This Caribbean-themed panel explores the quest for freedom through spiritual embodiment; healing and wholeness; and state sovereignty. The papers in this session takes on the parallels and convergences of Lwa (S/spirits) in Vodou and the Holy Spirit in Christianity in building community, Jamaican Revival Zion’s “Physician’s Order” and the graveyard technology of physician-healers, and the newly independent Jamaican state’s use of the suppression of Rastafari community at the center of the Coral Gardens Massacre of 1963 to perform independence while maintaining colonial scripts. The three papers offer innovative disruption and reconstruction of freedom by interrogating performances of power in community-building through spiritual divinity, healing and wholeness through graveyard medicine, sovereignty through marginal group suppression.
This presentation explores divine energy and presence through the Lwa (S/spirits) in Vodou and the Holy Spirit in Christianity, focusing on their roles, interactions, and manifestations. I introduce "Vodou-Spirit hermeneutics" to analyze spirit possession, the embodiment of the Lwa, and the anointed Vodou community. Examining Vodou songs and prayers, I draw parallels to Christian pneumatology, employing Craig Keener’s Spirit Hermeneutics and The Mind of the Spirit, along with Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen's concept of plural pneumatology. I propose a "Multi-Spirit Cosmology" and "Pneumatological plural experiences" to further this analysis. The study also questions whether the Lwa align with the divine attributes of the Christian God, referencing Karl Rahner’s theological framework. Finally, a comparative study highlights differences in ontology, power, and authority between the Holy Spirit and the Lwa, examining their cosmic significance and their impact on believers in both traditions.
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.
This paper discusses how the newly independent Jamaican state used the 1963 Coral Gardens Massacre to establish founding national myths by engaging the colonial plantation tradition of suppressing Africana religions. In response to a small Rastafari group’s resistance to police violence, state officials organized Jamaica’s first joint police-military operation, also enlisting civilians in a coordinated attack on Rasta communities near Montego Bay. Taking place in the first year of Jamaican independence, I argue that the new Jamaican state used the violent management of Africana religion at Coral Gardens as its foundational performance of sovereignty. By violently suppressing Afrocentric Rastafari, the state maintained the colonial plantation practice of denigrating Africana religion. In doing so, Jamaican state officials established narrative and mythic continuity between colonial and postcolonial modes of legitimate state management of Africana religions, exhibiting a colonially legible capacity to govern in the postcolonial context.