Kumina: Kumina! Afro-Jamaican Religion, Education, and Practice: A Site Where Afrocentricity, ‘Bodily Knowledge’, and Spiritual Interconnection Are Activated, Negotiated, and Embodied

Abstract

In this chapter, the concept of Kumina is re-examined. Kumina is an Afro-Jamaican religion and practice that include secular ceremonies, dance, and music that developed from the beliefs and traditions brought to the island by Kongo enslaved people and indentured laborers. For people of African descent in Jamaica, partaking in teaching and learning processes of the dances created possibilities for cultural connections through experiential, imaginative, participatory, and reflective dance activities. This chapter is concerned with epistemological questions of dance, specifically, the nature of Kumina dance as knowledge. The aim is to address the role of our bodily activity and the tactile-kinaesthetic sense in epistemology and to clarify the concept of ‘bodily knowledge’—knowing in and through the body. Black feminist work has criticized the primary interests of traditional epistemology, which seem to allow no role for subjectivity in the formation of knowledge. Therefore, this chapter will speak to the ways in which dances such as Kumina must be seen as epistemological domains and a constructed reality that is anchored in the nurturing of Black female agency. I will illuminate Kumina dance as a site of pedagogy, centering Black women as one of the leaders and teachers in this dance and religious tradition. My purpose too is to inter alia show how this physical knowledge or bodily knowledge forms a source for dance knowledge. My main effort concentrates on providing evidence of the existence of bodily knowledge through Black women. The body being their tool. About bodily intelligence, signature movements, and bodily habits. This Black feminist leaning toward intersectional analysis renders performance Kumina a site of Caribbean cultural production that reveals not only Kumina’s complex African religious foundations but women’s mastery of its theological system of thought.