Unsettling Science, Race, and Religion in an Era of Climate Crisis

When bringing non-Western knowledges into academic discourses on climate crisis, it is often assumed that Indigenous knowledge is emplaced, local, and animistic (treating “nonhuman” powers as animate).  Implicit in this characterization, is the idea that Western knowledge aims for a universal scope and de-animates nature.  In the context of the climate crisis, “modern science” either reveals the situation as it really is (i.e., the liberal rebuttal to climate deniers—“science is real”) or is responsible for treating nature as an inert resource, hence leading to contemporary environmental problems.  I take an ethnographic approach to the terms of this debate, comparing the work of Obeah practitioners who I call “spiritual workers” and petroleum geologists in Trinidad—arguably the world’s oldest site of petroleum extraction in the Caribbean region, which is often defined as “modern” even before Europe.  

Unsettling the terms of the aforementioned dichotomies in debates on climate change and the role of “non-Western” knowledge, both petroleum geologists and spiritual workers often call what they do science, and both kinds of specialists treat nonhuman, subterranean forces as lively interlocutors (albeit in different ways).  Rather than dichotomies of animistic religion vs. science, non-Western vs. Western, or local vs. universal, I found that geologists’ and spiritual workers’ divergent ethics of science centered on relations to the embodied risks of working with subterranean forces.    

When scholars have compared “African traditional religion” and “Western science,” they have often treated the terms of this comparison as racialized unitary entities.  Yet, in the anglophone Caribbean, “science” has long been a synonym for the popular term that denotes Africana religious practices of healing and protection (Obeah).  Initially identified as a motivating force for enslaved people’s uprisings, Obeah was criminalized across the anglophone Caribbean as “any assumption of supernatural power” (with Obeah remaining a crime in many independent Caribbean nations).  Scholars often conclude that the lexical equivalence between science and Obeah provides a legitimating mask for stigmatized practices. 

Based on long-term ethnographic research in Trinidad, however, I show how internal differences between those involved in “petroleum science” and “African religion” reveal a spectrum of meanings for the word “science” centered on relations to risk. At one end of this spectrum, science conveyed ideals of stable tradition that de-risked claims to knowledge for energy sector specialists intent on securing foreign investment or for “Yorubacentric” lineages of African religion centering initiation-based authority. At this spectrum’s other end, “science” foregrounded the risks of accessing hard-to-perceive forces in petroleum exploration or Obeah. In Africana spiritual work, the term science often communicated the potential dangers and powers of trying to heal and protect clients or enact justice. This lexical use of science did not express Western authority and objective truth, but the risks of working with (and using) nonhuman powers. In sum, by focusing on heterogeneous practices rather than cultural essences or ideals of rationality, I show how the ethical implications of “science” depend on differing experiences of the risks of working with subterranean powers. While petroleum surveys at my field site in Trinidad required embodied risks by laborers, geologists backgrounded these contexts of power, representing the risks of their work as a problem of scientific accuracy. Afro-Trinidadian spiritual workers, in contrast, foregrounded the embodied risks of their science as the ground for ethical practice. Acknowledging these risks lays the ground for a more nuanced ethics of responsibility in an era of climate crisis driven by the contested knowledge and use of subsoil powers.  

I begin this paper by providing more background on the lexical equivalence between “science” and “Obeah” in the Caribbean, and the relationship between Obeah/science and racialized debates about the limits of science, rationality, relativism, and inclusion. I draw on feminist science studies to show how “science” itself is not a unitary entity, briefly sketching the ends of a spectrum of meanings that I employ as an interpretive frame for the practices of both African-identified religions and petroleum sciences. I then delve into the ethnographic comparison between energy sector specialists and spiritual workers in Trinidad to show how these interlocutors, whether labeled practitioners of “science” or “African tradition” in popular discourse, navigated a spectrum of certainty and risk by performing “science” in different ways. I close by dwelling on the ethical orientations afforded by different sensibilities of risk—as epistemic uncertainty versus embodied threat. I focus on the divergent exposures to embodied danger that geologists and spiritual workers face, arguing that this difference matters in determining different stances toward the ethics of subsoil extraction in an era of climate crisis.