Caribbean Religious History

An Introduction

Ennis B. Edmonds, Michelle A. Gonzalez

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9780814722503
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Religionsgeschichte

The colonial history of the Caribbean created a context in which many religions, from indigenous to African-based to Christian, intermingled with one another, creating a rich diversity of religious life. Caribbean Religious History offers the first comprehensive religious history of the region.

Ennis B. Edmonds and Michelle A. Gonzalez begin their exploration with the religious traditions of the Amerindians who flourished prior to contact with European colonizers, then detail the transplantation of Catholic and Protestant Christianity and their centuries of struggles to become integral to the Caribbean’s religious ethos, and trace the twentieth century penetration of American Evangelical Christianity, particularly in its Pentecostal and Holiness iterations. Caribbean Religious History also illuminates the influence of Africans and their descendants on the shaping of such religious traditions as Vodou, Santeria, Revival Zion, Spiritual Baptists, and Rastafari, and the success of Indian indentured laborers and their descendants in reconstituting Hindu and Islamic practices in their new environment.

Paying careful attention to the region’s social and political history, Edmonds and Gonzalez present a one-volume panoramic introduction to this religiously vibrant part of the world.

1

Introduction

Caribbean Crossroads: Historical and Theoretical Considerations

The successful transatlantic crossing of Columbus and his crew in 1492 brought the Caribbean and the rest of the Americas into the mainstream of world history, initiating a process through which the area became an important arena in which European powers competed for political and economic dominance. This colonial experiment spawned the diversity of peoples, languages, and cultures that is the present reality of the Caribbean. An important part of this cultural mix is its variety of religious traditions. As these traditions encountered one another and their new environment, a process of accommodation, adaptation, and transformation began that has resulted in the character and diversity of religious beliefs and practices in the Caribbean today. This book traces the historical trajectory of the major (and some minor) religious traditions of the Caribbean against the broader background of Caribbean social history, paying particular attention to the historical events and processes that have shaped the religious experiences of the Caribbean people. To study the history of the Caribbean without serious consideration of the function and role of religion, we argue, is to miss a fundamental dimension of Caribbean cultures. The Caribbean is a microcosm of the world, where populations from around the globe have come together, with their cultures, traditions, and religions.

A Brief Profile of the Caribbean

In profiling the Caribbean, it seems apt to begin with geography, but we are immediately faced with the problem of delineating the area to be included under the designation “Caribbean.” One way of posing the problem is to ask whether our definition of the Caribbean is going to be restrictive or expansive. The restrictive definition reserves the term for the islands in the Caribbean Sea. These include the Greater Antilles, the large islands in the northwest Caribbean; the Lesser Antilles, the string of smaller islands in the eastern Caribbean stretching from the Virgin Islands in the north to the Grenada in south; and the southern islands of Trinidad, Aruba, Bonaire, and Curaçao, all off the coast of South America. In addition to the islands in the Caribbean Sea, the more expansive definition includes the Bahamas, which lie north of the Greater Antilles but are technically in the Atlantic, and such territories as Belize, Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana, in Central and South America. The inclusion of these territories is usually based on historical and cultural ties that link these countries more strongly to the Caribbean than to the Latino history and culture of Central and South America. An even more expansive definition would include all the northern coast of Central and South America that is washed by the Caribbean Sea. In this book, we are following the more restrictive view of the Caribbean, not because we want to deny Caribbean identity to those traditionally linked to the history and culture of the islands in the more expansive definition but because it is a more manageable unit. We will make occasional references to places found outside this restrictive definition, but they will not be the focus of sustained discussion.

The Caribbean islands are home to close to forty million people of diverse ethnicities whose ancestors and cultural heritages originated in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and Europe. Probably an equal number of people living abroad, especially in North America and Europe, identify themselves as Caribbean. The Amerindians who occupied the islands when the Spanish arrived in 1492 were the Ciboneys, the Tainos, and the Caribs. The Ciboneys were a relatively small group residing mostly on the western tip of Cuba and probably in the southwest of Hispaniola. The Tainos occupied the large islands of Greater Antilles—Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Puerto Rico—and the Caribs mostly resided in the islands of the Lesser Antilles. Within the first hundred years after the arrival of Columbus, a combination of European forced labor, massacre, and diseases killed most of the Amerindians. The Caribs who had intermarried with Africans who in turn had escaped from the Spanish resisted French and British encroachment into the late 1700s. The British eventually deported most of them to Roatán Island, off the coast of Central America. From there, they migrated into Belize, Honduras, and Guatemala, where they came to constitute the Garifuna people. Today a few small communities of Caribs have survived in Dominica, St. Vincent, and the Grenadines. Amerindian strains have also survived in various racial mixings, particularly in Puerto Rico and in Dominican Republic. People of darker hues in Dominican Republic, for example, are likely to refer to themselves as Tainos.

Today’s Caribbean population is a result of repeated waves of immigrants since the late 1400s. These include Europeans, from northern and southern Europe, who migrated to the area in search of fortune or simply to better their lives. Though a numerical minority in most places, they exercised political, economic, and cultural dominance during the colonial era. Many European Jews also migrated to the Caribbean, fleeing persecution in Europe and/or pursuing business opportunities. Today, descendants of Europeans are a small minority in most places in the Caribbean. Official censuses in Puerto Rico and Cuba place whites/Europeans squarely in the majority, though scholars contest the validity of these censuses, arguing that Puerto Rico is a mestizo (mixed-race) society and that Cuba should be considered predominantly mixed race as well.¹ People of African descent and people of mixed African and European ancestry are the dominant ethnic groups in most of the Caribbean. However, significant numbers of Asians were brought to the Caribbean from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s. The most significant group was Indians—or South Asians (from India and Pakistan)—who were imported as indentured workers by the British after 1838. Between 1845 and 1917, more that 400,000 Indian indentures were transported to the Caribbean with the largest concentration setting in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana. Today the number of their descendants is equivalent to the population of African descendants in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as in Guyana, and they form a substantial minority in Jamaica. Chinese also came to the Caribbean as indentured workers or as traders. They are a small minority in the Caribbean, mostly associated with commercial enterprises. Portuguese, Arabs, Syrians, and people of other ethnicities and backgrounds all add to the Caribbean mix, and miscegenation has produced a host of racial and ethnic mixings.

With the diversity of people comes a variety of languages. The major European languages—English, French, Spanish, and Dutch—are spoken. Various creole languages and dialects have also emerged in the Caribbean. Most Haitians speak Kreyol; Papimiento is the popular language in the Dutch Antilles; forms of French creole are spoken in the French Antilles and in Dominica and St. Lucia; and an English-based patois (patwa) is spoken in most former British colonies.

Modern Caribbean history may be divided into three periods based on European activities in the area. The first period stretches from exploration to emancipation (1492–1838) and covers most of the slave era. Though emancipation came at different times for different islands—Haiti in 1804 and Cuba in the 1890s, for example—the emancipation of the slaves in the British colonies in 1838 set the stage for the abolition of slavery throughout the Caribbean. The second period extends from emancipation to independence, 1838 through the 1960s. Again, independence did not come at once for all Caribbean islands. For example, for Cuba and Haiti emancipation and independence came together, while most of the larger islands that were former British colonies attained independence only after 1960. Other islands have maintained some form of dependent relationship with the European nations or the United States. The third period is from independence to the present.

Another way to characterize Caribbean history is to see it as composed of cycles in which the area alternates between taking center stage in world events and being peripheral to international interests and events. The Caribbean first burst onto the center stage of history between 1492 and the 1520s as it became the arena of Spanish exploration and colonization. Yet, it quickly became a kind of neglected backwater of the Spanish empire as the Spanish shifted their interest to Mexico and South America, where the precious metals of gold and silver were found in abundance. For most of the 1500s, the Caribbean became a mere staging area or filling station for Spanish ships on their way to and from what was seen as the Spanish mainland. As other European nations, especially France and England, challenged the Spanish monopoly in the Americas in the 1600s, the Caribbean became a main stage for the playing out of European conflicts. With the development of a plantation economy based on the growing of sugar cane, the Caribbean also became a main source of wealth for European powers. Successively, Jamaica, Haiti, and Cuba became the most economically prosperous colonies in the world from the early 1700s to the mid-1800s. With the waning of the sugar industry in the post-emancipation era, the Caribbean again became peripheral to metropolitan interests. During the Cold War that followed the Second World War, the Caribbean became an arena for U.S. and the Soviet Union geopolitics. Socialist revolutions in Cuba, Grenada, and Guyana and Jamaica’s experiment with Democratic Socialism all fueled and were fueled by Cold War geopolitics in the area. With the fall of the Soviet Union and the rise of the global economy, the Caribbean lost much of its political and economic significance, remaining important mostly as a tourist playground. With the spreading of Chinese economic power in the Americas and with Russia seeking to reassert its influence, there are signs that the Caribbean may again be swept up in international power play in the early part of the twenty-first century.

With the evolving history of the Caribbean, political realities in the region have also undergone changes. Plantation societies during the slave era were dominated by Europeans, either through the agency of colonial administrators appointed directly from Europe or by local legislatures and assemblies of Europeans elected by and from the planter class. While the European interests and the planter class of European extract continued to dominate during the period bookended by emancipation and independence, the emerging local middle class, consisting predominantly of mixed-race people, and the working, mostly black, population, agitated for self-rule and eventually for independence. Emancipation and independence for Haiti resulted from the same struggle, the Haitian Revolution—which transpired between 1791 and 1804. Similarly, emancipation and independence in Cuba came out of a great effort that lasted from the 1860s to the 1890s. Independence in the Dominican Republic is somewhat complicated. That nation first became independent in 1821 as part of the general movement toward the independence of Spanish colonies in Latin America. Annexed by Haiti shortly thereafter, it regained its independence in 1884 but has experienced periods of foreign domination by Spain and the United States (1916–1924 and 1965–1966, respectively). Most of the larger English colonies became independent nations in the 1960s and 1970s. Other Caribbean islands maintain a variety of relationships with European nations and the United States.

Franklin W. Knight and Colin A. Palmer, both noted historians of the Caribbean, identify three types of political status in which most Caribbean island fall. First, most of the islands, with between 80 and 90 percent of the Caribbean population, are independent states: Antigua, the Bahamas, Barbados, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Grenada, Haiti, Jamaica, St. Lucia, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, and Trinidad and Tobago. Second, a number of islands occupy the status of associated states of European nations or the United States. These include the French Overseas Departments of French Guiana, Guadeloupe, and Martinique and the Netherlands’ self-governing territories of Aruba, Bonaire, Curaçao, Saba, Sint Maarten (island shared with the French territory St. Martin), and Sint Eustatius. Puerto Rico is a commonwealth, or dependency, of the United States, and the U.S. Virgin Islands of St. Croix, St. John, and St. Thomas are U.S. territories. Finally, a number of islands may still be considered colonies. These include the British colonies of the Cayman Islands, Montserrat, the Turks and Caicos Islands, and the British Virgin Islands of Tortola, Virgin Gorda, Anegada, and Jost Van Dyke. St. Barthélemy and St. Martin occupy a similar status under the French flag.²

For most of the region’s modern history, the economy of the Caribbean has reflected the dominance of metropolitan interests, first of the European overlords and then, increasingly, of the United States. The initial Spanish thrust into the area was stimulated by the search for gold and other precious metals, followed by an attempt to develop a plantation economy when these metals were not found in sufficient quantities. In the first half of the 1500s, most of the Spanish settlers headed to Mexico and South America, where gold and silver were found in substantial quantities, leaving those who remained in the islands to develop ranching and subsistence agriculture as the main economic activities. With the arrival of northern Europeans, mainly from France and Great Britain, tropical products for European markets came to dominate the economy in the Caribbean. The major crops included indigo, tobacco, sugar cane, cacao, and, later, bananas. Sugar was by far the most important product, dominating the economy of the Caribbean from the late 1600s into the 1900s. The contemporary Caribbean has a somewhat mixed economy. Sugar and bananas continue to be significant but are of diminishing importance in many islands. Manufacturing output has increased significantly since the mid-1950s. Much of the manufacturing is actually offshore operations of multinational corporations, including the assembling of clothes, electronics, and baseballs. Exploration for bauxite (the raw material from which alumina is extracted), petroleum, and pitch add to the economic activities in the area. Increasingly, tourism has become the highest foreign exchange earner in the area. The Bahamas, Aruba, and Jamaica, for example, have long been recognized as world-class vacation spots. More recently, Barbados, Dominican Republic, Antigua, Puerto Rico, and even Trinidad and Tobago have developed robust tourism industries. Some smaller islands, famously the Cayman Islands, have become prosperous as off-shore banking centers and tax havens. In most rural areas, subsistence farming and the rearing of cash crops remain the economic life line for many. Economists now credit drug trafficking and remittances from Caribbean people living abroad as substantial contributors to Caribbean economies.

Historically and currently, the Caribbean region has been marked by internal fragmentation, resulting from the pattern of European involvement in the area. The present division of the region into Anglophone, Francophone, Hispanic, and Dutch Caribbean is a legacy of colonial conflicts and partitions of the islands by Europeans. This has created feelings of kinship based not on proximity but on language and former association with European powers. Jamaicans, for example, tend to feel closer and to have social and cultural exchanges with Barbadians and Trinidadians hundreds of miles away in the southeastern Caribbean, rather than with the Cubans, Haitians, and Dominicans in their own Greater Antilles neighborhood. Another expression of this fragmentation is that individual Caribbean countries tend to be oriented toward their former colonial powers instead of toward one another. Nowadays, the United States and, to some extent, Canada have replaced Europe as the object of the outward focus of Caribbean people. This shows up in travel and emigration patterns. Some observers have complained that it is easier to get to London, Paris, Toronto, New York, or Miami from any Caribbean country than it is to get from one place to another within the Caribbean.

In terms of public social institutions in the Caribbean, Europe still holds sway. Such institutions as politics, the economy, education, and the legal systems are either of European provenance or are adaptations of European institutions. On the cultural front there is a tension between what the Caribbean public intellectual and cultural scientist Rex Nettleford calls “the melody of Europe and the rhythm of Africa.”³ We see this tension between the official European languages taught in schools and the vernacular bending of grammar and vocabulary to African speech patterns. We also see this in the tension between the rational-ethical and confessional religious traditions from Europe and the vernacular religious traditions oriented more strongly toward ritual healing and expressive, emotional displays. As we will see, this tension in the religious sphere is finding some resolution at present in the growing, popular Pentecostal and charismatic churches. One of the ways of characterizing contemporary Caribbean culture[s] is to say that, while Europe rules in the official social institutions of politics, economic, education, and law, other ethnic groups, particular Africans, tend to rule in folk and popular culture, including religion, music, dance, and, increasingly, the visual and performing arts.

Social class is another issue that has evolved within the confines of Caribbean history. At first, the great divide was between white planters, traders, and colonial officials on one side and the mass of African slave laborers on the other. In some places, there were poor whites, but they tended to be identified with the white power structure. An intermediate group of mixed-race people emerged in most places through miscegenation between white males and slave women. Usually free, this group came to occupy a middle place between whites and blacks. Jews, Chinese, and Middle Easterners became grafted into the upper white class. When Indians (from India) first arrived, they were considered a special case outside the existing class construct. As they remained in the islands, particularly Trinidad, as poor rural agricultural workers, they were considered on a par with or below the masses of the black population well into the mid-1900s. Many have climbed the social ladder through educational, business, and professional success. Today, social class and social status in the Caribbean are much more complex. While race, color, and ethnicity remain important, education, economic success, and political power are more essential markers of socioeconomic status.

Theoretical Perspectives on Religions in the Caribbean

Theoretical consideration of the evolution and character of religion in the Caribbean falls within the broader discussion of how to account for the cultural traditions that have been forged in the Caribbean. In an attempt to explain the origin and character of Caribbean culture, scholars of the region have put forth three major theories: the plantation society theory, the plural-society theory, and the theory of creolization.

According to the plantation society theory, the legacy of the plantation slavery is the central determinant of life in the Caribbean. The Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson and George Beckford, a prolific scholar of the Caribbean political economy, are the proponents of this view.⁴ According to these scholars, the distinguishing features of plantation so...