They constructed them carefully, considering each object, substance and detail to include inside, as if their lives depended on it.
And in many cases, they did.
During the 1700s, Europeans trafficked millions of enslaved people from West Africa across the Atlantic Ocean to work in the mines and plantations of European colonies in South America like Brazil and Peru. Some of them created pouch-like amulets to keep on their bodies as a method of survival and protection, often imbuing them with what seemed to be near-supernatural powers.
Matthew Rarey, who received his master’s degree and PhD in art history from UW–Madison in 2008 and 2014, became fascinated by these objects. He spent years researching them, eventually crafting their history into his first book, Insignificant Things: Amulets and the Art of Survival in the Early Black Atlantic. Earlier this year, Rarey won the College Art Association’s 2024 Charles Rufus Morey Book Award, one of the top honors in the art history field.
“I have an inherent interest in objects, in histories, in lives that live on the edges of histories,” says Rarey, the chair of the Department of Art History and an associate professor of African and Black Atlantic art history at Oberlin College and Conservatory.
Rarey originally wanted to be an archaeologist. But a stint as an undergraduate in a field school in Peru showed him that the discipline was more science-heavy and site-specific than he had first realized.
“Also, I was somebody who liked to talk to people who were alive,” he says.
As a child, Rarey loved museums, obsessing over visual details and people and experiences that were different than his own. Art history offered all of that and more. He had already been nudged in that direction by an undergraduate course he took at the University of Illinois that focused on the history of African art.
At UW–Madison, several professors in the College of Letters & Science helped to further hone Rarey’s research vision. The first was James Sweet, a professor of history who taught Rarey’s first graduate seminar in African diaspora history. It was the class where Rarey first learned about the amulets.
“I was really interested in these, because the amulet seems so central to the lives of the people who were accused of using and making them, but not that many survived,” Rarey recalls. “So, I asked him if art historians had ever tackled this and he said, ‘No, not really.’ And he said part of it is that there aren’t very many, and they’re kind of visually benign. And I said, ‘Well, that’s fascinating, isn’t it? Visually, we’re not meant to look at them, not meant to see them. What does it mean to write an art history about something you’re not supposed to look at?’”
Henry Drewal, an emeritus professor of African Art, taught Rarey the importance of listening carefully to the life experiences of artists and makers. Rarey’s graduate advisor was Jill Casid, a professor of visual studies and the current director of graduate studies for the Department of Art History. Casid taught a course called Visual Transculture, an offering Rarey describes as “superstring theory for art historians.” In the class, Rarey learned to think critically about the life histories of objects.
“Something that I found at Wisconsin was a series of professors who were actually receptive to the questions that I was asking,” says Rarey. “Professor Casid had this innate ability to help me reframe the question that I actually wanted to ask and to really push me on it.”
Rarey drew most of his information about the amulets from references in the archives of the Catholic Church’s Portuguese Inquisition, recorded from 1656–1767. Within those hoary pages, he found nearly 100 records attesting to enslaved Africans making mandingas, a pouch-form amulet that was especially popular in places like Brazil, Angola and Portugal.
“There’s a wide variety of powers that are ascribed to them,” Rarey explains. “But the one that is mostly the focus of my book is the power to protect people from bodily harm and violence. There are rather spectacular descriptions of people having an amulet on their body and someone tries to stab them, and the sword breaks and bounces off them, or where they try to shoot them, and they survive unharmed.”
Rarey saw the amulets as part of a profound narrative of self-preservation in defiance of colonial structures. He also became fascinated by their contents. Unlike the gold and bejeweled magical amulets found in an adventure novel or an Indiana Jones movie, the pouch amulets Rarey studied had an intriguing collection of items enclosed inside. Pieces of crumpled paper with representations of Jesus Christ being crucified and the crest of the Portuguese Empire. A bullet. A piece of flint. Gunpowder and a silver coin.
“This is actually a classic West African practice,” Rarey notes. “You use a part of the thing you’re trying to protect yourself from to protect you.”
Rarey began to cross-reference the items in the amulets and discovered that in some cases, the individuals that created them were also creating a sort of archive of their lived experiences. The Portuguese crest, for instance, would likely have been on the church where the owner was forcibly baptized. The coin would have represented the object slavers used to buy their human goods.
“These people are assembling these experiences right under the view of all of these elites,” says Rarey. “And yet doing so in a way that avoids visual description and visual detection. What a metaphor for the way that we write art history.”
Other amulets described in the records incorporated pieces of human bones and hair that were used for luck and gambling. Many thousands of amulets never appeared in the Inquisition’s records and are now lost. Rarey wants to think about how our knowledge of the practice is mediated through the Inquisition’s stereotypes and priorities.
“The popular stereotype about art history is that it’s about things that are beautiful, things that make us feel good and things that we can hang on a wall and look closely at,” Rarey says. “What the history of these amulets suggests to us is that what we find beautiful, what we find engaging and what we choose to write about is ultimately tied to choices about value and importance and the construction of privileged identities.”
Rarey’s first book is likely to end up fueling his second. While researching the amulets, he came across a reference to one being used by an Indigenous man in Brazil. The amulet contained a piece of paper with drawings of a nautical navigation map — the idea being that the man thought a slave ship’s ability to navigate the seas represented a danger to him. It’s an idea Rarey finds himself excited to explore.
“What would it mean to write a history of map-making in the 1700s from the perspective of people who were most displaced and affected by it?” Rarey asks. “Like the amulets, maps are objects that are deeply bound up in the practice and the distribution of colonial power.”