Pablo F. Gómez
Pablo F. Gómez is a historian of early-modern Atlantic medicine and science whose 2017 monograph The Experiential Caribbean: Creating Knowledge and Healing in the Early Modern Atlantic recovered the lives and intellectual work of African and Afro-descended ritual specialists in the seventeenth-century Spanish Caribbean. In the encyclopaedia he is the lead specialist for the colonial Caribbean cluster of the gender, race, and colonial historiography tier.
Life and Position
Biographical particulars (training, current academic appointment) are not present in the evidence cards drawn from his own monograph and have been left for later editorial fill. [TODO: insert academic affiliation, training, and current title from external source.]
Argument of The Experiential Caribbean
Gómez’s central thesis is that Black Caribbean ritual practitioners’ authority rested on experiential phenomena they manufactured anew from local circumstances, rather than on first principles, tradition, or dogma, and that, working in this way, they led an epistemological revolution in Caribbean intellectual spaces that operated parallel to and in conversation with European New Science, not subordinate to it.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) He argues that during the seventeenth century the Caribbean produced a distinctive way of knowing in which the experiential replaced first principles as the basis for truth claims about the natural world,(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) and that what increasingly passed for truth in this setting was articulated in the materiality of phenomena and “owed more to what was perceivable than to what was inherited.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)
The book draws on extant records of more than one hundred Caribbean Black ritual practitioners from the long seventeenth century, roughly 1580 to 1720.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) Gómez’s tabulation finds 102 practitioners of African descent in Spanish Caribbean documents, more than half of them criollos born in the New World, with the next-largest groups born in Upper Guinea and West Central Africa.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) He shows that throughout the seventeenth century Africans and their descendants composed more than three-quarters of the population in Caribbean cities and their hinterlands, and that, because demographics meant a large segment of the population had been born free or manumitted, African ritual practitioners in the Caribbean did not face the same pressures to conform to European cultural norms as their counterparts in New Spain or Peru.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) First-generation bozales and a creole population increasingly defined as free pioneered novel ways of engaging with the natural world and human bodies that became normative.
Gómez’s reading of the Caribbean Galenic-Hippocratic medical economy is unsentimental. He shows that the protomedicato in the Caribbean functioned less as a public-health body than as “a mere instrument of occupational control” in a marketplace where “learned humoral medicine offered no more cures than alternative healing practices.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) In this contested marketplace Black Mohanes “fashioned novel ways of sensing” the early-modern Caribbean world, and it was in these new sensorial landscapes that their experientially based epistemological projects became rooted.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) The power of their healing substances “resided in the tactics these practitioners used to claim privileged access to nature’s secrets,” not in pharmacological properties or exoticism.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) Caribbean landscapes of healing were not reproductions of Old World hierarchies but were created anew through encounters among mostly Black actors in a competitive cultural economy.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)
He emphasises the future-looking creativity of the practitioners. Unlike Hispanic baroque intellectuals who responded to seventeenth-century upheaval with pessimism about human knowledge, Caribbean ritual practitioners “saw power in destruction and possibilities in death” and engaged in “future-looking, optimistic, and creative” endeavors that reasserted human experience as a basis for truth claims about nature.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) In his concluding argument Caribbean Mohanes “consumed old and new tropes from West and West Central Africa and Europe and ultimately invented a new culture”; “Old World epistemes, even composites of them, cannot contain the novel forms of creativity that arose in the Caribbean.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)
Methodological Argument
Gómez’s archival method is the book’s second contribution. He works mainly from Inquisition records, but he reads them against their own grain. From his vantage, Inquisition records about Black practitioners read not as testimonies of domination and silencing but as narratives of competition and grudging acknowledgments of power.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) He deliberately rejects the terms brujas, witches, sorcerers, warlocks, and shamans for these practitioners because such language reflects contemporaries’ efforts to isolate Black ways of knowing from “rational” knowledge production.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) In place of those labels he adopts the term Mohán (plural Mohanes), an Amerindian-origin word first recorded in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century records in the New Kingdom of Granada and defined by Inquisition scribes as “a master of sorcerers”, to denote the protean adaptive qualities of these knowledge makers.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)
He refrains from using modern Western biomedical epidemiological concepts to classify early-modern Caribbean diseases, on the grounds that the records were “produced, after all, within a different metaphysics of the natural world.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) He reads Black Caribbean ritual specialists’ habit of attributing their healing skills to other practitioners as a direct argument against European epistemologies that framed their praxis as “identifiable, secretive, occult knowledge of singular (diabolic or barbarous) origins.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)
His critique of integration-and-creolization narratives is sharp. Histories of materia medica that emphasise “integration” miss the essential, he argues; the inventories speak as much of impenetrability and enclosure as of integration, and the power of these substances depended on local social and experiential authority that “did not travel in lists of materia medica or Jesuit recipe books.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) Caribbean ways of knowing the natural world were “fleeting” and “characterized by the portable character of their praxis”; the early-modern criollo experiential apparatus is hard to grasp because it was “defined by an ephemeral sensuality” that does not coincide with the normative epistemes historians use.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)
Argument About Empiricism
The book makes a forceful methodological claim about the history of science. Empiricism, Gómez writes, “was not necessarily Enlightened; neither was it uniquely modern, exclusively European, or intrinsically connected to the hard sciences”, and “matters of experience and new ways of thinking about truth increasingly proved central to the creation of authority over bodies” across the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Caribbean and Atlantic.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) He shows that some of the plants “discovered” and “classified” by the eighteenth-century Mutis expedition were the same botanicals that seventeenth-century Black ritual practitioners like Mateo Arará had experientially tested decades earlier; the Mutis inventory reveals “the procedures by which European natural historians and philosophers subsumed and obscured the intellectual endeavors and techne created by early Caribbean communities under their own scientific rubrics.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) His final claim is that it was only when “experience was claimed exclusively by scientific empiricism” that the modern Western moral individual became defined against an irrational, magical “other” camouflaged under “soft” interpretive, religious, magical, cultural categories.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)
The argument matters for the wider field. By insisting that Caribbean ritual specialists’ practices “were not merely acts of cultural survival or the resorting of the dispossessed to witchcraft, sorcery, and fetishes” but instead invented “a powerful phenomenological language and tools” predicated on sophisticated readings of social, cultural, economic, and political systems,(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) Gómez locates the Caribbean as an Atlantic-world site where empiricism was being made, not received from Europe.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017)
Illustrative Cases: Method in Action
Two cases from the book’s conclusion illustrate Gómez’s method as clearly as his programmatic statements do. Between July and September 1816, José Fernandez and a team of Spanish royal functionaries inventoried 104 boxes in Santa Fé de Bogotá containing thousands of paintings and descriptions collected over twenty-five years by the Mutis-led botanical expedition — a team that included natural historians, botanists, painters, and what Gómez calls “hundreds of empiric women and men.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) Boxes 88 and 90 from that expedition contained gourds, insects, and fangs “of animals that do not exist anymore” — objects identical to those used by Amerindian piaches and Black ritual practitioners like Francisco Mandinga and Antonio Congo; box 89 listed the beak of the Coclí bird that Pedro Congo used in Mompox, and box 91 listed “the oil of María” used in Havana for treating broken bones.(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) The inventory is not, for Gómez, a record of discovery; it is a record of subsumption and erasure, the moment when European institutional science filed away what Caribbean communities had been doing for generations and labeled it under new names.
The book concludes by naming the sites where these “fragile certainties” were assembled: the Sierra de La María mountains, the town of Nuestra Señora de La Consolación, the Jagueyes Plaza in Cartagena, and the San Felipe y Santiago Hospital in Havana — places where Black Caribbean ways of knowing “enriched communities and created elastic models of interaction.”(Gómez, Pablo F., 2017) The phrase “fragile certainties” captures Gómez’s tone throughout. He does not argue that Caribbean experiential knowledge was equivalent to or predictive of modern science. He argues that it was a system of knowledge production that answered real questions, worked for its practitioners, and was later absorbed, discredited, and renamed by institutions that did not acknowledge its origins.
Place in the Encyclopaedia
The encyclopaedia uses The Experiential Caribbean as the lead source for the colonial Caribbean cluster: African and Afro-descended ritual specialists in Cartagena, Portobelo, Havana, and the wider Spanish Caribbean; Inquisition records as a methodological resource; the relation between Galenic-Hippocratic medicine and non-elite healing; and the experiential-knowledge thread that runs through the encyclopaedia’s accounts of empiricism. His work sits alongside sharla-fett‘s Working Cures and deirdre-cooper-owens‘s Medical Bondage as the third leg of the gender/race/colonial historiography tier, focused on the early-modern Spanish Caribbean.
See Also
- african-diaspora-healing
- ritual-healing
- non-elite-healing
- caribbean-creole-medicine
- empiricism
- inquisition-records
- colonial-medicine
- sharla-fett
- deirdre-cooper-owens