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SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, hosted by me, Alexandra Miller. Strictly Facts teaches the history, politics, and activism of the Caribbean and connects these themes to contemporary music and popular culture.

Why Obeah Gets Stigmatized

Meet Historian Katherine Gerbner

SPEAKER_01 0:21

Hello, hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of Strictly Facts, a guide to Caribbean history and culture, where we explore the Caribbean's past and present through the stories of people and the cultural traditions that have shaped us and who we are. I'm your host, Alexandria Miller, and today's episode takes us into a topic that I think has long been misunderstood, has been sensationalized, and really unfairly stigmatized in a lot of ways across the region. We're specifically talking about Obia today in today's episode, but this also, in a lot of ways, in terms of the stigma applied to several other traditions and religions across the region, and also across the African diaspora in general. But getting back to our episode today, across the Caribbean, African-derived spiritual and healing traditions have often been framed through a colonial lens. They've been reduced to superstition, criminality, or even fear. These narratives were not accidental, they were very intentional and produced and maintained through slavery, colonial law, and European religious domination as a way to undermine African cultural power. Also to disrupt communal knowledge and delegitimize the spiritual practices that sustain enslaved and freed people. Even after emancipation, that stigma has remained shaping how people today speak about Obia in public, how governments regulate it, how communities internalize shame around their ways of being and definitely cultural inheritance. But, you know, today's conversation is to, in a sense, to sort of unpack that a little bit, especially given the new work that we're going to discuss with our guests today. But before we get into that, I just also want to mention that, you know, in a lot of ways, African-derived religions and spiritual systems are not simply relics of the past. They are definitely traditions living today that are tied to memory, identity, healing, and resistance. And as part of recovering Caribbean history, as we usually do on strictly facts, that also means being willing to revisit what we've been taught to fear and to ask who has benefited from those fears in the first place. And so as I briefly alluded to, um, we are being joined today by Dr. Katherine Gerbner, Associate Professor in History and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota, and the author of new book, Archival Eruptions, Constructing Religion and Criminalizing OBIA in 18th Century Jamaica. Gerbner's book brings forward newly uncovered archival materials that allows us to see OBIA in Jamaica from a different perspective, one rooted in a deeper historical context, which we'll unpack today. And so, Dr. Gerbner, thank you so much for joining us for this episode. Why don't you begin with sharing with our listeners a little bit more about yourself, your connection to the region, and what inspired your interest in religious studies, race, and freedom?

SPEAKER_02 3:22

Thank you so much, Alexandria. It's uh really a delight to be here today and to talk to you about um Obia and this new book. So, as your listeners have heard, my name is Catherine Gerbner and I'm a historian at the University of Minnesota. And my interest in the Caribbean really stemmed from my research. So I grew up in Philadelphia. And when I was initially doing historical research, I actually wanted to study the history of Quakers and slavery in Pennsylvania, so where I grew up. But what I very quickly realized is as soon as I started digging into the sources, is that I just kept being brought down to the Caribbean. Like all roads led to, especially um in the 17th century, Barbados, uh, Jamaica. Uh so the Caribbean was really the center of the English Empire during that period. And so I followed my sources and began studying Caribbean history. And this really uh just captivated me, you know, in graduate school. And then uh in my first book, and now in my second book, I have focused on different areas of Caribbean history. So Barbados, uh, this book is focused on Jamaica, uh, but I also have research on the the US Virgin Islands, what was the Danish West Indies? And so, yeah, in my first book, I looked at sort of the role of Christianity in the establishment of slavery and white supremacy. So looking at the formation of race and its uh relationship to religion. And in this book, I turned to Jamaica and you know, found these sources that nobody had seen before that I thought shed new light on the history of Obia. And I felt like it was a really important story to tell. And that's sort of how I got into this project.

What Obeah Meant Before 1760

SPEAKER_01 5:10

Thank you so much for being here. Um, I think it was a very interesting read for me, as you said, because it brings about new archival information. Um, but also in a way that, you know, we're still very much contending with Obia Fra from a, I don't want to say comical in a jokey way, but it is, it is sometimes used in that fashion, depending on the context, right? But it's also villainized, as I mentioned, it's also stigmatized largely. Um, and I don't even know fully how much of Caribbean society understands that trajectory. Um, and the fact that it even goes so far back as you've pointed us to um in this book, I think oftentimes people immediately think of the 1898 Act. Um, but it goes much further than that, as we're going to talk about today, as far back as 1760. But I I definitely, for having done this research, I wanted to first ask you before we sort of jump into the book, given our sort of um cultural understanding of Ubyah and religious understanding of Ubia today, I think people would draw certain, as I said, you know, certain conclusions about those who are um practitioners of Ubia, um what they are doing, because you know, oftentimes African-derived religions are associated with rich craft and spells and all of these things that um obviously are casting a particular shadow on the practices and the people who also partake in these practices. Um, but I've sort of wanted to hear from you. How do you yourself, um, having done this research, define Ubia and its historical importance to the region and how that sort of differs from the stigmas that we have against it today?

SPEAKER_02 6:55

Yeah, thank you. This is such an important and also such a difficult question when you are uh trying to define a practice that has sustained literally centuries of oppression. So, you know, as you mentioned today, there's a lot of stigma around obiyah, you know, as this sort of like scary black magic, right? That's sort of the normative understanding of the practice. And um, historically, however, this was not the case. And this gets us into sort of a major issue uh studying the history of obia, right? So as we mentioned earlier, obia was criminalized in 1760, right? So very, very long time ago. And it was after Tati's rebellion. So this is the largest slave revolts in the 18th century British Empire. And it was in this context after uh this rebellion that truly did threaten the control of the islands, that colonial authorities passed the new law. And this was intended to prevent future uprisings. So there are a lot of different components to the law, but there was a section specifically devoted to obiyah because the colonial authorities were convinced that rebels had used Obia to support the rebellion. So this is where you see Obia defined as a wicked art. It's compared to witchcraft. There's actually a really interesting history there that they couldn't call it witchcraft because it was also, you know, they weren't supposed to believe in witchcraft, uh, but they they sort of associated it with witchcraft. And what you see here is that they believe that Obia practitioners had aided the rebellion, um, and that's why they made it illegal. So what we have here is an anti-colonial practice. That's the most important thing. Um, that was seen as a threat to the system of slavery and a threat to colonial government. And um the question then is clearly, you know, they are not seeing obiy in the same way as practitioners. And how can we understand what obium meant at that time and also before it was actually criminalized? And that's where sort of my research comes in because I found this reference to Obia from 1755 that had never before been found. And it was um actually written by a newly arrived Moravian missionary who sort of did not understand, he was sort of an outsider in many ways, and he spent nearly all of his time with Afro-Jamaicans. And so his description of what Obia was was as a prophetic practice, right? And he was actually called um obia by people who joined the congregation, and he embraced this term. And so what we see here is a completely different sort of idea of what Obia was and what it meant, um, that I think actually encompasses, you know, religion, encompasses practices of healing, encompasses community formation. Um, in the book, I use the term uh religio-political or religio nation to talk about sort of the sort of great significance of obiyah as a practice that brought people together, that bounds them together, that helps to create a new sense of community, a new sense of um understanding of the future. And um, because of that, would be used to bring people together in rebellion. And that is the reason it's criminalized. So, yes, there's a very long history there. Um, but it's really important to understand that the impact of criminalization has been really dramatic and that the reason it was criminalized was because it was anti-colonial and anti-slavery.

Why A Microhistory Changes Everything

SPEAKER_01 10:32

Thank you for pointing us in that direction. Because I think it also underscores a sort of central element in this book that I found very interesting, um, that it's written as a microhistory, right? And for our listeners who aren't familiar, depending on your reads, or if you've heard me say various titles of books on this show, uh, you know, I might say something like the book title from, you know, 1760 to 1960 or what may have you, right? I think from my perspective and some of the other texts that I've read on Obia thinking, especially of like Diana Um Patton's book and several others, they're kind of that sort of more um large-scale macro history, if I if I'll frame it that way. Um, but this is what written as a micro history, and as you can all probably gather from the the word itself, it's focusing on like a smaller subject or smaller time period sort of thing. And archival eruptions really situates us in this five-year period. So 1755, when as you were uh mentioning, Zacharias George Carey sends his first letter via the Moravian church, and then also this um 1760 moment when Obia is outlawed after Tacky's rebellion. And so for you, you know, why was it important for you to tell the story this way as a microhistory, or what do we sort of learn about Obia differently from having taken a very specific look at this five-year period? And how does a microhistory also help us to understand what you call the space of correlation a little bit that existed between Obia and the Moravian church and Christianity at this time?

Christianity And Obeah Intertwined

SPEAKER_02 12:15

Thanks for that question. Um, because yes, I I decided to go really sort of narrow and focused. Um my first book was a macro history, you know, looking at over a century of Christianity and slavery. And this um I felt needed a different type of approach. And that was for a number of different reasons. I mean, first of all, as I kind of alluded to before, there are very few archival references to obia before it was criminalized in 1760. And because I found this one from 1755 that no one had looked at, I thought it was absolutely important and that it sort of offered a different window into the meaning of OBIA. Um, I thought that this was really important to dig into. And I think the second reason that a microhistory is important is because as we've sort of discussed, and you know, I have a lot to say about this, but archival documents are problematic, right? Especially African diasporic histories, you know, the vast majority of sources that we have that survive from this period are written by enslavers, by colonists, by missionaries, almost all European men, right? Um, so that's a problem. How can how can we possibly tell a different history when this is what we have? So I really wanted to dig into this problem specifically and think about a methodology to read a missionary source for um what I call sort of an eruption. So, like this is the title of the book, archival eruptions. And one of the primary questions is trying to answer this sort of problem of the archive and the problem of silences in the archive. Is it even possible to tell a story that doesn't replicate and reiterate sort of the perspective of the person who's producing the archive? And I thought that I could do that, I could tell a different history, but it meant really getting into the granular detail of the production of the archive and then reading widely in sort of African diasporic history, literature, et cetera, in order to interpret the archival documents. So especially this reference to OBIA. So those were some of the reasons I wanted to do a micro history. I think a third reason, though, is that you can tell a much more intimate history. So one of the things that I can do with this Moravian archive, I mean, we have this reference to OBIA, but we also have church registers that denote the African nations of members of the congregation. And we have diaries written by multiple missionaries over multiple years where I could actually piece together the names of different people and start to tell different stories of both enslaved African men and women and also maroon uh men and women, and to sort of narrate a history that is not seen if we just sort of read the sources as the author wrote them, right? You kind of have to break them apart and put them back together and with sort of meticulous care tell new narratives. So, you know, in one of my chapters, I talk about a maroon woman named Marjorie, who actually is never named in the diaries of the missionary, but I found sort of one little reference to her name. Um, and then, you know, use that to kind of tell this story about the role that she was playing in sort of trying to create community and family um across this divide between the Maroon and enslaved people in the years before Takis revolt. There are other examples where a microhistorical lens offers an opportunity to just tell different histories. And I don't love the word recover, but I guess that is sort of what it is, right? Uh finding new people to tell their story and think about what their lives must have been like. And I think that's important. I realize you also asked about space of correlation. That was a very long answer to the first half of your question. Uh, but I think this is also a key term and part of my argument. So the space of correlation is a phrase that was coined by the art historian Cecile Fromant, um, and she uses it to talk about Catholic practice in the Kingdom of Congo. And basically what it means is that uh, you know, we tend to separate practices like obia from Christianity, right? And um, the reality is that in this period, Afro-Jamaicans viewed Moravian Christianity as a form of obiyah, right? They're not separate practices. And so this is this um space of correlation where, you know, a a ritual, um, you know, a missionary interprets it in one way, the same types of practices may be interpreted in multiple ways by multiple individuals. And so we should not kind of separate out obiyah from Christianity during this period. Uh, there was this very important space of correlation that you can see in the records.

SPEAKER_01 17:22

There are several things that you said that brought to mind. I think first off, again, sort of celebrate the work in a sense, because I found the approach given as a microhistory to be very intuitive in terms of the archives. I think depending on, you know, the subject or what is available, right? You might be discussing archives from a wide perspective, right? And you don't necessarily get to sit with them in the same way. And I found, you know, and even maybe this is sort of like a me having my own sort of, oh, this could maybe be a way I turned my dissertation into a book sort of moment type of thing. But I just, you know, echo what you said that being able to, you know, situate how these people lived in what some would call small time period um gives us a sort of definitely like a greater understanding of how Abia was understood, um, was a daily part of people's lives, and was drastically different, again, from the way that we're sort of conditioned to think about it as a religious practice. Also, another thing that I thought of in terms of this book is language, um, which I don't think we've we've talked about yet. Um, and so Carries is a Moravian missionary from Germany, um which I think adds another layer to how we understand not just the archives themselves, because they were in um a sort of archaic German language in a sense, but also I think added to the layers of our colonial histories in several ways, right? I think while Jamaica specifically was a Spanish and then British colony, I think we oftentimes pit those as sort of like the major quote-unquote colonial influences, or, you know, though those may be the places that we turn to immediately when we're thinking of archives on Jamaica, or, you know, it obviously works differently for other islands, but to sort of understand the also German context that Carries and other uh missionaries are coming from, I think is also something that I found interesting and maybe wanted to understand how he saw himself in this moment because as you mentioned, you know, he's saying that the people that, you know, the Afro-Jamaicans who become part of his church that he's working with and seeing on a daily life call him an Obi-Aman, they call him a seer or a prophet and sort of these things. And I wanted to know if you could share a little bit about what the archives, you know, that he's written sort of help us to maybe understand today his identity as sort of being described as an Obiaman. Like what did that mean for him and his understanding? Um, and what role did sort of race play in that identification of himself as an Obiaman? And also sort of what does that tell us about the depth of 18th century Afro-Jamaican communities to also then, you know, not limit their understanding of power and religion to their own blackness, in a sense.

SPEAKER_02 20:40

Um, yes, so much to talk about uh with language, with sort of the weirdness of this archive being in Eastern Germany and sort of the fact that that's why I think this history has been overlooked for so long. Um, but yeah, I'll sort of focus on the part of your question about Carries, who is this, you know, the first Moravian missionary to arrive on Jamaica. And it was sort of his letter in which he describes that he is called Obia that really got me started on this project. And so, you know, when I thought about what do I do with this weird reference, because Obia, throughout pretty much all other references and archives, is seen as like distinctly African practice, right? Um, or you know, Afro-Caribbean practice and not something that would be associated with, you know, a European Christian missionary. It's strange. I I think that that tells us something, right? And so one of the ways that I went about thinking about this was, you know, Carrie's he had a daily diary, so he just writes about what he did every single day. He writes about the interactions that he had. And so I looked at all of the months leading up to this reference to him being called an obiaman. So the way I kind of reconstructed, I guess you could call it the semantic field of obia was by looking at um sort of the the dynamic of those months. So what you see is that, you know, he's someone who Presented himself as a healer and someone who was sort of a spiritual practitioner for sure. But someone who actually went to people's homes and sort of aided the sick and the ailing, talked about, he called Jesus the great physician. That's a direct quote from his diaries. And he also sort of supported the creation of a community, advocated and supported members of his community and their sort of relations with overseers and other white people, you know, white attorneys, et cetera. And then critically, he's performing really powerful rituals such as baptism. And I think, you know, I have a whole section on baptism. Baptisms are practiced in many different, you know, religious traditions. It's not just Christianity. Christianity, they don't control all water rituals. You know, try to reinterpret this entire archive through the lens of obia rather than what I think we normally do, which is to sort of think about it through the lens of what is Christian and what's not. And I think that that offers us kind of a more complex, richer sense of Afro-Jamaican sort of intellectual, theological, cultural worldviews that isn't so confined, right? So, you know, if we think about Christianity as sort of a subset of OBIA instead of, you know, trying to fit obia into our categories of what is religion and what is medicine and what is witchcraft, et cetera, I just sort of systematically tried to kind of move to the side of those European categories and then think more broadly about the sort of complicated meaning of Obia during this time. So that that was another sort of methodological approach that I think was uh a bit different and important to do in a in sort of a micro-historical context so that we could see the texture of everyday conversations and relationship building, families who sort of make decisions together, et cetera. Like these little intimate things that actually I think are so important to the way we understand religion and and politics and um and all of this.

Criminalization Then And Now

SPEAKER_01 24:03

Certainly. I I agree. I think, you know, getting back to the kind of like cultural framing of Obia is something for us to fear and you know, stay away from it. It oftentimes feels like, and I'm this is not to disparage any parish or anything in Jamaica, but there is oftentimes this rhetoric of, you know, it being, you know, as you said, black magic, you know, but there's a obiyamana, obiyah woman in Saint Mary or wherever we may have you, and you know, you're going to them because you want something done to somebody, whatever. But I think to your credit, you break it down for us in these very lived ways that, you know, breaks down this sort of marker, not only for it as something to be feared, but just for us to understand that, you know, especially for enslaved people, you know, forcibly coming to Jamaica at this time and to the rest of the new world at this time, they're coming with their own practices, um, whatever that may have been, and whatever that sort of evolved into, because everybody was not from the same place in the continent, um, of course, right? And so whatever that sort of amalgamation of these practices come to be known as in the new world, or, you know, on the side of the Atlantic, what then becomes the rhetoric around them, you know, and as you you noted, are things that colonizers have placed upon um these traditions, right? Not necessarily the lived and everyday experience. And so I really appreciated sort of that breakdown for us and helping us understand that like, you know, you can't call a baptism, for instance, right, that's being done quote unquote by people practicing obia. It it just helped, I think, more generally, to sort of underscore um the way that these practices definitely developed as opposed to things to be feared. And I think that definitely also sort of like brings me to another question that I had for you because as we're talking about the sort of legal aspect of Obia in Jamaica, so we have this 1760 law where, you know, it's framed as, and this is a quote, guys, for those tuning in, um, it's an act to remedy the evils arising from irregular assemblies of the slaves, right? And so as you had pointed to earlier, um, that's a direct sort of using Ubia as something to be feared, quote unquote, because Ubia was thought of to help gain those that were participants in Taki's Rebellion, um, you know, the power, the courage, the solidarity to fight their enslavers. You know, these laws are still on the books. It's definitely gone through various iterations. So, as I mentioned, there's an 1898 version and so on and so forth. And it's something that I saw on social media. There were some, there was some work being done from people trying to sort of encourage the government. This needs to be something that we change. There is not necessarily the need for it, or not, I don't want to say need in that way. How about um we need to sort of reorient what we understand Ubia to be one, and then from sort of a legal aspect, like why is this still on the books? And I I mean that question is true for a lot of things in the region, um, but why is this still on the books? And also how can we sort of reorient um ourselves as a nation to sort of understand why these things even came into practice and how we should be moving towards understanding them better culturally. And so um, you know, OBIA still being criminalized, I think, is something that we still need to understand. And your book, again, also um tackles this criminalization as sort of a tool of violence. And um, that's also very important, I think, um, the shift from understanding of religion as being, you know, used to depict race and also police religion in Jamaica and maintain societal hierarchies. Um, so these are things that like we're still contending with today. How do you think both, you know, the transition and criminalization of Obia affect Afro-Jamaicans, both then and, you know, even today, especially those who were particularly part of the Moravian communities, as there is this change between understanding that Christianity was formerly described as like a Protestant thing to more so white people's religion.

SPEAKER_02 28:48

So, okay, I'm gonna begin with the sort of effects of criminalization and sort of the fact that phobia is still illegal, right? Which is um, you know, really interesting facts. And um, I mean, hopefully it will not be so for long, but you know, the resistance is still there. And I think that resistance does come from kind of um, it's a long-term effect of of what was set in motion hundreds of years ago. And I think, you know, my book focuses on the years before Taki's revolt and then looks at sort of the process of criminalization, but there's really great research that I also sort of draw on that actually analyzes how obiar as a crime has changed over time. Um, you mentioned Diana Payton's work earlier, and you know, her book on the cultural politics of OBIA really delves into this. And I think one of the important things to recognize about the impact and the changes to the criminalization of OBIA is that, you know, at first, the the law that you mentioned from 1760, it talks about irregular assemblies. And I think that this is actually a really important phrase because it alerts us to the fact that what was dangerous, considered to be dangerous about OBIA was the fact that it brought people together and that they were being bound together and then creating community, strong community through OBIA, right? That this is a communal practice. And one of the things that that first law does is it tries to individualize and materialize the practice of obia. So there's actually a list of all of these different objects that are associated with the practice of obia, you know, from gravedirt to parrot's beaks, you know, the alligator's teeth, like all of these different actual materials that make it more possible to police the practice of obia. And um over time, sort of this, I would say the the laws about obiar continue to sort of individualize it, um, make it into a practice that's about eventually about fraud, right? That you are fraudulently providing services and offering things to somebody, then that you are lying to them, right? So this is that's sort of what obia becomes uh later on in sort of the 19th, 20th century. This is sort of intentionally trying to erase the history of obia as a communal project. And that is the purpose of the laws. And, you know, we've seen them that they've been sort of successful, right, in this long-term stigma that that obia retains. Now I will say that I think that, you know, Afro-Jamaicans also, you know, it's not like they just stopped practicing obia. People changed the the name of their practices. You know, there's a interesting research on sort of the the rise of the term science is instead of obia. It's not like these go away, but then this term kind of gets ostracized and and criminalized and stigmatized. And that's that is the history that we see today. You know, one thing that I think is very also important is that it becomes from this period where you have a European missionary who's sort of embracing the term to the impact of criminalization, it does get increasingly racialized, right? So this is that's why sort of this, even finding this source was surprising to me, because then you have um, you know, this this sort of racialization of religious traditions, and umia is marked as sort of uh superstitious and and also kind of African. There is sort of that racial component that is a part of the criminalization process.

Hidden Archives In Old German

SPEAKER_01 32:23

I wanted very briefly to get back to the point on language, um, just as we're sort of unpacking the importance of archives here, because you know, if these uh archives were written in standard German, quote unquote, if I can say that, there may have would have been a potential for uh these things to sort of have come out a little bit earlier. Maybe, maybe not. We can hypothesize on that. Um, but having um been written by the Moravian missionaries, as I mentioned, an archaic German script, um, how do you think that this contributed to the silencing of the archives of these stories for so long? And sort of what was your personal experience working with this archaic language and having to, you know, transcribe and translate all of these pages?

SPEAKER_02 33:18

Yeah, you know, the history of the archive itself is sort of central to the story that I'm trying to tell about phobia. And um, there's a lot of ways in which knowledge is silenced and you know, forgotten, and um history is sort of we inherit only certain things. And the Moravian archive is an very unusual archive. As you mentioned earlier, you know, most people, if they're studying the history of Jamaica, for example, you need English and Spanish would be good, and but like they're maybe if you're gonna study other languages, it could be Portuguese or French, right? Like these are the dominant European empires of the Caribbean. And German is not on that list. And so when I first sort of discovered this archive that there were even sources that barely anyone had looked at that are talk about Caribbean history in the 18th century and they're in German and in this sort of strange script. Um, to me, it felt like, oh, this is actually a place where I can make a contribution. Because I just happened to be a person who knows German. I have taken orthography classes to learn how to read this German script. Um, for those who don't know, which is most people almost no one knows this, but the German language was uh sort of the alphabet, the way each of the letters was written, is not the same as the other European languages. And so you have to kind of learn these different symbols that represent A, B, C, et cetera, and then to, in order to read anything that was written by hand before 1940, it was actually not until World War II that Romans, that sort of the Romanized script was used by Germans. Um, and so I thought this can be a place where, with my sort of uh set of skills and interests and expertise, kind of offer something different to the conversation about uh Jamaican history, about Obia. So that was what I did. So for you know, many years I was reading through this, very difficult to read, you know, these manuscript pages and transcribing them. And one of the things I actually also did as part of my research was to uh make those all available online. For those who really want to get deep into the Moravian archive from the 1750s, uh, those are now transcribed into modern German. And also uh most of them I have actually translated. I actually think there are more of these kinds of documents, more of these kinds of archives. You know, I can talk all day long about the problems of the Anglophone archive and the way things are recorded. Um, but I think that history is very surprising and there are things hidden in places that we would never think to look. And I hope that people keep looking and then sort of when they find these um sort of off-the-beaten path archives uh to sort of do the work to make them accessible. Because, you know, I think we we can tell different histories, and that that is what I think this archive offers us for the history of OBIA. I think it's really important to think critically about how we read archives, but also look literally in other new places for archival records to tell different stories about the Caribbean and uh and other places.

Obeah In Pop Culture And Fiction

SPEAKER_01 36:31

Definitely, definitely. I fully agree. I think that point on language is definitely one I wanted to underscore, as we've said, completely different place out of probably most people's minds to to seek, you know, archival information on Jamaica. Um, but also there's this obviously added layer of sort of how we come to unpack these archives. And so I thank you for um that work of helping to unpack this. And I'll be sure to add it on our strictly facts syllabus for those wanting to check out the archives a little bit more intuitively. Um, I have to ask this question because it is my favorite question of all um in terms of strictly facts, but I think this one I found very interesting as I was thinking about it before recording because I can name a slew of songs that are obia related or, you know, Lee Scratch Perry, like Beanie Man has what I can the list can go, and it's not necessarily even, you know, just relegated to Jamaica. Like I can think regionally of songs that are showing us that Obia is definitely a central part of Caribbean life in many ways, in terms of how many times it shows up in our music. Um, but also to the point that we're sort of talking about in this episode, they are oftentimes following this sort of stigmatized um direction, right? That, you know, no obiyamine can't bother me because I've got God on my side. And I'll put them in our show notes for those who want to check them out. But I definitely want to hear from you, having done this research. Um, what is sort of your favorite example of obia or even just general Caribbean religiosity as it shows up in Caribbean popular culture?

SPEAKER_02 38:22

Yeah, um, well, I was thinking about this question, and I I decided to go with a novel that um I was reading sort of before and then uh while I was doing this research um that talks about obia, but it's also about rebellion and history and how, you know, the the histories from the archives are incomplete and sort of trying to imagine a different history, and that's um Marlon James's The Book of Night Women, um, which I just think is such a brilliant novel. I've actually taught it before. Um, and you know, again, Obia is in that book and it is an evil practice. But I actually kind of feel like if Marlon James read this book and then rewrote that, it would it would play a different role. Um, but I think that what is so important about that is I I think especially when it when we come to thinking about gender and religion, um, and gender and rebellion, oftentimes, you know, these are very like male authority is emphasized in archives and in sort of the stories that we tell. And he's sort of telling a different story uh that sort of reimagines the role of women, especially um in rebellion and and and in religion. And so that was one kind of uh more, yeah, the the novel that first came to mind when I when I read your question. But yeah, you're so right about the ubiquitous sort of presence of obiar um in music, etc. I love that question too. Thank you.

Rethinking The Obeah Christianity Binary

SPEAKER_01 39:50

Yeah, there are I was like, if I try to list them, then I'm going to to run myself ragged. Um so I will I will add them um on our strictly fact syllabus, as I said, you guys, but Book of Night women also came to mind. So I will add that as well for those who haven't read it. Um but to close out, Dr. Gerbner, I think, you know, our conversation alone, but um archival eruptions helps us, in my view, to really understand that like there is has been created this long-standing binary, right, between Christianity and Abia and other, you know, African-derived practices and you know, spiritual practices. How do you hope that um Caribbean societies at large sort of will benefit from understandings that many of these practices that have been criminalized, that have been demonized, that have um, you know, there have been these hierarchies drawn compared to um the colonial authority. How can we sort of, you know, through understandings like that in archival eruptions, help us to sort of draw more similarities or, you know, help us to reorient what we've been taught from a cultural perspective?

SPEAKER_02 41:08

Yeah, I think that this is um it's so important to realize that, you know, Afro-Jamaicans in the mid-18th century were not dividing Obia from Christianity the way that we do today. And I think that we have inherited kind of a definition of religion that is really colonial. And it's um, we are still sort of living in the uh the impacts of this the 1760 law that that criminalized obia. And, you know, if we can recognize that obiy is anti-colonial and anti-slavery, and it's not anti-Christianity, and it wasn't anti-Christianity in the records from before the the rebellion, then hopefully, you know, people today can kind of reassess their perceptions of the stigma of Obia and you know, and sort of embrace sort of this longer history and tell a different story about it because, you know, it definitely is noticeable to me kind of in the you know, the current debate about whether OBIA should be decriminalized or not. You know, there's a contingent of Christians who are really saying, no, you have to keep it as a it it is illegal and we should not decriminalize it. Um, and so I think this history especially maybe can speak to, you know, that community and sort of uh maybe have them rethink this longer history of Obia and its relation to Christianity, uh, because they were not oppositional. And I don't think they have to be oppositional.

Final Thanks And Where To Follow

SPEAKER_01 42:39

Beautifully said. Thank you so much for joining me, Dr. Governor, for this episode. I think one that is not only timely, right? But I certainly learned a lot from reading your book. And so for our listeners tuning in, it is linked in our show notes. Be sure to check out your copy of Archival Eruptions Constructing Religion and Criminalizing OBIA in 18th century Jamaica. It I think is not only a great read. Oh, so I definitely wanted to say to say that having had you on the show, but one that I think um, you know, we're still contending with as a society, and we have definitely learned a lot from, not just in Jamaica, but in the region as a whole. So thank you again for uh joining you, Dr. Garbner, for our listeners tuning in. We hope you enjoyed this episode. Again, be sure to check out your own copy. And till next time, look for more.

SPEAKER_00 43:35

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