This essay introduces Obeah: knowledge, power, and writing in the early Atlantic World, a special issue responding to recent scholarly interest in obeah and related creole and African-derived medical and religious practices common among enslaved Africans in the pre-emancipation Caribbean. It describes obeah and the epistemological conundrum it posed for colonists in the global Atlantic world, outlining possibilities for how scholars might study the texts that represent these practices.
Despite the recent profusion of interest in Samson Occom, scholars have focused primarily on his religious writings and autobiography and, by extension, his relationship with the Congregational minister Eleazar Wheelock. By contrast, this article examines Occom's medical writing, particularly "Herbs & Roots," a manuscript herbal written in the 1750s, in the context both of Occom's Christian education and of Native American medical knowledge. "Herbs & Roots" represents connections among plants, bodies, maladies, and medical practitioners; it makes visible medical networks that endowed plants with healing power. Moreover, Occom used the herbal's pages to keep accounts and to draft letters; these extratextual elements illustrate how Occom began to establish his relationship to Native, Christian, and colonial worlds. Finally, the herbal offers an opportunity to consider Occom in an epistemological tradition of Mohegan medical practitioners and to reexamine the form of the list in relation to eighteenth-century natural history and to oral and written communication practices.
and the United States to present and discuss their work on the history of various aspects of scientific, technological, and medical knowledge production, including cartography, astrology, shipbuilding, natural history, medicine, and public health. Several invited senior scholars, whose research interests resonated with those of the participants, offered commentary, suggestions, and probing questions. Lively debates ensued concerning the similarities and differences of the various geopolitical Atlantics, as well as the epistemological and methodological implications of looking at the history of science and medicine from an Atlantic perspective. Although most of us had arrived at Harvard prepared to discuss the role of the Americas in ''the advancement of European science and medicine,'' a great deal of what we did actually served to challenge the assumptions implicit in the seminar's title. We came to be far more interested in understanding how transatlantic interactions shaped and were shaped by processes of knowledge production, and we became fascinated by the implications of using the Atlantic as a unit of analysis in the history of science, medicine, and technology. As a result, much of our discussion focused on recent models developed by scholars in Atlantic history could recast the received narratives of the history of science and medicine � an enterprise we might call an Atlantic history of science. 2 Equally intriguing for us, however, was the notion of a history of Atlantic science: rather than importing a methodology from Atlantic history, we felt we could create a new series of questions by redefining what knowledge was in the first place and questioning the circumstances of its production. For the purposes of this review essay, which seeks to capture the spirit of those early conversations in Cambridge, we propose calling the assemblages and interac tions of the peoples, objects, institutions, and techniques that resulted in and from colonization during the early modern period ''Atlantic science.'' We recognize, of
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