In "Wizards and Scientists" Stephan Palmie offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmie argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms...

In "Wizards and Scientists" Stephan Palmie offers a corrective to the existing historiography on the Caribbean. Focusing on developments in Afro-Cuban religious culture, he demonstrates that traditional Caribbean cultural practices are part and parcel of the same history that produced modernity and that both represent complexly interrelated hybrid formations. Palmie argues that the standard narrative trajectory from tradition to modernity, and from passion to reason, is a violation of the synergistic processes through which historically specific, moral communities develop the cultural forms...

Featuring essays by historians and anthropologists, this volume focuses on the cultural dimensions of slavery in a wide variety of geographical and historical settings. The contributors examine the historical manifestations of slavery not only as legal, political, and economic institutions but as systems of human interaction and experience that are prone to conflicts and riddled with contradictions. Among the geographic areas covered in this collection are colonial Louisiana, the American South of the antebellum and Reconstruction periods, Jamaica, the Danish West Indies, Suriname, and...

Since the 1950s, anthropologist Sidney W. Mintz has been at the forefront of efforts to integrate the disciplines of anthropology and history. Author of Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History and other groundbreaking works, he was one of the first scholars to anticipate and critique "globalization studies." However, a strong tradition of epistemologically sophisticated and theoretically informed empiricism of the sort advanced by Mintz has yet to become a cornerstone of contemporary anthropological scholarship. This collection of essays by leading anthropologists and...