Replacing the Term "Voodoo" with "Vodou": A Proposal
The anthropologist Richard Barrett noted that ethnographers hold many stereoscopic visions of the societies that they study. Such visions provide them with views of the world through two or more lenses, including what he referred to as etic or emic perspectives. The etic description of a culture is an observer's oriented approach whose goal is to analyze a society's customs and symbolic forms afar, that is, objectively as a scientist observes a chemical reaction in his or her laboratory. To describe a culture emically is to understand the customs and categories of thought from a subject's point of view. It is to look and describe a people's worldview subjectively, that is, from inside their culture, to learn their languages and use the nomenclatures that they use to designate the categories of things that are part of their universe. Voodoo is a Western term that derives from the late 19th and early 20th centuries' views of Haitian culture. It is fraught with racist categories about blacks' religious practices. Writers like Spenser St. John, a member of the British diplomatic corps in Haiti, the occultist William B. Seabrook, and world traveler and author J. Verschueren among others, described Voodoo as primitive beliefs and practices involving zombies, wax dolls, and exotic spells celebrated clandestinely by Blacks who, inebriated with blood, enter into ecstatic and frenzied states of consciousness in which their bodies are invaded by supernatural malevolent powers. The term Voodoo then is associated with the colonial (even latent) views of African and African-derived New World ritual practices perceived as untamed and uncivilized.