Trance and Modernity in the Southern CaribbeanAfrican and Hindu Popular Religions in Trinidad and Tobago

This is a comparative historical ethnography of the convergent colonial globalization of African and Hindu traditions of trance performance and spirit mediumship in the southern Caribbean, as well as their divergent political fates in the Republic of Trinidad and Tobago's era of postcolonial multiculturalism. The analysis utilizes the methodology of controlled comparison in order to investigate the history of capitalism and modernization of religious cultures more usually thought of as “primitive” and hardly “modern.” This study explicitly compares and contrasts Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean materials in a systematic, multi-dimensional manner; it therefore makes innovative contributions to Anthropology, Religious Studies, and the Historiography of Modernity. This book not only charts the subaltern cultural histories of originally West African and South Asian ritual traditions among proletarian and lower classes throughout the colonial period in the West Indies, but also shows how they have become modernized—privatized, individualized, psychologized—and progressively more similar to one another as a result of congruent experiences in the Caribbean. The author argues for the theoretical value of transculturation over “creolization” or “syncretism” as concepts for the analysis of hybrid sociocultural interaction specifically, and cultural history more generally.