Wizards and Scientists

“[A]n important book about the historiography of Cuban religion as well as the Caribbean’s contribution to the emergence of Atlantic modernity. . . . This book’s value is not limited to its significant contribution to Caribbean studies, but instead, it is important for anyone to read who seeks to break free of conceptual categories that have become too comfortable—and thereby too limiting.” - Kevin Birth , Anthropological Quarterly

"[A] very thought-provoking analysis. . . . [T]he writing is lively and carefully wrought. . . . [C]ompelling." - Susan D. Greenbaum , American Anthropologist

"Intriguing. . . . Stimulating. . . . The book will interest not just readers concerned with Cuba and the Caribbean, but also those concerned with the ways that people in the present construct the past and their relationship with it, a relationship often coded as the modern and traditional." - James G. Carrier, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute

"[R]emarkable. . . . [T]his exhaustive . . . discourse on cultural theory is always lucid and provocative. Palmié has set a new standard for the historiography of slavery and black culture in the Americas." - Joseph M. Murphy , American Historical Review

"A book of extraordinary breadth, Palmié's volume on Cuba offers a complex series of ruminations on postindependence Cuban history. . . . [B]rilliant. . . . [I]t raises a challenge that all future historians studying modern Cuba, the Caribbean and beyond, will be unable to ignore." - Lauren Derby , The Americas

"Palmié forcefully reminds scholars that placing the Afro-Cuban experience in categories derived from other times and places has resulted in minimizing the degree to which the innovations and creative process in formulating new identities were part of what he would label 'modernity,' and not an unchanging and static 'traditional' past." - Matt D. Childs , Latin American Research Review

"The author's learning makes this book extraordinary. But it is his meticulous unlearning of ethnographic and historical givens that makes this an indispensable volume, one that renders customary interpretations discomfiting for their complicity in violence." - Reinaldo L. Román , The Historian

“Wizards and Scientists is a tour de force. Palmié’s material is extraordinarily interesting and original and his theoretical explorations are virtuosic. This work will become a new benchmark for scholarship on modernity and the Atlantic world.” - Rosalind Shaw, Tufts University

“Palmié unlocks and explores the fascinating world of oracle and historical divination in loving detail and with unrivaled narrative power. Wizards and Scientists is an extraordinary achievement.” - Robert A. Hill, University of California, Los Angeles