Race and Science in Global Histories

This book review examines how historians of science have defined knowledge production, as well as its protagonists and settings, in ways that both reject and reproduce the racialization of bodies and cultures in the early modern Caribbean. Recent scholarship in the history of science has furthered our understanding of the history of scientific racism, including the role of theories of biological difference in processes of slavery and colonization, the influence of Christian theological thought in race science, and the importance of eugenics projects in nation building.¹ These interventions emphasize how the content of science can be influenced by and further reinforce racial thinking and racism. An equally important area of research focuses on the ways in which non-Western ways of knowing are themselves racialized and othered and thereby denied the status of "science." In reflecting on the connections between race and science, it is paramount that we rethink what science is—and thus how we tell its histories.²

Recent scholarship in colonial Mesoamerica, the Caribbean, and the Atlantic World grapples with these questions by reworking our understanding of the when, where, and how of knowledge production. In this review we focus on Pablo F. Góez's Experiential Caribbean, a historical account of experience-based healing and ritual practices in the Caribbean during the long seventeenth century (ca. 1580-1720). The book locates the epistemologies of Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples as central to the history of science while shedding light on the dynamics of violence and extraction that allowed for European colonization and appropriation of knowledge in the Americas. Gómez also investigates how experiential and sensorial phenomena "shaped a creative praxis for the production of local power that was transportable" among Black ritual practitioners in the Caribbean (ec, 3). His exemplary work expands our vision of science and knowledge production beyond Europe and acknowledges the inventive and innovative capacities of non-Europeans. Additionally, Gómez's generative scholarship opens avenues for future work on the connections across the Atlantic world and the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean ecumene—an important step toward global histories of science that explore knowledge production in transregional contexts.

Book Summary

Gómez approaches the production of early modern knowledge of the natural world by focusing on healing practices as recorded in Spanish Inquisition documents. The Experiential Caribbean is struc-tured thematically: the first section focuses on the historical context of healing practices in the Caribbean, and the second delves into specific case studies. In chapter 1 Gómez sets the scene through detailed descriptions of the migrations and diverse communities that characterized the Caribbean, particularly Cartagena de Indias, "the main slave entrepôt of the Spanish empire" during the seventeenth century (ec, 27). In chapters 2 and 3 Gómez provides more specific context around illness and disease, as well as healing practices in the Caribbean.

Gómez mentions the role of Indian piaches (physicians, astrologers, and necromancers); yerbateros and herbolarios (herbalists); mohánes (Afro-descendant and African ritual specialists from Angola, Congo, Cacheu, Biafada, the Gambia Delta); and mulatto healers from a variety of Caribbean locales (ec, 65), highlighting how science and religion were intertwined in these various Caribbean epistemologies. In chapters 4 through 7 Gómez provides a series of case studies that stress the importance of sensory experience, creativity, and wonder among practitioners and patients in search of healing.

Throughout the book Gómez explains how witnessing, wonder, and sensorial experiences were central to how free and enslaved Black people in the Caribbean knew the natural world. In particular, Gómez argues that wondrous events, such as Antonio Congo's ability to bring a tropical storm to a halt on the shores of Cartagena, "established the foundation upon which black Caribbean experiential epistemologies about nature became cemented" (ec, 147). This is an important intervention because it challenges the narrative that locates seventeenth-century European...