Spirit Possession in French, Haitian, and Vodou Thought: An Intellectual History (original) (raw)

Spirits of Haiti: Catholicism, cultural crossroads, and the uniquely Haitian experience

2017

This thesis examines the characteristics of the spirits Ezili, Legba, and Ogou, in order to determine which aspects of their manifestations incorporate themes of syncretism from Catholic tradition, and which aspects reflect visual tradition that emerged from distinctly Haitian tradition. Elements of Catholic and African traditions, discernable within Vodou iconography, act as a basis upon which the practice was further augmented. These adaptations reveal the mixing of cultures and continuation of tradition that is of central importance to the development of Vodou, as reflections of the process through which the religion overcame the social problems faced by the practitioners, as well as the culturally devastating consequences of Haitian colonial history. These diversifications from the Christianity and African traditions reflect the ingenuity and resourceful nature of Vodou, which through its fluid nature, can be transformed to accommodate the needs of the devotees. Through a postcolonial methodology, this thesis demonstrates that through the syncretism of Catholic themes, the influence of the West African origins of the Vodou, and the unique experiences of the people in Haiti, the iconography of Vodou visual culture interacted of other religions as it evolved into a distinctly Haitian practice. By looking at the spirits Ezili, Legba, and Ogou, alongside their counterparts of the Virgin Mary, St. Peter, and St. George (or St. James) this essay will outline the syncretization of these spirits with Christian icons, while making parallels to the development of Christian iconography which borrowed from pagan imagery in an effort to place the importance of a figure within a pre-established lineage that placed importance on the image. iii DEDICATION This thesis is dedicated to everyone who helped me and guided me through the trials and tribulations of creating this thesis. In particular, my family and close friends who stood by me throughout the time taken to complete my research and articulate my ideas into this manuscript. iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This thesis is a milestone that has been reached through the support of many individuals. While I cannot succinctly thank each and every person for their invaluable support, there are a few extraordinary individuals I would like to acknowledge. First, I must thank my thesis committee chair, Dr. Wendy Castenell, at the University of Alabama, for spending countless hours helping me to most clearly articulate what I was trying to convey in this thesis. Her support and comments helped to guide me as I developed the original paper into a much stronger, scholarly work, and I am truly thankful to have had her as a mentor during this process.

Spirit possession, power, and the absent presence of Islam: re-viewing Les ma?tres fous

J Roy Anthropol Inst, 2006

In the history of ethnographic documentary, the late Jean Rouch's film Les maîtres fous is widely regarded as initiating a new phase in the development of the genre. It concerns the hauka spirit-possession cult of Songhay-Zerma migrants from the middle Niger river who had come to work in Accra, then the capital of the British colony of the Gold Coast, West Africa. When released in 1955, the film was both banned by the colonial authorities and simultaneously denounced by African intellectuals and leading French anthropologists. Since then it has gone through a progressive rehabilitation and today, some fifty years on, it is hailed in many sources as a remarkable counter-hegemonic representation of European colonialism in Africa. This article proposes a re-interpretation of Les maîtres fous, arguing that in order to defend the film against criticism, its counter-hegemonic features have been overemphasized , thereby obscuring its continuity with other forms of Songhay-Zerma religious belief and practice. The article concludes with some brief reflections on the place of film in anthropology. The death of Jean Rouch in a car accident in the Republic of Niger in February 2004, at the age of 86, deprived ethnographic cinema of its most eminent figure and arguably its most original genius, whose influence extended far beyond the world of academic anthropology. In a film-making career that spanned more than fifty years, he produced over 100 films of very diverse lengths, characters, and subject matters. Amidst this immense oeuvre, there are a number of works that stand out particularly, but even amongst these, Les maîtres fous is one of the most salient. Released in 1955, towards the beginning of Rouch's film-making career, it is in colour and has a running time of barely 30 minutes. 1 The subject of innumerable commentaries, in the view of Marc Piault, West Africanist anthropologist film-maker as well as historian of ethnographic film, it is a 'truly foundational film, without doubt one of the cult films of both cinema and anthropology' (1997: 2). Les maîtres fous (henceforth Lmf) concerns the hauka spirit-possession cult that developed in Accra, capital of what was then the British colony of the Gold Coast (later to become Ghana). The adepts were mostly migrant workers from the * Curl Essay Prize, 2004.

Kate Ramsey. 2011. Vodou and Power in Haiti: The Spirits and the Law

Caribbean Studies, 2014

S imply put, Kate Ramsey's study of the legalities surrounding the policing of vodou in Haiti since the inception of the nation to the late 1990s is, in a word, magisterial. Meticulously researched and documented, Ramsey conducts a close textual and investigative study of material that includes court documents, travelogues, historical and ethnographic studies, as well as some of her own and others' fieldwork, to expose the ways in which vodou has been systematically regimented. Those intent upon eradicating, manipulating or enforcing certain forms of peasant expressions of self-empowerment, argued primarily against the so-called "primitive" nature of peasant spiritual/ritual practices, while shaping the discourses surrounding such rituals as well as the nature of, and occasion for, their performance. Not a study on the nature of vodou itself, nor on how vodouisants participated in their own selffashioning or resistance to such incursions upon their lives/practices, what Ramsey realizes is an intense and focused discussion of the ways in which the Haitian peasant class has been exclusively and purposefully positioned as the focal point for repression and control. What emerges through the text is an understanding of how, as Ramsey concludes, "[l]ong figured as modernity's constituted outside, sorcery belief ought rather to be understood as its internal production" (256). In other words, interdictions against vodou ought not to be understood as a means of ridding Haiti and Haitians of actual ways of being hampering their access to modernity but, rather, as the very effect of this refused access. The most impressive aspect of Ramsey's study is the time she takes to critically assess the shifting nomenclature around peasant activities related to ritual, spiritual beliefs, and agency. These shifts reflect, in jurisprudence, an inability to grasp the content of vodou while also demonstrating a lack of true concern with its true meaning(s). As Ramsey explains in her introduction, her focus on the prohibition of "sortilèges (spells)" then "pratiques superstitieuses (superstitious practices)" from 1835 to 1987, explores a number of central questions, and, in particular, the "role…these laws play[ed] in producing the object of "le vaudoux" or "voodoo," particularly in foreign imaginings about Haiti" (1). She explores such questions within the context of Haiti's formation as "the rEsEñas dE libros • book rEviEws • comptEs rEndus

Sent Spirits, Meaning‐Making, and Agency in Haiti

Ethos, 2019

In Haiti, a "sent spirit" is an experience of misfortune, such as an illness or accident, that is interpreted as intentionally sent by someone supernaturally. Sent spirits are fundamentally social narratives, reflecting links among social inequality, structural violence, and solidarity. This paper focuses on the ethnographic stories of two women who experienced the death of a daughter, with one attributing the death to her own inability to care for her daughter, and the other to a sent spirit. A key question is whether these different explanations of misfortune create different possibilities for recourse to action. I explore how, in the context of gangan makout ("shaman with a sack," free Vodou services), a sent spirit attribution created a means of enacting agency following misfortune. However, as contemporary Vodou institutions have shifted to a gangan ason ("shaman with a rattle/bell," fee-forservice) model, sent spirit attributions no longer constitute a feasible avenue for enacting agency. Instead, they leave individuals facing new manifestations of structural violence, in the form of marketization of rituals for healing and justice that have become out of reach for the poor. However, sent spirit narratives continue to perform the work of culture by displacing blame from suffering individuals.

Undisciplined! A womanist ethnography for an Africana practical theology

Christina Taina Désert, 2023

This essay addresses the question of epistemology within Africana religious traditions, most particularly Haitian Vodou. It ponders, what lies within as well as beyond the human that gives us a glimpse of the Unseen? Stressing the need for a new methodology, I enter into conversation with Dianne Stewart and Tracey Hucks' transdisciplinary method and join Christina Sharpe to argue for the undisciplinary. Going beyond material culture and rituals, the undisciplinary emphasises knowledge that is embodied and situated. It privileges the body-in-relation. In addition to ethnography and archival research, the undisciplinary makes room for the poetic: the whispers of the sea, the secrets of the tree, the messages that birds bring. Anchored in the Crossing, the undisciplinary does not write about Spirit; it writes with Spirit. Deeply concerned with the point of conjunction between the space of excess and the space of nothingness, the undisciplinary highlights the need for the 'I' within scholarship: a historical, political, and spiritual self. This methodology guides the ethics of an Africana practical theology that centers practices as a form of reparation and regards scholarship itself as an act of spiritual care.

Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture

Vodou in Haitian Life and Culture, 2006

Invisible powers can be made visible. They can be made visible by action, acts by humans on the great stage of life. In Vodou, the sevitè, women and men who serve the spirits by literally embodying the divine Lwa, les invisibles, manifest themselves during sèvis, the ceremonies and rituals in which trances occur. During the sèvis, the invisible and visible interact with surprising intimacy. Invisible powers can also be illuminated through research. This volume presents the work of prominent scholars in the field of Vodou studies who offer their expansive views of a religious system which has generally been either unseen or misperceived. For most of the past five centuries, Western civilization has deliberately demonized peoples of African descent as an easy justification for their enslavement. Africans were considered to be less than human. Their physical features were declared repulsively ugly. Their cultures, denigrated. Their religions? Nonexistent, or a compendium of heteroclite, ill-conceived notions of noxious superstitions emanating from pre-literate and pre-scientific peoples who never quite rose from practicalities into the rarefied realms of abstract thinking. As logic, sophisticated science, languages, and religion became the apanage of the West, African religions were dismissed with terms such as polytheism, primitivism, paganism, heathenism, and animism, seen through European eyes as impediments to progress and material development. The patronization that informed the "white man's burden" became a liberal notion whereby the little brown brother might be educated and elevated beyond his primitive beliefs. And why not try? Many brown brothers and sisters fell into the trap, abandoning their genetic and cultural inheritances. This predjudice is still common currency in American discourse. "Voodoo economics" or "voodoo politics" are part of a political arsenal in which "black" magic defines the Other from American goodness and munificence. Today, Western powers continue to meddle in others' affairs via government, the private sector, and through missionary workers acting as "agents of civilization." Hollywood, the film industry, and the media perpetuate negative stereotypes. The United States and-by extensionother Caribbean and Latin American republics, justify the military occupation of Haiti using the same "white man's burden" principles. As slaves were denied their full humanity, Haiti is denied its sovereignty. Generations of educated Haitians, taught to speak and write in French, were also taught to embrace the ideals of their imperialist neighbors and the logic of colonial or neocolonial power relationships, individually and collectively deprecating Haiti, its citizens and its unique culture. The chapter by Carrol F. Coates is particularly significant in this regard. He studied a half dozen novelists who, though none admitted to practicing Vodou, have generally given a positive spin to Vodou. One author in particular proudly confessed to interviewing houngan, priests, in his effort at verisimilitude. The real story is the increasing acceptance of Vodou by middle-and upper-class Haitians. These writers constitute a "who's who" of progressive Haitian politics; their lives parallel anticolonial struggles around the world. Patrick Bellegarde-Smith extends the foregoing analysis by arguing that socioeconomic development, to be secure and genuine, must always take into account the national culture. The modernization of cultural elements-the acceptance of the Haitian language, Kreyol, and the Vodou religion-are necessary conditions for the realization of balanced development, befitting an autonomous culture and an independent country. Neither democracy nor development can be "spread" from a beneficent West to others; this is merely the white man's burden revisited. In both Coates and Bellegarde-Smith, one sees that social elites have realized that the emperor (imperialism) has, in fact, no clothes. One is reminded of an African proverb: "run from a naked man offering you a piece of cloth." Claudine Michel provides a clear and succinct explanation of Vodou as superstructure. Vodou transcends its religious role, becoming a spiritual discipline that infuses all other societal systems. Gerdès Fleurant addresses the "song of freedom" and the impact of Vodou music from the country's genesis to the present day, and in the musicians' search for renewal through modernizing their art. As a defining element par excellence, these two chapters show how Vodou provides an integrated and integrative worldview/worldsense that has an effect on every aspect of the Vodouist's life: family structure, economics, healing, and so on. This understanding goes a long way in explicating Haiti's development. Karen McCarthy Brown, author of the modern classic Mama Lola, presents Haiti as a case study in Afro-Caribbean spirituality. Her chapter is a precise and eloquent description and analysis of the religion, with an in-depth discussion of its healing powers-healing in all its permutations, defined broadly. This latter theme is augmented by Pierre Minn in his ongoing research interest on Vodou within his areas of specialization: illness, healing, medicine, and related nomenclature. Largely descriptive, Minn's chapter is an excellent introduction to that field. The text by Richard Brent Turner reminds us of the Haitian cultural elements found in New Orleans, Louisiana. While Haiti alone cannot be credited with "Hoodoo"-as the origins of U.S. Blacks parallel those of Haitians-aspects of Haitian Vodou, as well as African religions, were absorbed into the rituals of Christianity practiced by American Creoles. In New Orleans and beyond, something of the African religionwissenschaft resisted conversion to Protestantism and retained strong Africanisms in its practice of both Catholicism and contemporary Vodou as currently encountered in that part of the world. In Elizabeth McAlister's chapter, one finds the lingering and predictable colonial influences in the adoption of forms of anti-Semitism in the Haitian rara festivals around Christian Easter. McAlister addresses "the demonization by European Christianity of two groups-Jews and Black Africans." But, she states, things are never as simple as they seem, since even the Other has agency-a recurring leitmotiv found throughout this volume.