Sensual Knowledge
This chapter proposes a novel approach to our understanding of sensing and being in the early modern Atlantic world. Early modern black Caribbean ritual practitioners intensely fashioned new “forms of being in the world.” There exist, after all, multiple manners of sensing and shaping an apparently stubborn reality. The chapter shows how black Mohanes fundamentally fashioned novel ways of sensing the early modern Caribbean world. In the absence of common linguistic and cultural grounds, the chapter shows, black Caribbean ritual practitioners became involved in a new sensorial imbrication of Atlantic threads of all origins. It was through this essential process that Caribbean Mohanes fashioned routes for making perceivable the spiritual and social landscapes of their new land. These paths and ways of sensing were fundamental for the modeling of the experiential revolution of the seventeenth-century Caribbean.