Black Magic: Religion and the African-American Conjuring Tradition
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Black Magic: Religion and the African-American Conjuring Tradition. By Yvonne P. Chireau. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003. 222 pp. Illus. 22.95 [pounds sterling] (hbk). ISBN 0-520-20987-7
Magic and religion are closely interwoven in African-American cultural traditions. Although magical practices and ideas were certainly not identical with black American religious beliefs and institutions, they operated as counterparts to each other. Both have engaged with spiritual issues and with the sense of forces and powers beyond people's immediate, empirical realities. Particularly in local vernacular cultures, magical spiritual traditions such as Conjure, Hoodoo, and root working have coexisted with Christianity as part of a general moral and conceptual framework. Within this framework, the somewhat arbitrary categories of religion and magic have included cultural forms and practices that are remarkable historically for their complementarity rather than their opposition or incompatibility.
This is how Yvonne Chireau approaches the phenomenon of conjuring. She considers the prevalence of supernatural traditions in African-American experience and their eclectic sources, beginning with slavery and racial subjugation, and then moving to the indigenous religions of the western and central regions of sub-Saharan Africa from which black slaves were taken. She clearly resists any notion of an unbroken, essentialised African lineage, seeing such traditions as a variable intermixing of older cosmologies and newer spiritual conceptions. The newer elements in these traditions derived mainly from white society and were largely of immigrant European origin. There is a clear continuity of cultural exchange between the different ethnic groups, along with the correlations between African-American and Anglo-American spiritual beliefs, especially in their heterodox vernacular manifestations. It was this intermixing that reinforced the convergence of "magic" and "religion" in ways that were cumulative, creatively renewed, and adaptable to situation-specific actions, events, and processes. Conjure, along with Christianity, served multiple purposes, each meeting needs that the other did not, yet both involved attempts to find meaning in people's experiences and to regain a degree of control over the course and circumstances of their lives. At least at certain times, they became integrated as dual sources of empowerment.
Supernatural traditions in African-American vernacular cultures operated with the critical distinction between practices that harm and practices that heal. Chireau devotes two separate chapters to these. Harming magic could be directed to individual whites, but just as significantly acted as a means of expressing hostility and aggression within black communities, being employed "to punish criminals and wrongdoers; to attack opponents; to combat evil forces; and to retaliate against enemies and perceived adversaries" (p. 60). Less frequently, Conjure harming practices also featured in slave conspiracies, those associated with Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner being notable examples. There was, nonetheless, no absolute dichotomy between such practices and those designed to heal and restore. Seeing it in that way derives from bipolar conceptions of the sacred, dividing it sharply between its dark and dangerous side and its light-bringing, positive one. Within African-American communities these practices co-existed in the realm of spiritual power and had the potential to move either way and be applied in a malign or benign manner. That is why "conjuring specialists both cured and caused injury" (p. 74). They helped people "defend themselves against afflictions that were both seen and unseen," and yet in doing so they "set up a self-perpetuating cycle: causing harm and curing it" (p. 89). In both respects conjuring practices were part of a deep-seated vernacular pragmatism in black spirituality.
Chireau's final chapter examines what were largely twentieth-century manifestations of Conjure and Hoodoo, particularly following the Great Migration and the urbanisation of black people in the United States. While this final chapter is not as detailed or analytically finessed as it could be, Chireau offers a clear sketch of how African-American "magic" became commoditised as well as influencing musical forms such as the blues. She also shows how an academic interest in black folklore developed in the early twentieth century, one that to a greater or lesser degree was informed by the evolutionist ideas of the time. Although she does not note the fact, these ideas skirted close to the contours of black stereotypes, and while evolutionism has been discredited as a theoretical paradigm, it continues at times to resurface in some of the us/them distinctions of racialised stereotyping.
Chireau shows how the development of black American supernatural traditions coincided with a decline in the volume of imported African slaves from the late eighteenth century. What this entailed was a creative adaptation of cultural tradition to the American context, a process that went hand in hand with the embrace of Protestantism by large numbers of black Americans. Chireau quotes a white physician writing in 1829 of black people who, despite being "rampant Christians," also demonstrated a profound "faith in evil genii, charms, philtres" and "habitually indulged in an infinitude of cabalistic rites and ceremonies, in which the gizzards of chickens, the livers of dogs, the heads of snakes and the tails of lizards played a mysterious but very conspicuous part" (p. 54). Such detail is characteristic of the fascinating examples and cases explored in this book. Through them and the generally close readings she offers, Chireau has produced a rewarding account of areas of African-American experience that have been inadequately understood. The most important of these concerns the relation of magic and religion in African-American experience, and Chireau provides a convincing argument that, although distinct in various ways, they were far from being contradictory. Instead, contrary to evolutionist principles and values, they have operated as congruent features in the changing patterns of African-American life for at least the past two centuries.
by Michael Pickering
posted by VICKY @ 9:28 AM,
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