Voodoo in Haiti

Voodoo is a household term in American popular culture.1 Everyone has heard of "Voodoo dolls" of one's enemies, into which pins are supposedly stuck to kill or otherwise curse them. Zombies  variously "the living dead" or living individuals so drugged as to lose all independent personality  are a fixture of sciencefiction horror movies. When in the 1980 Republican presidencial primary campaign, George Bush wished to castigate thenrival Ronald Reagan, he denounced Reagan's economic policies as "Voodoo economics." This popular American image of Voodoo includes a tie to Haiti, where it is associated with the Tonton Macoutes and the system of terror which characterized the regime of "Papa Doc" Duvalier.

This "pop" image of Voodoo tends to disguise the fact that Voodoo is not a creation of Hollywood, nor even a fringe cult, but a religion which commands the spiritual allegiance of a large segment  probably a majority  of the people of Haiti, which serves as a central thread in Haitian society, and which has played a leading role in Haitian history since French colonial times. In order to understand Voodoo in its proper Haitian context, we must first of all rid ourselves of our popular preconceptions, and attempt to approach it with fresh, unbiased eyes.

Voodoo is, in essence, an animistic reli

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n colonial Haiti were the maroons. This word comes from the Spanish cimarrones, meaning "wild men" or "monkeys"  not a racial slur, but a reference to their independence and their lives in the forests. These were escaped slaves, or the descendents of escaped slaves, who formed their own autonomous communities in remote parts of the island. Other maroons lived mingled with freed blacks or mulattoes in the cities, or as vagabonds roaming the countryside.6 It was among the maroon communities, and the plantation slave populations with whom they remained in contact, that Voodoo originally developed. According to contemporary accounts, Voodoo was developed in either 1750 or 1767. It is most unlikely, however, that Voodoo actual appeared fullformed at these dates, or at any other time; these are simply the dates at which the ruling whites became aware of it. The actual origins of Voodoo are uncertain, but it probably ________ 5Katherine Dunham, Island Possessed (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1969), 8. 6Laguerre, 39ff. developed gradually out of a syncretism of the various African religions which the slaves or their ancestors had practiced in their original homelands. Since these African triba
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Approximate Word count = 2210
Approximate Pages = 9 (250 words per page)

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