Graveyard Physicians: The Politics of Healing in Revival Zion Religion

How might we understand health and healing if we started, not from a hospital or clinic, but from the graveyard? This paper explores this question through historical-archival and ethnographic analysis of  Jamaican Revival Zion’s “Physician’s Order” and its physician-healers. While Jamaican Revivalists are often viewed through an afrophobic lens that imagines them as perverse necromancers gallivanting in graveyards under the cover of dark, conjuring the dead for nefarious works; this paper reframes Revivalists’ relationship with the dead, through what I term, their graveyard etiology. Within this paradigm, disease, affliction, and misfortune, originate in the land of the dead, as it did for their Bakongo ancestors. Simultaneously, the land of the dead is also the source of powerful remedies for affliction. As such, the paper shows how the graveyard, as both a tangible physical site and a semiotic referent, is central to the healing, health, and well-being of the community.