The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

The Experiential Caribbean

The Experiential Caribbean

Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic

PABLO F. GÓMEZ

The University of North Carolina Press   Chapel Hill

This book was published with the assistance of the Authors Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

Support for this publication was also provided by the University of Wisconsin—Madison Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation.

© 2017 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

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Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Gómez, Pablo F., author.

Title: The experiential Caribbean : creating knowledge and healing in the early modern Atlantic / Pablo F. Gómez.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2017] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016031011| ISBN 9781469630861 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469630878 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469630885 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Traditional medicine—Caribbean Area—History—17th century. | Healing—Caribbean Area—History—17th century. | Experiential learning—Caribbean Area—History—17th century. | Free blacks—Caribbean Area—History—17th century.

Classification: LCC GR120 .G65 2017 | DDC 615.509729—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016031011

Cover illustration: Detail of Il missionario incendia la capanna dello stregone, from Bernardino Ignazio da Vezza [d’Asti], Missione in prattica [dei] Padri cappuccinni ne’ Regni di Congo, Angola, et adiacenti. Courtesy of Direzione Cultura, Educazione e Gioventù, Servizio Biblioteche, Torino, Italy.

Portions of chapter 3 were previously published in The Circulation of Bodily Knowledge in the Seventeenth Century Black Spanish Caribbean, Social History of Medicine 26, no. 3 (2013): 383–402. Used here by permission of Oxford University Press.

Portions of chapter 7 were previously published in Incommensurable Epistemologies?: The Atlantic Geography of Healing in the Early Modern Black Spanish Caribbean, Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 44 (2014): 95–107. Republished with permission of the copyright holder, Duke University Press.

Para Margarita y Gustavo

Contents

Acknowledgments

Note on Sources

Introduction

1   Arrivals

2   Landscapes

3   Movement

4   Sensual Knowledge

5   Social Pharmacopeias

6   Astounding Creativity

7   Truth and the Experiential

Conclusion

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures, Maps, and Tables

Figures

6.1.   Ritual practitioners manipulating the weather in West Central Africa (Matamba), ca. 1687, 149

6.2.   Map of the Villa del Cayo and surrounding settlements, ca. 1681, 157

7.1.   Detail of painting depicting ritual tools from Sogno, Kingdom of Kongo, 177

Maps

1.1.   Selected Caribbean locales in the seventeenth century, 21

2.1.   Cartagena de Indias in the seventeenth century, 53

Tables

1.1.   Caribbean vecinos population, ca. 1653, 1682, and 1688, 25

2.1.   Ritual practitioners of African descent in the long seventeenth-century Caribbean, 61

5.1.    Summary of the inventory of the medicines that Justiniano Justiniani, the factor of Domingo Grillo and Ambrosio Lomelín in Panama, owed to Doña Thomasa Árias Navarro, apothecary. Portobelo, Panama, 1666, 123

5.2.   Medicines for the treatment of slaves in the coast of Guyana, 1683–86, 126

7.1.   Botanical products used in healing practices by seventeenth-century black Caribbean ritual specialists, 182

Acknowledgments

A multitude of people and institutions have made this book possible—more than I can possibly recall. Two yearlong fellowships from the American Council for Learned Societies, with funds from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, provided formidable support for research and writing. The School of Medicine and Public Health at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, through the Centennial Scholars Program, provided generous support for multiyear course releases. Also at Wisconsin, the Department of Medical History and Bioethics and the Latin American, Caribbean, and Iberian Studies Program provided essential funding for research; the Center for the Humanities at Wisconsin sponsored a crucial workshop on the first complete manuscript draft of the book; and the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education, with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, provided a subvention for the publication of the book. The Department of History and the College of Art & Sciences at Vanderbilt University, the Department of History and Geography at Texas Christian University, and the Program for Cultural Cooperation between Spain’s Ministry of Culture and United States Universities all provided funds for research trips. Research at the John Carter Brown Library was funded by a Paul W. McQuillen Memorial Fellowship, and at the Huntington Library by an Elizabeth Crahan and K. Garth Huston Fellowship. The Cogut Center for the Humanities at Brown University provided support for a productive year during which many of the ideas that appear in this book were first gestated.

Jane Landers and Arleen Tuchman have remained loyal and constant supporters and advisers throughout the years, as well as patient, generous, and candid readers of my work. This book would not have been possible without them. At Vanderbilt I am also thankful to William Caferro, Dan Usner, Katie Crawford, Paula Covington, Steve Wernke, Celso Castilho, Marshall Eakin, Edward Wright-Rios, Tiffany Paterson, and Matthew Ramsey. The department of History and Geography at Texas Christian University provided a collegial and fertile intellectual environment. I am thankful for the friendship, support, and advice of Gene Smith, Peter Szok, Peter Worthing, Suzanne Ramirez, Jodi Campbell, and Juan Carlos Sola Corbacho. Amy Buono, Marco Musillo, Steven Sloan, Ryan Schmitz, and Denise Landeros-Schmitz became close and supportive friends during my time in Texas. All of them made my time at the metroplex productive and germinative. At the Cogut Center at Brown University I was fortunate to join a stimulating and generous intellectual community. I am particularly grateful to Catherine Bliss, Ipek A. Celik, and Felipe Gaitan-Ammann.

The Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has been my academic home for the past four years. I could not have asked for a better and richer environment in which to work. I am very grateful for the support of Susan Lederer, Gregg Mitman, Richard Keller, Ronald Numbers, Judith Houck, Thomas Broman, Judith Leavitt, Paul Kelleher, Linda Hogle, Dan Hausman, Margaret ‘Gretchen’ Schwarze, Robert Streiffer, Dayle Delancey, Alta Charo, and Pilar Ossorio. Jean VonAllmen, Lori Brooks, and Joann Steinich helped me with all sorts of administrative matters and an endless provision of chocolate. At the Centennial Scholar Program I want to thank all the fellows, and Patricia Kokotailos and Tracy Downs in particular, for the continued support and encouragement. I am fortunate to also call academic homes both the Department of the History of Science and the Department of History at Wisconsin. I have benefited greatly from working alongside and talking about the book with colleagues in both departments. James Sweet has been a formidable supporter of this project, a careful and candid reader, and an engaged and generous interlocutor. My special thanks also go to Lynn Nyhart, Florence Hsia, Nicole Nelson, Catherine Jackson, Robin Rider, Elizabeth Hennessy, Stephen Kantrowitz, Florence Bernault, Karl Shoemaker, Emily Callaci, and Pernille Ipsen. Thinking about health, bodies, medicine, and science in the African world with Claire Wendland and Neil Kodesh has been a crucially enriching enterprise that has put its imprint indelibly on this book. My Latin-Americanist colleagues have also been incredibly helpful. I am particularly grateful to Francisco Scarano, with whom I discussed many of the ideas about the Caribbean that inform this book. Steve Stern and Florencia Mallon have been equally supportive and inclusive. I am tremendously lucky that I have been the beneficiary of their years of expertise and insight in thinking about Latin America. My gratitude also goes to my students, who have been encouraging, energetic, and critical readers of some of the chapters of this book.

I am immensely grateful to the many librarians, archivists, and researchers working at the multiple institutions where I did research. David Wheat and Jane Landers shared with me their vast knowledge of the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) and were crucial guides during my first visits to Seville. Also at the AGI I would like to thank Esther Gonzalez for her invaluable collaboration during the later stages of the project. At the Archivo General de la Nación de Colombia, I want to thank Mauricio Tovar González for all the help and advice. Special thanks to Esperanza Adrados Vilar at the Archivo Histórico Nacional de España, who gave me access to a series of legajos that (because of suboptimal microfilm reproductions) had been long thought to be irreparably damaged. Mariana Candido, Timothy Walker, and Joanna Elrick provided invaluable guidance for my research at the Arquivo Histórico Ultramarino, the Arquivo Nacional da Torre do Tombo, and the Biblioteca da Ajuda in Lisbon. The advice of Florence Hsia, Amy Buono, J. Michael Francis, and John Thornton helped me enormously while doing research at the Archivum Romanun Sotietatis Iesu (ARSI) and the Archivo Storico di Propaganda Fide. Mauro Brunello and P. Raúl González were also greatly helpful while I did my work at ARSI. Linda Rupert shared with me her expertise with the records held at the Nationaal Archief at The Hague. Ken Ward and Kimberly Nusco helped me in locating materials and reproducing them during my time at the John Carter Brown Library. Finally, librarians at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, spent many hours procuring many of the books, articles, and obscure interlibrary loans I needed for this project. I am in debt to all of them for their help.

I am sincerely grateful to the participants at the workshops, seminars, and colloquia who read, and astutely commented on, preliminary versions of some of the chapters of this book. These include the Global Reformations workshop at the Center for the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin; the colloquium The Paths of Medical un/Orthodoxy? Colonial Latin America and its World at Queen’s University; the graduate seminar Religion in the Atlantic World taught by Jorge Cañizares Esguerra at the University of Texas at Austin; the Networks of Exchange seminar at Rutgers University; the workshop Globalizing Histories of Science, Medicine, Technology, and Medicine at New York University at Abu Dhabi; the workshop on the History of Medicine and Public Health in Latin America at the University of California at Santa Barbara; the Seminar for Caribbean Epistemologies at the Graduate Center, City University of New York; the fellows seminar at the Cogut Center at Brown University; and the symposium Globalizing the History of Colonial Medicine and Public Health: Adding Latin America and the Caribbean at Yale University.

I have been the beneficiary of the generosity of the many scholars I have met over the years at different events and archives in the United States, Latin America, Asia, and Europe and over e-mail exchanges. They have read and commented on papers and sections of this manuscript, patiently discussed and disabused me of half-formed ideas and concepts, shared references and their own published and unpublished work, and provided much needed criticism and words of encouragement. Among them, I am particularly grateful to Gabriela Soto LaVeaga, Harold Cook, Marcy Norton, Timothy Walker, Matthew Crawford, Kelly Wisecup, Cynthia Radding, Amy Buono, Neil Safier, Elena Schneider, Laura Mitchell, Renée Soulodre-La France, Michael LaRosa, José Polo Acuña, Frances Ramos, Claire Gherini, José Carlos de la Puente, Marcy Norton, Fiona Clark, Adam Warren, Ryan Kashanipour, Hugh Cagle, Jessica Krug, Projit Mukharji, Clapperton Mavhunga, Bethany Fisk, Stephan Palmié, John Thornton, Joseph Miller, Nancy Hunt, Mariola Espinoza, Allison Bigelow, Marta Hanson, James Delbourgo, Kathleen Crowther, Nayhan Fancy, Armin Schwegler, John Slater, and Ryan Schmitz.

I am particularly indebted to Herman Bennett and Kris Lane who refereed the book for the University of North Carolina Press and provided precise and detailed criticism and suggestions as well as encouraging comments on the book. Jorge Cañizares Esguerra, Mary Fissell, Claire Wendland, Richard Keller, Gregg Mittman, Florence Hsia, James Sweet, Sara Guyer, Adam Warren, Francisco Scarano, Ronald Numbers, and David Wheat read entire early drafts of the book manuscript and gave me equally careful, detailed, and candid criticism and valuable ideas for improvement. The book is immensely better because of all the work they put into it and their generosity with their knowledge and intellectual honesty. A special mention goes to Natalie Deibel, who painstakingly read and edited the entire manuscript and repeatedly provided exacting and exceedingly useful feedback. She accompanied me and supported me emotionally and intellectually during the years when I wrote this book. I will remain always grateful. Courtney Campbell, Nick Lally, and Alberto Ortiz carefully helped me with editing, formatting, and double-checking references and other infelicities. I am very appreciative for their careful and fastidious work. I am deeply thankful to my editor Elaine Maisner, who believed in this project since its inception and has been a patient, supportive, and wise adviser and editorial guide. I could not have been in better hands. All errors that remain are mine.

Kathrin Seidl provided love, companionship, and emotional and intellectual support over the early years of research and writing this book. José Morcuende opened multiple doors. The friendship of Juan Carlos Cárdenas, David LaFevor, Tara LaFevor, Celso Castilho, Ty West, William Fernandez-Hardin, Tim Maddux, Margaret Maddux, Courtney Campbell, David Wheat, Seila Gonzalez Estrecha, Erin Woodruff, Ronald Numbers, Margaret J. Wilsman, Francisco Scarano, Olga Scarano, Stephen Kantrowitz, Pernille Ipsen, Jennifer Derr, Stephen Young, Elizabeth Hennessy, Victor Goldgel Caraballo, Emily Callaci, Paul Kelleher, Bora Ozel, Melissa Ozel, Jay Roberts, Allison Cooley, Anthony Fontas, Judd Kinzley, Adam Charlton, Douglas Griffin, Lisa Schueler, Matt Hujet, and Karley Hujet has been crucial throughout the time it took to write the book. Carolina Sandoval Garcia arrived in my life as I completed the book and has lovingly accompanied and supported me as I finish this journey.

Finally, it is with enormous pleasure and gratitude that I acknowledge the unwavering support of my family. They have sustained me all along. So, in payment for all of their love, here is my offering to my siblings Sara and Sergio, their partners Salim Chalela and Lia Velez, and my nephew Lorenzo Gómez Vélez (el precioso!). I dedicate this book to my parents Margarita Zuluaga Tobon and the late Gustavo Gómez Serna, who, with inspiring love and tenacity, have supported me in all of my enterprises and remain towering sources of humility and inspiration.

Note on Sources

This book employs a wide range of underutilized and previously unknown primary source materials. These include a variety of administrative, corporative, judicial, and governmental records from Spanish, Colombian, Dutch, Portuguese, Italian, and U.S. archives and libraries. I have also drawn from medical and surgical texts and manuscripts, some of which were written in the Caribbean itself, as well as books and pamphlets describing popular healing practices. In addition, I examine early modern treatises and manuscripts about natural philosophy, theology, and natural history, as well as recipe books and pharmacy and library inventories. The book also makes widespread use of ecclesiastical reports and correspondence from missionary orders in Africa and the New World.

Throughout the book, I use a modernized paleographical transcription of all manuscript documents. All transcriptions and translations are mine, unless noted otherwise. For clarity I use punctuation and diacritical marks that had not become standard in Spanish sources at the time. In most cases the last names of African slaves refer broadly to their regions of geographical origin. For the last names of African slaves appearing in Spanish I transcribed them as they appeared in the sources (instead of using English translations for these ethnonyms).

The book makes ample use of a treasure trove of documents from the Inquisition office established in Cartagena de Indias in the seventeenth century. Cartagena’s Inquisition office—one of only three permanent tribunals in the New World—oversaw cases coming from all over the Caribbean, including Venezuela and Panama. The scope of the book reflects the inconsistent, but far-reaching, and for many I am sure unexpected, reach of the tribunal. Inquisition cases have provided an invaluable source for historians studying a large number of topics, ranging from religion to popular culture to gender. They have also proven crucial to the study of early modern African diasporic culture and religion. Some of the records I examine here from Cartagena are well known to historians. Many are, however, examined and transcribed here for the first time (particularly some that were mistakenly discarded as irreparably damaged by water or mold). Besides the hundreds of cases contained in the collections of Procesos de Fé and Relaciones de Causa de Fé, I also make use of the vast collection of administrative material produced by the Holy Office, including administrative visit reports, population censuses, inventories, correspondence, and accounting ledgers.

People of African origin did not represent the primary object of attention of Cartagena’s Holy Office. The Inquisition was, after all, a monarchic institution that in the Caribbean was mainly preoccupied with cases that threatened to subvert the Spanish crown’s tenuous political and social hold over the region. As such, it functioned as a tool for religious and political control, and its records reveal instances of imperial contestation as much as they chronicle local power struggles. The Holy Office in Cartagena was, indeed, established primarily to regulate the migration and lives of Protestants and Jews who immigrated to the region from all corners of Europe and the New World. A majority of black Caribbean ritual practitioners practiced for decades before they were called before Inquisitors. In most cases examined here, it was the success of these practitioners that brought them to the Inquisitors’ attention after their competitors (physicians and other healers) denounced them.

In the Caribbean, men and women were brought in front of secular authorities or Inquisition envoys within days, and in many cases just hours, of their capture; sometimes these hearings were held even before the accused person traveled to Cartagena. During these crucial initial court appearances, defendants informed Inquisitors about their rites, clientele, beliefs, history, origin, and enemies. These initial interrogations happened in most cases before the defendants examined in this book had a chance to be advised by lawyers. They also had not yet become acquainted with the demonological reference points that so clearly informed testimonies of defendants who had spent several months in jail prior to being interrogated, as was the case with prisoners sent to, for instance, Portuguese Inquisition courts in Europe.

If, in matters of demonological blending, some of Cartagena’s records resemble those of other Inquisition courts, they differ substantially from other seventeenth-century records in several critical ways. First, they were created in a city populated mainly by people of African descent, in which first-generation Africans, called bozales, appear repeatedly in the record while speaking their native tongue. Indeed, the fact that they could not speak Castilian Spanish was one of the reasons why they were called as such in the first place, as the word bozal refers to muzzle and was a reference to their inability to communicate linguistically and culturally within Spanish mores and languages. Spanish scribes were bound by law to transcribe word for word (or as close as was feasible) the depositions of these defendants. In Cartagena, this meant that many such depositions had to be translated, as the majority of bozal defendants did not speak Castilian. The Jesuit College in the city provided assistance in such cases by lending the court translators, whom Jesuits called lenguas (tongues). The college’s collection of lenguas included those who, together, spoke more than seventy African languages. While acknowledging the inevitable mediation of scribes and stylized court proceedings, these depositions represent a truly unique conduit for relaying the voices and ontologies of seventeenth-century African historical actors.

Although fascinating, Inquisition records are fractious, fragmented, and uneven in their detail. In addition to Inquisition records, I also use an array of contemporary sources. The initial two chapters and most of chapter five, indeed, are based almost exclusively on non-Inquisitorial records coming from governmental and private records, many of them from the vast holdings of the Archivo General de Indias. The pages that follow incorporate thousands of records from numerous archives that capture the worldviews of more than 100 ritual practitioners of African descent, the world in which they lived and the people with whom they interacted. My analysis is, thus, also built upon the recollections of hundreds of witnesses to these practitioners’ actions, and these witnesses represent all Atlantic origins, social extractions, and occupations. When read critically, these exceptional records provide some of the richest accounts left by early modern Caribbean people, particularly those of African origin, about their existences and the worlds they created. They reveal not only what people believed to be possible, but also what was possible to be believed.

The Experiential Caribbean

Introduction

After much delay, Bernardo Macaya finally arrived in Cartagena de Indias in late October 1675. The chief constable of the city of Portobelo in Panama had hastily arranged for Bernardo’s departure to Cartagena shortly after taking office some weeks before. The magistrate had heard worrisome notices about Bernardo during his time in Portobelo and had discovered equally disturbing accounts about him in paperwork left by the previous constable. Bernardo, a thirty-four-year-old West Central African slave of Congo caste, was a feared and renowned ritual practitioner operating around Portobelo. The chief constable was worried that he would not be able to keep Bernardo in prison or, worse, that he would end up like his immediate predecessor in office: dead. His fears were eventually realized by the events surrounding Bernardo’s departure from Portobelo.¹

For three days, according to the chief constable and the ship’s crew, the vessel taking Bernardo to Cartagena could not depart. The West Central African slave had commanded the skies over the Caribbean Sea to unleash fearsome winds and pour water and thunder over the city that Bernardo said he would use to break the ships of those taking him to Cartagena and kill them. It was only after prolonged negotiations and, later, after one of the sailing vessel’s shipmates held the West African ritual practitioner at gun point that Bernardo agreed to let the sea … become calmed enough so the ship could set sail.² Bernardo’s powers, however, went far beyond commanding seas and skies.

Witnesses told the chief constable how, among other events, in early 1675 the governor of the free black town of Nuestra Señora de La Consolación, some ten miles west of Portobelo, called for Bernardo to treat a wound to his hand. The governor was worried he "had been bitten by a bejuco (a reed). After examining the leader, Bernardo confirmed that, indeed, the ulcer was caused by herbs and gathered all of Nuestra Señora de La Consolación’s folk in the central plaza to discover the culprits. Bernardo then appeared in the middle of the group dressed in skirts, with a macaw feather on his head and started playing a deer antler and a bell. He danced for a space of six or eight hours performing different ceremonies, during which he approached seven blacks, three men and four women and smeared their faces with charcoal, explaining this was a signal that they were witches and that one of them was the one who had cursed the hand of the town’s leader. This was a procedure that allowed him to recognize the main culprits from those who only had been caught by the shadow of the herbs" by living close to the real yerbateros (herbalists/witch doctors).³ Bernardo commanded the powerful energies moving the sinews of the world in the eyes of his Caribbean audience. During his rites, Bernardo manifested his authority over the spiritual, political, social, and physical realms that were intermingled in the workings of early modern nature. His command over nature was experientially evident for all to perceive. Even if Panamanian folk did not capture the meanings behind Bernardo’s words or performances, they could not help but feel the power of his knowledge.

The hinterlands of Portobelo during the seventeenth century, like those of Havana or the northern plains of the New Kingdom of Granada (today’s Colombia), were a remote, harsh country. It was a place of fierce storms, where a simple reed could bite one’s extremities and injure one’s very soul. The early modern Caribbean lay far from the imperial courts, anatomical theaters, learned societies’ halls, and stock exchange rooms of the era, where, according to well-established historical narratives, fact-based ways of knowing the natural world and human bodies were conceived. And yet, it is in these godforsaken wetlands, tropical forests, mountains, and various urban and rural settlements, where the characteristics of early modern Atlantic histories of experientially based knowledge making truly become visible.

Caribeños, like Bernardo, lived at a time when the world and how people thought it could be known were being re-imagined. The early modern period, particularly the seventeenth century, remains the paradigmatic site for the creation of the epistemologies that birthed modernity.⁴ Bernardo Macaya’s history does not appear equivalent to the now legendary intellectual, cultural, and social transformations that occurred during the early modern era.⁵ Yet, Bernardo’s life and work are fundamental for understanding the world where these transformations took place.

This book departs from one foundational question: On what basis did people in the early modern Caribbean create authoritative knowledge and truth about the natural world, particularly that of the body, during the long seventeenth century (ca. 1580–1720)? The pages that follow study the uneven and untidy development throughout this period of novel strategies that black Caribbean ritual specialists used to exercise power over the natural world—strategies that included a combination of spiritual, analytical, experiential, descriptive, and classificatory practices.⁶ These novel revolutionary creative strategies were highly successful and made black ritual practitioners the intellectual leaders of a region saturated with ideas from all over the globe.

I argue that rather than depending on references to first principles, tradition, or dogma, black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ power and knowledge-creating strategies were based on experiential phenomena they manufactured anew on the basis of localized circumstances in different Caribbean locales. This book examines how, in order to ground this new type of knowledge, ritual practitioners of African descent created sensorial landscapes in which physical, social, and spiritual as well as moral orders became physically evident. Knowledge about the natural world in the black Caribbean emerged from particulars and did not lay claim to grand principles. It shaped a creative praxis for the production of local power that was transportable.

The new Caribbean experiential—a variegated array of novel knowledge-making practices based on these sensorial experiences—allowed black Caribbean ritual practitioners, many of them African, to claim access to truths about the nature of the world and allege morally superior knowledge in communities composed of ragtag groups of Atlantic people coming from a diverse number of cultural backgrounds. Success in this context depended on practitioners’ expertise in creating and deploying sensorially evident practices that demonstrated a capacity to effectively understand, classify, and manipulate the natural world.

The strategies that ritual specialists created to claim truth and power in the volatile geographic, cultural, and social spaces of the early modern Caribbean fundamentally present a different reality from those articulated in existent histories about knowledge and cultural production in the early modern era.⁷ Black ritual practitioners continuously reinvented the Caribbean experiential, based on their readings of the possibilities for inhabiting the world ensuing from thousands of encounters with diverse communities around the region. These encounters occurred in a social and intellectual realm removed from the contours and analytical categories of the oft-studied European-centered histories of empirical revolutions and the New Science that came of age in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Black ritual practitioners led an epistemological revolution in Caribbean intellectual spaces that existed both in parallel and in conversation with European-sponsored projects that explored the natural world.⁸ This history is one that unfolds outside the boundaries of the modern divide between the natural and the moral, nature and human, and the ideal and the material.⁹

The practices of black Caribbean knowledge makers are also ill-fitted to be analyzed as part of the diverse set of cultural, institutional, and intellectual practices encompassed under the exuberant umbrella of the Hispanic baroque—a famously controversial and capacious concept.¹⁰ Spanish and New World (particularly New Spain and Peru) baroque intellectuals and artists engaged with the changing nature of the world brought about by the manifold environmental, cultural, social, political, and economic crises of the seventeenth century by asserting the momentary and futile nature of the human experience.¹¹ They did so while chipping away at the foundational tenets of their own intellectual roots—which they saw as hopelessly limited for learning any fundamental truths about the nature of the world.¹² In contrast, seventeenth-century black Caribbean knowledge producers embraced the crisis of cultural uprooting and metonymic dissonance of the seventeenth century to create new forms of knowledge making that reasserted the power of the human experience to make truthful claims about nature. Seventeenth-century black ways of knowing represent an intellectual project that pointedly serves as a counterpoint to existing models for studying early modern Atlantic histories of knowledge making.

Criollo Interventions

The history of modernity and its attendant developments—the concept of race, nation-state building, new literary forms, capitalism, secularism, and individualism—anchor most scholarly works written about early modern Atlantic societies. This is the case even when modernity is conceived of as having a multiple, global, uneven trajectory or as a colonial re-import, rather than a singular, Eurocentric development—or when it serves as a contrasting surface against which to juxtapose the reaction of those left outside the project itself.¹³ These ideas about modernity continue to motivate the ways in which historians examine early modern stories of the world, bodies, and nature itself; in these, the early modern world is only important as an embryonic iteration of what follows.¹⁴

Producing knowledge from experience is common to every human group for which there is a record as a way of dealing with matters of health and disease. European learned elites from antiquity to the early modern era, however, viewed empirical knowledge with disdain. In the traditional scholastic and humanistic epistemic hierarchy (particularly in the medical realm), empiricism figured as a vulgar form of knowledge.¹⁵ Unlike the learned physicians and theologians who espoused the ancient Aristotelian scientia, so-called empirics and superstitious people did not concern themselves with the first principles or final causality that lay at the core of social hierarchies of knowledge production that linked philosophy, religion, and bodies.

Standard narratives sustain the belief that from the fifteenth to eighteenth centuries, a learned European-led project propelled fundamental economic, social, and political transformations around the globe under the auspices of objective knowledge. The rise of objectivity as the fundamental basis of European early modern changes in knowledge production resulted in the appearance of facts—a term that emerged during the seventeenth century in full form.¹⁶ As shown in numerous scholarly studies of Europe and Asia from the late Middle Ages to the sixteenth century, empirically produced knowledge gained new traction in medical practices, and physicians and health practitioners greatly influenced changes in knowledge production that elevated experiential phenomena above causality.¹⁷ Anatomists, artisans, women, apothecaries, surgeons, and empirics all played a role in this transformation.¹⁸

The consolidation of these practices resulted in what became known as empiricism: the theory, usually associated with the New Science of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, that all knowledge comes from what can be experienced through the senses. The acceptance of experiential proof in lieu of ancient dogma represents the defining development in current scholarly conceptions linking the early modern to its subsequent validation as an era of historical importance: modernity. Such is the attraction of these narratives in fields as wide-ranging as literary studies, intellectual history, and colonial anthropology that even scholars of the Middle Ages have been keen to usurp the roots of modernity from the early modern period.¹⁹

At the nucleus of these transformations lays the fundamental premise from which these myriad narratives depart: that a direct connection exists between the rise of science, commodity-exchange markets, biomedicine, and capitalism (including slavery) and the reduction of nature and human bodies to inert, knowable, regular, predictable entities.²⁰ This naked Nature acquired a central role in the legitimation and creation of new moral and social orders.²¹ As historians of science, medicine, and religion have shown repeatedly, however, the mischievous Nature of these overly determined early modern histories never completely lost their immaterial agency. Early modern worlds were never inevitably bound for modernity, and the seventeenth century did not consist of protoformations of the categories imagined by enlightened philosophes.²²

The last decades have also witnessed the appearance of a number of rich studies examining the work of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Iberian and Iberian-American natural historians, natural philosophers, cosmographers, physicians, surgeons, and botanists.²³ For all their many valuable revisions, these works traverse similar epistemological routes to those of the North Atlantic studies of natural history and philosophy in which they intervene; namely, the routes to and from European centers of knowledge production and through European channels (even if the actors were not European).²⁴ The popular, according to most of these histories, remains epistemologically and cognitively divorced from the learned New Science of the era.²⁵

Within these analytical frameworks, Bernardo Macaya does not figure as a transformative actor in larger histories of knowledge making in the Atlantic.²⁶ He appears instead as a participant in events related to resistance, cultural survival, and struggles for power in the popular realm.²⁷ Historians have focused on individuals such as Bernardo in works about baganga (ritual specialists from Congo) or brujos (sorcerers) and African priests from Rio de Janeiro, Saint Domingue, Andalucía, or the New Kingdom of Granada. In their examinations of ritual specialists of African descent in the Atlantic, they have highlighted how these historical actors, both free and enslaved, used the power of health practices (which many of these scholars argue were of defined African origin) to enrich their communities and achieve their own aspirations and those of the various communities they inhabited.²⁸ A wealth of literature has also analyzed the history of magic, witchcraft, and sorcery in the Americas, and the role of the Inquisition in it.²⁹ Within these types of frameworks, Bernardo’s story does not inform us about how the Caribbean world was, but rather about how people outside the realms in which the real nature of the world was being revealed at the time dealt with it. It appears as if people like Bernardo peddled, with their limited magical tools, the power of a newly discovered, inanimate, hegemonic reality that they did not comprehend, and to which secrets they did not have access—a reality that natural philosophers and historians claimed to have started discovering during the seventeenth century. Alternatively, they appear as unwitting providers of botanicals or other material samples for European experts to really classify and study. These works show how Africans or their descendants identified biomedically efficacious medicaments that could be inscribed in Western histories of pharmacy, science, or biomedicine.³⁰ But there is much more to these histories.

The recognition of early modern black Caribbean communities as active receptors, shapers, and, most importantly, acculturating agents allows us to concentrate on the concrete conditions and processes that construct meaning.³¹ The history of Bernardo Macaya is essential to our understanding of the dynamics through which the experiential emerged as the ultimate currency for producing knowledge in the early modern communities of the Caribbean. Like Bernardo, men and women throughout the region, most of whom were of African descent, depended on experiential, sensorial events to establish their power over bodies and nature.³²

Historians have increasingly acknowledged the multiethnicity of medical encounters and the emergence of a medicina mestiza (mixed-race medicine) and science in Atlantic locales during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries.³³ Ideas about mestizaje and the creation of hybrids depend on notions of bounded, homogenous healing systems—Castilian, Taino, or Congo, for instance.