Migration and Vodou (review)

Bibliographic Data

ID11638498
AuthorsRebecca Darlene Sager
Year2007
Volume28
Issue1
Pages165-170
Publication date2007-01-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueLatin American Music Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0163-0350 • E-ISSN: 1536-0199
PublisherProject MUSE (PUBLISHER • US)
DOI10.1353/lat.2007.0024
OpenAlexW1571283824
LanguageEN
References cited12

Reviewed by: Migration and Vodou Rebecca Sager Karen E. Richman. Migration and Vodou. Gainesville, FL: University of Florida Press, 2005. xxi, 356pp. ISBN 0-8130-2835-3. Photographs, compact disc, glossary, bibliography, index. $65. (Contribution to the series: New World Diasporas, ed. by Kevin Yelvington, forward foreword by Kevin Yelvington). In Vodou and Migration, anthropologist Karen Richman charts two centuries of ritual and economic transformations in Ti Rivyè, a village in the district of Léogane (western Haiti), that explain how this peasant community has become a producer of migrants and consumer of their wages. Richman's book contains the first ethnographic account of Haitians using cassette technology to extend traditional, rhetorical performance practices and "aesthetics of contest and persuasion" (212) across the transnational spaces traversed by migrants searching for a livelihood. Richman's twenty years of advocacy and research among Haitian immigrants and eighteen months of field research in Ti Rivyè (the basis of Richman's [1992] doctoral dissertation titled "They Will Remember Me in the House: The Pwen of Haitian Transnational Migration") as well as her post-doctoral research exploring migration in South Florida (mid-1990s) and religious conversion (2000–2002) impart an impressive depth and range of inquiry to this book. The narrative arch of Vodou and Migration encompasses the life of Little Caterpillar, a migrant farm worker in the southeastern United States, and his closest kin in Ti Rivyè. The book's outer chapters (1, 8, 9, and Epilogue) document Caterpillar's toil overseas, his continued involvement in home through remittances, cassette letters, and Vodou rituals, his Protestant conversion as an act of resistance to exploitation by greedy [End Page 165] lwa [spirits] and kin, his illness (attributed to sorcery), and death. Caterpillar's living and dying are captured in three cassette letters he authored, included as Tracks 2, 5, and 6 of the accompanying compact disc. While the directness of Richman's storytelling borders on the maudlin, I commend Richman for transparently conveying her protagonists' skepticisms, contradictions, rationalizations, even lies, literally, in their own words. The heart of the monograph, Chapters 2 through 7, makes possible a complete exegesis of the inner meanings of Caterpillar's life and cassette correspondences. Following the work of Murray (1977, 1980), Larose (1975a, 1975b), and Lowenthal (1987), Richman gives equal attention to historical and synchronic analyses of both Vodou cosmology and rites as well as the social and economic structuring of the Ti Rivyè peasantry. Richman reconstructs a vivid picture of inheritance, land tenure, and labor in the Léogane district from archival research, a quantitative survey, and interviews with both resident elders and foreign offspring of local nineteenth and twentieth century neo-colonists. This original research offers a uniquely local perspective on national political intrigues and coercive international agro-business strategies, while intersecting with the relevant literature, including Wallerstein (1974, 1980, 1989), Portes & and Walton (1981), and Mintz (1973, 1974). Likewise, Richman expertly chronicles "ritual change in twentieth-century Léogane," explaining the social logic motivating "the 'domestication' of urban, temple practices" in Vodou, the "monetization of ritual, ...professionalization of male ritual leadership, ...and new rites of passage" (116–117), including "post-funereal mortuary rites" and "the initiation of women (kanzo)" (124). She draws upon several earlier ethnographies of Haitian Vodou, including Courlander (1960), Metraux (1959 [1972]), and Mennesson-Rigaud (1946, 1951). The central thesis of Richman's exposition is that Vodou cosmology and ritual are "a model of and for" (Geertz 1973) Ti Rivyè peasant society. She observes that just as the peasants' land was lawfully swindled and their labor annexed by neo-colonial capitalists, ritual discourse in Ti Rivyè was expanding. Richman's explanation of how these concurrent phenomena are contingent pivots on several interrelated concepts about pwen ["point"]—as a discourse strategy, a magical power, and an analogy for migrant labor. As a discourse device, "a pwen crystallizes a complex reality into 'an elegantly simple image,' ...easily grasped and remembered" (17, citing Brown [1987: 151–152], also Courlander [1960] and Averill [1997]). Chapter 8 offers an exegesis of four chante pwen ["point songs"] performances recorded in cassette letters, demonstrating how pwen songs simultaneously tether migrants to home while articulating anxieties of socio-economic dislocation and

CONTEST · Peasant · Caribbean and African Literature and Culture

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