Spiritual and Physical Borderlands: Exhibiting the Invisible Presence of God and Other Afro-Caribbean Kindred in Old Bank, Panama

Using my 14 months of ethnographic fieldwork, I analyze how disputed narratives and experiences related to kinship, sorcery and the two different Christian doctrines of Methodism and Adventism overlap in Old Bank, Panama. I focus on a museum exhibition about the local funerary tradition that was designed in collaboration by the dwellers and me in 2016, and argue that Old Bank's community has two specific characteristics. First, it cannot be described as an ethnic unity due to its mixed and alien ancestry and composition. Second, it does not correspond to a unified religious collective. Indeed, the local religious emphasis does not lie in an affiliation to a doctrine, but in disputed Protestant routines, which were inherited from both black Caribbean ancestors and from biblical parents (including God, Adam and Eve). Thus, I describe how the community of Old Bank crosses many physical and spiritual borders, blurring the edges between Methodism and Adventism, Panama and the Caribbean. In so doing, I investigate the possibility of making an analogy between two modalities of invisible presences: on the one hand, the present invisibility of beings such as God, spirits and sorcerers; and on the other hand, the recurrent absent presence of emigrant kindred.