Obeah
Obeah, also spelled Obiya or Obia, is a broad term for African diasporic religious, spell-casting, and healing traditions found primarily in the former British colonies of the Caribbean. These practices derive much from West African traditions but also incorporate elements of European and South Asian origin. Many of those who practice these traditions avoid the term Obeah due to the word's pejorative connotations in many Caribbean societies.
Central to Obeah are ritual specialists who offer a range of services to paying clients. These specialists have sometimes been termed Obeahmen and Obeahwomen, although often refer to themselves in other ways, for instance calling themselves "scientists", "doctors", or "professors". Important in these ritual systems is engagement with the spirits and the manipulation of supernatural forces. A prominent role is played by healing practices, often incorporating herbal and animal ingredients. Other services include attempts to achieve justice for a client or to provide them with spiritual protection. Cursing practices have also featured in Obeah, involving the making of objects to cause harm or the production of poisons. There is considerable regional and individual variation in the nature of the rituals that practitioners of Obeah have engaged in.
Amid the Atlantic slave trade of the 16th to 19th centuries, thousands of West Africans, many Ashanti were transported to Caribbean colonies controlled by the British Empire. Here, traditional African religious practices assumed new forms, for instance being employed for the protection of Maroon communities. Enslaved Africans also absorbed British influences, especially from Christianity, and later from the Hinduism and Islam introduced by indentured South Asian migrants. The colonial elites disapproved of African traditions and introduced laws to prohibit them, using the term Obeah as a general label for these practices from the 1760s on. This suppression meant that Obeah emerged as a system of practical rituals rather than as a broader communal religion akin to Haitian Vodou or Cuban Santería. After the British abolition of slavery in the 1830s, new laws were introduced against Obeah, increasingly portraying it as fraud, laws that remained following the end of imperial rule. Since the 1980s, Obeah's practitioners have campaigned to remove these legal restrictions, often under the aegis of religious freedom.
The term Obeah has been used for practices in the Caribbean nations of the Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Grenada, Guyana, Jamaica, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, and the Virgin Islands. Caribbean migrants have also taken these practices elsewhere, to countries like the United States, Canada, and United Kingdom. In many Caribbean countries Obeah remains technically illegal and widely denigrated, especially given the negative assessment towards it evident in religions like Evangelical Protestantism and Rastafari.
Definitions and terminology
Obeah incorporates both spell-casting and healing practices, largely of African origin, although with European and South Asian influences as well. It is found primarily in the former British colonies of the Caribbean, namely Suriname, Jamaica, the Virgin Islands, Trinidad, Tobago, Guyana, Belize, the Bahamas, St Vincent and the Grenadines, and Barbados. Aside from the common use of Obeah, other spellings that have been used include Obiya, Obey, Obi, and Obia, the latter common in Suriname and French Guiana.The term Obeah encompasses a varied range of traditions that are highly heterogenous and display much regional variation.
The Hispanic studies scholars Margarite Fernández Olmos and Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert defined Obeah as "a set of hybrid or creolized beliefs dependent on ritual invocation, fetishes, and charms", while the historian Diana Paton termed it "a very wide range of practices that, broadly speaking, invoke the ritual manipulation of spiritual power". For the historians Jerome Handler and Kenneth Bilby it was "a loosely defined complex involving supernatural practices largely related to healing and protection". The historian Thomas Waters called Obeah a "supernatural tradition", and described how it "blended West African rituals with herbalism, Islam, Christianity and even a smattering of British folk magic". The term was originally used by Europeans, according to Handler and Bilby, as "a catch-all term for a range of supernatural-related ideas and behaviours that were not of European origin and which they heavily criticized and condemned."
Throughout history, the term Obeah has rarely been used as a self-description of a person's own practices. In the Caribbean, practitioners of folk healing traditions are often reluctant to publicly describe what they do as Obeah; there are some people who will privately describe what they do as Obeah, but used other words publicly. Historically, those who were accused of practicing Obeah in criminal court rarely used that term itself. Some practitioners instead refer to it as "Science", or as working, doing a job, doing some good, practicing, clearing. In Jamaica, another term for Obeah is "iniquity," probably deriving from the repeated Protestant admonitions that Obeah was an iniquitous practice.
Relations with other religious traditions
Paton noted that, in encompassing a broad range of supernaturally-oriented practices, the term Obeah served a "roughly equivalent" role in the Anglophone Caribbean to the terms conjure and root work in the United States and the of Francophone Caribbean islands Guadeloupe and Martinique. Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert suggested that Quimbois was essentially "a variation of Obeah".Obeah has both similarities and differences with other Afro-Caribbean religious traditions such as Haitian Vodou or Cuban Santería and Palo. Unlike them, it lacks communal rituals or a system of liturgy, and in contrast to the followers of these traditions, there is little evidence that Obeah's practitioners have regarded it as "their religion". Fernández Olmos and Paravisini-Gebert took the view that Obeah was not a religion per se, but is a term applied to "any African-derived practice with religious elements". Obeah exists at the borders of what both Christians and social scientists have typically recognised as "religion," and as such it has historically often been classified not as religion but as "magic," "witchcraft," "superstition," or "charlatanism."
Across much of the Caribbean it is common for individuals to practise multiple religious traditions simultaneously. Many practitioners of Obeah attend Christian church services and do not see their practice as being at odds with Christianity. In Trinidad, various Obeah practitioners are also involved in the Orisha religion. In parts of the West Indies, South Asian migration has resulted in syncretisms between Obeah and Hinduism. In places with large South Asian communities like Guyana and Trinidad there are records of some Obeahmen being brahmins who also served as Hindu priests.
Etymology
Obeah is often used as a general term for Afro-Caribbean religion as a whole. Bilby noted that in these cases it was "a monolithic signifier for African or neo-African forms of religiosity or spirituality still existing in the Caribbean". However, throughout the Caribbean, there is "considerable disagreement" about the meaning of the term obeah; the term is malleable, and as Bilby notes, it has no "single, essential meaning". It has instead often been used in reference to several different things.It is not known exactly how and when the term obeah came to be used in the Anglophone Caribbean. The earliest unambiguous use of it in the region was in a letter from Barbados from 1710, where it appeared as "Obia", and the term was more widely extant in Barbadian English by the 1720s and 1730s.
In contemporary scholarship, there is general agreement that the word obeah is of West African origin, although there remain different arguments as to which language it derives from. Paton noted that the exact origins of the term were "unlikely to be definitively resolved". One argument is that it stems from Twi, one of the Akan languages. In this case, it may derive from obayifo, a Twi term generally translated as "witch", or from bayi, the term for the morally neutral supernatural force employed by the obayifo. In support of this origin is the fact that the term obeah proved prominent in the British Caribbean colonies, Suriname, and the Danish Virgin Islands, all areas where large numbers of Akan speakers from the Gold Coast were introduced.
A second possibility is that the word obeah comes from the Efik language. If so, it could derive from the Efik word for "doctor," or alternatively from the word ubio, often translated as "fetish". A third option traces it to the Igbo language, where a dibia was a ritual specialist involved in healing and other practices. Other proposals trace the word obeah to the Edo language obi, often translated as "poison", or the Yoruba language obi, a term for a type of divination. In support of these non-Akan origins is the fact that captives taken from the Bay of Biafra constituted a major part of the population in those parts of the Caribbean where the term obeah is earliest attested.
In many parts of the Caribbean, the word Obeah is reserved only for destructive ritual practices and regarded as a synonym for sorcery or witchcraft.
In other places, the term is used in a fairly neutral manner to describe a form of spiritual power. This is the common understanding of the term among Maroon communities in Suriname and French Guiana, for example. Bilby noted that in this context, obeah was a concept akin to the Yoruba religious notion of aṣẹ, which is also found in Santería and Candomblé. He suggested that the positive use of the word obia here was because these Maroon communities had remained largely outside of European cultural domination. These Surinamese did believe in the negative use of supernatural power, but they called that wisi, a term derived from the English "witch".
Variants of the term Obeah also appeared among African-Americans in the South Carolina Lowcountry prior to the American Civil War.
The term obeah seems to have been unknown in Francophone societies during the 17th and 18th centuries, but began to appear among French speakers in Martinique by the early 19th century.