The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic by Pablo F. Gómez (review)

In The Experiential Caribbean, Pablo F. Gómez explicates the development of an embodied epistemology among black practitioners in the seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean. Gómez uses a number of terms for the men and women who became practitioners, including black ritualists, ritual healers, and “Mohanes” (11), an Amerindian term for religious healers. Their encounters with sufferers produced what he calls the “Caribbean experiential”: “a variegated array of novel knowledge-making practices based on these sensorial experiences” (3) that healers deployed in their efforts to cure sickness. The term conveys two phenomena: the primacy of sensory experience in black healers’ reading of the sick body, and ritualists’ performative deployment of their sensory-based spiritual power to build a medical authority distinct from other practitioners in the region.

Gómez’s work joins studies on the history of science and medicine in the Caribbean that decenter older, Eurocentric narratives of the rise of empiricism and Enlightenment rationality. Some of this scholarship excavates African diasporic modes of medical thinking, though most focuses on how European perceptions of the incommensurability between African and European ways of knowing marginalized Afro-Caribbean people as mere sources of folk wisdom rather than credible interpreters of specimens and antidotes.¹ But Gómez goes considerably further by suggesting that the empiricism that scholars once associated with the Scientific Revolution emerged not in the academic societies of Protestant Northern Europe but in the healing rituals of seventeenth-century Afro-Caribbean practitioners. Not all readers will be convinced by this argument, but Gómez does provide an astute rendition of the emergence, at the hands of Afro-Caribbean people, of the shared beliefs and expectations that mediated the relationship between the region’s sufferers and healers.

The book begins with the material conditions that created these shared beliefs. For Gómez, the region’s diverse populations explain the rise of the experiential, as the inability of Europeans to gain a demographic majority kept physicians from replicating in the Caribbean the outsized interpretive power that they maintained in Europe. Simultaneously, forced transportation of diverse African ethnic groups to the basin ruptured the intergenerational transmission of healing cosmologies tied to any one kingdom or region. Belief in a sacralized natural world, however, was common among black diasporic communities and supplied a unifying set of premises that made the experiential intelligible to individuals of diverse origins.

The absence of a dominant system for diagnosing and curing sickness enabled the experiential to gain traction among African residents and their descendants. Experiential knowledge resonated particularly with black Caribeños because they shared the conviction that the landscape was haunted by ancestors. Black ritualists manifested their abilities to corral the power of spirits before diverse communities of Afro-Creole onlookers and patients, cementing their unique healing authority in the process. Ritualists did not accomplish the elaboration of the experiential into a distinctive way of knowing on their own; each retelling of a Mohan’s sensory communication with the natural world generated expectations among audiences about the rituals and physical objects constitutive of black practitioners’ spiritual power. Experiential knowledge represents, for Gómez, not the survival of a specific healing tradition but Afro-Creoles’ creative response to the cultural violence wrought by coerced dislocation.

Gómez’s archival dexterity is on full display as he charts the development of the intellectual culture of black healers and its movement across the Spanish Caribbean. Scholars of the Iberian Atlantic have noticed elites’ patronage of black practitioners but have struggled to identify them in the archives in significant numbers. Gómez fills this lacuna by pulling testimony about healing activities from approximately one hundred Inquisition cases that were lodged with Cartagena’s Holy Office, with occasional reference to Cuba and Venezuela as well.

Practitioners’ and witnesses’ testimony reveal that economic competition drove ritualists’ self-fashioning in the medical marketplace. Black healers faced the challenge...