Gendering Gullah Makers: Recovering the Intellectual Motives of the Women Who Researched and Imagined the Gullah, 1915–91

My paper introduces a new framework and innovative topics for the historical study of Gullah-Geechee religious cultures. First, it explores how the concept of African-Atlantic Spiritual Pluralism provides a framework that allows for a more productive understanding of the development of Gullah-Geechee religious cultures from the founding of the colonized Lowcountry into the early twentieth century.  Embracing the presence and influence of multiple religious cultures within Gullah-Geechee communities over numerous generations permits a more nuanced approach to assessing the complex engagements of these communities with the diverse religious cultures introduced by various African, indigenous, and European people, as well as those religious cultures created from these interactions. One of the insights we gain from this reorientation is that the emergence of Gullah-Geechee forms of Protestant Christianity is not the sole or even the central narrative of Gullah-Geechee religious history. Instead, the core narrative tells of the thoughtful cultivation of religious pluralism in much the same manner as that seen throughout the African-Atlantic Diaspora in places such as Brazil, Cuba, Haiti, and Jamaica. Second, the paper examines multiple sources of evidence that we can used to explore the plural religious cultures of Gullah-Geechee communities. Foremost among these is the rich knowledge about Lowcountry spirits and their interactions with people. My analysis demonstrates that this body of knowledge reflects deeper African-Atlantic ways of connecting spirits from diverse religious cultures. The second source includes the expansive lexical/semantic record unique to Gullah-Geechee communities that reveals the plural essence of spiritual expression over several generations. The third source ties the other two kinds of evidence to specific sites studied through the discipline of historical archaeology. Inclusive interpretations of spiritually significant items and their physical contexts provide new understandings of the ways that African-descended people in the Lowcountry made and lived within their plural religious cultures.