The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (review)

Anthropological studies of Haitian popular religion are legion, but few of them deal with its history other than to claim for it an important role in the revolution of 1791 to 1804, which ended slavery and made Haiti the Americas' second independent state. This impressive book provides an ethnologically informed history of Vodou with a particular focus on the politics of law. In four chapters of increasing length, Ramsey deals with the colonial and revolutionary periods, the nineteenth century, the U.S. occupation from 1915 to 1934, and the debates of the following decade surrounding an emergent cultural nationalism. Ramsey's central problem is to explain why the state only intermittently enforced the laws that criminalized popular ritual practices from colonial times until the 1987 constitution. The plasticity of the term vaudoux and the vague wording of the laws, which failed to distinguish sorcery from familial and communal religious practice, provide much of the answer. The likelihood that state agents at the local level participated in such practices was another factor, as was the incorporation of elements of Catholicism into Vodou.

The first, briefest chapter is a solid and judicious overview of magico-religious practices during the period of slavery. Relying on printed, mainly secondary, sources, Ramsey surveys the development of legal prohibitions and the controversy regarding Vodou and the Haitian Revolution. The focus is political rather than cultural. In the post-independence period, the state continued to fear the subversive potential of popular religion and perhaps the detrimental influence of its celebrations on agricultural productivity, but new motives also inflected its criminalization. Although denigration of popular culture underpinned the new elite's claim to power and its exploitation of the masses, the sensitivity of this elite to foreign opinion reinforced the state's desire to condemn "barbarous" practices that increasingly shaped Haiti's international image. Ramsey stresses that such restrictions often had broad popular support when they targeted sorcery or, as in the notorious Bizoton case of 1864, reputed anthropophagy. Yet most of the major campaigns against popular religion were spearheaded by foreigners—the French-dominated Catholic Church or the American occupying forces.

The two twentieth-century chapters, which draw on various archives and Ramsey's oral interviews, are the most deeply researched and original. Ramsey highlights the American miltary's discursive use of "voodooism" in justifying at different levels its actions in Haiti and in depicting the varied ways in which Haitians responded. The book climaxes with the development of the black-nationalist indigenist movement of the 1920s and 1930s and the state's diverse reaction to it, which included more precisely worded legal prohibitions, the last of the drum-burning anti-superstition campaigns, and official efforts to package popular religion as folklore. These years also saw an upsurge in U.S. anthropological interest in Haiti, as well as the appearance of the "zombi flick." An epilogue briefly extends the narrative into the era of the Duvalier governments.

This richly detailed and sophisticated study, supported by 150 pages of notes, extends the work of Hurbon and makes an original argument about the interaction of law, culture, and development.¹