Healing, Slavery, and the Law: the Gendered Archive of Black Ritual in Eighteenth Century New Granada

My research examines the relationship between bondage, freedom, and religious ways of knowing. Legal status and place of birth often worked to produce quite different negotiations with the sacred; slavery configured not only the geographic but religious landscape of eighteenth century New Granada. This paper focuses on the prosecution of people of African descent for witchcraft, sorcery, and poisoning. Despite the largely free African-descended population, almost all of the accused were enslaved. Moreover, the patterns of judicial persecution were profoundly gendered; the majority of defendants charged were enslaved, male and African-born, following Old World patterns of access to the sacred. Using ecclesiastical and criminal records, I explore the intersections of African gendered patterns of spiritual authority and Spanish concepts of enslaved masculinity and criminality. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries there was a significant decline in the number of prosecutions, from over 150 in the 1600s to less than twenty in the 1700s. I find that the decline in prosecution was due to the Bourbon reforms, expressed locally as elite self-representation as secular and modern, rather than a decrease in black ritual activity. I argue that at the height of the Atlantic slave trade, while slavery worked to shape the religious world of New Granada and the expectations of judicial authorities, reduced prosecution ultimately afforded African descended healers more space to practice. Nevertheless, due to the decentralization of judicial persecution away from the Inquisition, the punishments that black practitioners suffered were often the ultimate expression of state and slaveholder violence.