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Race and Science in Global Histories

2019; Duke University Press; Volume: 28; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/10418385-7861892

1938-8020

Juana Catalina Becerra Sandoval, Shireen Hamza,

Colonialism, slavery, and trade

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.2Recent 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. Gómez’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.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 structured 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 natural philosophers at the center of innovative empirical investigations of marvels and other wondrous phenomena.3 If witnessing and wonder were also part of the ways of knowing of free and enslaved Black people, then these properties are not unique to European science. They emerged as shared epistemologies in the vastly heterogeneous and asymmetrical interactions between people in the Caribbean.4The book gives ample space for the sources to breathe, including lengthy descriptions of Inquisition cases. In one case study Gómez constructs the story of a Black herbalist who came under the Inquisition’s jurisdiction for providing a Spanish man with a truth-telling herb to be used against the governor of Cuba. The wondrous effects of the truth-telling herb piqued the interest of the bishop of Havana, who was strongly prejudiced against “Amerindian spells” and ordered that the Spaniard and Black woman be captured under suspicion of sorcery. The Black woman, who had been blamed by the Spaniard, provided the court with samples of the herb in her testimony, explaining that the herb was “natural and not a diabolic thing” (ec, 155). To assess the Black woman’s truthfulness, the bishop “made experiences [experiencias] with the herb” (ec, 155). He did this by sending court officials to touch habaneros (people who were believed to have given untruthful testimonies) with the herb and interrogate them. Taken aback by the habaneros’ confessions and the power of the herb, the bishop ordered the release of the Spanish man and the Black woman. As this case illustrates, the centrality of wonder led to a transformation in how the world could be known, which in turn allowed Black ritual practitioners to use witness and wonder as ways of establishing their authority over a world that was “‘up for grabs’ both epistemologically and ontologically” (ec, 155).Through his attention to the everyday interactions of people in the Caribbean, Gómez brings forth aspects of Caribbean ways of knowing that critically rework our idea of where and when early modern science takes place. As the story of the Black woman and her truth-inducing herbs illustrates, Black healers and practitioners were often forced to make their work legible to Spanish and Creole authorities under the duress of legal structures. Their testimonies in Inquisition records were a matter of survival. The stories that Gómez retrieves from the archive are made visible precisely because of the violent contexts in which Black practitioners had to not only produce knowledge but also make it commensurate with the epistemologies of their captors—if they desired to prevent their own incarceration or death.In Gómez’s book actors are consciously positioned as producers of scientific knowledge, and the author pays clear attention to how ethnic identities and specific historical backgrounds enabled people to make specific truth claims and be believed. While Gómez explains how racial and ethnic differences conditioned how African and Afro-descendant practitioners articulated epistemological claims and described healing practices, an analysis of how gender enabled specific mobilities and credibilities would further enrich our understandings of early modern science. Figures like the Black woman who wielded a truth-telling herb among colonial officials, mentioned above, abounded in the early modern Caribbean. Gómez emphasizes that “more than half of the Inquisition cases involve a woman” (ec, 159), which makes analysis of the intersections between gender, race, and ethnicity—and all the attendant implications for language, ritual practice, religion, and authority—all the more important.In 1655 Francisco Mandinga, a mohán (African or Afro-descendant ritual specialist), was asked to treat “some Indians sick of yerbas” outside Cartagena and physically examine the previous healer, an “Indian woman called Leonor,” in front of the community (ec, 106). After having Leonor and her son stick out their tongues and palpating them with his finger, Mandinga found Leonor guilty and her son innocent, showing everyone the pot of yerbas (herbs) he had found in her house. Gómez narrates this event as part of his argument about language and difference, noting that showing the pot of yerbas was a way of “making sensually evident the cause of the multiple incidents of disease occurring in Tolú” (ec, 107). Gómez explains that Black ritual practitioners had to manufacture sensorially based signs and tools to make convincing truth claims. This argument about language and experiential knowledge can be extended further by exploring how gender was implicated in this interaction. How was the accusation of Leonor as a yerbatera gendered, and, likewise, her son’s disavowal because he “did not ‘understand herbs’”? How should we understand the authority granted or denied to women healers? How are mohánes and the other healers and actors described by Gómez complicit in defining and marshaling gender as a category?Although Gómez’s main analytic framework centers on race and ethnicity, the inclusion of these stories suggests that gender is deeply implicated in the history of knowledge production in this period. Indeed, broad interdisciplinary scholarship has shown the integral role of gender and sexuality in processes of racialization and the role of racial hierarchies in gendering and sexing bodies.5 Just as racial categories are historicized and shown to be historically contingent in Gómez’s work, further scholarship can contribute to exploring how gender operated in these histories of knowledge production in the early modern Atlantic. Intersectionality, in which the historical contingency of race and gender is maintained, might help us understand, for example, how masculinity played a role in the mohánes’ and colonial officials’ credibility and mobility in the Caribbean. Throughout Gómez’s reliance on Inquisition documents, we are reminded that these stories are accessible to us only through colonial heteropatriarchal surveillance. Alongside Gómez’s deep work in the colonial archives, these sources demonstrate the difficulties for historians interested in understanding gender and knowledge production in the pre- and early colonial period. In taking up this critique, it is imperative to keep in mind that colonial gender categories do not have an obvious and universal meaning, especially when taken up by colonized peoples. A method that foregrounds the potential instability of identity categories is necessary to tackle these partial colonial archives.Gómez’s book also contributes to a larger body of literature on the history of science in the Atlantic World, which has argued that science was a transregional project that formed far beyond the boundaries of Europe. An exemplar of this line of inquiry is Marcy Norton’s Sacred Gifts, Profane Pleasures. In this book Norton highlighted the processes through which European science appropriated and exploited Indigenous knowledge, explaining that Indigenous epistemologies critically influenced European Galenic understandings of tobacco and chocolate consumption.6 In “Subaltern Technologies and Early Modernity in the Atlantic World,” Norton engages with the challenges posed by the limited colonial archive in writing histories that center Indigenous knowledge production. Reframing cacao making as an “Indigenous technology,” Norton circumvents the archive’s tendency to give credit and ascribe authority to European physicians and their Creole counterparts in New Spain who authored medicoscientific treatises.7Placing Gómez’s work alongside the work of Norton and other scholars working on Indigenous Mesoamerica is critical for understanding Gómez’s intervention in the field of history of science, and in conversations about race and science more specifically.8 Currently, studies of the Black Atlantic and Indigenous Mesoamerica take place in separate fields of study and rely on distinct methodological resources, which rarely intersect. This division further perpetuates the racial categories built in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Fully understanding the diverse cultural backgrounds forced into contact in the Caribbean and the implications on the people living there, especially non-Europeans, requires attention to these intersections. As María Elena Martínez has argued in Genealogical Fictions, racial categories in Mesoamerica, and particularly the sistema de castas, were the product of European interactions with both Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples.9 Building on these important interventions, we propose an approach to early modern science and ways of knowing that investigates the processes through which non-European epistemologies were racialized along with non-European bodies. Understanding that the hierarchies of knowledge production are mediated by racial hierarchies in the creation of archives of early modern science, we argue that investigating the links between race and science requires reading across Black Caribbean and Indigenous Mesoamerican literature.In reframing the sites of knowledge production and the epistemic cultures of early modern science, Gómez often depends on a notion of European science as a cohesive unit that is then changed by and through interactions with Black practitioners in the Atlantic. However, historians of science writing about Europe have complicated the idea of European science as a consistent and coherent object through their study of regional and confessional difference. Many have framed their studies as “Mediterranean,” working comparatively on North Africa and/or the Eastern Mediterranean, most often in the Ottoman period.10 In historical accounts of the Atlantic World, the heterogeneity of Afro-Caribbean and Mesoamerican epistemologies often emerges at the expense of the heterogeneity of European science. It is important to recognize that European science has always been in flux, formed through a multiplicity of exchanges between Europeans and other peoples across the Atlantic, the Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean worlds. The recognition of European heterogeneity places Europe in a broader context and begins to explore alternative, non-European connections between the Americas and the rest of the world. How might the Atlantic World, Mediterranean, and Indian Ocean historiographies—which center connectivity, flow, and circulation—be further integrated within the history of race and science?Gómez’s monograph gestures toward Europe and West Africa’s connections to a broader world. He mentions knowledge practices and epistemic structures elsewhere in the world that inform European and African actors alike, such as the relevance of Arabic in the seventeenth-century “medical marketplace facilitated by the trans-Saharan trade network,” which drew parallels between practices of bixirins in Senegambia and “Moorish geomancy” (ec, 84). He acknowledges that practices like cupping were present in the medieval Islamic world, but it is not within the book’s scope to follow up on the scholarship on these other regions and practices outside Europe. Future scholarship, engaged with how West African Muslims have long been traveling to and from Egypt and beyond for Islamic study, could bring more specificity to the influence of Perso-Arabic practices in the Caribbean.11 Galenic medicine—and the contested categorization of new, global commodities within its pharmacological systems—was neither limited to Europe nor detached from other systems of medicine across Africa and Eurasia.Anna Winterbottom’s study of china root is one example of scholarship that traces global commodities through multiple regions and traditions, providing a more comprehensive account of knowledge production. Winterbottom is attentive to the classification of china root within Chinese medical texts, in Ayurvedic medicine, and in Galenic medicine across South Asia, the Middle East, Europe, and New Spain. In tracing its circulation beyond China, she analyzes the physical descriptions and classifications made by diverse writers across Eurasia, never taking for granted the stability or singularity of this object as it traveled the world in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Winterbottom’s approach to following a commodity through scientific and literary sources, and her attention to non-European physicians writing in multiple epistemes, can serve as a model for more-connected histories of science and medicine.12Despite efforts to expand the definition of science and who counts as a knowledge producer, “global” histories of science largely continue to center colonial European authors, archives, and languages, occasionally identifying a non-European as a “go-between” who helps knowledge travel. Such an approach often fails to read non-Western language sources (when they exist) and attend to changes in knowledge systems outside Europe, many of which predate the European colonial period and continue to evolve in various forms in the present. The result is often the perpetuation of racist imaginaries of science and innovation as the purview of white European cis men. We need scholars to reframe the work of white male scientists within histories inclusive of knowledge produced by people from a diversity of racial and geographic backgrounds. Critical studies of race are necessary to explain why so few histories of science have considered nonwhite and non-European actors as knowledge producers doing science—why their ways of knowing “are rendered unthinkable under colonial regimes of knowledge/power.”13 In this sense, Gómez’s Experiential Caribbean is an exemplary work that reads colonial archives against the grain to center Black knowledge producers and practitioners.Collaborative work between historians, archaeologists, and other scholars is one method to better our partial histories of science. Collaborations between scholars working across the Atlantic World, the Mediterranean, and the Indian Ocean may enable truly global histories—in which all people, including non-Europeans, are producers of knowledge. We recognize that there are structural and systematic challenges faced by scholars who wish to engage in such collaborations. For instance, scholars of the Atlantic World and those of the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean share few spaces for intellectual interactions and are trained to read and translate entirely different languages and sources. For this reason, we need to find creative ways to harness the potential of collaboration. Collaborative work can help us further challenge the definition of what counts as science by decentering the Western epistemic values of individualism, linearity, progress, and universalism. In a more expansive definition of science, the intellectual production of non-European actors can be recognized and taught as science across undergraduate and graduate courses in the United States. We hope that these new avenues of research will unlock more capacious understandings of the intersections between race and science.We are grateful to Rachel Lim, Laila Riazi, and the other members of the editorial board of Qui Parle for their insightful and detailed comments on an earlier version of the present essay. We were fortunate to receive substantial feedback and support from Ahmed Ragab throughout the writing process.