In a recent paper in the American Journal of Sociology, Professor U. G. Weatherly has called attention to the advantages of the West Indies as a sociological laboratory.
Islands are peculiarly interesting sociologically, provided, of course, that they are inhabited. For one thing, they are physically defined. The island community is, for this reason, invariably isolated, geographically and socially, and because the means of communication are known, the extent of isolation can be reduced to relatively measurable terms.
This isolation tends to give to each separate island community an individuality that one rarely finds elsewhere. Because islands are geographically limited and isolated, the influence of climate and physiographic characteristics, as well as of economic organization, in defining cultural traits, can be estimated and assessed with greater accuracy than elsewhere. Until one has visited some of the Lesser Antilles, he is not likely to understand or appreciate Frederick A. Ober’s rather drastic summary of their history—“Discovered by the Spaniards, appropriated by the Dutch, Danish, or English, and finally abandoned to the semi-barbarous blacks from Africa, this has been the usual succession in the islands.”[[67]]
The rather bitter note of this statement probably reflects the tone of the white planters, whose position in the islands has gradually declined since the emancipation of the slaves.
It directs attention, however, to what is, from the point of view of the student of human nature and of society, the most interesting and unique feature of the islands, namely, the racial situation. As Professor Weatherly has said, “Perhaps nowhere else is there a better opportunity for securing definite evidence bearing on the opposing theories of race and contact as factors in cultural growth.” Every island, in fact, is a separate racial melting-pot in which the mingled cultures and races of Europe, Africa, and Asia seem to be gradually, very gradually, simmering down to a single cultural, and eventually, also, to a single racial, blend.
IV. OBEAH: THE MAGIC OF THE BLACK MAN
Outside the Spanish Islands, Negroes are the dominant race in the West Indies. In regions where they have not been replaced by Hindus, as they have been in Trinidad and Demerara, British Guiana, they constitute 90 per cent of the population. They are, in fact, the only people who regard themselves as natives. The Asiatics and the Europeans are, for the most part, mere sojourners.
So far as the islands now have a native culture it is the culture of the Negro folk. It is, at the same time, the most characteristic manifestation of the mentality of the West Indian black man, so far as he has preserved what Lévy-Bruhl describes as the mentality of primitive man.
What is more interesting about obeah is that while as a practice and a belief it is universal among the uneducated classes of the black population in the islands, it is everywhere different, and everywhere in process of change. Practices that were originally imported from Africa tend to assimilate and fuse with related practices and traits of the European and Hindu cultures wherever the Africans have come into contact with them.
This is evident, in the first place, from the fact that the obeah man is not always a Negro; he may be, and not infrequently is, a Hindu. In the second place, the ritual of obeah may include anything from patent medicine to Guinea pepper. Among the instruments of obeah in the possession of the police of Trinidad recently were a stone image, evidently of Hindu origin, and a book of magic ritual published in Chicago, which pretended to be, and no doubt had been, translated originally from the writings of Albertus Magnus, the great medieval writer on magic. A book called Le Petit Albert is said to be extremely popular among obeah men in the French Islands.