Summary of proposed research

 The project intends to be an innovative research project and examine the spread of cultural traits from Africa and the influence of the ‘African factor’ (culture, religion and concepts and practices of healing) among slaves in the former Danish islands. In order to uncover the ‘muted’ discourse of slaves and write the narrative of healing from their point of view (which is unconventional), the project ‘oscillates’ between 18-19th centuries historical descriptions by Danes and others of the African continent and African healing and the culture and healing practices of the slaves taken to the Danish tropical islands as well as contemporary anthropological descriptions and analyses of African healing and Caribbean practices o f healing contained in the memories of so-called ‘weed women’, being direct descendants of former slaves. Supporting this narrative is the great similarity of the plants growing in West Africa and the Danish West Indies and used widely in healing.

To accomplish the objective of examining the African impact on healing and curing measures, the project inserts itself in the ‘demographic debate’. Slave demography has emerged as a major feature of slavery studies relating to post-Columbian America. Particular interest has focused on the failure of slave populations to sustain themselves by natural reproduction. This has been an issue for scholars working on the Danish Caribbean islands, the records for which are extremely rich. This project will complement existing work on slave demography in the Danish territories by investigating the impact of medicine and medical practice in the islands, African and western, on slave survival rates before 1802/48. Specifically, it will

1 determine the nature of local healing practices by slaves, by examining who the healers were (normally seen as women), the treatments they offered, and the discourse of healing among slave healers, an issue almost totally ignored in the literature

2 This study will depart from a description by Bierlich of the local African medical culture and female therapy management in contemporary Africa, 1980-2005 (Bierlich, 2005e and f) and then proceed to look at practices of slave healing contained in the memories of so-called ‘weed women’, direct and living descendants of slave healers, in the Caribbean islands (George Tyson, personal communication). It will then tie these two discourses together and push the implications of the African data and the memories of slave healing further and look at the evidence of their healing discourse in the 18-19th centuries sources. When further examining relevant sources the project will explore an existing database (Jensen, 2002) regarding the surgeons who settled in the Danish West Indies, 1755-1830, and examine how the surgeons came to draw nearer to the practices of the enslaved by appropriating African remedies and local, empirical knowledge ("the West learns from Africa"). In this connection the project will pay particular attention and compare how they treated/neglected pregnant and birth-giving slave women with the attention shown them by their own healers. The question of the health of pregnant and post-partum women is, of course, a critical issue in the context of low reproduction rates of slaves.

3 construct databases of slave remedies and medical treatments and evaluation of their medical efficacy to ascertain the impact, by age of sex, of care-giving on slave populations across different plantations. One obvious difficulty is to determine what "efficacy" is, since what slaves may have thought of as culturally effective may not necessarily have produced a cure and contributed to demographic improvements and lowered the morbidity- and mortality rate. Thus, in order to determine the issues of efficacy and care-giving convincingly one must problematize the concept of efficacy and evaluate treatments case-by-case or according to groups of people. This problematization will distinguish between cultural efficacy and biomedical outcomes. The methods to be used derive from anthropology, history and epidemiology and will be administered by Bierlich, Richardson and a senior medical doctor.

Since some of the shipboard surgeons identified by Bierlich (Bierlich 2005a) also operated in the islands we intend in our investigations of the approach and practice of Western medicine in the islands also to compare the detailed dataset describing diagnoses and medicines administered to slaves on board ship that we created for an earlier project on Medicine and The Slave Trade (Wellcome, 2003) with the practice of land-based medical ways and procedures.

So as not to repeat, but to complement and enhance the significance of on–going work on the Danish West Indies that basically examines the interaction from the point of view of the surgeons and the Western colonial power, the emphasis in this project is the opposite, to examine the relationship from the perspective of the Afro-Caribbean slaves. A thorough examination of the ‘African factor’ and its interaction with the dominant Western-medical approach is unexamined and remains to be studied. Jensen devotes only a few pages in his recent master’ s thesis to the subject of slave healing (Jensen, 2002, pp. 46-49). We argue that via our combined anthropological and historical approach and experience (Bierlich is an anthropologist, Richardson is a historian) we are in a position to contribute to knowledge and understanding of the neglected discourse by slaves, especially in the realm of healing. This constitutes the justification for this project and applying for support for it. We think that we have the needed expertise in African culture and healing, the study of slavery and in the construction of relevant datasets to begin unravelling the healing approaches of slaves. The rationale for approaching the difficult question of healing by slaves relates to a narrative that assembles various groups of data, historical and modern, African and Caribbean-centred, as well as analyzes, compares and shows the relevance of present-day healing and memories for the evaluation of past healing measures by the slaves taken across the Atlantic.

This project confronts previous research and seeks to avoid a one-sided Danish perspective and wishes to promote a ‘multicultural’ understanding. In this it explores an unexamined discourse, the one of slave healers. This project focuses therefore first and foremost on the African (and African-American ) perspective and the impact of African traits in healing on the islands and not primarily on how Danish colonial history and related healing was played out from a Danish point of view. In the final analysis, however, both narratives or perspectives should speak to and enrich one another and the basic intention is thus that all researches complement each other. The two narratives contribute each in its way to what is meant by multiculturalism.

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