Early American (or American-trained) observers of kumina reflected the acculturation and functionalist frameworks of many mid-20th century anthropologists (Moore 1953 (and see Warner-Lewis’s 2016 critique of his research design and questions); Simpson 1970; Seaga 1969), frameworks that understood societies as tending toward dominant (Euro-American) cultural frameworks or as organismic unity, and that didn’t allow for complex interpretations of broader power dynamics, locally and globally.  Later (and local) scholars came to understand kumina as evidence of the ontological and epistemological continuity of central African notions and practices of being within Jamaica (Wynter 1970; Warner-Lewis 1977, 2003; Brathwaite 1978; Bilby and Bunseki 1983; Ryman 1984; Stewart 2005). These texts offer lists of ki-Kongo words as they are used among kumina practitioners; they outline Bakongo and Bantu cosmologies; they draw parallels between central African prohibitions against the eating of salt and the washing of clothes in the river with those that endure among Jamaicans; and they outline conceptual continuities in terms of possession, ancestral veneration, and herbalism. 

These interventions emerged from a wider effort during the 1960s and 1970s among West Indian scholars to reject the notion that acculturation was the primary conceptual frame through which to understand Caribbean societies. They argued instead that the dominant European sector, often physically absent if economically and politically controlling, did not provide a cultural and social scaffolding to which dominated Africans had to acclimatize, but that Afro-West Indians, in maintaining, reconstructing, and transforming their own cultural practices (especially those having to do with land use and religious expression) underwent a cultural process of indigenization that rooted them in the New World, rejecting colonial logics of personhood and production. For these scholars, and for those who followed them, it was the African heritage embedded within Caribbean cultures that should be seen as the primary site of cultural creativity. Understanding the ontologies of kumina therefore became part of their present, which necessitated a more robust decolonial intellectual and political praxis (Wynter 1970; Brathwaite 1971).

These are descriptive as well as analytic texts, coalescing around the overarching principle that the body is unbounded. This principle is rooted within relationships between the living and the ancestors, relationships brought into view through drumming, dance, and myal. For these scholars, what is critical is that the ritual practice of kumina provides evidence for and access to modes of thinking and being in community that are not tethered to liberal, Western models, but that instead instantiate what Paul Christopher Johnson has called a “bodily technology of history making” (2014, 6-7). This history, of course is iterative, and like ancestral presences, linked to the problems of the moment, the community, the individual within the community, while also being transmitted bodily. What the body knows, what the body remembers, and what the body communicates are modes of presence grounded in relation. 

When contemporary practitioners describe what it feels like when myal comes on, they say, “You can feel it move inna you, feel your body a rock, a more powerful energy.” Or, “Sometimes I can feel it coming on and I can resist it, like stop dancing, do certain things, cut it off. But when I go deep, I know nothing. When I come back, I dirty. Mud up.” Such observations reflect what Roberto Strongman has identified as a kind of transcorporeality distinctive to Afro-diasporic communities but reflective of broader African conceptualizations of personhood, in which the human soul is “multiple, removable, and external to the body that functions as its receptacle” (2019, 2). The real tragedy of imperialism and slavery, Strongman argues, was not that it positioned Africans as primitive, backward and soulless, but that its discourse of interiority closed off their “philosophical corporeal openness while at the same time legislatively prohibiting precisely those religious rituals of trance possession that render black bodies inhabited or soulful” (Strongman 2019, 4)