Obeah and its others: buffered selves in the era of tropical medicine

Abstract

This article argues that the eighteenth-century cultural interrelation of obeah practices and European tropical medicine demonstrates a profound limit to Charles Taylor’s theory of the “buffered self.” According to Taylor, Western secularity depended upon the rise of a theory of a disenchanted subjectivity. This article suggests instead that the hallmark of Western secularity is not so much a disenchanted subject, but a conflicted relation between a psychology defined by disenchantment and a theory of the body open to a world of invisible and untraceable forces.

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