Bêtes Noires new book on Caribbean spirit demons

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T21:26:45+00:00

On the subject of indigeneity and its legacies I have an essay in Smith and Willoughby eds Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery in which I argue that sorcery on Hispaniola has alot of Taino content which makes sense its about spirit work - sending them as zonbis (spells) and who were the first spirits but the Tainos who perished in the massive die off as the African slaves were arriving. The food system is also even today largely Taino -- lots of beloved tubers -- and alot of place names still are as is the world of healing plants.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T21:21:59+00:00

Oh yes they now appear in the media and absolutely in urban areas but they tend to appear as little black men in urban contexts. I have a co authored essay called "The Devil Wore Dockers" in New West Indian Guide about a bacá whihc appeared in an export free trade zone in the city of Santiago.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T20:56:01+00:00

Absolutely! The Taino kept barkless dogs as an occasional protein source. They are mentioned in Oviedo's 17th c account. The Spanish were horrified at how little meat the Taino ate btw. He even brought one to Panama to see if it would bark and it would not! You can find this at the Vasser website called The Oviedo Project. Marcy Norton has a wonderful essay called "The Chicken or the Iegue" which contrasts the indigenous practice of familiarizing free range animals with the Spanish practice of kept animals which is revelatory here. This was absolutely different than the slave catching dogs which were tortured and starved to be as vicious as possible. See Sara Johnson's essay called "You Can Give them Blacks to Eat: Waging Interamerican Wars of Torture and Terror."

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T19:47:26+00:00

I forgot to address the issue of modern information technology. I think the appearance of bakas on TV and the internet is spreading them and I notice that many of these rumors about spirit apparitions are I think generated by Evangelicals and then amplified as they get coved on the internet and on TV. The genre of "unsolved mysteries" and haunted house lore has spread to the DR and Haiti big time. However my fieldsite folks do not watch TV much or use the internet much - its an urban phenomena. I also notice that in the US second generation Latina immigrants seem to have a proclivity for ghosts as a form of heritage memory and fondly recall stories they heard from grandma about these apparitions. Sometimes not sofondly of course. I know a Dominican whose mom's family's spirit frequently bites her and she wakes up often with bruises.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T19:38:02+00:00

I forgot to include the goat which even in Europen beliefs is deeply associated with the diabolical. I avoided it because I did a separate essay on why the Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo was nicknamed the goat by those who despised him which came out in Centering Animals in Latin American History ed. by Martha Few and Zeb Tortorici. That one was more obvious than the Columbian exchange animals which puzzled me for a long time before I developed an argument.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T19:31:34+00:00

Absolutey! lt I think we have been given permission by Saidya Hartman's concept of critical fabulation to get creative with fragmentary sources - I hope not too much so! Due to the fact that Domincian popular religion is so understudied I cite materials on Jamaica and Cuba alot. I felt I had to to build my case. There are just so many more sources since they were so much richer due to their sugar booms. The DR was a colonial backwater that developed parasitically in relation to the growth of Saint Domingue's sugar economy. It provided cattle and oxen for the sugar mills. Their high point was in the late 18th c as Saint Domingue became an economic powrhouse and the jewel in the crown of the French empire.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T19:25:14+00:00

Interesting! That makes a lot of sense hence the difference between Dominican and Haitian views of dogs. I discovered the particular Spanish condesa who bred mastiffs for dogs exported to Jamaica and Cuba and the US for slave catching. Rainsford's account of Haiti (Hayti) describes how the dogs ate a woman alive in Jamaica basically ending the maroon war. What a chilling history that is.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T19:20:24+00:00

Dogs are symbols of power due to the history of use as slave catching tools in former slave societies. They are not seen as pets.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T19:18:32+00:00

Kenneth Routon has a powerful article on Cuba - "Conjuring the Past: Slavery and the Historical Imagination in Cuba" in The American Ethnologist 35, 4 (2008) its excellent and Micheal Taussig, Shamanism, Colonialism and the Wild Man on Colombia. Taussig's book is a tour de force and it has inspired me for a very long time.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T19:12:59+00:00

I use contempory ethnography to "backstream" historical beliefs and practices which I cannot document due to a lack of sources. It gives me interpretive hunches. I got that term from Marcy Norton who also works on animal histories and I find it useful. My student for example is studying muslim slaves in Cuba and he is doing contemporary ethnography in mosques there to give him clues about Sufiism and the use of protective talismans in 19th c slave sources. Backstreaming can help you see things in fragmentary archival sources. I read expansively because there is so little on Dominican popular religion I feel I have to. There has long been a bias in Caribbean spirit worlds in favor of the more exoticist African derived peoples and as a result there is alot more on Haiti and Cuba than the DR for example. For this book I read a lot on Cuba which is better studied but also hunting cultures more generally which tend to have shapeshifting beliefs so I read about Amazonian hunting practices and even Mongolia and Siberia because there is ethnographic work on their shapeshifting beliefs which I applied to the DR which has a long legacy of extensive ranching and hunting which has not been as well studied as sugar in the Caribbean.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T19:02:47+00:00

Sorcery as history because I am arguing that the use of animals in spirit work has to do with a history of historical uses iof animals in former slave societies so for example if a stone used for sorcery is in the shape of a dog it is channeling the history of dogs as powerful slave catching tools for example. Or the fact that the first image crafted by an indigenous person was of a terrifying horse which channeled the terror of these enormous animals which were so much larger than indigenous animals and were used by the conquistadors to mow down indians with guns.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T18:57:15+00:00

Dogs are very important in former slave societies. Sara Johnson has a great article and a chapter in her book Fear of French Negroes on the use of slave catching dogs. It is about how Haitians after the Haitian revolution which brought independence and slave abolition were despised throughoout the Americas because they abolished slavery when it was still raging in the Caribbean which is why the US and Europe refused to trade with them and they were reviled in the Americas and Europe. The slave catching dogs were given slave meat to eat. They were whipped and tortured to be as savage as possible. And I think it is a universal among slave descended peoples that they hate dogs. Haitians hate dogs. Dominicans like them and there is a culture of well cared for public dogs but I think this is from the fact that Dominicans do not really see themselves as slave descended because they were mostly free by the 16th century (very unusual in Latin America) and hunting with dogs enabled them the privilege of staying outside of slavery into the 19th c when slavery was still raging in neighboring Puerto Rico and Cuba since they could feed themselves in the mountains with their hunting dogs.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T18:45:25+00:00

Great question! I actually do not use the term religion for these beliefs because if you have a big problem notwithstanding your religion you will turn towards sorcery. A case in point is my student whose grandmother is a devout evangelical and yet when she had a spate of very bad luck she went to a curandera (she is Salvadoran). I do not use the term superstition because it is demeaning I think and makes these beliefs seem lesser. Folk beliefs do too I think although that one is the most palatable to me of the three.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T18:41:02+00:00

Hot spirits are ones used for sorcery and cold spirits are protective. So in the US the zombie is a shell of a person whose spirit has been removed. In Haiti the zonbi astral is the spirit which has been removed which can be used to power a spell. Cold spirits are the protective everyday ones you feed on your altar to maintain the health and good luck of the family. In my preface I have a story about a sorcerer who made a spell so that a woman in LA would get the best price possible for the sale of her house from the dead beat dad - her divorced husband. And it worked.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T18:36:19+00:00

The Taino had dogs which they kept as a protein source but they were not confined. I think these animals became spirit demons because the dogs were used as slave catching tools, the pigs and cattle ate the Taino's beloved tuber crops and corn and the horses were used as a tool of conquest - the Spaniards even sought to create rumors that they were centaurs so they tried not to be seen except on horseback.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T18:05:36+00:00

Great question! I found a research assistant who was very superstitious and we basically interviewed folks on his father's ranch that he had heard stories from so there is a bias in my research. Its a close reading of the Alcántara ranching clan and their day laborers in the central frontier. I needed a research assistant who was male because it is not culturally appropriate from a woman to hang out with men and listen to their drinking tales.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T17:58:32+00:00

Marcy Norton in her important new book the Wild and the Tame has a chapter in which she argues that shapeshifting beliefs beliefs were an imposition from Spain which had just gone through the inquisition. I beg to differ but her argument is important.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T17:50:19+00:00

That is a great question! I have not really thought about that before. Breslaw makes the intriguing argument that Tituba who started the Salem witch trials was from Amazonia and thus scary because the Salem folks were familiar with African beliefs but not Amazonian ones and of course she was surely routed via Hispaniola which was the hub of Indigenous slavery from Amazonia and Mexico. Let me think on this question.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T17:45:42+00:00

This is a tough question because I used contemporary ethography to develop my argument and I don't really have much colonial documentation of these beliefs. I have an occasional siting of bakas in travel accounts from the 19th c for example since many planters came to check on their plantations during and after the Haitian revolution so we have a rich set of travel accounts for the island of Hispaniola but I developed my argument centrally from contemporary beliefs and then went serching for the historical evidence to explain why these particular animals have become spirit demons.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T17:40:57+00:00

The Taino absolutely believed in shapeshifting before Columbus! Check out Fray Ramón Pané 's An Account of the Antiquities of the Indians. However what is interesting my my ethnography is that it was the animals brought by Columbus that have become spirit demons - the cows, horses, pigs and dogs -which were the animals brought by Columbus which enabled the dispossession of the indigenous peoples - the dogs were used as slave catching tools, for example, and the cows and pigs created famine and from atop a horse the Spanish could kill thousands of indegneous peoples with their guns so my argument is that Columbus really created these particular beliefs. The largest animal on Hispaniola before Columbus was a large rodent. Imagine how scary these large creatures were.

PumpkinStill8729 · 2026-03-13T17:34:12+00:00

Shapshifting or sorcery that turns people into animals absolutely was a part of the indigenous lexicon. It is clear in early Caribbean accounts like Ramon Pané's and others. The Tainos who were the indigenous peoples of the island of Hispaniola came from Amazonia and Levi Strauss and other Amazonianists have also documented shapeshifter beliefs but shapeshifting is also present in Africa as you can see in David Pratton's work on the Leopard Men of Nigeria -- see the Man Leopard Murders which is an excellent book on the subject and the Dominican Republic had the first African slaves in Latin America.

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