On Wednesday, November 4, Khytie Brown, a doctoral student in the African and African-American Studies department and doctoral fellow in the Science, Religion and Culture program at Harvard, presented on the topic “Sweetness, Spirits and the Senses: Mapping Revival Zion Religion." In her presentation Khytie discussed her preliminary dissertation fieldwork over the course of two summers in Jamaica and Panama as well as sketched her intellectual journey and current dissertation project.
Invoking the work of cultural historian Constance Classen, she began with this quote:
According to Christian mythology, the fall of Adam and Eve entailed a fall of the senses. Through hearing, Eve was convinced by the serpent of the desirability of the forbidden fruit. Through sight, Eve decided that the fruit was "pleasing to the eye" (Gen 3:6). Through smell, touch and taste, Adam and Eve ate of the fruit and committed the original sin. — Constance Classen, The Color of Angels
She explained that the senses and the sensual, positioned within an Enlightenment as well as Protestant Reformation frame, prove to be vexing concepts that undergird the maligning of many African-derived religions. Beginning here she situates her future dissertation project as one that aims to interrogate the sensual modalities activated by the array of complex ritual activities orchestrated by Jamaican Revival Zion practitioners and their Afro-Antillean Panamanian brethren. Her work posits that, embedded in Jamaican debates over the creative religio-cultural ritual complex of Revival Zion are anxieties about the human body and the sensual. Her dissertation will focus on the Revival Zion’s world-sense, asking: what does it mean to be “inna di spirit” [in the spirit] outside of the tent of conventional Anglophone Christian forms of spiritual communion?
Further questions she centralized were: how do Revival Zion practitioners assemble the sensorium – outside of empiricist epistemological frameworks– so as to create a pragmatic spiritual habitus that responds to everyday life challenges? What configuration of aromas, tastes, sights, sounds and touches (or perhaps sensorial arrangements outside of the Aristotelian five senses model) make up the scaffolding of the Revival Zion habitus? How are Jamaican Revivalists negotiating Afrophobic discourses in their society through the sensory cosmology and somatic rituals afforded them in Revival Zion? How might this sensory cosmology allow for alternate spatio-temporal and racial-corporeal schemas? How does the configuration of their sensorium provide structure, generate and organize practices and representations and ultimately produce durable systems and transposable dispositions (Bourdieu 1990)? She notes that her project centralizes journeying as a fundamental category of somatic ritual in Revival Zion, as well as an analytic trope for exploring the diasporic, translocal and transnational relationship between Revival Zion practitioners in Jamaica and their Afro-Antillean Panamanian brethren–descendants of the West Indians recruited as laborers during the construction of the Panama Canal. It asks: how does journeying, through spiritual waters and across actual seas, create deterritorialized subjects and what she terms spiritual citizens?
Khytie then delved into the background about the Afro-Jamaican religious tradition of Revival Zion which is in contest with Jamaican notions of obeah (a catch-all Anglo-Caribbean term for sorcery, witchcraft and magic). She described Revival Zion’s central ritual practices and provided ethnographic footage for context. In addition, she described her process of coming to this particular topic and the process of making connections between Jamaica and Panama in her research. Diasporic connections between the two locales are not new, she cites West Indians, and in this case Jamaicans, who have moved between the Caribbean islands and the Panamanian isthmus since the 1850s during the construction of the Panamanian Railroad and the largest wave of migration which occurred between 1904 and 1914 when the United States took over the building of the canal.
She explains that within the field of Religion there has been recent attention to the history of the senses; however, this history focuses on the construction of the senses primarily in early modern Europe. Classen’s work The Color of Angels (1998), Matthew Milner’s The Senses and the English Reformation (2011) and Wietse de Boer and Christine Göttler’s Religion and the Senses in Early Modern Europe (2012) are some of the prominent works on the subject. While she utilizes these works to understand how religious experience is mediated by sensory discourse and practices, as well as how the English Reformation changed Christianity’s relationship to the senses, she points out that the authors see Europe as a “privileged observatory for the study of these [affective and sensory] dimensions.” Her project, on the other hand, intervenes in this discussion of religion and the senses by considering the contemporary African diaspora as a fecund site for teasing out problematic binaries between sacred and profane, spirit and flesh, black and white, science and religion – all mediated by the sensuous.
She noted the lacuna in scholarship on contemporary Revival Zion practice and aims to revisit Revival Zion through a careful, sensory ethnography, attending to the sensory dimensions of these anti-African sentiments, and to think outside of Jamaica to the diasporic flows, fostered by religion, between the island and the Isthmus of Panama, which she argues, will inform productive new discussions on diaspora, religion and cultural identity and reveal new linkages and relationships within the fields of African Diaspora Studies and African Diaspora Religion specifically, and Religion and Anthropology of the Senses more broadly.
After presenting on the more formal aspects of her project, Khytie turned to a new aspect of her dissertation, and intellectual project, which is an object history of Florida Water - a cologne and ritual substance activating the senses within African diasporic religions. She is interested in tracing how this commodity went from a primarily Euro-American product to one primarily sold and consumed among religious devotees of African-derived religions in the Caribbean and Latin America. She discussed her nascent ideas about how to conduct this work and how she sees it fitting within her larger theoretical concerns. There was much lively, thoughtful and engaging feedback from CSWR residents and she looks forward to further feedback from the CSWR community as her project develops.