Showing posts with label Vodou is not a Country. Show all posts

Thursday, March 23, 2017

Vodou is not a Country, and Haiti is not a Religion: A Response to Reza Aslan and Others!

“Vodou is Haiti. Haiti is Vodou”–Reza Aslan
by Dr. Celucien L. Joseph
In his spiritual adventure series, sponsored by CNN, religious scholar Reza Aslan undertakes a series of ethnographic research based on his visits in various countries and interviews with religious adherents and religious leaders of different religious traditions. In his visit to Haiti, he visited some of the most sacred spaces of the Vodou religion such as the sacred waterfall Saut-d’Eau, a popular site for Vodou pilgrimage.  In Haiti, he interviewed Evangelical leaders of Protestant Christianity and Hougan and mambo of the Vodou religion to gain various perspectives of Haiti’s popular religion. Aslan’s underlying objective is to shed better understanding of the Vodou religion that has often been misrepresented as evil, paganism, cannibalism, sorcery, witchcraft, etc. in the writings of American and European missionaries and writers. Aslan is also interested in challenging those distortions of Vodou and resituate Vodou in its rightful place as a legitimate religion like any other religions of the world. In the conclusion of his documentary on Vodou, Professor Reza Aslan seems to rearticulate a commonly-held misconception about Haiti, a nation, and Vodou, a religious system, when he declares “Vodou is Haiti. Haiti is Vodou.”

It is like saying Christianity is America. America is Christianity. This is a false dichotomy that does not represent the religious and experience and diversity of the Haitian people.  Haiti is not a religion. Haiti is a country. Vodou is not a country, but a religion among other religious traditions practiced in Haiti. In fact, the ancestral faith of the Haitian people is not monolithic. It is African traditional religion (i.e. Vodoun), Christianity, and Islam. In the remaining part of this short analysis, I would like to communicate a few ideas about three important issues that are intertwined and closely related to each other: religion, religious affiliation, and the construction of self and collective national identity based on certain religious tradition or system. The emphasis of this brief reflection will be on Haitian Vodou and Haitian (national) identity. Here are my 13 propositions:
  1. Religious experience could be both personal and collective.
  1. Religious piety is not spirituality.
In closing, Vodou is not a country, and Haiti is not a religion. The idea to link Haiti to Vodou is part of the Haitian exceptionalism narrative, which American and Western scholars, missionaries, and thinkers have constructed. The relationship between Haiti, a country, and Vodou, a religion, was never intended to showcase Haiti or the Vodou religion in a positive light. Like any other religious traditions, Vodou is not an “exceptional” religion.