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Abstract
Obeah encompasses a wide variety of beliefs and practices involving the control or channelling of supernatural/spiritual forces, usually for socially beneficial ends such as treating illness, bringing good fortune, protecting against harm, and avenging wrongs. Although obeah was sometimes used to harm others, Europeans during the slave period distorted its positive role in the lives of many enslaved persons. In post-emancipation times, colonial officials, local white elites and their ideological allies exaggerated the antisocial dimensions of obeah, minimizing or ignoring its positive functions. This negative interpretation became so deeply ingrained that many West Indians accept it to varying degrees today, although the positive attributes of obeah are still acknowledged in most parts of the anglophone Caribbean.
The word obeah found across the anglophone Caribbean is probably one of the most widely known African-derived terms in the region.2 However, there is little consensus among scholars on its meaning and significance, although many conceptions of obeah, both in the past and in more recent years, stress its antisocial and evil nature as witchcraft or sorcery. Indeed, the term obeah has come to be endowed with a malevolent/malign social power - much like the "bad words" (swear words) which can lead to legal sanctions if publicly uttered in Jamaica or other West Indian societies.
Obeah is not an organized religion. It lacks a more or less unified system of beliefs and practices involving, for example, deities or gods, communal or public rituals and ceremonies and the physical spaces or sites where they occur, or spiritual leaders of congregations/congregants, as in Haitian Vodun/Vodoo, Brazilian Candomblé, Cuban Santería, or the Orisha religion (formerly known as Shango) in Trinidad. Rather, obeah is a catch-all term that encompasses a wide variety and range of beliefs and practices related to the control or channelling of supernatural/spiritual forces by particular individuals or groups for their own needs, or on behalf of clients who come for help. Originally, on the seventeenth-century slave plantations of the British Caribbean, these beliefs and practices drew on a number of common and broadly related African models or belief systems, including sacred traditions and medical knowledge, modified over the years by the New World environment, including its plant and animal life; European practices, beliefs and material culture...