Francisco A. Scarano

Stephan Palmié

Combining fertile soils, vital trade routes, and a coveted strategic location, the islands and surrounding continental lowlands of the Caribbean were one of Europe’s earliest and most desirable colonial frontiers. The region was colonized over the course of five centuries by a revolving cast of Spanish, Dutch, French, and English forces, who imported first African slaves and later Asian indentured laborers to help realize the economic promise of sugar, coffee, and tobacco. The Caribbean: A History of the Region and Its Peoples offers an authoritative one-volume survey of this complex and fascinating region. This groundbreaking work traces the Caribbean from its pre-Columbian state through European contact and colonialism to the rise of U.S. hegemony and the economic turbulence of the twenty-first century. The volume begins with a discussion of the region’s diverse geography and challenging ecology and features an in-depth look at the transatlantic slave trade, including slave culture, resistance, and ultimately emancipation. Later sections treat Caribbean nationalist movements for independence and struggles with dictatorship and socialism, along with intractable problems of poverty, economic stagnation, and migrancy. Written by a distinguished group of contributors, The Caribbean is an accessible yet thorough introduction to the region’s tumultuous heritage which offers enough nuance to interest scholars across disciplines. In its breadth of coverage and depth of detail, it will be the definitive guide to the region for years to come.

A History of the Region and Its Peoples

The Caribbean

Over a lifetime of studying Cuban Santería and other religions related to Orisha worship—a practice also found among the Yoruba in West Africa—Stephan Palmié has grown progressively uneasy with the assumptions inherent in the very term Afro-Cuban religion. In The Cooking of History he provides a comprehensive analysis of these assumptions, in the process offering an incisive critique both of the anthropology of religion and of scholarship on the cultural history of the Afro-Atlantic World. Understood largely through its rituals and ceremonies, Santería and related religions have been a challenge for anthropologists to link to a hypothetical African past. But, Palmié argues, precisely by relying on the notion of an aboriginal African past, and by claiming to authenticate these religions via their findings, anthropologists—some of whom have converted to these religions—have exerted considerable influence upon contemporary practices. Critiquing widespread and damaging simplifications that posit religious practices as stable and self-contained, Palmié calls for a drastic new approach that properly situates cultural origins within the complex social environments and scholarly fields in which they are investigated.

How Not to Study Afro-Cuban Religion

The Cooking of History

Until recently, African Americanist scholarship has been dominated by programmatic searches for African origins. This book aims to transcend this research agenda by exploring the ritual and discursive production and reproduction of conceptions of Africa and Africanity in the Americas.

Beyond the Search for Origins in the Study of Afro-Atlantic Religions

Africas of the Americas

In Wizards and Scientists Stephan Palmié offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmié argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms that integrate them. Highlighting the ways that Afro-Cuban discourses serve as a means of moral analysis of social action, Palmié suggests that the supposedly irrational premises of Afro-Cuban religious traditions not only rival Western rationality in analytical acumen but are integrally linked to rationality itself. Afro-Cuban religion is as “modern” as nuclear thermodynamics, he claims, just as the Caribbean might be regarded as one of the world’s first truly “modern” locales: based on the appropriation and destruction of human bodies for profit, its plantation export economy anticipated the industrial revolution in the metropolis by more than a century. Working to prove that modernity is not just an aspect of the West, Palmié focuses on those whose physical abuse and intellectual denigration were the price paid for modernity’s achievement. All cultures influenced by the transcontinental Atlantic economy share a legacy of slave commerce. Nevertheless, local forms of moral imagination have developed distinctive yet interrelated responses to this violent past and the contradiction-ridden postcolonial present that can be analyzed as forms of historical and social analysis in their own right.

Explorations in Afro-Cuban Modernity and Tradition

Wizards and Scientists

Stephan Palmie

"Featuring essays by historians and anthropologists, this volume focuses on the cultural dimensions of slavery in a wide variety of geographical and historical settings. The contributors examine the historical manifestations of slavery not only as legal, political, and economic institutions but as systems of human interaction and experience that are prone to conflicts and riddled with contradictions." "Among the geographic areas covered in this collection are colonial Louisiana, the American South of the antebellum and Reconstruction periods, Jamaica, the Danish West Indies, Suriname, and Africa's Gold Coast. Some of the essays deal with conceptual and theoretical problems of current slavery studies, while others present new research on neglected issues such as Native American slave-holding and the integration of former slaves into West African societies. Still other essays probe the continuities of cultural processes across the historical threshold between slavery and freedom." "Taken together, the comparative perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches offered by this volume make it an important addition to the increasingly sophisticated ways in which the social and ideological arrangements produced by slavery are understood."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Stephan Palmié

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