Migration and Vodou (review)

The African-derived religions of Haiti have a long and checkered bibliography in academia and in the popular press, but until now there has been no book-length study that relates the beliefs and practices of Vodou to the social and economic history of the troubled island of Haiti. Karen Richman's Migration and Vodou eschews lurid descriptions of zombies and cannibals as well as platitudes about Vodou's African origins and timeless reconstructions of its theology. Instead she offers a textured social history of religious practice that combines analyses of labor migration and land tenure, ethnographies of performance and ritual practice and a poignant biography of Ti Chini, The Little Caterpillar.

The Little Caterpillar is a Haitian man who traveled to the United States in a sailing canoe in the first wave of semi-legal Haitian migration. He worked in the agricultural labor camps of Virginia, Florida and the vast swath of the Southeastern United States known to Haitians as Mayami (Miami). He communicated with his family in Léogane though ritual songs recorded on audio cassettes. His remittances built their homes and sustained their cult of the Lwa, the high gods of Haiti's Afro-Catholic popular religion. His life story opens a window onto the history of the relationship between Haiti and the United States and the dialectical relationship between the Lwa and Pwen in the ideology of contemporary Vodou. Richman's book, founded on three decades of ethnographic, quantitative and historical research, explores these two interrelated themes

The Lwa are the focus of a devotional religious cult that brings together descent groups and legitimates land claims through the authoritative articulation of ritual genealogies. Although the Lwa descend to possess (or ride) the bodies of their earthly servants, they remain remote from the quotidian concerns of Haitian peasants and agricultural proletarians. They offer no aid to their devotees other than a sort of passive protection and they consume an enormous proportion of their meager resources in communal sacrificial rituals called feedings (manje Lwa). In these ceremonies the Lwa behave like the French colonials of pre-revolutionary Saint Domingue and the tourists of Haiti's Belle Époque. They drink fine rum and eat imported delicacies. They exploit the labor of their impoverished servants, who render them untold luxuries as selfless gifts. The Lwa are the guardians of Haiti's moral community but they launder the earnings of an immoral economy. This economy focuses on wage labor and the manipulation of Pwen spirits.

If the Lwa are effete and voracious consumers of surplus value, the Pwen are gritty and dangerous proletarian producers. The Pwen are made, bought and sold rather than inherited through family lines like the Lwa. Pwen spirits are propitiated with the coarsest, but most nutritious staples of the Haitian peasant diet. They produce wealth for their owners, but their power is fraught with risk. If they are not adequately propitiated, they will afflict their recalcitrant masters and their families with acute sickness and even death. Pwen are physical objects, packets of sacred substances bound with cords. They are constructed for specific earthly ends, especially success in employment. It is only through the labor of the Pwen that impoverished Haitians may assemble the resources they need to worship the exalted and demanding Lwa. Pwen and Lwa stand in dialectical relationships of production and consumption, of wage labor economies and reciprocal gift prestations, of evil individualism and the kin-based moral community.

According to Karen Richman, the relationship between Lwa and Pwen is a model of and a model for the relationship between Haitian labor migrants abroad and their kin on the island. Migrants' wage labor "Over There" is indispensable for the reproduction of families ostensibly dedicated to peasant agriculture in Léogane. Wage labor (as opposed to peasant agriculture) is seen as inherently shameful and morally wrong. However, it is only through the proceeds of evil wage labor that moral, family-based peasant agriculture can sustain itself. Workers launder their wages by sending remittances to be consumed or invested on the...