Oppressed Religion. Since the beginning of time, human beings have created various cultural categories that have helped with the development of today’s society. Within the Caribbean society, it has been the Tainos job to develop these cultural characteristics that through time have evolved and have been part of our daily lives. Fishing, hunting, farming are cultural and labor traditions passed down to today’s society and have evolved due to new technology.
Religion on the other hand, is one of the social/cultural categories that has always, in away, been oppressed.This paper will analyze the effects that slavery has resonated on the lives of people living in the Caribbean by looking at this from a religious perspective; how Afro-Caribbean people have adopted these old religious ceremonies and how they have maintained them for such a long time. The Tainos developed religion in the Caribbean, a form of worship to their trinity gods: a male-like god, female-like goddess and another god that took form of a dog. The male god represented cassava and volcanoes, the female goddess represented sea and moon and the dog-like god would be in charge of taking care of the departed.
The priest or shaman in charge of the worship ceremonies was the cacique, who was also the person in charge of the village. “The Tainos had no written language, and what is known of their customs and belief-systems was recorded by early European observers” (Ferguson 8). Conquistadors saw the Tainos’s religion as witchcraft, demon-like, banning it from the islands and the same happened when African slaves arrived. Cuban anthropologist, Fernando Ortiz created the term transculturation, which basically means the merging or combination of two or more cultures.This made it easier for conquistadors to help some tainos and slaves transition from one religion to another.
The small amount of people that did not transition to Catholicism was not a threat to the government ruling in the Caribbean. Fast forward to the Cuban Revolution, where religion too was oppressed and banned by the revolutionary elites: “…given the Afro-Cuban religions’ lack of an institutional or structural base, they were not considered a threat to the Revolution which tolerated and on occasion even courted a threat to the Revolution, which tolerated and on occasion even courted their favor” (Paravisini 73).Voodoo has always been a branch of religion that has always been frowned upon. It is practice by people of lower economical status and by people of color, therefore giving it a sense of an undesired cultural category.
Voodoo is what Roger Bastide would classify as an active form of syncretism: a transformation through renegotiation, reorganization, and redefinition of clashing belief systems (Class Notes). Altars, candles and crucifixes are Catholic elements seen within Voodoo and that have redefined the definition of those elements.People who do not practice voodoo might see this as elements used against Catholic society. Furthermore, voodoo has been a branch of Caribbean religion that has overcome many banishments but that has been able to stay afloat for many years, a religion that has been passed down from African slaves to Afro-Caribbean people, but time changes and so does culture. Voodoo itself has branched out into different categories and has reclaimed different meanings.
Rastafarianism is a religious cult that sets back from Africa.This religion is set on to believe that a man named Ras Tafari is the Messiah and that Ethiopia is the Promise Land. However, like in many other religions, the beliefs are not clear and are somewhat divided: “Rastas may differ among themselves concerning many of their important beliefs, but all are in accord regarding the Babylonian nature of life in the African diaspora, and all declare their psychological and cultural rejection of the values and institutions of Babylon. ” (Edmonds 23).
Rastafarians do agree in one thing and that is the return to the motherland: Africa.There is an American proverb that says “Home is where the heart is” and that is what many Jamaicans who practice Rastafarianism are referring to. Rastafarians have showed to many what their religion is all about, it is not a spiritual religion but more of a poetic religion, claiming their culture and values back from the white hand that once took it away from their sncestors. “The Rastafarians choice of the term Babylon as the symbolic designation of the forces that seek to “downpress” and dehumanize them is, in effect, an attempt to neutralize those forces.Therefore, Babylonian constitutes a symbolic delegitimation of those Western values and institutions that historically have exercised control over the masses of the African Diaspora” (Edmonds 24). Voodoo and Rastafarianism roots all the way back to Africa, before black slaves were forced to migrate against their will to another country, to acculturate unwillingly and to live a life that was not their own, meaning that other people had control and ownership of their bodies.
Although slavery has been abolished, the religion of slaves as yet to disappear. Voodoo and Rastafarianism are African religions that still exist in the Caribbean and that is practiced by many Afro-Caribbean and West-Indians. This paper argues just that, although the upper white hand tried multiple times to eliminate a part of a culture thought to be vulgar and evil, society, especially the black community have learned to defend what little culture was left for them to pass on to other generations and to keep revolutionizing it from time to time. Resources 1.Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Marguerite Fernandez Olmos, Creole Religions of the Caribbean, Introduction and Ch. 2 2.
Ennis B. Edmonds, “Dread 'I' In-a-Babylon: Ideological Resistance and Cultural Revitalization,” in Nathaniel S. Murrell, ed. , Chanting Down Babylon: the Rastafari Reader, (Temple University Press, 1998), pp.
23-35 3. James Ferguson, A Traveller’s History of the Caribbean, Second Edition (Interlink Books, 2008) 4. Jan Rogozinski, A Brief History of the Caribbean: From the Arawak and the Carib to the Present (Plume, 1994)
