Obeah : Healing and Protection in West Indian Slave

Obeah encompasses a wide variety of beliefs and practices involving the control or channelling of supernaturallspiritual 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 h a m others, Europeans during the slave period distorted its positive role in the lives o f many enslavedpersons. In post-emancipation times, colonial officials, local white elites and their ideological allies exaggerated the antisocial dimensions o f 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 o f 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.' 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 congregationslcongregants, as in Haitian VodunIVodoo, Brazilian CandomblC, Cuban Santeria, or The Journal o f Caribbean History 38, 2 (2004): 153-183