Catching Power: Problems with Possession, Sovereignty, and African Religions in Trinidad

ABSTRACT

In 2010 and 2011, female students at my field site in southern Trinidad experienced ‘mass possessions’ that closed down the secondary school. While Pentecostal-charismatic Christians figured African traditions (particularly ‘Obeah’) as atavisms that caused the events, observers also blamed the ‘possessions’ on salient markers of a twenty-first-century modernity – particularly the Internet, ‘science’, citizen insecurity, and illicit transnational networks. I argue that this seeming temporal disjuncture in causal narratives points towards some common problems with sovereignty that have marked representations of both African religions of ‘possession’ and (neo)Liberal politics. African spirit manifestation religions have often been characterised by the trope of slavery, as a relation of non-sovereign possession between spirit and human, while Liberal politics (or born-again Christianity) have ostensibly promoted a contrasting ideal of self-determination and national (or spiritual) sovereignty. While these seemingly opposed representations show how ‘spirit possession’ has shaped modern ideals of sovereignty through a racialised ‘labour of the negative’, I examine how practitioners of an African religion at my field site questioned these terms of (dis)possession at the school. These practitioners’ conceptions of ‘catching power’ suggest alternatives to both political models of sovereign ‘possession’ and anthropological models of ‘spirit possession’. I close by arguing that African religious practices of ‘catching power’ can provide a critical alternative to these racialised and gendered dynamics of ‘possession’, modifying the conceptual and geographic province of Foucault's critique of Western political theories of sovereignty.

KEYWORDS:

• Postcolonial sovereignty
• spirit possession
• African diasporic religion
• spiritual warfare
• slavery

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. All names of places and persons (besides those of nation-states and national public officials) are pseudonyms. I use the phrase ‘Trinidad and Tobago’ when referring to the formal nation-state, but I tend to refer specifically to Trinidad as the setting for my research to respect the marked differences between the two islands. The events discussed in this article also presented some difficult and important issues of gendered child abuse that far outstrip the focus of this article, and which I have been ambivalent about detailing for a variety of ethical and legal reasons. The focus of this article is thus on the problems with possession, the Internet, and African religion that surrounded the ‘mass possessions’ rather than on the personal lives of the affected students.

2. While I do not have the space to discuss the historical circulation of discourses on science in the Black Atlantic, mail-order book companies, especially Chicago's DeLaurence Company, were important sources of textual knowledge for anglophone African and African diasporic healers in West Africa, the Caribbean, and the American South from the late nineteenth century onwards (see Palmié 2002).

3. The most important of these grimoires for spiritual workers at my field site were The Sixth and Seventh Books of Moses and The Lesser Key of Solomon (as well as other texts such as The Egyptian Book of the Dead). These books were widely distributed via mail-order in the anglophone Caribbean (as well as anglophone West Africa) by the Chicago-based De Laurence Publishing Company from the turn of the twentieth century onwards.

4. The controversy that Ruth Landes’ emphasis on female leadership and homosexual participation in Afro-Brazilian Candomblé provoked, especially for Melville Herskovits and Arthur Ramos, reflects the sensitive nature of such associations between femininity or homosexuality (or ‘inversion’ as it was tellingly called by Herskovits) and African religions (see Landes 1970).

5. Another example of this narrative is Orisha leader Iyalorisha Melvina Rodney's initial experience of manifestation. 

6. In the context of Hayes’ (2011) written and documentary film work (Slaves of the Saints) on ‘Afro-Brazilian religion’, it should be noted that her racially diverse set of practicing interlocutors overwhelmingly cast their relationships with the ‘saints’ as ones of aid, assistance, help, and protection. In this context, the occasional references to being a slave indicate not a recapitulation of a relationship of chattel slavery, but the notion of human obligation and sacrifice that the spirits’ protection demands (2011:12) – in other words, the same ‘difficult relationality’ that I have presented in this essay.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by American Council of Learned Societies; Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Ruth Landes Memorial Research Fund; Fulbright IIE; and University of California, Santa Cruz.