Course Description

A course that introduces student to the centrality of Africa in the magico-religious belief systems that undergird traditional health practices of Afro-descendant populations in the Americas generally and the Caribbean in particular. Caribbean nations are products of historical processes that have included native genocide, the invention of the Americas, the cradling of economic and political empires, the scourge of human trafficking, slavery and forced migration. In this course students will engage with analytical categories such as race, ideology, identity, culture and power in order to interrogate and evaluate how and why citizens access to healthcare remains an unsettled question of colonization that plagues many of these new and emerging nations states.

One module of the course deals with African Knowledge Transfer to the Caribbean. Here students will interrogate the transfer of health and healing knowledge from Africa to the Caribbean through:

• An introduction to African ethnobotany, medicinal and healing rituals.
• An examination of the spiritual, architectural, agricultural, linguistic and cultural legacy of Africa in the Americas, with focus on the Caribbean.
• Engaging with African epistemologies and ways of knowing.

The lectures and class sessions in this module will problematize the marginalization and delegitimation of African knowledge and religiosity in Caribbean state-society relations. 

At the close of this module students should have developed an understanding of the role and place of African practices and  ritual ways of knowing  in development of alternative systems of healing which serve to address deficiencies in state health care systems. 

They should also be able to use the knowledge acquired in the module as reference points for framing questions about the contentious, contradictory and sometimes exclusionary nature of political processes that is at the base of the quest of African descendants in the Caribbean to overcome asymmetries of citizenship.

Dossou-Yovo, Hubert Olivier, Fifanou Gbèlidji Vodouhè, Alevcan Kaplan, and Brice Sinsin. 2022. "Application of Ethnobotanical Indices in the Utilization of Five Medicinal Herbaceous Plant Species in Benin, West Africa" Diversity 14, no. 8: 612. https://doi.org/10.3390/d14080612

Janzen, John M. “African Religion and Healing in the Atlantic Diaspora” in Oxford Research Encyclopedia, July 2017 DOI:10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.54

Moret, Erica “Afro-Cuban Religion, Ethnobotany and Healthcare in the Context of Global Political and Economic Change”. 2008.Bulletin of Latin American Research (27) 3, pp 333 - 350

Vonarx, Nicholas “Haitian Vodou as Healthcare System: Between Magic Religion and Medicine” 2011. Alternative Therapies (17) 5, pp. 44 – 51