that reminded the Court that “Religious scholars have “the Crown in our case seeks to diminish the increasingly recognized the danger of according offensiveness of its investigative technique by cor- privileged status to religions simply because they rupting the relationship Leon [the fictitious name are mainstream and established.” Previous negati- assumed by the police officer] created between vity toward African and Caribbean religions such himself and the Robinsons [the defendant and his as Obeah has also been diminished by a gradual mother]—by having Leon request money and recognition that the alleged dark sides of these prac- offer to harm justice system participants” so as to tices have been overstated. render the relationship unworthy of protection Scholarly study of new and marginalized reli- (Bayliss 2007). Instead, the defense attempted to gions has shown how religious traditions, such as define the relationship as a religious one “during Obeah, have been misunderstood because of domi- which the subjects receive religious guidance in a nant and false perceptions about witchcraft, the fully justified expectation of confidentiality—no occult and esoteric traditions.”16 Beverly’s argu- less than a Catholic penitent receiving the sacra- ment pushed against the Court’s intellectual his- ment of confession” (ibid). Meetings in this case tory by emphasizing the biases involved in were argued to be religious in nature and constructing religion as a category. His testimony involved elements of Obeah ritualistic practice, also calls the Court’s attention to the vocabulary initiated by the posing officer.

138 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(2) In this matter, the Crown ruled against the cultural difference while also setting limits for the defendants. Evidence obtained by the officer under exercise of democracy. Here we see that the trial false pretense as “Leon” was deemed admissible, judge’s finding is that the religious distinctions and the three defendants were later convicted of relied on by the Court of Appeal draws on what is the first-degree murder at issue. Among troubling essentially a Christian model of religion. By aspects of the evidence ruling, Ontario Superior emphasizing incidental attributes of mainstream Court Justice T.P. O’Connor found that “[w]hile religious practices, the Court of Appeal missed the the police conduct did interfere to a degree with core of the issue: “pastoral counseling,” “repen- Robinson’s religious freedom, it did not do so in a tance,” “confession to sin,” “divine forgiveness,” manner that was more than trivial or insubstan- and “spiritual cleansing” are all distinctly Chris- tial. He was not constrained or coerced in his reli- tian concepts. However, Christian religions vary in gious practice. The planted fake religious leader the extent to which they view confession, and did not interfere with his freedom to worship or God’s forgiveness, as conferring earthly protection express himself spiritually. In fact, Leon encour- and benefits on the penitent. In this case the aged him to believe in Obeah, to participate in the breadth of constitutional protections afforded to chanting, the use of candles and handkerchiefs suspects in contemporary, multicultural society is and the various rituals of the belief system, as only defined according to the Christian standards. then could he help him defeat those who wished The underlying premise of the ruling in both to harm him. While Leon was a fake, playing on courts is that if a person hopes a religious ritual the Applicant’s belief in his authority as a spiritual will yield a temporal (“secular”) benefit, his/her leader who could bring him positive benefits, i.e., purpose is for that reason alone not “religious,” protection from evil spirits and from prosecution, and the ritual is stripped entirely of its religious Leon did nothing to interfere with the Applicant’s character. This is a false dichotomy and points to ability or right to worship nor did he coerce him the inseparable nature of North American civil to disbelieve or disavow his religious beliefs” (R v. societies with Judeo-Christian core values in con- J. Welsh, E. Robinson and R. Pinnock ¶42.). Fur- ceptualizing the law and personhood. Many main- thermore, Justice O’Connor concluded that “even stream Christian denominations teach that ritual, if the undercover police investigation did restrict combined with faith, will be efficacious in sparing Evol Robinson’s freedom of religion as guaranteed believers from the deserved consequences of their under s. 2(a) of the Charter, the restrictions consti- actions. Many faithful Christians believe that their tute a reasonable limit demonstrably justified in a trust in God’s power and participation in church free and democratic society under section 1 of the rituals will lead to them being protected and even Charter.” The “clear harm to the effective prosecu- blessed in their secular affairs. Many other reli- tion of crime and the proper administration of gions have no concept at all of an after-life or any criminal justice, should this evidence be sup- divinity to whom confessions can be made, and no pressed, outweighs any potential harm to the rela- realm beyond the terrestrial. Yet those religions, tionship of pastoral counseling between the pastor too, presuppose that the observance of its rituals and his congregation” (¶ 74, ¶97). will ensure benefits to the believer. The ontological To date, the August 2007 Canadian Superior difference of African and African-inspired religions Court Judgment, on a motion to disallow evidence —as a source for theorizing religious experiences collected under false pretenses, failed before the across differences—is what creates the biggest Superior Court however, and the case is under challenge for the genealogical approach to track- appeal. In this case, like the other cases, the key ing this kind of religiosity. It is not supple enough issues reflect challenges to the contemporary state for tracking African diasporic religious fluidity: in managing religious freedoms in relation to for example, the making of community, self, and claims to North American religious pluralism. The place on multiple material and spiritual levels and court wanted to establish not only the definition tacks between being and becoming as an ontologi- of religion, and the legitimacy of the defense’s call cal sphere of meaning. This was the challenge for for client-priest privileges, but also whether the me when I also served as one of the expert wit- evidence collected was obtained under legitimate nesses in this case. grounds, thus admissible before the court (Clifford When given the terms of reference for this case, 1988). it became very clear to me that poststructuralist The cases also point to the challenges of the genealogical approaches to defining religion in rela- multicultural state to accommodate religious and tion to the constructed nature of religion as a

Kamari Maxine Clarke 139 concept were not going to be useful in rendering elements of religion according to the following Obeah legible before the court. Rather, as noted in components: my testimony below, I returned to a more rigorous • Belief in something sacred (e.g., gods or other systems analysis in my quest to define religion for supernatural beings). the court. As I explained: • Ritual acts focused on sacred objects. • A moral code believed to have a sacred or Religion, broadly defined, represents a sphere supernatural basis. of cultural meanings, practices, beliefs, and • Characteristically religious feelings that tend forms of social logics that enables people to to be aroused in the presence of sacred objects understand their social world. It ranges from during the practice of ritual. belief in one god to beliefs in multiple deities, • Prayer and other forms of communication spirits, forces, often involving rituals, codes of with the supernatural. ethics, and philosophies of life. One of the • A worldview, or a general picture of the world most widespread anthropological approaches as a whole and the place of the individual therein. to understanding religion in the social sciences This picture contains some specification of an was spearheaded by Clifford Geertz (1973) in overall purpose of point of the world and an indi- which he defined religion in a broadly sym- cation of how the individual fits into it. bolic domain as: “(1) a system of symbols (2) Then I explained the histories and intellectual which acts to establish powerful, pervasive developments that have influenced the definition and long-lasting moods and motivations in of religion historically, including: men (3) by formulating conceptions of a gen- eral order of existence and (4) clothing these (1) an understanding of faith in relation to conceptions with such an aura of factuality social collectives (Durkheim 1915); (2) an that (5) the moods and motivations seem anthropological articulation of religion as uniquely realistic.” expressed through daily ritual (Geertz 1973); (3) the social construction of reality in which In an attempt to make a connection between beliefs, meanings, and truth are shaped religious symbols, signs, and our communicative through the production of knowledge about modalities I explained that: the world (Asad 1993; Clarke 2004).

This approach to religion highlights the ways It was important for me to think about these that symbols and signs convey messages to us developments in relation to religious diversity and about the nature of our world. For religion the resultant complexities around which the spread enables us to communicate our worldview and and formation of Obeah took shape. I described gives us understandings about the connection such historical formations with the goal of high- between our worldview (how the world is) and lighting how not only are African diasporic reli- our ethos (how we live or ought to live) which gions shaped by histories of complex shapes our experience and frames how we interconnections with hegemonic world religions should respond to our experience. In this but that they are also products of ontological dif- regard, religion represents a manifestation of ference, shaped by the particularities of social life collective beliefs through which society might in the socio-political contexts in which they have be able to transcend itself by using rituals to emerged: express and regenerate society. At times this transcendence might take the form of enno- In African states today, large numbers of the bling paths of higher consciousness through population are Christian, others are Muslims, which members of society create religious others practice various world religions, and objects, ritual, beliefs, and symbols in order to others practice indigenous religions which produce a particular sphere of understanding. often involve the worship of deities and spirits associated with both the dead and the living. I clarified that at the center of most religions According to the definitions of religion articu- is a commitment to particular ways of defining the lated above, Obeah can be considered a reli- power of a force larger than oneself and through gion, in that we see that the definition of such explorations to use religious practices and religion refers to specific fundamental sets of beliefs to shape one’s social world. I defined the beliefs and practices (rituals and observances

140 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(2) of faith) generally agreed upon by a number highlight how a comparative approach to religious of persons or sects. In fact, to argue that practice seems to be more useful for rendering Obeah is not a religion because religious sys- intelligibility in court. Even those practices that tems require a system of established liturgy are the hegemonic standard are a product of com- and community rituals, or that the end result plex change over time. of its practices recast its religious form as something other than religious is to misunder- All contemporary religions are syncretic. Both stand the history of Obeah’s suppression in Judaism and Christianity originated within social life. (see Barrett 1974, 83) Middle-eastern cultural traditions and were brought to the West and the Far East cen- Accordingly, I explained how the Ashanti of turies later. The Christian church at-large rec- West Africa had a clearly defined system of reli- ognizes the Judaic roots of the religion, gion in which the Supreme Being, (Onyame), without which its message of Jesus’ relevance known as, Nyankopon, or Great One, existed would be devoid of meaning. One might argue alongside numerous minor deities or spirits (abo- that over the centuries, the truly syncretic nat- som) who acted as mediators between God and ure of Christianity was borne out in the multi- human beings. The Ashanti practice emerged from tude of social groups throughout the world a complexly sophisticated set of religious obser- from which a plethora of traditions have vances, which involved Nyankopon, the spirits, arisen. In his study of over 100 world reli- priests, and shaped daily affairs such as birth, mar- gions, Eternity in Their Hearts (1981), Don riage, death, and so on. In my testimony, I sought Richardson corroborates this point. World not only to limit my analysis to the older more religions are not static entities. They have been symbolic approaches to religion but also to detail recognized by academics, theologians, and the very complex analytics of anthropology of reli- practitioners alike to be fluid—evolving over gion and religious practice through which these time, along with the cultures within which “diasporic religions” took shape. they are expressed—and their adherents con- I began the next section with an examination tinue to use these religions to adapt to change of syncretism/religious change, in which it was and to make meaning of life. important for me to establish the term “syn- cretism” and its use in the social sciences and My testimony suggests that so-called syncretic humanities. My intent was to establish the term practices functioning alongside mainstream prac- historically as it refers to a melding together of tices are often constituted by them; religious prac- practices thought to be separate and distinct, and tices such as Cumina, Shango, Vodoo, Santerıa, how it has been used to identify new forms of and Condomble are examples of these syncretic practices such as Santerıa and Obeah. I discussed manifestations. They represent the fusing of the how a new anthropological definition of syncretic beliefs and practices of various ethnic traditions religions highlights the merger of African religious from various African countries (Barrett 1974) with practices prior to the transatlantic trade of slaves particular forms of Christianity present in the with Christian forms in the Afro-Atlantic world of Americas during the development of plantation plantation slavery. For example: slavery. The documented evidence that Africans on plantations were able to combine beliefs in Obeah[’s] roots grew out of the historical their gods with those of the gods in their new Ashanti culture in West Africa. As African world contexts17 makes a clear case for a more peoples migrated to different islands in the practical application of the comparative study of Caribbean (i.e. Jamaica, Suriname, Virgin African diasporic religions. Islands, Trinidad, Tobago, Guyana, Belize, As we see from the testimony above and the Bahamas), the religion took on different forms challenge before the Courts, at the core of the first in these distinct colonies, eventually merging two cases is the need to define religion and to with the religion practiced by the colonialists. determine which evidentiary rules should be Some commonalities in the religion remained, brought to bear on religious practices. It is neces- while regional differences emerged. sary to make sense of the ways in which defini- tions of religion both shape and are shaped by I ended by detailing the different ways to religious practice. These cases highlight how we think about religious practices and attempted to come to understand the making of religious claims

Kamari Maxine Clarke 141 in a moment in which “the religious” has been boundary between “‘true’ religion” and supersti- rendered recognizable within a framework of the tions, magic, witchcraft, and paganism; the term history of Christianity but in which new discursive distinguishes between primitive and civilized peo- strategies of institutional organization render invis- ple (Paton 2009, 2). More importantly, as Aisha ible traditions of practice in which self-professed Khan explains, religion functioned as a form of membership is not a necessary component. In power: other words, in Obeah, as in the Santerıa example to which I will move, the making of a church or a Power is always an integral dimension of reli- community is not the only way that members of gion, through (1) the distinction made, at least these religious groups gain standing. in Western traditions, between the material Also central is a question about the workings and the mystical, the kind of relationship nat- of democracy to protect those practices that out of ural and supernatural forces are perceived to historical conditions of modernity and the building have with each other; (2) the debates about of slave plantations were necessarily disguised and which interpretation of a given religion is cor- rendered unintelligible. The history behind the rect, legitimate, or superior; and (3) disputa- suppression of African-based belief systems in the tion about what kinds of forces (natural, Caribbean involves the conjoined twins of Euro- supernatural) can be determined “religious” at pean identity politics and religion. The continued all, which in turn has implications for the way marginalization of these practices through their we understand social and cultural phenomena. contemporary judicialization further demonstrates For imagining a priori that certain forces, how the validity of non-European cultural prac- events, and beliefs are firmly rooted in the cat- tices is disputed and the practices themselves egory religion actually reflects assumptions denied the ability to define their existence in rela- about the character of religious phenomena as tion to their own ontological context. Rather, their these are constructed out of power relations. existence became bound up with the production of (2004, 119) racial and ethnic categories of value and disregard. The example of the transatlantic slave trade is a Khan parses religion further, noting it oper- case in point. ates as a synthesis of “worldviews, beliefs, moral The transatlantic trade in human cargo and values, and consciousness that work together the plantation systems required the British, for according to particular cultural histories, social instance, to define how they differed physically, contexts, and vested interests” (ibid.). These inter- culturally, and ideologically from Africans. As twined components require dissection if one will Audrey Smedley explains, this process began in understand how Obeah, along with Black and Europe with English contempt for the Irish, a brown bodies, became the antithesis of “religion” population whose nomadic pastoralist lifeways and “man” in the West. Sylvia Wynter (2003) conflicted with British ideals of land ownership, decoded these processes in detail, summarizing the farming, and social status (Smedley 2007, 59). Latin-Christian Europeans’ centuries-long progres- Religion, especially protestant Christianity, became sion from defining the human as “Christian,” and a principal indication of one’s civility, read “hu- thereby a “religious subject of the church” (265) to manity.” Consequently, British civil society reified a “political subject of the state,” which she calls an idea of the “savage”: “He was lazy, filthy, evil, Man1, which later became “a bio-economic sub- and superstitious; he worshipped idols and was ject,” or in Wynter’s parlance, Man2 (318). Crucial given to lying, stealing, murdering, double-dealing, here are the “others” produced by these quests for and committing treachery” whereas “civilized the “self.” “Pagans” became the opposite of men...were sedentary and bound not only to the “Christians,” and people indigenous to Africa and land but to other men by laws” (ibid., 63). This the Americas became “the physical referent of the rubric for the savage became a taxonomy for idea of the irrational/subrational Human Other.” Black and brown bodies in the Anglophone Carib- (ibid., 266). Economically disadvantaged people of bean through the use of racial categories.18 While color, especially in North America, functioned as colorism played a role in the European’s bias opposites to “the jobholding Breadwinner” (Man2) against indigenous African and Indian people, reli- (ibid., 321). gious differences became an equally important cat- With respect to the Obeah case, it is useful to egorical tool. In keeping with Enlightenment consider how Wynter’s thinking pinpoints how thinking, the word “religion” marked the Western religious constructs position any non-

142 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(2) Christian belief as non-normative. She argues the contemporary assumptions about religion, reality, West’s Man1 and Man2 dissolve any supposed link and rationality itself. Acknowledging the preju- between human ontology and religious concepts. dices and historical events at the basis of the Furthermore, the Christian Heaven–Earth binary Court’s perspective on African and African-based stratifies the natural world from the celestial, and religions requires us to inspect current cases for the body from the soul. Many indigenous African their institutionalized reliance on this intellectual religions, on the other hand, esteem the earth’s lineage. Given this history, what accommodations sacrality. Both Akan religion and Vodou, for should be made to incorporate religio-cultural dif- instance, deify the earth. These cosmologies pro- ferences into new legal considerations? duce ontologies wherein spiritual principles and It is clear that in a world of competing rights divinities themselves render the body paramount. claims developing theories of religion that make The ideological (and later scientifically reasoned) clear not just genealogies but the workings of tech- spectrum that positioned Black bodies and the nocratic productivity—and the concepts that circu- spirituality they practiced at the nadir of human late and render other concepts invisible—are all existence contradicts African worldviews, but as part of the reshaping of the meaning of modernity Wynter demonstrates, colonialism enabled the of religion in the contemporary present. But these West to reify human beingness according to its sci- formations are directly tied to the increasing use entific constructs and domains of rationality. As of expert knowledge as evidence in court cases such, the realm of the secular court, which governs (Boyer 2008, 2013; Carr 2010; Engelke 2008; religious meaning through predominant Christian Mertz et al. 2016; Sullivan 2015, 2016) or the way binaries, produces a terrain in which the other, that contemporary Christianity is being publicly “the heathen,” must be analyzed in relation to transformed through the demonization of Santerıa pre-existing normative standards of beingness— or Obeah by those from ancestral groups that are especially as it relates to the public dimension of also its historical authors. This is tied to the con- its practice. flicting basis for what constitutes acceptable forms Ultimately, the clash between seemingly Wes- of religious practice and highlights some of the tern and African ideologies and the power of most controversial issues of our time. European dominance afforded Judeo-Christian biases about religion to marginalize Obeah and its THE CONSTRUCTION OF THE “EXPERT” practitioners. Accordingly, Diana Paton (2009) AS A DOMAIN OF KNOWLEDGE AND noted that in the Caribbean, the definition of POWER vagrancy often included Obeah. Furthermore, The use of expertise in contemporary common law anti-Obeah laws in the Anglophone island colonies trials has its roots in early British litigation mod- emphasized “the fraudulent, gainful, or injurious els, long before the eighteenth century in which purpose for which this power was ‘assumed’” and experts were deployed by the court as juries or thereby led colonial governments to categorize decision makers. They were partial court agents “the Obeah practitioner as primarily a fraud or a helping the court to make decisions about cases charlatan” (ibid., 7). The language within the law (Golan 1997). However, by the eighteenth century reinscribed ideas about savagery and in return the courts attempted to constitute themselves through rubric for the savage infused racism into the law. assumptions of neutrality. Litigants engaged in the Often those arrested for practicing Obeah were production of a legal science of proof through the indeed Black people, thereby pinning Obeah’s development of evidentiary standards in which perceived immorality to the character of Black experts deemed neutral were called on in courts as Caribbean people in general. witnesses before juries. A famous civil case of Colonial laws rendered Obeah unintelligible 1782, Folkes v. Chadd,19 set a key precedent for not only by characterizing it as indicative of scientific expert testimony. This case, involving the immorality but also by aligning it with incivility, opinions of John Smeaton, a well-known engineer, and thereby, inhumanity. It became oppositional established the basis for the admissibility of expert to modernity. Multiple centuries of religious testimony in contemporary common law cases. By oppression in the Caribbean locate Obeah’s roots agreeing that the “neutral” expert could play a in Western intellectual history through a demean- critical role in shaping non-expert juries, what ing inheritance that is imbricated within Enlighten- emerged was the rise of an adversarial mode of ment reasoning and questions about human legality that took root in nineteenth and twentieth difference. Such realities have shaped century Anglo-American law.

Kamari Maxine Clarke 143 The nineteenth century civil trials were deeply was knowable as tangible and structured knowl- inundated by property and commercial legal chal- edge within particular certifiable domains. lenges shaped by complex uncertainties about how Today experts are called on by both defense to understand scientific evidence (Golan 1997, and the prosecutorial teams to offer analyses of 1999). With increasing interest in the application statements of fact by claimants. Their roles are of science in criminal matters as well, emergent widespread, ranging from criminal and civil cases patterns depended on scientific evidence for mur- to asylum and human rights and arbitration hear- der convictions.20 However, because of the wide- ings, to name a few (Anders 2014; Carr 2010; spread mistrust of science in the eighteenth Crane 2014; Ford 2016; Gershon 2012; Gibb 2008; century members of the public tended to be wary Levidow and Carr 2007; Mosse 2011). Key to the of the epistemological and ethical standing of emergence of such contemporary litigation needs is expert witnesses (Golan 1997, 1999). the production of a data-driven science structured It was not until the industrial revolution in the to clarify what can be known and what is early to late nineteenth and early twentieth century unknowable. The emergence of this domain of that the foundation of rules governing evidentiary knowledge production reflects struggles over the standards took shape through what Stephan Lands- measure and control of expert truth through the man called the convergence of a larger “adversarial rubric of science (Ingold 1996; Latour 2009, 2010; apparatus” that involved experts, jury evaluation, Latour and Woolgar 1979; Luckhurst 2006; Wil- and the deployment of hypothetical questions (ibid; son 2016; Zenker 2016). These domains shape the Landsman 1995). Thus, the role of the expert wit- construction of the subject, based on conventions ness emerged in the nineteenth century with the deemed legitimate. Yet, the anthropology of reli- increasing significance of a jury—as an “impartial” gion has stopped short in theorizing the ways that body of one’s peers—that was placed in situations experts, and not just religious experts, are engaged in which they were expected to make case determi- in shaping religious assertions that are then taken nations based on very little knowledge. Alongside up by practitioners in religious articulations. This the growth of an expert legal category among those reality highlights the need for constellations of in the bio chemical sciences, the growth of psycho- linkages between religion, law, and realities of logical and then human sciences emerged as a way their products that circulate in some of the most to assess the inner mind of the individual and to expected and obscure spaces. determine “criminal” culpability (see Herbart 1891, [1824]; Ladd 1894). PRODUCING RELIGION THROUGH The early twentieth century saw the rise and JUDICIAL CONTESTATION: SANTERIA standardization of the human sciences as ways to RITUAL know and measure social groups and individual Over the past two decades, another issue related behavior (Hale 1980; Hamilton and Godkin 1894). to evidentiary questions and the making of legible By the mid–twentieth century, social sciences, like religious practices taken up by courts has involved sociology and anthropology, became popular the interface between the ritual practice of animal modalities for establishing evidence for those sacrifice and the attempts by US courts to adhere determining modes of culpability through under- to its constitutional and international treaty obli- standings of the normal social order. The second gations. In the U.S., Santerıa rituals involving ani- half of the twentieth century led to the construc- mal sacrifices have raised legal questions regarding tion of the “neutral” expert—as scientist, scholar, the freedom of religion and its limits in the man- doctor, practitioner. The expert became critical to agement of public safety and animal rights. The the increasing significance of an assumed objective landmark case of the Church of the Lukumi Babalu scientific knowledge in which determinations for Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah 508 U.S. 520 (1993), truth were procured through the active formation brought before the district court in Florida, held of the adversarial court model of the twentieth that “the ordinances [against the rituals under century (Golan 1997, 1999). Such a model question] had three compelling secular purposes: depended on particular scientific ways of knowing (1) to prevent cruelty to animals; (2) to safeguard that over time became increasingly aligned with the health, welfare and safety of the community; public expectations of neutral and objective and (3) to prevent the adverse psychological effect knowledge claims (Jones 1994; Peak 1801; Stephen on children exposed to such sacrifices” (Backer 1883). These modes of knowing rendered what 2008).

144 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(2) Many followers of Santerıa argue that the ani- Supreme Court where the ruling was made in mals are treated carefully, killed humanely, and favor of the state of Oregon. The central premise most often eaten afterwards. Some have pointed of the ruling established that the law against the out, by way of comparison, the widespread inhu- use of controlled substances was not targeting reli- mane treatment of animals on commercial farms. gion; rather, it is one that is “neutral and generally Others have pointed out the general acceptance of applicable.”22 sport hunting and other practices involving killing In 1992, a coalition of diverse religious groups that are secular in nature (Drinan and Huffman who were dissatisfied with the Smith decision cre- 1993). The counter-argument regarding health con- ated a bill titled the Religious Freedom Restora- cerns underscored the lack of evidence that there tion Act,23 which they presented to the House has been any spread of disease from the disposal Subcommittee on Civil and Constitutional Rights. of animal carcasses in the areas in question. Fur- The decision of Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye thermore, Santeros asserted that the sacrifices, v. City of Hialeah thus restored the Free Exercise which are a principal form of devotion, have been Act of the First Amendment to its pre-Smith state, part of their ancestral ritual practices for over one which was the goal of the proposed Religious millennium (Robinson 2009). Freedom Restoration Act.24 In this way, the 1993 In response to a number of city ordinances outcome of the Hialeah case not only granted San- enacted at the time the church announced plans to terıa practitioners the right to perform animal sac- build a house of worship, practitioners “filed this rifice within the limits of the law but it also suit under 42 U.S.C. 1983, alleging violations of expanded the interpretive framework of the Free their rights under, inter alia, the Free Exercise Exercise Act to its earlier state. Clause of the First Amendment” (ibid). The Dis- To date, and over fifteen years later, cases trict Court acknowledged that the enacted ordi- underway illustrate continuing challenges to the nances were not religiously neutral but ruled in free practice of animal sacrifice by Santeros and favor of the city, “concluding among other things, the way that the non-mainstream and secretive that compelling governmental interests in prevent- aspects of the religion render it illegible to the pro- ing public health risks and cruelty to animals fully tection of the law. Most notable among such cases justified the absolute prohibition on ritual sacrifice is that of Jose Merced, President of Templo Yor- accomplished by the ordinances, and that an uba Omo Orisha Texas, Inc., who sued the City of exception to that prohibition for religious conduct Euless, Texas over municipal ordinances that pre- would unduly interfere with the fulfillment of the vented him from performing ritual animal sacri- governmental interest because any more narrow fices. The Washington-based Becket Fund for restrictions would be unenforceable as a result of Religious Liberty spearheaded the appeal in which the Santeria religion’s secret nature. The Court of they launched a defense over whether municipal Appeals affirmed,” (ibid) and the case was taken ordinances are neutral and of general applicability. to the Supreme Court, where the judgment was In contrast, Euless asserted that it is “not reversed. Lukumi” and its practices that it is countering; it Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City does not object to the fact that Jose Merced wants of Hialeah established precedent with a Supreme to keep and kill animals in his home. It objects to Court decision in favor of the plaintiff and over- the “kind and number of animals Merced wants to turned an earlier Supreme Court ruling in Employ- keep and kill there” and argues that Merced is ment Division, Department of Human Resources of thus “treated no differently on account of his reli- Oregon v. Smith (No. 88-1213), which essentially gion than he would be if his proposed activity overturned what is known as the Sherbert Test were purely secular in nature.”25 To be specific, that was used to ensure a balance between state the City of Euless would permit Merced to sacri- and individual interests.21 In Employment Division fice a specified number of chickens but not goats v. Smith, the question of religious freedom was or other livestock. However, as Merced explains, raised when two members of the Native American according to religious prophesy, “You cannot do Church were fired from their jobs as private drug initiations without an animal with four legs. You counselors for ingesting peyote during a religious cannot do it with just chickens. Without that, the ritual. The Department of Human Resources religion ceases to exist” (Deleon 2007). Employment Division denied the plaintiffs their Additional challenges to the practice of ritual unemployment claims, arguing they were fired due animal sacrifice and animal dumping have taken to misconduct. In 1989, the case was argued in the place in Coral Gables, Florida; Orange County,

Kamari Maxine Clarke 145 Florida; and Torrance, California. Some of these sense of the ways in which what counts as religion cases have resulted in raids and individual arrests both shapes and is shaped by religious practice. In on the grounds of animal cruelty. And as of Santerıa, people do take on new birth dates, March 23, 2010, a bill (No. A10387) introduced names, families, spiritual kin, and so forth and its by in the New York State Assembly was adopted publics are in plain sight but are made private by to amend the agriculture and markets law in order semiotic codification. Thus, its ontology is seen to create a central registry for those convicted of through the expansiveness of its self and commu- animal abuse. At the core of these debates over nity-making, which generates changes that are animal sacrifice as expressions of religious freedom embodied, recognized by those who understand its versus cruelty to animals are democratic principles semiotic meanings, experiential and foundational that allow for the legal restriction of religious free- for making sense of how practitioners come to doms only if there is a justified or compelling rea- constitute themselves. These practices take shape son and those reasons are “narrowly tailored to not in “private” per se but through what James advance that interest” and do not burden, single Scott (1990) referred to as “hidden transcripts.” out or suppress a particular religious practice. They highlight ways of understanding particular Rather, in the Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, religious claims in a moment in which “religion” Inc. v. Hialeah, the Court held that the ordinances or “the religious” have been rendered recognizable were not narrowly tailored because they advanced within a history of Christianity. New discursive governmental interests only when the conduct was strategies of institutional organization render invis- motivated by religious beliefs—the health risk of ible traditions of practice in which self-professed animal sacrifices to participants, the emotional membership is not a necessary component but injury to children who witnessed the sacrifices, the reflects forms of community-making and member- need to protect animals from unnecessary killings, ship. As mentioned earlier, in Obeah, as in San- and the need to restrict the slaughter of animals to terıa, practitioners are not required to ascend into areas zoned for slaughterhouse use. But also cen- a new institutional domain of practice in which tral here is the role of ordering subjects, especially one must break from the past and become a differ- in relation to taxonomies of cruelties, species and ent form of person. The distinction between a pri- appropriate practices. Donna Haraway (2015) and vate inner space of worship and a space of secular Danielle DiNovelli-Lang (2010) have usefully clari- public life untouched by religious conviction is not fied these in relation to taxonomies, empathy, relevant. The making of a church or a community companionship, and spiritual genealogies. is not the only way that members of various spiri- Through these various cases, we see how the tual groups gain standing and are seen as appro- unintelligible aspects of Santerıa as a religion priate practitioners. Rather, Obeah and Santerıa which requires sacrifice as key to its ritual compo- practices are operative through individual engage- nents is rendered illegible to the state and requires ment with multiple worlds—spiritual, bodily, and translation and veridiction in order to make sense so on—thus the invisibility of their practitioner’s of its cosmologies of existence, its taxonomy of engagement with rituals are as important as their acceptability/cruelty. Seen in relation to the secre- visibility with them. In that regard, mapping tive nature of Santerıa practices such taxonomies genealogies requires assumptions of historical legi- highlight the centrality of “the private sphere” as a bility among practitioners whose ritual missions space of its ritual prestige and as key to its foun- have always involved elusiveness and secrecy. dations of sacrifice. Among millions of Santeros Yet, what we also see here is the manifestation spread throughout the Americas, this space of of religion through its power to define itself as ritual prestige—the realm of the individual and fundamentally private. The Christian impetus to “the private,” “the secretive,”—is critical to reli- privatize religion through frameworks that under- gious expression. The fact that these cases involve write religion as a function of one’s inner life (But- the public (legal) scrutiny of a critically private ler et al. 2011, 71) requires that we rethink notions religious realm makes them extremely fraught. of the public outside of delimitations that frame it Central to the cases detailed above is the con- in relation to secular exteriorities and religion as temporary challenge of defining religion before private interiorities. These tensions between reli- various North American courts and determining gious legibility, frameworks of visibility and mani- which evidentiary rules should be brought to bear festations of practice are at the center of the issues on those practices. They also attempt to make with which I close.

146 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(2) BEYOND GENEALOGIES OF RELIGION: witness, the key issues raised in the overwhelming REVERSE MISSIONS AND NEW CHRISTIAN majority of these cases highlighted the challenges PUBLICS to the contemporary state in managing religious The third domain related to the manifestation of freedoms in relation to its discursive claims to plu- religion has involved contemporary challenges ralism and legal protectionism. In social theory, connected to the types of innovative practices that the 1990s move to constructivism (the study of the have emerged and transformed the public–private construction of social reality) and post-structural- conceptualizations of religious life. Here I end ism (the study of the concept of “self” as a singu- with the claims of adherents to religious freedoms lar and coherent entity, as a fictional construct and their relevance in asylum cases throughout the with conflicting tensions and knowledge claims) U.S. and Canada. In these cases, the defendants has led to the move from a crisis in representation use information about the very religious practices to a passionate need to marry real world chal- being reclaimed by others in the Americas as the lenges, transnational bodies, and traveling prac- basis for invoking evil, violence, and potential tices and products with articulations of those danger. A large number of these cases have enactments as always constructed. The gap in the involved Middle Eastern, African, and Asian relationship between social theory and engaged immigrant defendants whose conviction for crimes practice has led to crises in North American in U.S. courts have led to deportation proceedings courts. As a result, it has called on us to articulate or whose asylum cases before Canadian courts social theories that reflect the complexities of prac- address the dangers for the Applicant if he/she is tice and their uses. As we see by the asylum seeker sent back to their home country. One such case is case, notions of religion were claimed as rights that of Ayodeji Odumosu v. Immigration and Natu- and were petitioned to be protected. Yet even their ralization Service. United States Court of Appeals concept of religion itself is also strategically for the Seventh Circuit. 11 May 1994. Here, Mr. deployed, struggled over, contested, and produced Odumosu’s appeal for asylum was denied by the in particular regional zones and discarded in Board of Immigration Appeals and taken to the others.27 U.S. Court of Appeals. Given these competing challenges before the Mr. Odumosu sought asylum as a refugee, court—the interplay between different approaches defined by the INA § 101 (a) (42) (A) as a person and meanings of traditions and the cultural pro- who cannot return to his or her country “because duction of those practices—it is clear that contem- of persecution or a well-founded fear of persecu- porary religious claims are being reclaimed tion on account of race, religion, nationality, through new public articulations and are reshaping membership in a particular social group, or politi- the meaning of religion itself. In a world of com- cal opinion.” Mr. Odumosu claimed that he had peting claims, especially when court decisions can been initiated into a traditional Yoruba cult lead to human danger and even death, we must group, the “Organization Ogbhoni,” a “very secret develop theories of religion that can also have powerful organization” of which his father was a practical application and legibility. Indeed, the member.26 Odumosu testified that he feared perse- public articulations of religion are doing a differ- cution and probable death by cult members if he ent type of work. The asylum seeker’s characteri- were to return to Nigeria, as he had been desig- zation of “African tradition,” and of the peoples nated as his father’s successor but refused to join and cultures connected to particular African reli- the organization. He also stated that he feared gious practices seen as “barbaric” and “back- persecution in Nigeria because he was a Christian. ward,” are made in relation to the importance of In denying the Appeal, the Court relied upon the the Western courts to intercede in the name of State Department’s advisory opinion that Odu- human rights and individual freedoms. Such artic- mosu “did not have a well-founded fear of perse- ulations of the heritage religions as “backward” cution, as one-third of the Nigerian population highlight not only the way that African diasporic was Christian and that, although religious differ- subjects and practices have been historically con- ences may lead to ‘inter-personal discrimination,’ structed but also the way that new publics are ‘there is no government-inspired nor government- emerging and reconstituting those narratives condoned persecution on religious grounds in rhetorically through the reformulation of them- Nigeria’” (R. 90).24 selves as “born-again,” pious, “enlightened” In the hundreds of cases that I reviewed and a rights-bearing citizens who are committed to number of them for which I served as an expert reframing the way that enlightened Africans

Kamari Maxine Clarke 147 should be seen. Through these discourses, invoked own not encompassed by straightforward with conviction while also strategically, various genealogical accounts. What we see is that reverse claimants articulated their commitments to their missions and the public nature of Africanized religious conviction through the reclamation of Christianity provide ways to go beyond religious Christianity through its professed emancipatory subjects as purely artifacts of the legal imagina- possibilities (Comaroff and Comaroff 1997, 1999, tion. And while African Christian churches, like 2000, 2002, 2004a, b). the Aladura Pentecostal churches28 that worship Let us take Adewole, a former refugee from throughout West Africa, Europe and the Americ- Nigeria and one who saw himself as a reformed as, do not necessarily exhibit the types of behav- Christian. He described his practice as being open iors characteristic of reverse missions, the for everyone to see and distinguish his practice negotiation of Esin Ibile (traditional Yoruba reli- from Obeah by saying that “Obeah is not a reli- gion), especially by women, provides the epistemo- gion. It is a medicinal approach that can involve logically “Yoruba” aspects of the new practice. bad intentions or good intentions.” For Adewole, These postcolonial Nigerian conceptualizations of Obeah means “bad medicine.” But through his traditional practices can sometimes render tradi- own reformulation of Christianity and what he tional practices unintelligible. What we see is that sees as enlightened traditional rituals he “prayer,” as a modality of cleansing and purifica- approaches his religious practices with “a free tion, provides the central way to deliver the practi- heart, a true soul and truthfulness.” When I told tioner from evil forces seen as rampant in him about the Robinson case and the various “traditional spirituality” and daily life. Through other impersonation cases, he indicated that “if prayer, practitioners engage in prophesy and call there is a case involving evil and lies, then it either for divine intervention against evil spirits and, as must come to light or it should be thrown out.” such, engage in the further taxonomies that distin- He continued, “there are two basic people in the guish between particular practices as “good” and world—good and bad, or otherwise understood as others as “dark,” “demonic” and “evil.” It is these those who ‘know’ and those who do not ‘know.’ contemporary revivalist Christian formations, such Among those who do not know—we should leave as Aladura and reformed Christianity that might them and let them be. Ours is not a religion of be seen as extensions of earlier missionary excur- active conversion. They may eventually come into sions into Africa but if traced genealogically would the light in this life...if not, it’s not their destiny. render unintelligible the complexities of knowledge For those who know, they are the ones who come forms deemed “traditional.” to their destiny from the spirit world. Some of Genealogical approaches to religion have pro- those people are ‘Christians’ and they come to us vided the field with the armature to make sense of for things. Some are down and out and have the relationship between social constructs and nowhere else to turn. Ultimately, we change lives. power. By mapping the coming into being of cate- But Obeah, I’m not sure that it has the ability to gories and concepts, such approaches render visi- change lives for the positive. It’s practice is from ble the formation of practices that are sometimes Ghana and it has had a history of bad doing— taken for granted. However, what we are seeing in witchcraft—devil work... No Nigerians would be the contemporary period is that the production of willing to support it. If it’s a religion, it’s not a “religion” today is conjoined not only with good faith religion. It’s secretive and harmful.” genealogies of knowledge and power but also with Here we see how some discourses about Afri- the making of portable concepts that have the can diasporic religion in the public sphere travel power to deny practices like Obeah, spirits, and with various Nigerian Christians involved in witches their place in knowledge production pro- “reverse missions” (Olupona, 2007, Olupona cesses. This is happening through the reformula- 2014). It highlights how new narratives about tion of new pious subjects worthy of “saving” and appropriate forms of religiosity constitute different “redeeming” through asylum processes. What we subjects whose lives are shaped by complex syn- see, therefore, is the emergence of particular legal cretic elements and judicial categories, but whose practices rendered legible through the widespread reformulation of Christianity has come into being rights language and new ways to manage and reg- through practices and values popular in the public ulate the contours of religious freedom in the con- sphere. These alternate readings of religion offer temporary period. Yet, as artifacts of the scholarly us opportunities to ponder the ways that religious imagination, practices such as Obeah and Santerıa knowledge produces new cultural products of its produce linkages between religion, law, the state,

148 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(2) and ultimate expressions of practice, and represent legible the subaltern practices under examination distinctions and tensions between public and pri- (Povinelli 2002). vate worship. In summary, the genealogical approach, while Shifting the study of religion to its public useful, has limits when dealing with the issues that manifestation involves the relationships between arise with marginalized peoples and practices— categories of knowledge, power, and subjectifica- such as Obeah and Santerıa—not readily intelligi- tion as it relates to the making of these social cate- ble to courts. Comparative approaches to the gories. The exploration of my expert testimony assemblages of fracture in African diasporic reli- through the reflections of my role in technocratic gions are critical for understanding the ways that productivity and recognition that particular meth- the making of the West through transatlantic slav- ods would render the object of inquiry unintelligi- ery has led to histories of rupture and consequent ble will hopefully move us closer to a theory of ontological inequalities. A re-conceptualization of anthropological praxis that involves understanding both the genealogy of religious knowledge and the the ways that these social categories operate and deployment of its expertise must not only involve the way they circulate. It highlights how academics the role of experts as knowledge producers for participate in relationships of knowledge and North American courts but must also acknowl- power through technocratic productivity and in edge the importance of not simply dismissing the doing so often foreclose various formations while category of “religion” as a historical, analytically opening others. The argument here is that the useful construct. It is crucial to recognize that “religion people see” shapes what we understand as colonial and Christianized histories of empire con- acceptable and believable. But how scholars study it tinue to render non-mainstream practices illegible, and profess its realities is a problem of method that and that in doing so they render suspect, on an requires disclosure and reflexivity about what is at ongoing basis, the everyday lives and customs of stake. If the experience of the spirit is ultimately those who claim those practices. The contempo- unknowable by others, the challenge that emerges is rary explosion of rights-based adjudicatory mecha- concerned with larger questions about ontology and nisms is one prime example of anthropological legibility. Using genealogies to track such forma- knowledge moving beyond theoretical dispute to a tions allows us to articulate that which is visible, position of genuine impact, a transformation that present and recognizable. Contested religious forms will continue to improve our understanding of the seen as “indigenous” are inseparable from the his- play of knowledge and power in relation to these tory of Christianity and colonization. Yet at times histories of inequality. In the realm of legal exper- both adherents and technocrats have demonized tise, a comparative approach to the study of reli- them and rendered them outside of the sphere of in- gion allows for the visibility of marginalized telligibility for the purposes of genealogical mean- beliefs and practices by granting them status, even ing-making. if questioned, in their own right. This in turn dig- The reality is that one cannot understand reli- nifies the practitioners of historically marginalized gions such as Santerıa and Obeah without the belief domains and provides the possibility for a backdrop of Christianity and colonial violence. more equitable administration of law. Despite this, one must also recognize how the very practices of making and regulating African dias- poric practices through Judeo-Christian frame- Kamari Maxine Clarke Department of Global works also led to the terms for the negation of and International Studies, Carleton University, African diasporic spiritual worlds. They operated Ottawa, ONT K1S 5B6, Canada; through legality only in terms of the history of [email protected] European modernity, its linearity, and its con- structed truths and histories. Given this, how we understand the contemporary explosion of Wes- tern governance attempts to manage religious ACKNOWLEDGMENTS practices deemed deviant and illegal requires that I thank for input from Kristin Bright, Mabinti we also rethink the role of a new twentieth century Dennis, Aisha Khan, Barney Bate, Aisha Beliso- trend in the establishment of expert witnessing in De Jesus, Venise Battle, Deborah Thomas, John religious and cultural cases. Yet this trend has its Jackson, Jacob Olupona, Francis Henry, Ronald characteristic contours in reifying classical cate- Jennings, Tina Palivos, Evon Clarke, Terry St. gories and analytics that will assist in rendering Denis, Sheryl Metzgner, Sean Brotherton, and

Kamari Maxine Clarke 149 colleagues at the Departments of Anthropology at such as a talisman or charm, used for evil magical Yale University and The University of Pennsylva- purposes. However, despite its fearsome reputa- nia, as well as the anonymous reviewers for this tion, Obeah, like other forms of folk religion or piece. folk magic, contains many traditions for healing, helping and bringing about luck in love and NOTES money. It contains various forms of religiosity, 1. It is worth noting here that there are many such as veneration of the ancestors, divination, moments in which rendering subjects visible and spirit possession, animal sacrifice, and at various invisible happened over the course of history. This times the incorporation of religious texts such as contemporary moment is instructive for thinking the Bible and some of its related practices. It high- of the role of rights language in both invisibilizing lights liturgy, elaborate rituals, and forms of theol- and articulating religious categories in particular ogy that attempt to explain the role of human ways. Another moment in Santerıa cosmology was beings in the world. These tenets that describe its the scientific movement known as Sprititualism in religious texture are relevant to social science and which processes of modernization contributed to anthropological understandings of Obeah as a reli- the rendering legible of various subjects. The abo- gion. See also Handler and Bilby 2001; Pulis 2003; litionist cause in the US during the 19th century Udal 1915; and Williams 1932. also emerged as another moment of legibility and 5. Clarke, M. Kamari. Expert Testimony invisibility. These developments are key to under- before Canadian Provincial Court. April 20, 2007. standing. 6. Among other groups, Yoruba natives were 2. Also see Native American Indian Claims abducted from Yorubaland in West Africa and and anthropological expert testimony. See United transported to the Caribbean countries of Cuba, States v. Diaz, 499 F. 2d 113—Court of Appeals, Haiti and Brazil, Trinidad, Puerto Rico and the 9th Circuit 1974; United States v. Washington; Dominican Republic, among other Caribbean Native American Church v. Navajo Tribal Coun- islands. Ritual animal sacrifice is a principal form cil, 272 F. 2d 131, Court of Appeals, 10th Circuit of devotion to an Orisa, or spiritual being or pres- 1959; United States v. State of Washington, 384 ence that is a manifestation of God (Olofi), and F. Supp. 312, District Court, WD Washington has been practiced as part of the Santerıa religion 1974; and Alto v. Jewell, Dist. Court, SD Califor- for over a millennium. nia 2015. 7. For more on how legal determinations cre- 3. For example, for Yoruba returnees such as ate conditions for how practitioners organize reli- Samuel Johnson, as noted in The History of the giosity in different ways, also consider institutions Yoruba (1921) written in the 1890s by a Yoruba such as pharmacology and medicine and their role Anglican priest educated by the Christian Mission- in helping to produce legible subjects. See also ary Society (CMS), we see an interesting example Paul and Beatriz Preciado’s discussion of Foucault of the role of nationalist movements in circum- in Testo Junkie or Sean Brotherton’s work in venting the relevance of genealogical approaches Revolutionary Medicine: Health and the Body in in constructing religious subjects vis-a-vis Chris- Post-Soviet Cuba (2012). tianity and African (inspired) religions. Yet, while 8. R. v. Rowe [in the Supreme Court of Johnson played an important role in taxonomizing Canada, Applicant’s Memorandum of Argument” Yoruba religion, he did so within a modernist tra- at Paragraph A.1.] jectory by which notions of nationalist tropes were 9. Rothman v. The Queen referred to in R. v. part of the story of Yoruba origins. Rowe, paragraphs 49 and 50. 4. In some Caribbean nations, Obeah refers to 10. Section IV of Chapter One, “Definition of various African folk religions with admixtures; in Religious Phenomena and of Religion.” other areas, Christians include elements of Obeah 11. This finding has many precedents. For in their religion. In Jamaica, slaves of West example, the Five-Percent Nation believes that Ashanti descent used the Ashanti term “Obi” or only ten percent of the world’s population under- “Obeah” to describe the practices of slaves of Cen- stands the truth of existence. These elites control tral African-descent. Thus, those who worked in a the remaining 85 percent by keeping them igno- Congo form of folk religion were called “Obeah rant of this truth. The remaining are the Five-Per- men,” practitioners who used their religion to cent Nation whose role is to enlighten the rest of resist the power of those who had enslaved them. the population. The Five Percenters provide a Obeah also came to refer to any physical object, challenge for the courts in that they have been

150 TRANSFORMING ANTHROPOLOGY VOL. 25(2) recognized as a religion in New York (see Patrick Obeah in St. John’s. The police entered the men’s v. Le Fevre, 745 F. 2d 153, Court of Appeals, 2nd property with Search Warrants and confiscated Circuit, 1984) and as a “security threat group” in several objects alleged to be used in Obeah ritual New Jersey (see Fraise v. Terhune, 283 F.3d 506 practices, which are crimes under the Obeah Act, [3d Cir. 2002]). Cap 298 of the Laws of Antigua and Barbuda 12. Factum for Her Majesty the Queen vs. (Antiguan Police Arrest Three for Practicing Evol Robinson and Ruben Pinnock, “Obeah Obeah, Times Caribbean, November 11, 2015). In Motion,” 38. 1931, Daniel Young was convicted in Trinidad for 13. For historical cases involving the arrests “obtaining money by the assumption of supernatu- of those practicing zombification and other Vodou ral powers.” Young’s case is significant because it practices in Haiti see Spencer St. John (1884). shows that people who were prosecuted for Obeah Hayti or the Black Republic. London: Smith, Elder during this period were using magic and healing and Company; Anon (1864) “Horrible superstition rituals from a variety of sources, not only from of the Vandoux heretics”; and Kate Ramsey Africa but also mixed with European mystical (2011). The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power practices (https://obeahhistories.org/daniel-young- in Haiti. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. trinidad-1931/) Accessed January 15, 2014. For 14. Historical cases from Jamaica include: The additional historical cases, see the following head- “Woman of the Popo Country,” Jamaica 1770s. lines in the Gleaner: “Arrests Made,” March 10, Copies of certain of the evidence submitted to the 1916; “Fined £20 on Obeah Charge at Montego committee of Council of Trade and Plantations in Bay,” September 8, 1927; “Arrested on Obeah the course of their enquiry into the state of the Charge at Alley,” September 26, 1930; “Here and African slave trade, 1788, BT 6/10, folios 182–190; There in the News,” April 30, 1934. Also see sev- Polydore, Jamaica 1831 Proceedings of trials of T eral press cuttings from unnamed newspapers House, Polydore, and Industry convicted for located in a scrapbook kept by Deputy Inspector Obeah. Howe Peter Browne, Marquess of Sligo, General of Police, JA, John Henry McCrae, Governor of Jamaica, Jamaica No. 315, folios Jamaica Archives, Spanish Town 7/97/3, ff. 63, 65, 355–375, The National Archives, UK, CO 137/ and 133: “Arrests for Obeah in Clarendon,” “A 209; Rose Ann (Mammy) Forbes and George For- Baker’s Dozen and a Word of Praise for the bes, Jamaica, see “Charge of Practicing Medicine Clarendon Police,” July 28, 1899; “Crime in against a Woman.” Gleaner, August 5, 1910 and Clarendon”; and “Obeahism Extraordinary.” For “Cases in the Mandeville Court” Gleaner 7 April more detail and discussion of these cases, see 1916; Cindy Brooks, Jamaica 1964, see “Woman Paton and Forde 2012. The number of cases in fined 25 for practising Obeah,” Daily Gleaner,26 Jamaica and Trinidad fluctuated depending on March 1964. Also see the Obeah Histories: several factors including political agitation and Researching Prosecution for Religious Practice in pressure from the press as a result of campaigns the Caribbean website. Accessed on January 15, directed against Obeah. Policy decisions among 2014—https://obeahhistories.org/ high ranking police officers also affected the rate 15. On October 4, 2014, Abeomi Jeremiah, a of arrests and prosecutions of Obeah practitioners. nine-year-old boy in Longdenville, Chaguanas, In 1898 the Obeah Act was passed in Jamaica, Trinidad, was found in his bed motionless with which resulted in a sharp increase in arrests during candle wax on his ears, eyes, and face. The police the following year. For example, in Clarendon, arrested the boy’s twelve-year-old sister, who they aggressive crusades resulted in thirteen convictions suspected performed necromancy, an Obeah ritual in the parish that year (Paton 2015). See also Bell used to communicate with the dead. Police reports (1893) for more historical background on Obeah indicated that Jeremiah’s mother, Ingrid Francis, in the West Indies. smelt smoke coming from the room around 16. The word, “occult” exemplifies the pro- 11:30 p.m. When she entered the room, she found duction of a negative meaning mapped onto a Jeremiah’s sister with her hair on fire along with a term in order to describe a religious group(ing). wardrobe that was also burning. The girl was It’s Latin root “occultus,” as the Oxford English released two days later due to a lack of evidence. Dictionary explains, means “secret, hidden from The girl was not brought to trial (Sookraj 2014). understanding, hidden.” In itself, the term does In another recent case, Sandeep Gangadharaiah, not denote evil or witchcraft; however, these mod- Krishna Chennai Madras and Manjunath Govin- ern associations reflect the West’s stipulation that dappa were arrested and charged for practicing public practice defines religion. Dichotomies such

Kamari Maxine Clarke 151 as public/private and positive/negative, wherein 24. Ibid. public is to positive as private is to negative, stand 25. Appellees’ Brief. Jose Merced v. Kurt Kas- at odds with indigenous African and Afro-diaspo- son; Mike Collins; Bob Freeman; City of Euless. ric religions. The latter belief systems claim spe- 26. Ayodeji Odumosu v. Immigration and Natu- cialized knowledge is hidden from understanding; ralization Service, United States Court of Appeals one must earn it. Thus “secret” groups with “hid- for the Seventh Circuit, 11 May 1994. Accessed on den” initiations, apprenticeships, and rituals January 15, 2014. http://www.unhcr.org/refworld/d remain central to African and Black Atlantic reli- ocid/3ae6b6cb18.html. gious practices. 27. See Anthony Good (2004a,b, 2007, 2010a, 17. Yet, despite these various shifts in the b,c) for more on expert evidence in asylum and manifestation of various African religious prac- human rights claims. tices, there remained what some scholars refer to 28. The word “Aladura,” prayer people, refers as cultural retentions (Barrett 1974; Beliso-De to the formation of various West African indepen- Jesus 2015; Buisseret 2000; Capone 2010; Farris- dent churches whose identity is shaped by their Thompson 1984; Herskovits 1941) but what in a belief in divine healing, Holy Spirit baptism as more refined sense represents particular traces of well as prayer. Central to this faith is the belief older forms of practices. It is these older forms that through prayer one can be saved from evil. that are today present and operative in Santerıa, Voodoo, and Obeah contemporary practices. 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