Wizards and scientists

Stephan Palmié revises the way historians have written about the Caribbean. By examining developments in Afro-Cuban religious life, he argues that long-standing local practices are rooted in the same historical forces that gave rise to modernity, and that they take shape as complex, mixed formations. He challenges the familiar story that societies move from tradition to modernity and from emotion to reason. In his view, that story misreads how cultures form historically specific moral communities through interacting processes. Palmié shows how Afro-Cuban discourses are used to judge social conduct morally. He contends that the irrational assumptions within religious systems compete with Western rationality in analytical sharpness and are closely tied to rationality itself. He places Afro-Cuban religion on the same modern footing as nuclear thermodynamics, and he treats the Caribbean as one of the earliest truly modern places. Its plantation export economy, which profited from the seizure and destruction of human bodies, came more than a century before the industrial revolution in Europe. Palmié's aim is to show that modernity is not solely a Western achievement. He keeps his focus on the people who bore the physical abuse and intellectual contempt that came with it. Every culture shaped by the transatlantic economy shares the legacy of the slave trade, and local moral imaginations have responded to that violent past and to a postcolonial present full of contradictions in distinct yet closely connected ways.