Haitian Vodou and Voodoo: Imagined Religion and Popular Culture (original) (raw)
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Shortly after the catastrophic earthquake that crushed Port-au-Prince and the surrounding towns on January 12, 2010, The New York Times published an article in which columnist David Brooks claimed that “voodoo” is a “progress-resistant” cultural influence because it spreads the message that “life is capricious and planning futile.” Alongside Brooks, many authors promote similar views, especially Christians. I argue that Vodou does not negatively affect progress in Haiti. Rather, there are historical, linguistic, and governmental policies that limit progress. In reality, Vodou practitioners enhance progress in their attention to the planning and giving of ceremonies, in the hierarchical organization they establish in communities, in their ritual and language, and in the education imparted through inheritance, teaching, and initiation. The scapegoating of Vodou by Brooks and others perpetuates a racist colonial legacy, and it betrays an ignorance of the community and the abundant research about it.
Shortly after the catastrophic earthquake that crushed Port-au-Prince and the surrounding towns on January 12, 2010, The New York Times published an article in which columnist David Brooks claimed that "voodoo" is a "progress-resistant" cultural influence because it spreads the message that "life is capricious and planning futile." Alongside Brooks, many authors promote similar views, especially Christians. I argue that Vodou does not negatively affect progress in Haiti. Rather, there are historical, linguistic, and governmental policies that limit progress. In reality, Vodou practitioners enhance progress in their attention to the planning and giving of ceremonies, in the hierarchical organization they establish in communities, in their ritual and language, and in the education imparted through inheritance, teaching, and initiation. The scapegoating of Vodou by Brooks and others perpetuates a racist colonial legacy, and it betrays an ignorance of the community and the abundant research about it.
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.
WesScholar Review, The Spirits and The Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti
2013
The Spirits and The Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti is a brilliant, nuanced re-mapping of how Vodoun became Voodoo and Vodou. In the process of her meticulous delineation, Ramsey offers in the world of geopolitics critical insights into the inevitable plight of the "avant-garde," to use Haitian anthropologist Antenor Firmin's casting of the first black republic in relation to Africa and its diaspora (95). Ramsey charts her course early, stating: "Arguably no religion has been subject to more maligning and misinterpretation from outsiders over the past century". (1) Indeed, "voodoo," she writes, especially to foreigners, is synonymous with Haitian "sorcery" and "black magic". (9) In fact, as she reveals, the etymology of this word denotes not only that the one with the four vowels is a misnomer but also that the more correct term Vodou (spelled vaudoux during colonial times) traditionally refers to a mode of dance. Vodou, she convincingly argues, has had multiple significations. Her goal is to excavate the foundations of each of these meanings, especially in relation to the supposed Haitian curse or pact with the devil, as Evangelists would have us believe. In the wake of the devastating 2010 earthquake, Ramsey writes, several commentators revived this idea blaming "voodoo" as a
Gothic "Voodoo" in Africa and Haiti
E Tropic, 2019
This paper seeks to historicize and demystify “Voodoo” religion in Africa and Haiti while also drawing comparisons and contrasts to concepts and themes related to “the gothic”. What is assumed to be “supernatural” or “paranormal” in Western and Gothic circles has long been a part of everyday reality for many peoples of African descent and devotees of Vodun in Western Africa and Vodou in Haiti. Tropes that are essential to realms of the gothic (supernatural characters, mystery, the macabre, spirits, and paranormal entities) — are also central to the cosmology and liturgy of so-called “Voodoo”. As “the gothic” undergoes a resurgence in academic and popular cultures, so too does “Voodoo” religion. And yet, both terms continue to be conflated by popular culture, and by equating “voodoo” with “the gothic”, the true spirt of both concepts become confounded. A certain racialized Eurocentric hegemony devalues one of the world’s least understood religions (“Voodoo”) by equating it with equally distorted concepts of “the gothic”. As globalization transforms society, and the neo-liberal order creates more uncertainty, the continued distortion of both terms continues. Vodun does more than just speak to the unknown, it is an ancient organizing principle and way of life for millions of followers. Vodou/Vodun are not cognates of the “American Zombie gothic”, but rather, are a mode of survival and offer a way of seeing and being in an unpredictable world.
Vodou and Haiti: A Historiographical Look
A popular quote that is mentioned amongst Haitians and non-Haitians alike is that Haiti is 80% Catholic, 20% Protestant, and 100% Vodoun. This implies that Vodou not only plays a religious role within Haitian society but culturally as well. Vodou has been a topic of discussion roughly within the past thirty years and many within and without the historical discipline have produced profound pieces of academic work on the subject. That being said, there has not been a historiographical look at what has been said about Vodou and obtain a temperature of the subject in regard to what the narrative about Vodou within academia is saying. It is only within the past three decades that the subject has been taken into consideration within academia. One might usually find that the topic of Vodou or "Voodoo", as it is misused, is found within the New Age and alternative religion sections of famous bookstores, but the topic is now migrating to the history section as researchers turn their attention to it.
Vodou in Haiti: Way of Life and Mode of Survival
2006
This chapter originates in the movement of rediscovery and rehabilitation of religions and modes of spirituality of indigenous peoples with a long history of subjugation and whose beliefs have been dismissed continually as primitive if not downright evil. Animism, fetishism, paganism, heathenism, and black magic are some of the terms that have been used improperly in the West to describe the Haitian religion, which is presented in the foreign press and the media as a religion of blood and sacrifice, as a religion of sexual orgies and malevolence, thus resulting in the widely shared perception that the practice of Vodou equals sorcery and witchcraft.1 This work is revisionist in that it recasts the values and principles inherent in the Vodou religion, in particular its humanism and sense of communality, and emphasizes the complexities behind the way these values are transmitted from one generation to the next in Vodou communities. It also shows how this New World religion combines an...
NEW VANTAGES: TRACING THE SPIRITUAL AND CULTURAL INTERSECTIONS OF VODOU, VODUN, AND VOODOO
Vodou, Vodun, and Voodoo are three distinct yet intrinsically connected religious systems of Africa and the Black Atlantic diaspora. In popular thought, these religions are mistakenly conflated with one another, as well as with other African and Diasporic religions under the all-encompassing term voodoo. Scholarly inquiry into the complex histories, intricate structures and practices, and culture materiality of these religions is relatively new, while much remains shrouded in mystery. To date, much of Vodou scholarship has been dedicated to de-stigmatizing African and African-derived religions and articulating the differences which separate Vodou, Vodun, and Voodoo. Even though Vodou scholarship is becoming increasingly interdisciplinary, exchange between African and Diaspora studies has been limited. While scholars have made great strides in closing the information gaps around Vodou over the course of only 40 years, the growing field of Vodou Studies is ripe for investigation.
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