Selected Articles and Books

Experiments with Power

Obeah and the Remaking of Religion in Trinidad

University of Chicago Press, 2020

My first book examines ritual responses to police violence, unsettling the limits of religion, ethics, and law in modern nation-states. 

"Don't Study People"

The Ethics of Studying Others in Trinidad and in Anthropology 

Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 93, no. 1 (2020)

Part of the special issue "Overwhelmed by Proximity," edited by Julienne Obadia (Cambridge U) with an afterword by Elizabeth Povinelli (Columbia U).

What Possessed You

Spirits, Property, and Personhood at the Limits of "Possession"

Ethnos vol. 84, no. 4 (2019)

A special issue on the relationship between spirit possession and material possessions that I edited and contributed to, with an afterword by Paul Christopher Johnson (U of Michigan).

What Obeah Does Do

Healing, Harm, and the Limits of Religion

The Journal of Africana Religions, Vol. 3, No. 2 (2015)

"Obeah, which colonial ordinances defined capaciously as 'any assumption of supernatural power,' was a crime in Trinidad until 2000, and the law continues to make Obeah a punishable offense in much of the anglophone Caribbean. Scholars have..." 

Own People

Race, "Altered Solidarities," and the Limits of Culture

Small Axe, no. 45 (2014)

Winner of the Duke Univ. Press journal Small Axe's "Question of the Social Sciences" award for 2014.

Oil, Obeah, and Science

Cosmologics, Summer 2016

What are petroleum geologists' and spiritual workers' contrasting practices of sensing subterranean worlds at the site of intensive oil exploration? 

The Impossibility of Liberal Secularism

Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, vol. 30, no. 4

What can recent episodes of religious intolerance in the Caribbean and Texas tell us about the project of religious tolerance, enshrined in most modern constitutions and inherited from Liberalism's founding thinker (John Locke)...