Obeah and the Politics of Religion's Making and Unmaking in Colonial Trinidad
This article investigates the practices of itinerant Indian Trinidadian ritual specialists, sadhus and priests, and their contestations with colonial institutions over the definition of their practices. It examines on the one hand Indians' norm-bending healing and spirit working, often construe...
| Veröffentlicht in: | Journal of the American Academy of Religion |
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| 1. VerfasserIn: | |
| Medienart: | Elektronisch Aufsatz |
| Sprache: | Englisch |
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| Veröffentlicht: |
Oxford University Press
[2015]
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| In: |
Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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Volltext (Verlag) Volltext (doi) |
| Zusammenfassung: | This article investigates the practices of itinerant Indian Trinidadian ritual specialists, sadhus and priests, and their contestations with colonial institutions over the definition of their practices. It examines on the one hand Indians' norm-bending healing and spirit working, often construed as “obeah” or witchcraft in the Caribbean. At the same time, it looks at the role of laws that determined what practices got to count as religion, and the ways in which courtrooms became sites where religion was actively (though unequally) made and unmade, by both colonial elites and subalterns. By examining Indian ritual specialists on trial for obeah, the article analyzes Indians' participation in such religion-making: the construction and reinforcement of boundaries between reified categories and the redescription of Indians' ostensibly non-normative practices in accordance with regnant colonial norms for religion. |
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| ISSN: | 1477-4585 |
| Enthält: | Enthalten in: American Academy of Religion, Journal of the American Academy of Religion
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1093/jaarel/lfv022 |