The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti

singular.

INTRODUCTION

Between 1835 and 1987 many popular ritual practices in Haiti were officially prohibited, first as sortilèges (spells) and later as pratiques superstitieuses (superstitious practices). This study asks several key questions about the institutional and social histories of this legislation. Why was the ban on popular ritual maintained as a fixture of the Haitian Code Pénal (penal code) for over 150 years when, for the most part, the sustained application of these laws was politically impossible for the Haitian government? What was the significance of these laws for popular religious communities both at times when they were strictly enforced and also, as was more generally the case, when they were not? How did local communities interpret these laws and shape their application, and what does this reveal about the relationship of the Haitian state to the rural majority at different points in the country’s history? What role did these laws play in producing the object of "le vaudoux or voodoo," particularly in foreign imaginings about Haiti, and how did such figures, in turn, impact the penal regime against popular ritual practices in Haiti?

This book situates these questions in relation to the long history of Euro-American denigration of African and African diasporic spiritual and healing practices. As the nation born of the world’s only successful slave revolution, Haiti was the preeminent locus for nineteenth-century debates about whether peoples of African descent had the capacity for self-government. Detractors of the Black Republic pointed to the persistence and prevalence of what they called "the vaudoux cult" as primary evidence to the contrary. Arguably no religion has been subject to more maligning and misinterpretation from outsiders over the past two centuries. In his 1928 book Dra-Po, written in the midst of the first United States occupation (1915–1934), the Haitian esotericist Arthur Holly argued that the accusations according to which our African Fathers have 1 bequeathed to us a degrading and ‘diabolic cult’ . . . have very much contributed to maintaining the black race in a deplorable state of social segregation in Haiti as elsewhere.¹ Holly spoke to the social force of these ideologies and implicitly raised the question of how they were materialized and made effective in law. Because the barbarism relentlessly attributed to Haiti by imperial denigrators during the mid- to late nineteenth century was consolidated in the figure of vau doux—this one word, as Hannibal Price wrote, from which sprang all the misunderstandings, sincere or not, spread against the Haitians in the world—a key focus of this study has been the extent to which different Haitian governments relied upon the penal prohibition of le vaudoux to repudiate foreign charges that civilization was regressing in independent Haiti.²

FIGURE 1. Map of Saint-Domingue.

The question, though, is not only to what extent these laws were intended to defend against European and North American anti-Haitianism (and other variants), but also what the internal political stakes of their promulgation and enforcement were at particular historical conjunctures. This is an especially important problem in light of the role attributed to African-based magico-religious practices, organization, and leadership in unifying enslaved, maroon, and free rebels in northern Saint-Domingue in 1791, and ultimately in propelling the revolutionary overthrow of French colonialism and the founding of independent Haiti in 1804. To what extent were penal laws against le vaudoux—enacted and maintained by the postcolonial state—designed to contain and control a potential parallel political power in Haiti? If these statutes became part of the battery of laws that specifically targeted the Haitian rural population, to what extent and in which ways did the prohibition of many family- and temple-based ritual practices classified as sortilèges and pratiques superstitieuses contribute to the political marginalization, economic exploitation, and social stigmatization of this population over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries?

FIGURE 2. Map of Haiti.

My conceptualization of this study is indebted to the pathfinding work of several scholars on the history and legacy of these laws, and most particularly to that of Jean Price-Mars and Laënnec Hurbon.³ One reason these laws have received little attention, apart from such notable exceptions, in the voluminous ethnographic literature on popular religious practice in Haiti is, again, that they tended not to be consistently or rigorously enforced over the course of their 152-year history. At times during my research in Haiti, this was reflected in responses to my description of the project, usually from those who, on account of class standing, religious affiliation, and/or age, had never themselves been immediately affected by the laws. Some, for example, expressed surprise to hear that such laws had existed, asserting that it was the Roman Catholic church, not the state, that had been most active in repressing these practices. More commonly, interlocutors acknowledged the laws but cautioned me not to read them too literally, given their infrequent application against Vodou. These responses were extremely valuable, for they raised crucial points concerning (1) the ambivalent relationship of the Haitian state to practices it officially prohibited, yet, on political grounds, necessarily tolerated or sought to co-opt; (2) the role assigned to the Catholic church after its 1860 Concordat with the Haitian state in enforcing this regime; and (3) the nature of the customary regulation to which popular religious practice was subject.

Perhaps most important, such responses propelled me to think seriously about how to understand the historical significance and contemporary legacy of these laws, if they usually were not strictly enforced against socially sanctioned family or temple-based religious practices. This book is an extended attempt to answer that question, taking into account its complexity and, oftentimes, its uncertainty, given the fragmentation and silences that mark archival research on subaltern histories.⁴ It is critical to remember that these laws always retained the potential to be enforced, and at times were violently so. The book is organized around several notable cases when the official prohibitions of sortilèges or pratiques superstitieuses served as the authorizing basis for the repression of communities of Vodouizan (practitioners of Vodou). Given that it was politically impossible for any Haitian government to sustain such an offensive, it is unsurprising that three out of four of the campaigns against le vaudoux or voodoo examined below were instigated by foreigners in Haiti: namely, the French-dominated Roman Catholic church hierarchy in the late 1890s and early 1940s and the U.S. military during its occupation of Haiti between 1915 and 1934. These cases most powerfully bear out Jacques Derrida’s caveat in his essay on legal authority that if there are, to be sure, laws that are not enforced, . . . there is no law without enforceability, and no applicability of the law without force.⁵

Yet over the course of my research on the social histories of these laws, it became clear that local communities also played a significant role in shaping their enforcement according to popular interpretations of what their just object should be. Thus, people whose own spiritual practices may have been officially criminalized by the inclusion of vaudoux in the law against les sortilèges seem to have taken the state’s apparent will to forbid spells at its word, and pressured local authorities to apply this statute against alleged crimes of sorcery. As long as they were interpreted in this way and enforced against alleged malicious magic and not against socially sanctioned ritual practices, there even seems to have been a level of popular investment in these laws.⁶ The effectiveness of popular influence on their local enforcement is an ambivalent dimension of this history, on the one hand ensuring that for the most part those rituals considered essential to maintaining mutually sustaining relations with the spirits could still be performed. At the same time, the archival record is largely silent about what local hierarchies and power relations conditioned the direction of these laws against those accused of malicious spells.

That Vodouizan, quite understandably, interpreted the law against les sortilèges as prohibiting malicious magic also points to the perversely affirmative nature of these prohibitions. The intermittent efforts to see these laws strictly applied on the parts of state authorities, the Roman Catholic church, and U.S. marines in Haiti often seemed to more powerfully confirm and instantiate the reality of superstitious beliefs than to undermine them. In other words, as enforced under these regimes, the laws tended to affirm beliefs that they were meant ostensibly to eliminate. At the same time, the Catholic church’s campaigns against what it called le mélange (the mixture) inevitably culminated in acts of self-destruction and self-interdiction given the interpenetrations of Catholicism and Vodou in popular practice, and the tenet among Vodouizan that to serve the spirits well, one must be a good Catholic. In the late nineteenth century, the law against les sortilèges was also relentlessly read against its intended grain by foreigners hostile to Haiti’s existence as positive proof of the persistence of the barbarism that the state sought, perhaps in part through the prohibition of spells, to repudiate. If the great post-Enlightenment rationale for legislation against pretended magic, divination, and enchantment was to protect the public from the tricks of charlatans, these laws proved to be extremely tricky themselves for different Haitian governments and for any other entity that sought their enforcement.

Such paradoxical effects bring to mind a Haitian saying that comments on the potential trickery of law more generally, but from a subaltern perspective: lwa toujou genyen yon zatrap ladan (law always has a trap inside of it).⁷ It is a succinct commentary on the long history of ruling-class and foreign manipulation of the Haitian legal system to exploit peasants and, particularly, to appropriate their lands.⁸ In light of that history, the potential trickiness of the law might seem analogous to that of magic itself.⁹ Do not magic and the law share a common potential for mobilizing power toward good and for ill, as relatively defined? Cannot law, like magic, be engaged to produce, in Theophus Smith’s terms, either tonic or toxic effects? Smith, in his book Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America, examines "how black Americans have attempted to render American law as a social curative or pharmakon (Greek: medicine, poison) for transforming the destructive reality of slavery."¹⁰ This study likewise documents and analyzes how the Haitian peasantry and urban poor engaged with juridical law and attempted to shape its enforcement as a potential social curative even as they opposed and resisted its toxic provisions, such as the penalization of family-based, socially sanctioned ritual practices.

Serving the Spirits

Vodou is the name by which Afro-Haitian spiritual beliefs and ritual practices are today known in official Kreyòl orthography and most scholarly writing.¹¹ Yet practitioners have tended not to objectify the religion in this way, but rather say in Kreyòl that they sèvi lwa (serve the spirits).¹² References to Vodou across colonial and postcolonial histories often take this object for granted, obscuring an important genealogical question: if, in popular usage, the word Vodou has traditionally referred only to one way of ritually serving the spirits, among others, when and how did it (in its various orthographies) come to be figured by outsiders as the metonymic sign for a demarcatable whole, whether this has been ascribed a superstitious or a religious character?

That question revives an etymological debate that was conclusively settled over eighty years ago. In the inaugural issue of the Journal of American Folk-Lore (1888), the American folklorist William W. Newell wrote an article exonerating Haitian peasants of the ritual crimes then relentlessly attributed to them by tracing how many of these charges paralleled those made against the Vaudois, a heretical sect in late medieval France and elsewhere: child sacrifice and cannibalism, the ability to take on monstrous forms, and disinternments.¹³ Newell’s theory that the word Vaudoux was derived from Vaudois won a number of prominent converts at the turn of the century, including the young W. E. B. Du Bois, who cited it in his study The Negro Church (1903).¹⁴ This derivation was definitively countered in 1928 by the founder of Haitian ethnology, Jean Price-Mars, who argued in Ainsi parla l’oncle (So Spoke the Uncle), his classic study of Haitian folklore, that the word actually came from the former Dahomey, where Vôdoun signified spirit or deity.¹⁵ However, as Price-Mars himself acknowledged, what this authoritative etymology did not fully explain was why the name vaudoux became appropriated by foreigners as the encompassing sign for all African-based spiritual beliefs and ritual practices in Haiti, thereafter taking on a powerful life of its own.¹⁶

In Haiti the word Vodou has traditionally referred to a particular mode of dance and drumming, and has generally not been figured as an inclusive term for the entire range of spiritual and healing practices undertaken within extended families and through relationships with male and female religious leaders, called, respectively, oungan and manbo. As Rachel Beauvoir and Didier Dominique note, when reference is made to a Danhomen-Vodoun dance, the word holds a very specific sense, evoking the West African roots of the important Rada spirit nation.¹⁷ For many practitioners, the encompassing term is not Vodou, but rather Ginen, a powerful moral philosophy and ethical code valorizing ancestral African ways of serving the spirits and living in the world.¹⁸ The Rada spirits are particularly identified with the ethos of Ginen, but the concept can also be invoked more inclusively, in reference to the broader range of popular spiritual practices in Haiti.¹⁹ These include rituals serving other nanchon (nations) of lwa, including the Nago, the Ibo, and the Petwo, as well as lemò (the dead) and lemarasa (the sacred twins); baptism, initiation, and death rites; and, with manbo and oungan, individualized client consultations focusing on healing, divination, and the creation of charms for specific ends such as protection, health, prosperity, and love. Gran Mèt or Bondye (French Bon Dieu, or God), the creator of the universe and the spirits, is a remote and transcendent figure, for whom the lwa serve as intermediaries through their interventions in worldly affairs. However, as the frequently heard expression si Bondye vle (if Bondye is willing) reflects, there is no eventuality outside of God’s will.²⁰

Regional variations as well as differences in rural, urban, and diasporic religious organization, ritual, and nomenclature complicate attempts to generalize about Vodou translocally as much as transhistorically. Families in rural Haiti who have lived on or maintained a relationship to a piece of land for several generations are tied through their zansèt (ancestors) to a venerated prenmye mèt bitasyon (original founder), from whom they inherited not only the physical estate, but also a spiritual heritage encompassing familial spirits and the ritual knowledge of how properly to serve them.²¹ The involvement of ritual specialists such as oungan and manbo may have been peripheral to the religious practice of such families during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Oral historical and archival evidence suggests that their role intensified over the course of the twentieth century in parts of the country where economic pressures, dispossessions, and displacements forced migrations to other regions, to cities, across the border to the Dominican Republic, and to Cuba and beyond. Today, what has been called temple Vodou is more commonplace in the countryside than it once was.²²

In Port-au-Prince and other cities, including those in the diaspora, voluntary congregations are likewise family based, but in a more expansive sense, incorporating members into fictive kinship networks in relation to a religious elder, whether manbo or oungan. As Karen McCarthy Brown has observed, The relationship between devotees and spirits is . . . characterized by reciprocity and mutual dependence, and in both rural and urban settings sèvis (services) are the occasions for mutually sustaining communions with the spirits.²³ Ceremonies in honor of major lwa are timed to coincide with the feast days for the Catholic saints with whom they are iconically or otherwise characteristically associated. For example, St. Peter holding the keys to the gates of heaven evokes Legba, guardian of the crossroads and all barriers (thus also the lwa of communication); Azaka, lwa of agriculture, is associated with St. Isadore the Farmer; Ezili Frida, Creole goddess of love and lover of luxury, is a Rada lwa identified with the bejeweled Mater Dolorosa, or Mother of Sorrows; her rival, Ezili Dantò, a Petwo spirit, has darker skin and is fiercely maternal, and is thus linked with Our Lady of Czestochowa, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Mater Salvatoris, Our Lady of Perpetual Help, and Our Lady of Lourdes.²⁴ Lwa of the same family can belong to different nanchon and perform, like these two Ezilis, the ideological complementarity of the Rada and Petwo pantheons—the august authority, tradition, coolness, and benevolence of the Rada posed against the innovative individualism, transformative potency, efficiency, and sometime hot violence of the Petwo.²⁵ The Petwo are magically identified lwa, and their proximity to the Rada spirits is always well buffered and marked off, whether spatially, in terms of the placement of altars, or temporally, in terms of the sequence of ritual.

During large-scale ceremonies spirits are invited through sacred designs called vèvè drawn on the ground with cornmeal; by drum rhythms, songs, prayers, and dances in their honor; and by libations and offerings of favorite foods, including, when appropriate, sacrificed animals that are cooked and shared with the group. The order and protocol through which different spirits are greeted are called, notably, the regleman, presumably deriving from the French règlement, meaning (in one sense) regulation or statute. Once a lwa has mounted a horse, that is, has spiritually embodied or possessed a devotee, she or he may counsel, comfort, chastise, bless, and otherwise communicate with those present and also perform cures or characteristic physical feats. The lwa might have messages of advice or complaint for her or his chwal (horse), whose gwo bon anj (in Gerdès Fleurant’s words, big consciousness) is displaced by the spirit and thus has no memory of what occurs during the trance.²⁶ These performances (the word does not imply pretense) and the distinct personalities and relationships of the lwa themselves—codified in mannerisms, dress, speech, and general comportment—can be understood to comment on, analyze, and reinterpret not only familial and local matters, but also memories of ancestral Africa, enslavement and revolution, postcolonial militarism, foreign occupation and dictatorship, and social relations across such histories.²⁷ In earlier ethnographic literature the hot Petwo nanchon of spirits were believed to have been Creole lwa, emerging under slavery and revolution, as evoked in the cracking whips, small explosions of gunpowder, and piercing police whistles that are hallmarks of their ritual service. Now the Petwo lwa are recognized as having deep roots in Kongo (West Central African) culture, but their iconography and performances can still be seen as indexing and commenting on multiple histories and relations to power.²⁸ As Brown writes, One Petwo ritual gesture could . . . evoke, at once, the magical power often attributed to Kongo religion, the social power of colonial slave holders, the financial and technological powers of American tourists and politicians, and the destructive potential of one’s own inner rage.²⁹

Foreigners have long taken voodoo (and its various Francophone and Anglophone cognates) to be synonymous with Haitian sorcery and with black magic more generally. The image of pins stuck in dolls is a product of the colonial and imperial histories that this book studies, one that lamentably shows little sign of becoming history itself in European and American fantasies of African diasporic religion. In fact, though, for its self-definition Ginen tradition relies in part on the critique of self-seeking and malevolent maji (magic), considered the business of specialists who work with the left hand dealing in spirits that have been stolen from the dead or purchased and can thereafter be made to perform magical works for their owners. Of course, what constitutes immoral magic is ambiguous, subjective, and indefinable in absolute terms; as Karen Richman has analyzed based on her research in Léogâne, spirits purchased for protection or as an instrument of self-gain in one generation may be ritually incorporated into the descent group’s Guinea legacy in the next.³⁰ What is particularly striking, though, in light of past and persistent Hollywood images of voodoo is that malicious magic has long been constructed as a constitutive outside of socially sanctioned belief and ritual, morally repudiated by those who identify their religious practices with Ginen.³¹ It is particularly ironic, then, that the word that came to signify the whole of malevolent Haitian sorcery among often hostile outsiders has in popular usage been figured by servants of the Ginen lwa as antithetical to such practices.³²

The gloss of Haitian popular spiritual practice by outsiders as vaudoux or voodoo will be situated at the center of this study. The questions raised by this objectification become particularly salient with regard to colonial and postcolonial legal texts, as statutes prohibiting le vaudoux further reified it as a politically and perhaps also magically threatening entity existing in the world.³³ My research suggests, however, that the reality of such an object, legally defined as a form of witchcraft under the category of sortilèges, would have been refuted and repudiated by the great majority of the Haitian population after the revolution. Thus, throughout this book, I want to think about what the historic incommensurability between such laws and their purported object has meant for the potential freedom of popular religious practice in Haiti, and for the potential success of state and, after 1860, Roman Catholic church attempts to apply those laws given the strength of popular opposition and everyday practice set against them.

The Instrument to Make Us Legal and Legitimate

Throughout his writings, Jean Price-Mars examined the ways in which the official criminalization of Vodou contributed to the social and political marginalization of the peasantry and urban poor. In his 1951 address Folklore et patriotisme, for example, he asserted that Haitian elites had long relied upon the Code Pénal to deliver them from any association with the barbarism that Haiti’s detractors often generalized to the entire population: Ah! you do not wish to hear talk of Vodou, your ears are offended by the raucous sound of the drums, the dynamic and rhythmic intermingling of steps in the vodouesque dances confuse your conception of choreography, your academicism revolts against the syncopated assonance of the chants, you feel only shame and scorn for this form of barbarity and it is the Code Pénal that you call upon for help to end this disgrace that contrasts so strongly with the degree of civilization that you pride yourself on having attained.³⁴ Such laws, he argued, not only stigmatized the peasantry and urban poor as a class apart. At one time or another, in their ever-expanding sweep, they potentially criminalized the majority of the Haitian population. Thus, because this regime was a key factor in the subjugation of the masses, its lifting—or, as Price-Mars suggested more precisely in this essay, its reform—had to be considered a critical prerequisite for their empowerment.

Price-Mars’s consideration of the social and political force of these laws and the liberatory potential of their repeal strongly resonates with the Trinidadian writer Earl Lovelace’s analysis in his novel The Wine of Astonishment (1982) of the significance of a similar set of laws passed in 1917 against the Shouters or Spiritual Baptists in British colonial Trinidad and Tobago. As narrated by Eva, wife of the novel’s protagonist, Bee: One day it was in the papers. They pass the law against us that make it a crime on the whole island for people to worship God in the Spiritual Baptist religion. . . . One day we was Baptist, the next day we is criminals.³⁵ Bee and other members of his church resolve to organize against the law by put[ting] a man of our own in the Legislative Council to speak for us, to make the law protect us as the law is suppose to and to keep the police from brutalising our people.³⁶ Once in office, this representative, Ivan Morton, born into the community but educated out of it, chooses not to identify with or politically assist their struggle. Bee’s incomprehension and exasperation in the face of Morton’s inaction and seeming indifference is explained by Eva in an extraordinary passage: Bee say the church is the key to everything, that if Ivan Morton can’t understand that to free the church is to free us, if he can’t understand that the church is the root for us to grow out from, the church is Africa in us, black in us, if he can’t understand that the church is the thing, the instrument to make us legal and legitimate and to free him, Ivan Morton, himself too, if he can’t understand that, Bee say, then he don’t have any understanding of himself or of black people.³⁷ Lovelace’s novel diagnoses not only, then, how the banning of Spiritual Baptism in Trinidad or of Vodou in Haiti rendered practitioners perennially delinquent before the law. Because such religions permeated every aspect of believers’ lives, and because their practice was officially constructed, not least of all through such laws, as the principal sign of popular backwardness in need of civilizing reform, they became, to Bee’s mind, the key to everything. Through this passage Lovelace suggests that the right to serve the lwa or worship as a Spiritual Baptist freely was not simply connected to other socioeconomic and political struggles, but rather had the potential to be an instrument through which a wider social liberation and legitimacy could be achieved.

A similar analysis seems to have propelled the coming together of thousands of Vodouizan and their supporters in the wake of the period of dechoukaj (uprooting) that followed the ousting of Jean-Claude Duvalier and the end of the twenty-nine-year Duvalier dictatorship in February 1986. Oungan, manbo, and bòkò (ritual specialists who work with both hands), members of their families, and other Vodouizan were among those attacked by crowds across the country after Duvalier’s flight, identified as sorciers (sorcerers) and/or as members of the tonton makout (secret police) forces that had terrorized Haiti since the beginning of François Duvalier’s regime.³⁸ This violence can be attributed partly, though not solely, to the fact that the elder Duvalier was well-known for his efforts to iconographically appropriate, ideologically manipulate, and institutionally co-opt the popular powers of Vodou.³⁹ There were, indeed, prominent Vodouizan affiliated with the Duvaliers’ paramilitary apparatus, alongside well-known Catholic and Protestant makout. However, as Laënnec Hurbon has argued, any analysis of why so many oungan and manbo became targets of dechoukaj in the days following the overthrow of the dictatorship must also take into consideration the long history of clerical discourses demonizing oungan as agents of Satan, a label that, in preceding years, fundamentalist Protestants in Haiti had particularly exploited in their missions.⁴⁰

Rachel Beauvoir and Didier Dominique document and analyze the 1986 violence against Vodouizan in their Savalou E. They recount the visit of an American pastor with his Christian music group that year who broadcast an anti-Vodou message in a nationally televised presentation, and they report that leaflets repudiating Vodou in the New Haiti were left on houses and cars. In recording the testimonies of many who witnessed and were themselves victims of the anti-Vodou violence, Beauvoir and Dominique also document the inaction and silence of the interim government and of the political class more generally in the face of these crimes. Significantly, their analysis, like that of Hurbon, connects the atrocities against Vodouizan in 1986 to the long history of repression of popular religious organization and practice in colonial Saint-Domingue and postcolonial Haiti, one that encompasses, but also exceeds, the missions of Catholic and Protestant clergy.⁴¹ The fact that in one way or another Vodou was criminalized in the Haitian Code Pénal from 1835 forward was the authorizing basis for such campaigns.

In the face of the 1986 anti-Vodou dechoukaj, two groups, Zantray and Bòde Nasyonal, formed to demand that the religious rights of Vodouizan be officially recognized and protected. That year rallies, demonstrations, and open meetings were held across the country.⁴² In early February 1987, the Association des Vodouisants et Défenseurs du Vodou submitted a declaration to the Assemblée Constituante (Constituent Assembly) calling for the abrogation of the 1935 law prohibiting les pratiques superstitieuses on the grounds, in part, that it served as the basis for certain imported sects . . . to preach intolerance, racism and the suppression of liberty of conscience and of religion. They also called for the recognition of Vodou as a national religion, just as Kreyòl had been recognized as a national language.⁴³ The first demand was met by Article 297 of the new Haitian Constitution of 29 March 1987, which abrogated the décret-loi against les pratiques superstitieuses. Article 30 of the new constitution stated: All religions and faiths shall be freely exercised. Everyone is entitled to profess his religion and practice his faith, provided the exercise of that right does not disturb law and order.⁴⁴

Sixteen years later, on 4 April 2003, President Jean-Bertrand Aristide signed a decree granting official recognition to the Vodou religion for the first time in the nation’s two-hundred-year history. Describing Vodou as an essential constitutive element of [Haitian] national identity, the decree authorized religious leaders to register with the government and become licensed to officiate at civil ceremonies such as baptisms, marriages, and funerals. It noted the increasingly public role that Vodouizan were claiming in Haitian civil society and politics as a key factor in the government’s decision to extend official recognition.⁴⁵ For Vodouizan and their supporters in this cause, the decree was the vindication of a long and ongoing struggle for religious rights. For individuals, it meant that they would no longer be required to affiliate with other religions, and thus generally to conceal that they served the lwa, in order to baptize a child, marry, or bury a loved one. The decree also meant that Vodou-based organizations could seek government aid for initiatives in public health, education, and other social services.⁴⁶ In the days following the government’s announcement, testimonies from popular religious leaders about the importance of the decree appeared in the Haitian and foreign press. One oungan noted that the decree allows us to emancipate our culture, to practice in the open.⁴⁷

Significantly, this decree granted national status, recognition, and protection to Vodou, an objectification that, as Brown notes, was first used by outsiders . . . to name the whole of Haiti’s traditional religious practice.⁴⁸ Arguably, it was partly because the sign of Vodou (and its cognates) had long been constituted as a demarcatable whole by outsiders that it could be converted into, in Lovelace’s words, an instrument for the demand of religious rights. In making vaudoux a metonymic gloss for Haitian sorcery and pratiques superstitieuses, Haiti’s nineteenth-century detractors unwittingly paved the way for the word’s resignification, by defenders (such as Jean Price-Mars), over the last century in religious terms, and for the emergence of the sign of Vodou as an indispensable object of political identification and struggle.⁴⁹ I hope that my focus on the construction and contestation of Vodou as an object of the law in the pages that follow will illuminate the complex processes through which several of these conversions have taken place.

Outline of the Book

The core chapters of this book (2–4) are framed by the promulgation of the Haitian penal law against les sortilèges under the government of Jean-Pierre Boyer in 1835, and the replacement of this prohibition (revised in 1864) with a new law against les pratiques superstitieuses under Sténio Vincent in 1935. However, the repression of African-based ritualism in colonial Saint-Domingue and the role that magico-religious practice, organization, and leadership played in the overthrow of first slavery and ultimately French colonialism are crucial reference points for that post-colonial history. Chapter 1 thus focuses on the statutes that criminalized particular ritual practices and forms of assembly on the part of slaves and free gens de couleur in late colonial Saint-Domingue.⁵⁰ It examines how, in the four decades prior to the 1791 uprisings in the northern province, crimes of poisoning, profanation, and sorcery came increasingly to be merged together in white dread of black resistance. During these years, the law prohibiting gatherings of slaves from different plantations, first codified in the 1685 Code Noir (the legal basis for slavery in the French Caribbean colonies), was the object of repeated elaborations, each of which seemed designed to expand the field of prohibition through ever increasing specificity. The chapter also analyzes recent historical debates over the role Vodou played in the revolutionary struggle in Saint-Domingue, and it briefly examines the policies of the revolutionary leaders Toussaint Louverture, Jean-Jacques Dessalines, and Henry Christophe toward popular religious practice and