Caribbean Religions: The Origin Of The Caribbean Slave Culture

Attempting to analytically appreciate the religious inclinations of the populaces of the Caribbean, it is undeniable that the region must be consumed as a whole. With interconnecting origins, environs, and social formations, it was interesting to consider the emergence of Caribbean religious affiliations collectively. Through the process of socialization, displaced persons culturally survived the misfortune of slavery and the pressures to dismantle their embryonic religious autonomist groupings. Under an anthropological scrutiny, the regrettable interrelations between colonial entities and slaves of their possession generated modern misconceptions of Caribbean religions and attributed to their current configuration. Spinning under the pressure

The political became personal and social with language warfare in colonial Haiti beginning with the Roman Christian word religio meaning an exclamation of truth (Paton 2). As the origin of the well-known term religion, it implies boundaries between factual religious doctrines and fabricated superstitions (Paton 2). In the era of Caribbean colonization, these differentiations created class warfare that separated savages from nobles on a moral plain (Paton 3). The scholarly, Frazer distinction between science, religion, and magic supplements this discrediting by asserting that defining the latter hinges on practical navigation using natural laws and an eternal omission of empirical support (Versnel 178). Development of the dichotomy of religion and magic persevered upon cultural interactions between colonial entities and oppressed Haitians, creating new dynamics within the concept of magic. The direct, individualized rituals of mysticism became associated with manipulative motives by the mortal knowledge used to invoke concrete results (Versnel 178-179). Moreover, the socially ostracizing uncomfortability related with unfamiliar traditions further separated magical customs and lumped the practices with deviant, immoral behaviors (Versnel 178-179).

Yet, as Professor H.S. Versnel flawlessly articulates, “Magic does not exist, nor does religion. What do exist are our definitions of these concepts” (177). Anthropologically evaluating the variance, it is moot and rooted in modern-Western bias that is irreconcilable with the reality of non-Western spiritual systems (Versnel 180). Yet, such perverse infusion of the concept of magic maintains its