On Katharine Gerbner's Archival Irruptions: Construction Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica

“In December 1760, Obeah became a crime.” This assertion opens Katharine Gerbner’s Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (2025) The criminalization of Obeah is the centering historical event in this careful study of religion, crime, nation, and race. Through structured discussion with the audience, this roundtable will offer a ranging discussion of large-scale problems in the study of religion. What is a religious tradition and how does it relate to another religious tradition? What does a conversion include and exclude? How does state law decide what is religiously possible? What can the study of religion teach about what archives show about religious experience? How does a nation differ from a religion? Our plan is to host an audience-with-readers conversation about the major conceptual challenges of this historical work.