How Colonial Jamaica Turned Obeah Into A Crime with Dr. Katharine Gerbner
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Obeah has been called superstition, “black magic,” and even a crime but those labels have a history, and that history was built to serve colonial power. We sit down with historian Dr. Katharine Gerbner to trace how African-derived spiritual and healing traditions in Jamaica were deliberately stigmatized through slavery, missionary politics, and law.
We follow the chain from a rare 1755 archival reference to the shockwaves of 1760, when Tacky's Rebellion prompts British colonial authorities to outlaw Obeah as a threat to control. Along the way, we unpack why defining Obeah is so difficult when most surviving sources come from enslavers and missionaries, and how Gerbner’s microhistory method reads the archive for what it tries to hide. One of the most surprising turns is the Moravian missionary Zacharias George Caries being called an “Obeahman,” opening up a “space of correlation” where Afro-Jamaicans do not separate Christianity from Obeah in the rigid way many of us inherit today.
We also connect this history to the present: Obeah remains illegal in Jamaica, and the long arc of criminalization still shapes public stigma, community silence, and debates about decriminalization. If you care about Caribbean history, Jamaican culture, African diaspora religion, and the politics of the archive, this conversation offers a new way to see what we have been taught to fear and who benefits from that fear.
Katharine Gerbner is a historian of religion, race, and freedom. She examines religious practices that have been excluded from traditional definitions of religion and develops multilingual archival strategies to uncover stories that have been marginalized and forgotten. She is the author of Archival Irruptions: Constructing Religion and Criminalizing Obeah in Eighteenth-Century Jamaica (Duke University Press, 2025) and Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). She is Associate Professor of History and Director of Religious Studies at the University of Minnesota.
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