Interning the Serpent: Witchcraft, Religion and the Law
Transcription
Interning the Serpent: Witchcraft, Religion and the Law
GHAN111596.fm Page 1 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology, Vol. 16, No. 2, June 2005, pp. 00–00 Interning the Serpent: Witchcraft, Religion and the Law on Montserrat in the 20th Century Jonathan Skinner 2002890973700 School JonathanSkinner 02890 [email protected] 00000June 973705 of Anthropological 2005 Ltd StudiesThe History 10.1080/02757200500116139 GHAN111596.sgm 0275-7206 Original Taylor 2005 16 & and and Article Francis (print)/1477-2612 Francis Anthropology Ltd (online) Queen’s University BelfastBelfastBT7 1NNUK This article is an examination of the uneasy relationship between religion and witchcraft (the worship of the serpent/obeah) on the British colony of Montserrat in the eastern Caribbean. It looks at obeah in the 20th century as practised by colonial British subjects and prohibited by British law imposed by British expatriates. Colonial governance is examined first through correspondence at the start of the 20th century, and then through newspaper archives and fieldwork reports and experiences throughout the century. The continued use of anti-obeah laws by the British is shown to be an irrational but effective colonial technology of control. Keywords: Obeah; Witchcraft; Colonial Governance; Montserrat AQ1 Laura Nader’s (1969/1999: 289) call to “study up”, to investigate “the colonisers rather than the colonised, the culture of power rather than the culture of the powerless” and to thereby influence the governing bureaucracies, was a rallying cry to anthropologists that came at the end of the 1960s. It was a call to politically-correct arms that resulted in a swathe of colonial criticism which cut through the 1970s before turning into a dialogics of colonialism – to notions of the co-creation of European metropole and colony – and the colonial consciousness, in the 1980s. This rethinking and revisionist “games-playing”, to invoke Leach (1982: v), subsequently morphed into a phase of colonial and postcolonial textual studies in the 1990s (Stoler, 2000; cf. Asad, 1973; Said, 1978/1991; Hobsbawm & Ranger, 1983/1992; Comaroff, 1985, 1992; Taussig, 1987; Ashcroft Tiffin, 1989; Williams & Chrisman, 1993). What Nader failed to observe was that British colonial anthropology already had its historical roots in investigating, Correspondence to: School of Anthropological Studies, The Queen’s University Belfast, Belfast BT7 1NN, UK. Email: [email protected] ISSN 0275–7206 print/ISSN 1477–2612 online/05/020000–23 © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd DOI: 10.1080/02757200500116139 GHAN111596.fm Page 2 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM 2 J. Skinner contesting and critiquing colonial practices (Kuper, 1991). For example, delving into the official correspondence written by research directors of the Rhodes Livingstone Institute in Zambia (formerly British Rhodesia), Schumaker draws our attention to Max Gluckman’s correspondence to the British Chief Secretary of Northern Rhodesia. This extract shows that Gluckman’s view of Zulu research very firmly included Africans, anthropologists and administrators: It is not pleasant to be made an object of study, and I can only urge District Officers to appreciate that when they say they are more interested in, and do more for, the welfare of the people than the chiefs they must allow themselves to be studied in their role as a most important part of the modern political administration. (Schumaker, 2000: 341) AQ2 In exploring the shared spaces and practices of anthropologists and administrators – the touring and surveying, the language, the clothes and the expressions (“bushed” is the bureaucratic version of “to go native”) – Schumaker points out Gluckman’s inclusion of the colonial administrator in his field as the critical difference between anthropologist and administrator in Africa. This small but significant inclusion demonstrates the long-term existence of what Stoler (2000: 321) refers to as the growth of an “anthropology of colonialism”, a sub-discipline which, for her, is premised on the idea that “[c]olonial cultures were never direct translations of European society planted in the colonies, but unique cultural configurations, homespun creations in which European food, dress, housing, and morality were given new political meanings in the particular social order of colonial rule.” It distinguishes the anthropological perspective from the administrative perspective. As an anthropologist working on one of the remaining British colonies in the 1990s (Skinner 1997, 2004), my time on the island of Montserrat in the eastern Caribbean was spent characteristically engaging with Montserratians singing calypsos and organising social protests, but it was also spent socialising with the expatriate elite of development workers and administrators, as well as the local poets who were writing for Montserrat’s independence. My participant observation necessitated shifts between social and racial groups, led to my guided tours of the National Museum, my sorting of calypso archives in the local radio station, and my “liming” on the streets of Montserrat, hanging out and watching social life. In my work I became a “racial zebra” (Skinner, 2004: 33) moving between racial groups, Bruner’s (1993: 7) “Arab Jew” ethnographer, and in my subject matter, my work reflected the evolution of colonial and postcolonial academic interests over the last 30 years. During my research visit to Montserrat, 1994–1995, I found an island still divided along colonial racial lines. The twin colonial concerns of land and labour continued to determine the social and settlement patterns of the 10,000 “Mons’ratian” African slave descendants and 300 “snowbird” European and North American residential tourists, expatriate managers and Foreign and Commonwealth appointees. Typical of the black consciousness movement which diffused down to the West Indies from the north American civil and human rights concerns of the 1970s, many of the islanders reflected a burgeoning pan-Africanism, a postcolonial identity in formation: Christian names were being “Africanised”, traditional African clothes were becoming the preferred GHAN111596.fm Page 3 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology 3 evening wear after a day in the office in a suit, and the island’s educational establishment taught “national” history to the “brothers” and “sisters” as part of a policy of consciousness-raising.1 To give a more detailed example, while the majority of the islanders are devout Methodists, Catholics and Pentecostalists, in June 1991, the island’s sports officials held a Jumbie Dance to appease the ancestral spirits and break a losing streak “hex” which they had endured for several years. This spectacle cleft a rift down Montserratian society, revealing and reviving native practices for the tourists and the members of Montserrat’s new generations, but deeply offending many Christians on the island who preferred a night of prayer and condemned the return to such African savagery (Anon, 1991). It echoes the recent contentious decision of the Ralaushai Commission in South Africa to revise and reinvigorate beliefs in witchcraft as a marker of primordial African identity (Niehaus, 2001), and it is reminiscent of Dessalines’s historical change to the Haitain constitution in 1805 to permit “the freedom of cults” (Dayan, 1995: 85) as a marker of independence after years of Spanish and French Catholic rule. Imbued by what Pietz (2000) refers to as the colonial “fetish of civilisation” – a thesis derived from his exploration of turn-of-the-19th-century British colonial adventures in Benin, West Africa, the colonial association of African fetishism with sacrifice and slavery, the polar opposites of the “fetish” of colonial civilisation – and emboldened by the convictions of their religion, Montserrat’s British subjects betray the ambivalent identity that “sly civility” (Bhabha, 1994) affords them. Politically and psycho-dynamically, Montserrat is a British island where Britain is the maternal guiding force, to be revered and detested, to be courted and to be resisted – though many politicians since adult suffrage in the 1950s have criticised the British colonial governance of their island, none have stood for independence in local elections. Pietz (2000) goes on to point out that the idea of African fetishism was constructed by colonial law, and that traditional institutions and practices were tolerated by British sovereignty and commercial enterprises, so long as they were not a threat to production or civil order and “civil” society. In other words, fetishism was criminalised in colonial territories such as Ghana and Nigeria because, as a practice, it could not be reconciled with the white man’s civilising – née colonial – mission. These legal processes and procedures are, surprisingly, still enforced on some colonial territories, one of which is Montserrat where the colonial – Christian/civilising – approach has been part-instilled in the population. Pietz concludes his ethnohistorical investigations by discussing the imposition of British law in British colonial Africa: fetishism was distinguished from witchcraft, the former a “customary procedure for ordering civil society” to be adjudicated traditionally, the latter a criminal offence for the colonial court. Significantly, since the 1736 repeal of the Witchcraft Act in Britain (fully repealed in all respects in 1951), the criminal in the case was generally the witchcraft accuser rather than the accused. As Pietz explains: In British law, the injury done by witchcraft derived from the accusation, not the practice, and was comparable to the injury done by acts of slander; the criminal aspect of such accusations, that is, the infraction falling under the police power of the state, was the threat of civil disturbance that might be caused by witchcraft accusations. Pietz (2000: 77) GHAN111596.fm Page 4 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM 4 AQ3 J. Skinner Pietz’s interpretation of the law is substantiated by the work of many anthropologists of anthropology’s colonial era who have shown witchcraft accusations in many African territories to be akin to a sentence of death for the reviled witch (Evans-Pritchard, 1937; Marwick, 1964; Gluckman, 1966; see also Niehaus, 2001). Witchcraft was secret, hidden and unknown, and frequently you did not know if you or your neighbour were witches. These legal and socio-cultural distinctions are not echoed in the West Indies. As De Alva (1995) and others have successfully argued, colonialism varies across time and space: 16th-century Latin America, 18th-century Caribbean, 19th-century India and 20th-century Africa are distinctly dissimilar from each other; it is also possible to distinguish Old Empire from New Empire in terms of the shifts in consumption patterns in about the 1760s from colonial products (sugar, spices, slaves) to industrial servicing which facilitated the growth of a local free class.2 Moreover, anthropologists of colonialism Pels and Salemink situate their edited volume Colonial Subjects, a collection on the colonial management of cultural difference, with the following perceptive and pertinent statement: Legal, economic, and police relationships developed at different moments in a colony’s history, shaped by the different subaltern agencies in the field to which they apply, by the historical context of the colonizer’s initiative, and by the way in which the establishment of one sector of a colony’s administration precedes the establishment of another. (Pels & Salemink, 2000: 27) Plantation economy societies in the West Indies such as those of Montserrat, Antigua, Guadeloupe, St Kitts, Nevis and Haiti thrived upon the spells, charms, potions, hexes and curses developed by witch doctors. There, among the imported slaves, were the imported witch doctors who had their uses amongst the slave workers. The obeah (serpent worship) that they practised was open and public; they were feared but also revered by slave, planter and administrator alike. Colonial Resistance Archived Sir, I have the honour to make the following report upon the Obeah cases which I have tried in Montserrat since the beginning of 1900, thinking it may be useful to those who have to aid in its suppression in the Leeward Islands. Sent from the Commissioner’s Office,3 Montserrat, to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary on 1 February 1905, Commissioner F. H. Watkins’s letter gives a report into not just the cases of witchcraft which came to trial on the island over the first five years of his rule, but also documents the workings of colonial governance and the machinations of the colonial mind (see Figure 1). The letter is held in a colonial file in the Antigua and Barbuda National Museum, four typed pages with an Appendix list of cases and sentences, as well as a series of five photo-fit sheets of sentenced obeah practitioners on other islands (see Figure 3). In the letter, a carefully archived colonial report, each paragraph is a numerical point – there are 13 in total – the first of which covers working colonial and legal Figure 1 First Page of Letter from Commissioner Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive) GHAN111596.fm Page 5 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology 5 Figure 1 First Page of Letter from Commissioner Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive) GHAN111596.fm Page 6 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM 6 J. Skinner understandings and definitions of obeah. Point two notes that there have been 20 cases during Watkins’s rule, implicating the 41 people listed in the “accompanying return” on page five. Point three details the legal working understanding of obeah. The letter then goes on to divide and detail the different types of obeah in points four to ten. The remaining points (11–13) relate to recommendations for policing. Point three reads as follows: AQ4 3. Obeah, or the worship of the serpent, is prevalent in all the West Indian Islands, and has been handed down from generations of slaves deported from Africa. The expression “Obeah” as defined by the Obeah Act of the Leeward Islands means “Obeah as ordinarily understood and practised, and includes witchcraft and making or pretending to work by spells or by professed occult or supernatural power”. Though perfectly well understood by every inhabitant, obeah is difficult to define, and it is therefore best to leave it as “Obeah” as ordinarily understood and practised. (Watkins 1905: 1, original emphasis) From these legal, if obtuse, definitions, the letter goes on to divide obeah into three kinds: Maleficent, Benevolent, and Precautionary (point four). Points five, six and seven are examples of Maleficent Obeah, “by far the worst kind … using as it does vegatable [sic] and other poisons and trading on the worst passions of revenge” (Watkins, 1905: 1). Point five continues with comments about the threatening of witnesses and the use of poison on shards of broken bottles and plates. Watkins also notes the African knowledge of poisons which has been imperfectly passed down to the present generation. Point six develops the Maleficent Obeah description by detailing the practice of desecrating corpses and graveyards: It is the practice for each person consulting the “Doctor man” to bring a separate skull. In one case before me two skulls, a tibia, an ulna and other human bones were produced in evidence. A year after, the same obeah man was arrested, and a third skull, decorated with a band of silver in front with a cross marked in chalk, was discovered in his possession. Human skulls, when scraped, are supposed to be a deadly poison, which is generally administered in rum or other spirituous liquors. (Watkins, 1905: 2) Watkins concludes that Maleficent Obeah is thus the worst form of obeah, one which, according to point seven, can even involve the sacrifice of fowls or goats, and sometimes the sacrifice of larger animals, babies, children and adults. Examples of this “atrocious” “voodooism” come from a spate of killings in British St Lucia, as well as other “disappearances”: “Certain mysterious disappearances of children and adults in these islands may, with a certain amount of truth, be traceable to the results of obeah” (Watkins, 1905: 3). Benevolent Obeah contrasts with Maleficent Obeah in that it is about healing, curing and laying to rest the spirits of deceased persons. Often the practice of this form of obeah “arises from a desire of parents and others to heal their relations of diseases for the most time pronounced incurable by the local Medical Officers”. In point eight, Watkins goes on to recount one such healing case: In one case, the principal “doctor man” was found rubbing a woman with cassava root who was suffering from cancer, while an assistant danced round having in each hand a plate containing bones and parched corn mixed with earth, and the rest of those present sang lullabies and incantations. (Watkins, 1905: 3) GHAN111596.fm Page 7 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology 7 Perhaps it is of note, here, that Watkins refers to the obeah “doctor man” in inverted commas, presumably distinguishing the witch doctor from the real doctor. This example moves on to “a more innocent kind”, namely, to “lay the spirits of deceased persons”. In point nine, Watkins (1905: 3) explains this activity as follows: “Widows, when anxious to enter into fresh matrimonial or other complications, are anxious to lay the spirit of their departed spouses so as not to be troubled by their apparitions.” Finally, in the tenth point, Watkins concludes his description of the three forms of obeah by considering Precautionary Obeah. Watkins (1905: 3) chides the followers of obeah for their ignorance in this point when he writes: “Precautionary obeah is used by those who should know better to keep off marauders from their crops.” He continues: “Miniature coffins and bottles containing lizards and other objects of obeah are placed on trees with the idea of frightening away the superstitious, and it often succeeds in gaining the desired end.” Watkins’s final point about the practice of obeah betrays the colonial desire to eradicate the practice, and points to the reasons for its slow decline. 11. Although the spread of civilizing influences is beginning to make the more respectable and sensible of the labouring class regard obeah with ridicule, there is still considerable difficulty in obtaining direct evidence in open Court with regard to obeah cases. Very many of the witnesses will deny in court what they have stated to the police. (Watkins, 1905: 3) From here Watkins goes on to comment upon the court cases he has heard as Commissioner on Montserrat. He has heard 20 cases which involved some 41 people. As Watkins (1905: 4) states: “[T]he police are questioned by Counsel and defendants how they know that such and such an object is an instrument of obeah.” Watkins deems it useful, then, “to summarise the objects produced in evidence” in his cases (see Figure 2). These consist of the following: packs of cards (5); small oval looking glasses (8); tufts of hair in small cloth parcels (4); coins, chains and rosaries (9); bottles containing assofoetida, rum and quicksilver, garlic, turpentine, castor oil or some other nauseous liquid (15); powder of bones (4); human remains, skulls, etc. (9); food – Jumby suppers (3); churchyard earth (5); dead rat (1); goat’s hoof (1); piece of chalk (4); and small coffin – hung over obeah man’s house (1). The report then ends with reference to this being an interim report, with a full report to follow into the working of the Obeah Act of 1904 in August, “in accordance with the Secretary of State’s directions” (Watkins, 1905: 4). Figure 2 Extract from p. 4 of Letter from Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive) I have,&c. ( sd ) F.H.Watkins. Commissioner. Containing the Serpent in the Indies The litigious, lying native became a central object of nineteenth-century colonial, legal regulation. Each winter an Indian magistrate was dispatched to the Caribbean to adjudicate over the incalculable indentured Indian coolies. That the process of colonial intervention, its institutionalization and normalization, may itself be an Enstellung, a displacement, is the symbolic reality that must be disavowed. It is this ambivalence that ensues within GHAN111596.fm Page 8 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM 8 J. Skinner paranoia as a play between eternal vigilance and blindness, and estranges the image of authority in its strategy of justification. (Bhabha, 1994: 100, original emphasis) Though concentrating upon witchcraft accusations contained in the editings of Mary Douglas (1970), Stewart and Strathern (2004) rightly describe the accounts and rulings concerning witchcraft and sorcery in Africa and India as a colonial discourse on modernity. And yet, because of their colonial treatments, they are at the same time also a postmodern undermining of modernity’s civilising grand narrative. British colonial punishments and imprisonment in India (cf. Dirks, 2000) or Spanish categorisation and subsequent brutality towards Amerindians are grotesque examples of this (cf. Taussig, 1987). A further irony is the fact that early modern European nation states had a history of acting in an inquisitional fashion towards witchcraft claims and cases, just as many African tribes have a “persecutorial” view of misfortune (Niehaus, 2001: 63), blaming it upon witchcraft; perhaps it is no small coincidence, too, that anthropologists Figure 2 Extract from p. 4 of Letter from Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive) GHAN111596.fm Page 9 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology 9 frame their witchcraft inquiries largely as “cases” heard and presented. Levack (2002a, 2002b) contends that the state machines in 16th- and 17th- century Europe used the witchcraft trials to promote judicial and administrative centralisation, to attack localism and particularism – including superstitions – and to promote obedience to God and King. The great witch-hunts ended once the bureaucracy was more settled and feudal upheavals in the old social order had come to an end. At the same time, the intellectual revolutions of Cartesian and neo-Platonic thought – that extraordinary (paranormal) phenomena have natural causes – began to hold sway. This theme of trial as a system for maintaining public order is one which was developed and extended in the crown colonies despite Britain’s amendment to the 1604 witchcraft statues in 1736 to stress the “pretence” of witchcraft rather than witchcraft per se. There are similarities between the Morant Bay rebellion in Jamaica (1865) and the Indian Mutiny of 1857, which Stewart and Strathern (2004) and Bhabha (1994) hold as emblematic of the power of rumour and superstition in fostering anti-colonial struggle. The consequences of rebellion in the interstitial spaces of Empire were terrible suppression through disciplinary and regulatory practices, specifically, what Comaroff (1998: 323) refers to as “colonial governmentality” with its “rational administration” (a means of control over the development of the native population through the classic Weberian mechanisms of bureaucratisation, documentation, rationalisation and registration). These dispossessing and dislocating practices found their form in the obeah laws of the West Indies. Through these laws against voodoo and obeah, such nomadic thought could be curtailed and ordered society enforced by attacks upon the personal body in the form of the lash, pecuniary charges, physical labour and physical confinement – the characteristic penalties of a capitalist colonial machine. In his now classic Voodoos and Obeahs: Phases of West India Witchcraft, Joseph Williams (1933) chronicles and explains the evolution and suppression of such practices. According to Williams, obeah could be a derived practice of ophiolatry, serpent-worship, which spread from Egypt to West Africa and then via the slave trade to the West Indies. Originally, in Egypt, the snake goddess was worshipped in a cult which grew from the practice of keeping non-poisonous snakes in granaries to protect the contents from vermin.4 According to Mannington (1925: 267), obeah is “a degraded form of religion”, what the abolitionist William Wilberforce (1823: 22) had once downplayed as “fascinating mischief”, and what the armchair anthropologist Sir James Frazer (1993) subsumes under the label “sympathetic magic”. This obeah on the English colonies is voodoo on the Spanish and French territories. The “professors of Obi” (Williams, 1933: 110) are African slaves with their own folklore, an indigenous knowledge of plants, herbs and spells. They can cure and they can curse. They can protect and they can destroy. The 1760 Jamaican Anti-Witchcraft law details the farrago of their obeah materials for the first time: Any Negro or other Slave who shall pretend to any Supernatural Power, and be detected in making use of any Blood, Feathers, Parrots’ Beaks, Dogs’ Teeth, Alligators’ Teeth, broken Bottles, Grave Dirt, Rum, Egg-shells, or any other materials relative to the Practice of Obeah or Witchcraft … upon Conviction … [shall] suffer Death or Transportation. (Act 24, Section 10, 1760, quoted in Brathwaite, 1971: 162) GHAN111596.fm Page 10 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM 10 J. Skinner This law came about following the 1760 insurrection of the Koromantin Gold Coast negroes in St Mary’s, Jamaica, and was reintroduced in 1938. The plantocracy saw how dangerous the slaves’ use of fetishes and oaths to render them invulnerable could be. Prior to this anti-colonial and anti-slavery rebellion, citing a British government colonial report (Anon, 1789), Williams (1933: 113) notes that many of the planters had disregarded the “tricks of Obi”: Hanging up feathers, bottles, eggshells, &c. &c. in order to intimidate Negroes of a thievish disposition from plundering huts, hog-styes, or provision grounds, these were laughed at by the white inhabitants as harmless stratagems, contrived by the more sagacious for deterring the more simple and superstitious Blacks, and serving for much the same purpose as the scarecrows which are in general use among our English farmers and gardeners. The anti-obeah laws are a direct result, then, of rebellion and struggle, more so than a Christian struggle to save souls and to fight evil forces. The laws are for the suppression and punishment of obeah practitioners, threats to the tense and fragile status quo. Another anti-obeah force was the 19th-century Myalism revival, a priestly “antidote” (Rampini, 1873: 131) to obeah deriving from Ashanti tribal religion. The expectation amongst the more lackadaisical planters was that with the end of the slave trade (1807) and post-slave emancipation (1834), these beliefs and practices would eventually all die out. Assimilation, to quote Mullin (1992: 212), resulted in new generations of Christians with “impregnated archaic knowledge”. For some, however, their “African-based religiosity” (Lazarus-Black, 1994: 45) was retained. Mullin (1992) continues with the point that these obeahmen – with their African science – maintained an unofficial power over life and death. They had the respect, awe and fear of other slaves in the Caribbean, as well as the planters. Whether anyone disputed the obeahmen’s claims, the consequences of their work were frighteningly real. They didn’t just protect property, uncover secrets, predict the future, charm overseers in order to prevent punishment, attract men to women or make themselves useful to planters by putting a hex on black jockeys. They prevented crops from growing and also led slave insurrections by mentally, physically and spiritually poisoning their opposition. Their authority came from their illegitimate status as alienated leaders on the margins of society. To conclude, Lazarus-Black (1994: 46), in her assessment of law and illegality in Antiguan society, makes the critical point that obeah is more than magic and witchcraft, religion and resistance – it was and still is a potent form of traditional judicial practice, one which is capable of uniting and empowering, “part of a system of illegalities whose conceptual opposition is not Christianity per se but an entire system of legalities.” Colonial Assessments of the Contorting Serpent Frederick Henry Watkins (1859–1928) served as Commissioner for Montserrat, a position upgraded from Administrator in 1888, but one not to advance to full governorship until 1971. This meant that, as a deputy stationed on Montserrat, Watkins was subordinate to the Governor of the Leeward Islands. At the time of the letter, Watkins had GHAN111596.fm Page 11 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology 11 been in post for five years: he was writing his letter to the Colonial Secretary in London, knowing that he would soon face rotation to another colonial position. He was writing to Alfred Lyttleton, a member of Balfour’s Conservative government – a government which, ten months later, was to resign and be replaced by Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman’s liberal Cabinet.5 The Liberal Unionist Lyttleton, a renowned wicket-keeper and tennis player, and member of a family of colonial governors, had succeeded Joseph Chamberlain to the office of Secretary of State for the Colonies and served from October 1903 to December 1905.6 The letter, then, is a diplomatic record, a textual fragment of colonialism held in a postcolonial national museum, referenced as “Copy. No. 53/40” (Watkins, 1905, p 1; see Figure 1). In terms of Comaroff’s (1992) historical ethnography of mission in colonial South Africa, this letter is a shard which should be anchored in the processes of its production, namely, that of British colonialism creating a colonial consciousness among the planters and former slaves of Montserrat. Held where it is, for posterity, the letter is part of a colonial archive, one of the primary sites of state monumentality, a place which, according to Dirks (2000: 175), “reflects the forms and formations of colonial epistemology”. To continue, it is where “[h]istory was written by the state to educate and justify political policies and practices, and it was produced and preserved by the state for future reference in the archive” (Dirks, 2000: 174). Quite why the letter and archive are in postcolonial Antigua is an irony which I cannot explain other than to note that most records on Montserrat seem to have been almost routinely destroyed in the natural disasters which routinely befall the island – fire, flood, hurricane, earthquake and volcano. The fixity of history naturally favours the coloniser. Though laws change and were changing at the time of writing, Watkins accounts for the colonisers’/his practical working knowledge of them. The obeah laws and their context, however opaque they are acknowledged to be (“Obeah as ordinarily understood and practised”), are outlined in his letter to a reader who is not expected to have a background knowledge of them. Watkins’s rationalisation for the laws is equally clearly laid out at the start and the end of the letter: it is to aid in the suppression of obeah in the Leeward Islands administered by the British,7 to promote “civilising influences” and to enforce them through clearer police recognition of obeah artefacts. Further explanations for imposing British values and practices upon a population of formerly African tribesmen and tribeswomen are taken for granted and are not deemed necessary. It would appear that the burdens and complicities of colonialism, the consciousness of the coloniser, are shared between the writer and the reader, even if the local inhabitants’ working knowledge of obeah is not. Typical of the coloniser’s desire for knowledge and order and hence control, Watkins presents a typology of obeah: the bad (maleficent sacrifice and murder by “vegatable poisons” and “the setting of jumbeys on persons”; Watkins, 1905: 2), the good (benevolent healing strategies which conflict with and undermine the colonial medical officers, such as “massage with turpentine or cassava roots accompanied at times by incantations”; Watkins, 1905: 3) and the preventative (using obeah to prevent trespassers). The preventative example reiterates the research on obeah in Jamaica by Bessie Pullen-Burry (1903: 140), an historical and colonial contemporary of Watkins, when she writes: GHAN111596.fm Page 12 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM 12 J. Skinner Some planters adopt Obi to ensure themselves against thieving. They take a large black bottle, fill it with some phosphorescent liquid, and place within it the feather of a buzzard, the quill sticking uppermost. This they fasten to a tree on the outskirts of the coffee-patch or banana-field, where it can be well observed by all who pass near. The dusky population, firmly believing it to be the work of the Obeah man, refrain their thieving propensities accordingly. It is the light-hearted and humorous attitude to obeah that Watkins dislikes and disapproves of so much. It can lead to slippage in the colonising mission and mandate, and it can hold up the courts and the “natural” flow of evidence. The ordering and orderings of obeah continue in point 13 with the list of items outlined above and extracted in Figure 2. Out of the 20 cases, there were 69 objects cited as “instruments of obeah” (Watkins, 1905: 4). These objects were all taken, interpreted and framed as evidence in the court of law. It is surprising that “Food” could be classified as “Jumbey suppers”, and that “castor oil”, “coins” and “rosaries”, and “Churchyard earth” were accepted as legal evidence. In India, in the same colonial period, colonial officers were developing anthropometric fingerprinting technologies for caste groups (cf. Dirks 2000), whereas in the British West Indies, with its particular and peculiar planter history of grotesque and lascivious misrule – rivalled only by the terrors and atrocities of the Columbian and Belgian mines and plantations (cf. Taussig, 1987) – both the planters and the public were still in fear of the rumours and superstitions of old: poisons on shards of glass, “medicine-laying” for the intended victim; graveyard dirt thrown at a man to kill him; and small coffins in the trees to keep the shadows caught by the obeahman. On Montserrat and throughout the British West Indies, the only further development of the “colonization of subjectivity” (Tagg, 1988) was through the photo-fit (see Figure 3). Watkins’s letter shows us that the indigenous obeah ideology was being sustained despite the introduction of the colonisers’ religion and legal practice. Watkins is concerned by the number of obeah cases he has heard so far over the period of his office on Montserrat. The intimation, in Watkins’s letter, is that the numbers are not tailing off with the end of the slave trade and slavery and that a rigorous and consistent crack-down on the obeah practitioners is necessary. Watkins then closes his letter with the note that this is but an interim report and that in August 1905 a more substantial report will be sent to the Colonial Secretary, as requested and needed following the introduction of an island Obeah Act in the previous year. His Appendix (1905: 5) is a “List of persons convicted of Obeah under Section 45 of Act No.11 of 1891 from 1900 to 1903” (see Figure 4). Listing 41 people, and covering the time period featured in the letter, we can reason that this list features the 41 people referred to in point 12 of the letter. The names, furthermore, all appear to be Montserratian family names still recognisable during my fieldwork on the island approximately 90 years later. The sentences range in severity from “dismissal” (one case) and “To come up for judgement if called upon” (seven cases) to the average sentence of “6 months hard labour” (22 cases), and the extreme sentence for Charles Dolly on 18 August 1904 of “12 months hard labour and a flogging of 24 strokes”. The number of cases range from Figure 3 Sample from a Series of ‘Photo-fits’ Filed with the Letter from Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive) Figure 4 Appendix to Letter from Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive) GHAN111596.fm Page 13 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology 13 three (1901) to 11 (1902) in a year and average seven. Hard labour and flogging were punishments imposed by the coloniser, an echo of those used by the planter to control their slaves several decades earlier. The gender ratio is interesting in that 35 of the “convicts” were male, six female, and five of the female obeah practitioners were Figure 3 Sample from a Series of ‘Photo-fits’ Filed with the Letter from Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive) GHAN111596.fm Page 14 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM 14 AQ5 J. Skinner sentenced at the start of 1905, a worrying year with so many cases at the start (eight in number). The gender-neutral idea of fixity can therefore be developed to apply not only to the process of historicism, but also to the colonial ideological construction of the obeah practitioner, to Bhabha’s (1994) notion of otherness and difference, not least the physical restrictions placed upon the prisoner to work.8 Figure 4 Appendix to Letter from Watkins to the Honourable The Colonial Secretary, 1905 (Antigua and Barbuda National Museum Archive) GHAN111596.fm Page 15 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology 15 A Century of the Serpent Law on Montserrat One of the white man’s often quoted proverbs is: “Never quarrel with your cook”; the meaning of which is that the cook can put something in your food in retaliation if you maltreat him. (Nassau, 1904: 263) In the middle of my first period of fieldwork on Montserrat, I heard the following true story from some expatriate residential tourists who lived on the island during the winter months back in Canada and had employed a cook/cleaner who they were not happy with. One day, they had had enough of her and so they decided to sack her when they returned home from a round of golf. When they came in, they found her in the kitchen preparing her usual Irish stew. The expatriate couple were earlier than usual and so, when they came in, they happened upon the ingredients of the stew sitting on the chopping board. The cook had brought a little something from herself to add to the stew in the hope that her employees would eat it and so, by contagious magic, the employers and employee would be forever linked together and her job saved. Alas, it was not to be! Her dried faeces were thrown out into the garden and she was thrown out onto the street. Had the cook been successful in creating her stew, then the outcome might have been very different – assuming that this was only the first time that she had attempted to add a little je-ne-sais-quoi to the dish. The current Revised Laws of Montserrat 1962 (Lewis, 1965) with their sediment of past and future amendments put obeah under the coloniser’s lens, but also give the reader great insight into the workings of the colonial mind. Though it was not possible to access the 1891 Obeah Act records, the definition held and in use in 1962 had changed little from Watkins’s summary and was the result of amendments in 1932, 1949, 1956 and 1961 to the 2 August 1904 benchmark law enforced on Montserrat by Watkins (the 1891 Act refers to the collective Obeah Act of the Leeward Islands as opposed to a law for each island). The current Act also makes mention of “the instrument of obeah” in establishing the Act: 1. This Act may be cited as the Obeah Act 2. In this Act – “instrument of obeah” means anything ordinarily used in the practice of obeah or intended to be so used in such practice, and anything used or intended to be used by a person and pretended by such person to be possessed of any occult or supernatural power; “obeah” means obeah as ordinarily understood and practised, and includes witchcraft and working or pretending to work by spells or by professed occult or supernatural power. (Lewis, 1965: 527) The Act goes on to legislate on the maximum sentence (“not exceeding five years with or without hard labour”; Point 4, Lewis, 1965: 527), to allow police to enter, search and seize items from properties, and “to arrest without warrant any person practising obeah, or reasonably suspected to be practising obeah” (Point 10, Lewis, 1965: 528). The sentences range from a maximum of six months (fortune-telling or healing, or publishing and promoting obeah) to 12 months (practising obeah, sponsoring obeah, GHAN111596.fm Page 16 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM 16 J. Skinner in possession of obeah instruments or hindering the authorities in their investigations), and fines not exceeding $240. Newspaper records show that the Obeah Act has been invoked throughout the 20th century, largely as a means for deporting obeahmen and -women who visit the island and tour the villages plying their trade. This suggests a shift in its target from the 20 Montserratians sentenced at the turn of the century under the 1891 Act. In terms of the development of that Christian civilised society mentioned by Watkins, the colonisers have been successful. And yet, out in the field, the obeah potions continue to swing freely from the trees and gates to ward off trespassers, my neighbour keeps a cock’s foot hanging from his back door to deter thieves – and visitors and some locals regularly put their t-shirts on the wrong way around so that the jumbeys cannot creep up on them. While it is unlikely that minor instances of obeah such as these warrant sentences in excess of public disapproval and condemnation (a bank teller’s name found in a colleague’s shoe at work is another contemporary example), a Haitian visiting the island and going from village to village is likely to be apprehended, detained and deported. This happened in March 1992 when Joseph Antis was convicted on a charge of practising obeah and was fined $1,000 and deported (Anon, 1992a). Follow-up reports noted that he still left the island with over EC$10,000 and that he continued to practise from Antigua, the neighbouring island, where Monserratians visited him (Anon, 1992b). Apparently, he had toured door to door offering the following services: His promises were simple and to the point: “Exorcise the Jumbie (evil spirits) in your body, home or ground.” “Bring good luck, promotion on the job, money and marriage.” “Hurt those who were using evil forces against you”. In fact he will cure all ailments and ills including your personal economic recession. (Anon, 1992b: 20) AQ7 AQ7 In the same article, there is the supplementary note that Montserrat “has had a record for serious Obeah Men who could swell you foot or you belly” (Anon, 1992b: 20). One obeahman was so powerful he used to “sun his money and defy anyone to touch it”. While other Caribbean lands such as postcolonial Guyana are making obeah legal as a recognised folk religion, British colonial islands such as Montserrat – and the British Virgin Islands – continue to oppress the vernacular belief system.9 The only difference in the application of the Obeah Act in the 1990s compared with the turn of the century was that in the 1990s it targeted off-islanders. Earlier newspaper records, for example, regularly noted obeah cases, such as the case of Harry Fenton of Molyneaux village who was simultaneously sentenced for indecent language and obeah in 1961: Indecent Language: Harry Fenton of Molyneaux $12.00 or 1 month H.L. GHAN111596.fm Page 17 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology 17 Obeah: Harry Fenton of Molyneaux was sentenced to 2 months H.L. after pleading guilty to having instruments for practising obeah in his possession. (Anon, 1961: 3) It would appear that for some offences, a period of hard labour is equivalent, financially, to $12 dollars. This is not the case for obeah offences which are considered to be more serious and so cannot be excused through payment. Nevertheless, similar sentences do give some comparative indication as to how obeah cases were perceived. For example, in the same week, Daniel Daley, Peter Howson and St Clair Taylor all received similar sentences to Harry Fenton, but for very different offences: Wounding: Daniel Daley of Wapping and Peter Howson were each fined $10.00 or 2 months H.L. for wounding each other with knives. Larceny: St. Clair Taylor of Lees was fined $10.00 or 2 months H.L. for stealing a brown mare donkey. (Anon, 1961: 3) AQ8 Perhaps the shift to sentencing those from overseas reveals the success of colonial policy on Montserrat, an island which, despite UN decolonisation initiatives (Skinner, 2002), has continued to opt for dependency status. In other words, the enforcement of the Obeah Act has eroded subscription to the islanders’ folk religion such that all that remains are off-island visits and tourist/cultural displays. In the mid-1990s, the obeah and jumbee activities had been almost laid to rest. However, when the Roman Catholic priest and anthropologist Jay Dobbin (1986) visited the island during the mid-1970s and the early 1980s, he did find the dying remnants of the local folk religion, African-derived with a strong folk Catholic or Protestant influence. Though denied by the many Pentecostals, Methodists, Anglicans, Roman Catholics and Seventh Day Adventists on the island, particularly middle- and high-income Montserratians, upon investigation during his stays on Montserrat, Dobbin (1986) found a number of examples and instances of obeah and jumbee occurrences: Nurses and matrons from the hospital told me of terminally ill patients being carried out into the bush where dances were performed around them. A man asked me for magical books. People came to the presbytery asking for blessed medals and candles; many were not Catholic. They insisted the articles be blessed, on the spot. Questioning revealed that the articles were being used for purposes patently magical. I was embarrassed to find myself reluctantly trafficking in magical appurtenances. A man was lost in the hills, and platters of food were set out for the spirits of the jombees in order to persuade them to bring him back. I saw the lavish display of food and drink set up before the midnight Mass “for the jombees to come and eat.” (Dobbin, 1986: 15) AQ9 Dobbin clarifies our understanding of jombees and the contemporary obeah beliefs on Montserrat. According to him, jombees are “dee dead”, beneficent or maleficent spirits who can be controlled by the obeahman, and can even be seen, heard, felt and touched. If the jombee is beneficent and helpful then, more than likely, the jombee is an ancestral GHAN111596.fm Page 18 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM 18 AQ10 J. Skinner spirit, often identifiable as recently deceased kin, “dee loving dead”. However, if the jombee is a nuisance, evil or unidentifiable, then the jombee is a spirit of “a dead” from another island, perhaps brought to Montserrat by a local or visiting obeahman (Dobbin, 1986: 24, 46). Dobbin (1986) concentrated his research upon the jumbee dance of Montserrat that was merely acted out by the 1990s. Traditionally, a jumbee dance is a trance ritual for divining, curing sickness and solving personal problems, described by one of its critics as “neargamancie” (black magic), “part of the sub-subculture of Montserrat” the “Old Serpent” Devil’s work (Montserratian 1991: 9, 11). It begins like a local drum dance held for a spree, but is held for ritual healing at which a dancer, usually female, will become so spirited that she is described as “turning”. “Turning is the local term for the ecstatic dancing when the jombees are said to possess the dancers” (Dobbin, 1986: 49, original emphasis). Over a period of several years’ research, Dobbin saw several jombee dances, one of which was staged for public audience at the University Centre on the island. I never saw a jombee dance, but I heard of people talking about the jombees they had met, and the jombee table they prepared on Christmas Eve for the jombee spirits, usually the deceased ancestors of the household – a folk tradition the American tourists equated with the food and drink placed at the bottom of the chimney for Father Christmas. Significantly, towards the end of The Jombee Dance of Montserrat, Dobbin writes that the dance ritual has a strong political dimension to it: It is a creativity born of opposition, resistance, and perhaps even rebellion. Certainly, the Montserratian folk religion is another case negating that difficult-to-kill myth of passivity in the face of slavery and colonialism. Where Montserratian police and court records show dances and obeah to be punished by raids, floggings, imprisonment, fine, and even an arrest as late as 1961, the jombee religion persisted. Denied political voice and social status in the past, the Blacks of Montserrat expressed their resistance in the domain of religion. The jombee religion expressed and still expresses the creativity of the suppressed and exploited. (Dobbin, 1986: 153) AQ11 Here, Dobbin expresses obeah’s creative, religious and functional uses, the matrix of ideological beliefs and practices mentioned by Lazarus-Black (1994). He articulates the reason for the legal suppression of obeah. Obeah has always been a threat to official bureaucratic institutions and practices with its subversive and unregulated practice. Come the emancipation of slavery and the demise of the plantocracy, obeah survived as one of the remaining traditional resistance strategies to slave acculturation and colonialism, a tacit informal form of opposition taking place in an “invisible” religious dimension (Mullin, 1992: 175). As Watkins suggests in his letter to the Colonial Secretary, obeah per se is an ineffectual practice but with real and worrying consequences. This is the position probably taken by the officers, such as Commissioner Watkins, who administer the Government of Montserrat on behalf of the British government. For them, despite the emancipation of slavery, obeah remains an unregulated force of influence. Although, according to the law-makers and law-enforcers, obeah is just a ridiculous practice associated with African superstitious beliefs, it needs to be suppressed so that it cannot be used to motivate resistance to the official forces GHAN111596.fm Page 19 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology 19 and institutions on Montserrat. One such legitimate institution is the Christian church; Dobbin estimated in the 1980s there to be one church for every 300–400 people on Montserrat. In this case, in a strongly Christian community such as Montserrat, the Christian religion is increasingly used as one of the social bases for this colonial world. That Christianity acts as Peter Berger’s (1967: 30) “nomos” at the centre of the society. It is one of the social institutions giving out ontological status and working as a universal frame of reference. The cosmic frame of reference claimed by the obeahman is in direct conflict with that Christian and colonial cosmic frame of reference; it threatens and undermines the social (superstitions), economic (payments), political (rebellions), judicial (informal control over people) and religious (folklores) institutions on Montserrat and other islands in the Caribbean. This conclusion allows me to account for the continued use of the Obeah Act across the 20th century – in the 1960s, in Dobbin’s experiences in the 1970s and 1980s, in the paternalistic use of the Act in the 1990s, and in the local government’s recent institutionalisation of a National Day of Prayer on Montserrat in response to public religious canvassing against cultural events such as the cricketers’ jumbie dance and natural events such as the 1995 ongoing eruption of Mount Chance. Colonial Chimera AQ11 Grottanelli (1976) suggests that the witchcraft complex, in which we can include the colonials’ serpent, is an allegory of social and moral subversion. Obeah is certainly seen by Watkins and others as a threat to the establishment as well as to the established Christian denominations on Montserrat. The development and continued use of the Obeah Act on Montserrat in the 20th century shows, contra Bhabha (1994), that any mimicry in terms of colonial discourse is one with agency and difference to it, that, to paraphrase and invert the colonial officer Sir Edward Just in his 1839 address to the Colonial Office, “[not] every colony of the British Empire [is] a mimic representation of the British Constitution.” As a colonial creature, an anachronism of law and history, the colonial island with the serpent laws reflects the Burkean political approach of contextualising law and maintaining different laws and latitudes in the colonies. It is this anachronism that the diplomat and author Sir Hesketh Bell (1936, see also 1889) was pointing to in his letter to The Times in 1936 following a debate about the bicentennial anniversary of the British Parliament passing the 1736 law abolishing prosecution for the crime of witchcraft: It will probably be an additional surprise to many people to learn that while the law in this country has declined for 200 years to recognise the existence of witchcraft, the legislatures of some of our oldest and most civilised colonies, to wit, the British West Indies, have not only recognised the existence and effects of sorcery but, in quite recent years, have made laws for the repression of witchcraft which, for their severity, savour almost Tudor and Jacobean times. (Bell, 1936: 8) Almost 275 years after the abolition of such laws and witchcraft prosecutions, the Obeah Act continues to be invoked and revered, the practice of obeah feared and forbidden. Ironically, this transpires in the colonial laboratory of the tropics. GHAN111596.fm Page 20 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM 20 J. Skinner Explaining the evolution of the horse (Anon, 1972: 8), one common jumbie story on Montserrat concludes with the judicious comment from one jumbie caught off guard in the middle of the night by strange noises: “Well my done! Horse eye bright tonight eh?” On Montserrat, Britain and British law has played a key part in co-creating and sustaining a modern-day colonial chimera. Acknowledgements This article has benefited from the assistance of staff and curators at the Antigua and Barbuda National Museum, the incumbent His Excellency The Governor of Montserrat Frank Savage and Royal Montserrat Police Commissioner David Crowther, as well as the generosity of comments from audiences at the University of St Andrews, the University of Abertay Dundee and The Queen’s University Belfast. I am grateful to the Carnegie Foundation for their part-funding of my fieldwork on Montserrat in 1994– 1995, and to the generous hosting of Ms Cherrie Taylor and her sister Laine who not only welcomed me to the island but also introduced me to the range of orthodox (Christian) and unorthodox (obeah) religious beliefs and practices currently and formerly practiced there. Notes [1] 1 [2] 2 [3] 3 [4] 4 [5] 5 [6] 6 [7] 7 The University of the West Indies Extra Mural Department on the island, the island’s main cultural centre, had these terms of reference on the bathroom doors. Mullin (1992) refers to the period 1768–1805 as an era of slave resistance, war and revolution in the British Caribbean and the American South. The St Patrick’s Day rebellion in 1768 on Montserrat and the American Civil War can be linked with the change in imperial trading practices. The Commissioner acted as the officer who administered the government of Montserrat on behalf of the British government. The person was a deputy to the Governor of the Leeward Islands. In 1889 the title was Commissioner. The title changed to Administrator in 1956 and eventually the status of the post advanced to governorship in 1971 (Fergus, 1994). Etymologically, obeah, obiah or obia refers to those who worship Ob(i), the Egyptian for serpent (Williams, 1933). The new Colonial Secretary would be Victor Alexander Bruce, ninth Earl of Elgin, Colonial Secretary 1905–1908, former Viceroy of India (1894–1899), a position held by his father (1862–1863 deceased) who had previously been Governor of Jamaica (1842–1846) and Governor-General of Canada (1847–1854). Lyttleton lost his Warwick Borough political position to the Liberal T. Berridge in the 1906 general election. He was a descendent of Sir Charles Lyttleton, Deputy Governor of Jamaica (Governor Windsor left the island to Lyttleton after 10 weeks in post in 1662, a contemporary to pirate Sir Henry Morgan who became Lieutenant-Governor in 1673) and William Henry Lyttleton, Governor of Jamaica (1762–1767), and inspired Charles John Lyttleton, future Governor-General of New Zealand (1957–1962) and Vice-Captain of the English cricket team. The Leeward Islands were ruled by the British as a federation between 1871 and 1956. In 1905, that federation consisted of Antigua with Barbuda, Montserrat, St Kitts with Nevis and Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands and Dominica. GHAN111596.fm Page 21 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology 21 [8] 8 AQ5 [9] 9 This is an example of the colonisation and disciplining of the human body – as well as time; the forced construction of a work force, one which, if needs be, will break the human subject, “whipping them into line” quite literally (cf. Foucault, 1977; Cooper, 1992). On 5 February 2004, the British Virgin Islands customs and police detained and charged an arrival with obeah offences for importing a miniature coffin with a doll in it (Anon, 2004). References AQ12 AQ13 AQ14 Anon. (1789), Report of the Lords of the Committee of the Council Appointed for the Consideration of All Matters Relating to Trade and Foreign Plantation (London). Anon. (1961), “Round the Court”, The Montserrat Mirror (17 June), 3. Anon. (1972), “Jumbie Story: The Evolution of the Horse”, The Montserrat Mirror (8 March), 8. Anon. (1991), “Editorial: Jumbie Dance Won’t Do It”, The Montserrat Reporter (7 June), 4. Anon. (1992a), “Dey Wuking Obeah”, The Montserrat Reporter (27 March), 20. Anon. (1992b), “The Obeahman Said ‘Look into my Crystal Ball’”, The Montserrat Reporter (10 April), 20. Anon. (2004), “Attempted ‘Obeah’ Smuggling Investigated”, The Island Sun (21 February). Available online at: http://www.islandsun.com/2004-february/21022004/local1-v12i16.html. Asad, T. (1973), “Introduction”, in Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter, T. Asad (ed.), London: Ithaca Press, 9–20. Ashcroft, B., G. Griffiths & H. Tiffin (eds) (1989), The Empire Writes Back – Theory and Practice in Post-Colonial Literatures, London: Routledge. Bell, H. (1889), Obeah: Witchcraft in the West Indies, London: Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington Ltd. Bell, H. (1936), “Recent Laws in the West Indies [Letter to the Editor]”, The Times (24 July), 8. Bell, H. (1946), Glimpses of a Governor’s Life: From Diaries, Letters, and Memoranda, London: S. Low, Marston and Co, Ltd. Berger, J. (1967), The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion, New York: Doubleday. Bhabha, H. (1994), The Location of Culture, London: Routledge. Brathwaite, E. (1971), The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770–1820, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bruner, E. (1993), “Introduction: The Ethnographic Self and the Personal Self”, in Anthropology and Literature, P. Benson (ed.), Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1–26. Comaroff, J. (1985), Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Comaroff, J. (1992), Ethnography and the Historical Imagination, Oxford: Westview Press. Comaroff, J. (1998), “Reflections on the Colonial State in South Africa and Elsewhere: Factions, Fragments, Facts and Fictions”, Social Identities, 4:3, 321–361. Cooper, F. (1992), “Colonizing Time: Work Rhythms and Labor Conflict in Colonial Mombasa”, in Colonialism and Culture, N. Dirks (ed.), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 209–246. Dayan, J. (1995), “Haiti, History, and the Gods”, in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, G. Prakash (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 66–97. Dirks, N. (2000), “The Crimes of Colonialism: Anthropology and the Textualization of India”, in Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology, P. Pels & O. Salemink (eds), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 153–179. Dobbin, J. (1986), The Jumbie Dance of Montserrat – A Study of Trance Ritual in the West Indies, Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Douglas, M. (ed.) (1970), Witchcraft, Confessions and Accusations, London: Tavistock. Evans-Pritchard, E. (1937), Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Oxford: Clarendon Press. GHAN111596.fm Page 22 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM 22 J. Skinner Fergus, H. (1994), Montserrat: History of a Caribbean Colony, London: Macmillan Caribbean. Foucault, M. (1977), Discipline and Punish, London: Penguin. Frazer, J. (1993), The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Ware: Wordsworth Editions Ltd. Gluckman, M. (1966), Custom and Conflict in Africa, Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Grottanelli, V. (1976), “Witchcraft: An Allegory?”, in Medical Anthropology, F. Grollig & H. Haley (eds), The Hague: Mouton Publishers, 321–330. Hobsbawm, E. & T. Ranger (eds) (1992), The Invention of Tradition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (original work published 1983). Klor De Alva, J. (1995), “The Postcolonization of the (Latin) American Experience: A Reconsideration of ‘Colonialism’, ‘Postcolonialism,’ and ‘Mestizaje’”, in After Colonialism: Imperial Histories and Postcolonial Displacements, G. Prakash (ed.), Princeton: Princeton University Press, 241–278. Kuper, A. (1991), Anthropology and Anthropologists: The Modern British School, London: Routledge. Lazarus-Black, M. (1994), Legitimate Acts and Illegal Encounters – Law and Society in Antigua and Barbuda, London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Leach, E. (1982), Rethinking Anthropology, London, The Athlone Press Ltd. Levack, B. (2002a), “State-Building and Witch Hunting in Early Modern Europe”, in The Witchcraft Reader, D. Oldridge (ed.), London: Routledge, 213–226. Levack, B. (2002b), “The End of Witch Trials”, in The Witchcraft Reader, D. Oldridge (ed.), London: Routledge, 373–386. Lewis, P. (1965), The Revised Laws of Montserrat 1962: Volume 1, London: Waterlow & Sons Ltd. Mannnington, G. (1925), The West Indies with British Guiana and British Honduras, London: Leonard Parsons. Marwick, M. (1964), “Witchcraft as a Social Strain-Gauge”, Australian Journal of Science, 26, 263–268. Montserratian, A. (1991), “Jumbie Dance”, The Montserrat Reporter (14 June), 9, 11. Mullin, M. (1992), Africa in America: Slave Acculturation and Resistance in the American South and the British Caribbean 1736–1831, Chicago: University of Illinois Press. Nader, L. (1999), “Up the Anthropologist – Perspectives Gained from Studying Up”, in Reinventing Anthropology, D. Hymes (ed.), Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 284–311 (original work published 1969). Nassau, R. (1904), Fetishism in West Africa, London: Duckworth & Co. Niehaus, I. (2001), Witchcraft, Power and Politics: Exploring the Occult in the South African Lowveld, London: Pluto Press. Pels, P. & O. Salemink (2000), “Introduction”, in Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology, P. Pels & O. Salemink (eds), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1–52. Pietz, W. (2000), “The Fetish of Civilisation: Sacrificial Blood and Monetary Debt”, in Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology, P. Pels & O. Salemink (eds), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 53–81. Pullen-Burry, B. (1903), Jamaica as It Is, London: T. F. Unwin. Rampini, C. (1873), Letters from Jamaica, Edinburgh: Edmonston and Douglas. Said, E. (1991), Orientalism, London: Penguin (original work published 1978). Schumaker, L. (2000), “Constructing Racial Landscapes: Africans, Administrators, and Anthropologists in Late Colonial Northern Rhodesia”, in Colonial Subjects: Essays on the Practical History of Anthropology, P. Pels & O. Salemink (eds), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 326–352. Skinner, J. (1997), “‘Doing Ethnography’ as Action and In-action”, Anthropology in Action, 4:2, 13–16. Skinner, J. (2002), “British Constructions with Constitutions: The Formal and Informal Nature of ‘Island’ Relations on Montserrat and Gibraltar”, in Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Culture (Special Edition: Managing Island Life, ed. J. Skinner), 8:2, 301–320. GHAN111596.fm Page 23 Friday, May 20, 2005 7:44 PM History and Anthropology 23 AQ14 Skinner, J. (2003), “Anti-Social ‘Social Development’? The DFID Approach and the ‘Indigenous’ of Montserrat”, in Negotiated Development: Power and Identity in Development, J. Pottier, A. Bicker & P. Sillitoe (eds), London: Pluto Press, 98–120. Skinner, J. (2004), Before the Volcano: Reverberations of Identity on Montserrat, Kingston, Jamaica: Arawak Publications. Stewart, P. & A. Strathern (2004), Witchcraft, Sorcery, Rumors, and Gossip, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stoler, A. (1992), “Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule”, in Colonialism and Culture, N. Dirks (ed.), Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 319–352. Tagg, J. (1988), The Burden of Representation: Essays on Photographies and Histories, Basingstoke: Macmillan. Taussig, M. (1987), Shamanism, Colonialism, and the Wild Man: A Study in Terror and Healing, London: The University of Chicago Press. Watkins, F. (1905), Letter from Commissioner Watkins of Montserrat to the Colonial Secretary, Commissioner’s Office, 1 February 1905. Copy No. 53/40. Document held in Montserrat Archive, Antigua and Barbuda National Museum. Wilberforce, W. (1823), An Appeal to the Religion, Justice, and Humanity of the Inhabitants of the British Empire, on Behalf of the Negro Slaves in the West Indies, London: J. Hatchard. Williams, J. (1933), Voodoos and Obeahs: Phases of West India Witchcraft, London: George Allen & Unwin Ltd. Williams, P. & L. Chrisman (eds) (1993), Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Author Query Sheet Manuscript Information Journal Acronym Volume and issue GHAN Author name Skinner Manuscript No. (if applicable) QUERY NO. QUERY DETAILS 1 Ashcroft & Tiffin as per citation or Ashcroft et al as per ref in ref list? 2 Please provide full details for the ref list. 3 De Alva as per citation or Klor De Alva as per ref in ref list? 4 Emphasis? 5 This sentence not understood – please clarify. 6 Please check this sentence – the speech marks in the original did not tally up (more opening than closing quotes) 7 Previously also jumbey (in Watkins, also in general text), jumby (Jumby Suppers) and jumbie (Jumbie Dance). OK to use jumbee also? 8 Jombees OK? 9 Previously Jumbie Dance… 10 Sentence reworded for clarity. Please check. 11 Please give citation and ref details. 12 Any other ref details available for this one? 13 Please give date accessed 14 This ref is not cited in the text. Please either cite or remove from the ref list. AN AGREEMENT FOR THE TRANSFER OF COPYRIGHT IN RELATION TO THE CONTRIBUTION OF YOUR ARTICLE (‘THE ARTICLE’) ENTITLED: ………………………………………………………………………………………………………… BY:……………………………………………………………………………………………………… WHICH WILL BE PUBLISHED IN G-HAN ………………………………………………………………………………………………………… In order to ensure both the widest dissemination and protection of material published in our Journal, we ask authors to assign the rights of copyright in the articles they contribute. This enables Taylor & Francis Ltd ('us' or 'we') to ensure protection against infringement. In consideration of the publication of your Article, you agree to the following: 1. You assign to us with full title guarantee all rights of copyright and related rights in your Article. So that there is no doubt, this assignment includes the assignment of the right to publish the Article in all forms, including electronic and digital forms, for the full legal term of the copyright and any extension or renewals. Electronic form shall include, but not be limited to, microfiche, CD-ROM and in a form accessible via on-line electronic networks. You shall retain the right to use the substance of the above work in future works, including lectures, press releases and reviews, provided that you acknowledge its prior publication in the journal. 2. We shall prepare and publish your Article in the Journal. We reserve the right to make such editorial changes as may be necessary to make the Article suitable for publication, or as we reasonably consider necessary to avoid infringing third party rights or law; and we reserve the right not to proceed with publication for whatever reason. 3. You hereby assert your moral rights to be identified as the author of the Article according to the UK Copyright Designs & Patents Act 1988. 4. You warrant that you have at your expense secured the necessary written permission from the appropriate copyright owner or authorities for the reproduction in the Article and the Journal of any text, illustration, or other material. You warrant that, apart from any such third party copyright material included in the Article, the Article is your original work, and does not infringe the intellectual property rights of any other person or entity and cannot be construed as plagiarising any other published work. You further warrant that the Article has not been previously assigned or licensed by you to any third party and you will undertake that it will not be published elsewhere without our written consent. 5. In addition you warrant that the Article contains no statement that is abusive, defamatory, libelous, obscene, fraudulent, nor in any way infringes the rights of others, nor is in any other way unlawful or in violation of applicable laws. 6. You warrant that wherever possible and appropriate, any patient, client or participant in any research or clinical experiment or study who is mentioned in the Article has given consent to the inclusion of material pertaining to themselves, and that they acknowledge that they cannot be identified via the Article and that you will not identify them in any way. 7. You warrant that you shall include in the text of the Article appropriate warnings concerning any particular hazards that may be involved in carrying out experiments or procedures described in the Article or involved in instructions, materials, or formulae in the Article, and shall mention explicitly relevant safety precautions, and give, if an accepted code of practice is relevant, a reference to the relevant standard or code. 8. You shall keep us and our affiliates indemnified in full against all loss, damages, injury, costs and expenses (including legal and other professional fees and expenses) awarded against or incurred or paid by us as a result of your breach of the warranties given in this agreement. 9. You undertake that you will include in the text of the Article an appropriate statement should you have a financial interest or benefit arising from the direct applications of your research. 10. If the Article was prepared jointly with other authors, you warrant that you have been authorised by all co-authors to sign this Agreement on their behalf, and to agree on their behalf the order of names in the publication of the Article. You shall notify us in writing of the names of any such co-owners. 11. This agreement (and any dispute, proceeding, claim or controversy in relation to it) is subject to English law and the jurisdiction of the Courts of England and Wales. It may only be amended by a document signed by both of us. Signed ___________________________________ Print name ___________________________________ Date ___________________________________