“Voodoo Doll”: Implications and Offense of a Taxonomic Category

This paper focuses on the persistent use of a particular term, “Voodoo Doll,” to classify certain artifacts and argues that it is both fundamentally misleading in its history of applications and especially egregious in the current debate over the openness of classics to people of color. Voodoo Doll not only exploits caricatures of Afro-Caribbean religion, it maintains a fundamental error in the interpretation of ancient ritual figurines: that is, the assumption of a primitive “law of sympathy.” This paper reviews current scholarship on ancient ritual figurines and then discusses the category Voodoo Doll and its modern origins, with an argument for its abandonment.