It's that season again...

...for Vodou, that is. In the Artibonite Valley we hear the night-drums and see the assorted odd bits of Vodouiana from about Halloween to Easter. Last year we nearly stumbled into a torchlit cow-sacrifice processional as we locked up the office gate one night, and I'm hoping to avoid that experience this year.

Not only has the subject of Vodou recently appeared here and here, it came up in conversation yesterday with our teammates Frantzo and Fritzner. As we returned from a meeting with a group in the next town over, Bryan accidentally ran over something we've come to recognize as clearly Vodou: a calabash bowl with a candle in it sitting in an intersection. Everyone hastily reassured Bryan that because it was the truck that broke the bowl, and the truck is not alive, it would be fine because magic can't affect machines.

Well!

me: So if trucks represent technology, can we say that technology is more powerful than Vodou magic?

Frantzo: Yes! If everyone had technology, Vodou would be finished. The more technologically-advanced people become, the less they rely on Vodou.

Fritzner: Yes, Vodou definitely gets in the way of development. If it helped, then Haiti and Africa would be the most developed nations on earth.

(So - can we think of technological development as a form of evangelism?)

It's really interesting to me to think of the role that people expect religion to play in their lives - F & F seem to think that Vodou fulfills some need that is more apparent when physical needs are not being met, but once a person is able to meet basic needs the role of Vodou in the life of that person drastically shrinks.

The Artibonite Valley is known as the Scary Center of Vodou by people in other parts of Haiti, but it seems to me that what F & F point out is true. People turn to Vodou when there's an illness the local hospital can't address. They turn to Vodou when they feel like someone is taking unfair advantage of a situation. They use Vodou to access power that feels otherwise remote.

Is this an indictment of the Christian church? Of the Haitian government?

Dismissing Vodou as a religion of the peasants is sort of akin to throwing out the cultural baby with the ceremonial bathwater, since Vodou has long been the primary way that Haitians have addressed questions of spirituality. I think it's important to take that means of expression seriously and pay attention to what it can tell us about a perception of God that is unique to this culture.

I know a lot of evangelical Americans in particular think that Haiti is the way it is because of the practice of Vodou, but it might turn out to be just the opposite.

(By the way, be sure to check out the American Museum of Natural History's archived exhibition, The Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. It provides a nice overview that covers many aspects of the religion.)