Caribbean stones and the creation of early-modern worlds

ABSTRACT

This article considers the role that objects which anthropologists and historians have labeled ritual stones perform in the theorization of early modern worlds’ materiality. These stones function primordially as locators of epistemic and ontological difference. They define the categories through which historians engage early-modern things that are similar to these metonymically construed objects only in naturalistic terms. Histories that engage with “non-western” technologies stem in many cases from a benevolent impulse of paternalistic inclusivity. Such projects, however, depend ostensibly on the identification of certain types of things as being part of a world that is not, really, ours. The history of the criollo/creole things of the early modern Caribbean invites us to think of objects like seventeenth-century Caribbean stones, not as elements belonging in realms of incommensurable alterity, but instead as part of a shared history, one that belongs intrinsically together with the history of “the moderns” and their things.

KEYWORDS:

• Stones
• ontologies
• things
• Caribbean
• slavery
• blackness

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to the anonymous reader, Thomas Broman, Projit Mukharji, Stephan Palmié, Gabriela Soto Laveaga and Andrew Warrick, who generously provided much needed criticism and feedback for this essay.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

References

Archival sources

University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, Miami, FL

Archivo Histórico Nacional de España, Madrid, Spain. (AHN)

Notes

1. University of Miami Libraries, Cuban Heritage Collection, Lydia Cabrera Papers, CHC0339, Box 64.

2. For the “ethnographic interface” see Palmié, The Cooking. For the “naturalizing sieve” see Descola, From Nature.

3. Among many others see, Latour, “Fetish-Factish’; Hacking, Historical Ontology; Goolbrad, “America in the European Wunderkammer,” Cañizares-Esguerra, How to Write; Feest, “European Collecting.”

4. For examples, see, Sweet, Domingos Alvares; Norton, “Subaltern Technologies.”

5. Among others, see Latour, On the Modern Cult; Chakrabarty, ‘The Muddle”; Trouillot, Silencing; Marx, “Technology.” For a rich discussion of anthropologist’s treatment of the relationship between people and things and their history see, Palmié, “When is a thing?”.

6. This is, certainly, a non-homogenous camp. Among many others, Henare, Holbraad and Pedersen, The Ontological Turn.”, Viveiros de Castro, “Cosmological Deixis”; Descola, “From Nature.”

7. See, for instance, Palmié, Wizards and Scientists.

8. Archivo Histórico Nacional de España (hereafter AHN), Inquisición, L.1023, Fols. 395v-396r.

9. Ibid., Fol. 396r.

10. Ibid., Fols. 396r-397r.

11. Ibid., Fol. 396v.

12. Ibid., Fol. 395v-396r.

13. Ibid., Fols. 395v-403r.

14. Ibid., Fol. 397r.

15. Ibid., Fol. 397r.

16. Ibid., Fols. 396r-397r.

17. Gómez, The Experiential Caribbean.

18. Espírito Santo, “Materiality.”

19. AHN, Inquisición, L.1023, Fol. 399r.

20. Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand; Viveiros de Castro, Cannibal.

21.. See, among others, Safier, “Global Knowledge.”

22. Chakrabarty, “The Muddle.”

23. Holbraad, “Powder is Power.”

24. Holbraad and Pedersen, The Ontological Turn.”

25. See, Palmié, ‘When is a thing?’.

26. For instance, Brandon, Santeria.

27. See note 25 above.

28. For instance, Kopelson ‘One Indian’ or Sweet, ‘Domingos.’

29. Mol, Body Multiple.

30. Wilson, ‘Science’s Imagined Pasts.’

31. Descola, Beyond Nature and Culture.