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.

Astounding Creativity

This chapter explores black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ use, classification, and production of wonders in the seventeenth century. The chapter argues that wondrous events established the foundation upon which black Caribbean experiential epistemologies about nature became cemented. The Caribbean’s baffling realities were anything but stable. The chapter shows how Caribbean ritual practitioners drew from their own traditions while creating new meanings with their awe-inspiring acts; they did not simply duplicate representations of preordained, episteme-bounded signifiers of Old World origin. Witnesses to black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ reality-creating rituals could not help but feel viscerally amazed when these men and women flayed open the skin of the world to reveal its mysteries. Their ability to astonishingly master nature imbued each ritual practitioner with the social capital necessary to validate his or her diagnoses, healing procedures, and preparations. The wondrous nature of Caribbean lands allowed black ritual practitioners to claim authority over material truths in a world where facts remained difficult to articulate formally within multicultural and transitional societies.

Conclusion

Between July and September 1816, José Fernandez and a team of Spanish royal functionaries inventoried a large and precious set of boxes in Santa Fé de Bogotá.1 The 104 boxes contained thousands of paintings and descriptions of botanical, animal, and mineral specimens collected over twenty-five years by a team of natural historians, botanists, geographers, chemists, painters, royal functionaries, and hundreds of “empiric” women and men charged with exploring and recording the “harsh countryside” and “wild forests” of New Granada and Venezuela....

Truth and the Experiential

The chapter examines the fundamental transformations to ways of knowing the natural world effected by black ritual practitioners in the seventeenth-century Caribbean. During this pivotal period, black Mohanes led an epistemological revolution in which the experiential replaced first principles as the basis for Caribbean ways of knowing truths about the natural world. Experientially based forms of producing and consuming medical knowledge proved essential to the creation of Atlantic nodes of knowledge production in spaces like Cartagena. Black Caribbean epistemological spaces in which the experiential overcame old dogma, even if experientially-based, were conspicuously located outside the boundaries that natural philosophers defined.In the early modern Caribbean a heterogeneous group of ritual practitioners of African descent arriving from Europe, Africa, and the New World experimented with new materials they found in the Americas and formulated material, conceptual, and social practices based on Caribbean experiential findings that they designed to interpret and establish authority over a natural world that encompassed the moral and the spiritual. As the chapter shows here, black ritual practitioners’ ways of knowing the natural world and bodies were intrinsically related to the development of novel Caribbean experientially based ways of articulating the nature of truth.

Social Pharmacopeias

This chapter traces the strategies that Caribbean ritual specialists used to create substances and objects with bodily effect. It shows how ritual practitioners modeled the power of medicinal substances and power objects on the basis of myriad encounters with cosmopolitan therapeutic communities in Caribbean lands. The power of healing substances resided in the tactics that practitioners used to claim privileged access to nature’s secrets, to its blessings and terrifying truths. The chapter shows how the tracing of the history of seventeenth-century Caribbean materials with bodily effects necessitates the plotting of maps of social realities and competition that go beyond a study of European appropriation and interpretation of “exotic” materials.These substances’ effectiveness was inextricably linked to the local realities within which practitioners deployed them. Caribbean substance specialists worked in communities that were unstable and continuously engaged in exchanges and appropriations. The specialized and complex powers of the substances and power objects they crafted for specific Caribbean rich and vibrant social spaces were, thus, not always geographically portable.

Movement

Caribbean spaces were nourished physically and culturally by their sea links and a vast network of terrestrial connections uniting small rural settlements and larger urban spaces like Cartagena and Habana. Free blacks and slaves frequently traveled between different caribben locales, and between urban settlements and rural areas in the region, where they had contact with maroon blacks. These elastic, unbounded migrations proved to be journeys of historical consequence. The chapter explores how black ritual practitioners and their cosmopolitan practices of knowledge production about the natural world moved within this vibrant world. It argues that black ritual practitioners’ claims about the world emerged from local particulars that fostered an adaptive praxis predicated on the experiential. Early modern Caribbean epistemologies about the body were shaped not only by ritual specialists, but also by their patients. The chapter shows how this was a population that was highly mobile and exposed to ideas and treatments coming from all over the world. In the Caribbean, this amalgamating culture was driven by the imperatives of creating new healing techniques that could be deployed under myriad biological, political, cultural, and economical circumstances.

Landscapes

This chapter describes the sanitary conditions of the seventeenth-century Caribbean, the diversity of ideas about illnesses, spaces for healing and diseasing, and the multitude of practitioners who operated in this context. It introduces a Caribbean geography of health and disease, the contours of which appear familiar, but upon closer scrutiny morph into unsettling spaces. Rather than being mere reproductions of Old World hierarchies and dynamics, the chapter shows, Caribbean landscapes of healing were created anew through the multiple encounters that occurred between mostly black historical actors in the highly competitive cultural economy based on the experiential that developed in the region. These were arenas in which a variety of actors deployed multiple visions of the natural, cultural, and social world of the early modern Atlantic. The multiplicity of origins of practitioners of African descent implies that analysis of their historical circumstances cannot be contained in simple dialectic terms of continuities, ruptures, or coarsely defined hybridities. By unmasking muddying labels and maps of social and physical landscapes conceived through Old World imaginaries, we begin to perceive the countless ways in which black Atlantic actors usurped canonical and mundane spaces in which to enact their own corporeal encounters.

Arrivals

This chapter describes the larger historical and social context in which Caribbean epistemological transformations concerning the natural world and human bodies transpired. These transformations directly resulted from encounters that occurred between the thousands of people who arrived in the Caribbean from all over the globe during the early modern period. Most of these immigrants were of African descent, and by the end of the seventeenth century they had transformed the Caribbean into a cosmopolitan place where a new type of blackness was normative—one that used African inspirations to invent new realities. The chapter shows how Africans’ appropriation of the social and cultural landscapes of the Caribbean depended not only on the population of the realm of the living, but also of the underground. Otherworldly colonizers, the dead, represented powerful forces in Caribbean locales where cultural and social mores shaped by people of African descent were normative.

Introduction

After much delay, Bernardo Macaya finally arrived in Cartagena de Indias in late October 1675. The chief constable of the city of Portobelo in Panama had hastily arranged for Bernardo’s departure to Cartagena shortly after taking office some weeks before. The magistrate had heard worrisome notices about Bernardo during his time in Portobelo and had discovered equally disturbing accounts about him in paperwork left by the previous constable. Bernardo, a thirty-four-year-old West Central African slave of “Congo caste,” was a feared and renowned ritual practitioner operating around Portobelo. The chief constable was worried that he would not be able to keep Bernardo in prison or, worse, that he would end up like his immediate predecessor in office: dead. His fears were eventually realized by the events surrounding Bernardo’s departure from Portobelo....