Vodou and History

Haitian Vodou has long been viewed through a distorted lens by outsiders. In the nineteenth century, as the Republic of Haiti suffered from a unique degree of economic and political isolation implemented and enforced by the powerful slaveholding empires and nations that surrounded it, Vodou was commonly represented as the ultimate antithesis of "civilization," as a case of African superstition reborn in the Americas. During the U.S. occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934, images of Haitian Vodou as a terrain of demonic possession, absurd superstition, and zombis proliferated in the United States. At the same time, the twentieth century has also seen the publication of several careful ethnographic works about Vodou. During the 1930s, Melville Herskovits published his Life in a Haitian Valley, which argued that the Haitian religion had West African roots. During the same period Zora Neale Hurston wrote her less well-known Tell My Horse. Both of these works attentively described aspects of Vodou, as did Alfred Metraux's classic 1959 text Voodoo in Haiti. The next year Harold Courlander's Drum and Hoe provided detailed examinations of Haitian ritual music. The filmmaker and dancer Maya Deren published her at times experimental Divine Horsemen, which drew on Joseph Campbell's theories in seeking to describe the theological system of the religion. Another dancer, Kathryn Dunham, also described Vodou in her Island Possessed, published in 1969. The obstinate, broader stereotypes against which these works were articulated influenced the ways in which all these authors wrote about and interpreted the religion. These texts, notably those by Metraux and Deren, fought a battle for Vodou, confronting the idea that was it was little more than a "cult" or the expression of "superstition," with carefully crafted descriptions of the belief systems and ritual of what they showed to be a complex and deeply rooted religion. This work on Vodou developed alongside other works on "Afro-Atlantic" religions, such as Cuban Santéria, and Brazilian Candomblé, as well as on the African influences on Afro-American Christianity.Melville Herskovits, Life in a Haitian Valley (Garden City: Anchor Books, 1971); Zora Neal Hurston, Tell My Horse: Voodoo and Life in Haiti and Jamaica (New York: Harper Perennial, 1990); Alfred Metraux, Voodoo in Haiti (New York: Schocken Books, 1959); Harold Courlander, The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960); Maya Deren, Divine Horsemen: The Living Gods of Haiti (New York: McPherson and Company, 1953); Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Garden City: Doubleday, 1969). Among the classic broader studies of African religion in the New World are Roger Bastide, African Civilizations in the New World (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), and, more recently, Robert Farris Thompson's Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Random House, 1983

Cult · Possession (linguistics · Superstition · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade

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