Conference organized by Carla Gardina Pestana (UCLA) and Gabriel de Avilez Rocha (Brown University)
Co-sponsored by the Joyce Appleby Endowed Chair of America in the World
The diverse peoples who converged on the Caribbean before 1700 held a range of differing beliefs, ideas about the natural world, and understandings of social, political, and spiritual order. Considering how Indigenous, African, and European systems of thought and faith clashed, adapted, and transformed will be the focus of this second meeting. We invite participants to consider how culturally specific systems of knowledge were expressed and transformed under emergent rubrics of what would become known as religion, science, and law. We will likewise reflect on how these ideas animated the creation and maintenance of institutions of governance and knowledge production both in the Caribbean and extending beyond it. This conference grants an opportunity to weigh how the globalization of the early Caribbean marked historical changes in beliefs and ideas but also witnessed continuities that cut across the 1492 divide. In the process, a multitude of convictions about spiritual, natural, corporal, social, and political order helped shape (and were reshaped by) encounters in the Basin.
For the list of speakers and the program schedule, please visit the website.