℞ITUAL OBJECTS: SPIRITS, HEALTH & DECOLONIZING THE STUDY OF AFRICAN POWER FIGURES

Abstract

Composite ritual power objects are used throughout West and Central Africa and across the Black Atlantic. These sacred objects are composed of a material figure, medicines, and spirit power, and can be constructed to perform a variety of functions from generating luck or love to warding off illness or seeking revenge. As part of the material culture of holistic healing in African and Disaporic traditional religions, these figures act as important objects within traditional medical systems. However, they, like the traditions of which they are a part, have long met with stigma in the West, being outlawed, destroyed, demeaned, and dismissed by those who thought them heretical, barbaric, irrational, and unmodern. Western assumptions have tended to interpret power figures and their traditions according to Western categories of what constitutes art, religion, and medicine, leading to flawed and incomplete representations by outsiders. This study reveals that all aspects of power figures – from the physical figures, to the medicines, and the spirits – have been subjected to the same stigma. Through object and content analysis of these sacred objects, their ingredients, and their records in museums, art galleries, popular culture, public discourse, and legal documentation, and also in botánicas, ritual shops, and ritualists’ blogs, this work aims to produce a decolonized study of these sacred objects – one that attempts as much as possible to see these figures and their power on their own terms – while also providing insight into what these objects can teach us about how we might heal.