The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic by Pablo F. Gómez (review)
Pablo Gómez’s book fills a significant fissure in our understanding of the processes and countervailing forces at play in the production of knowledge in the early modern Atlantic. Gómez argues “that rather than depending on references to first principles, tradition, or dogma, black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ power and knowledgecreating strategies were based on experiential phenomena they manufactured anew on the basis of localized successes in different Caribbean locales” (3). Black ritual practitioners were at the forefront of creating and circulating authoritative medical knowledge. In order to prosper, practitioners deployed “sensorially evident practices that demonstrated a capacity to effectively understand, classify, and manipulate the natural world” (3).