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ОглавлениеIntroduction
Vodun has survived by adopting and then adapting foreign elements…. The converging point of Vodun’s “open-endedness” and “globality” is its pulse. That pulse is sustained by Vodun’s flexible structure, its refusal to become stagnant, and, as a consequence, its ability to incorporate what it needs from local and global sources.
—Rush 2013: 5
“Let’s go, Tim! Daágbó Xunɔ̀ wants to see us,” Marie, my research assistant, shouted as she pushed open the gate to the compound that I shared with her family.
“Oh, okay! I am coming!”
I had been waiting to see Daágbó for nearly two weeks. For many who live in the coastal city of Ouidah, Daágbó is recognized as the supreme chief of Vodún in Bénin. While his actual power and political reach are contested, receiving his blessing to conduct my research and hearing his perspective were important to me.1 I hurried around the house and stuffed into my brown leather messenger bag my Moleskine notebook, a pen, a bottle of lukewarm water, and a few gifts I had purchased for Daágbó in anticipation of this meeting.
In just a matter of minutes, Marie and I hopped onto the backs of two motorcycle taxis en route for Daágbó’s palace. As was customary, we arrived with a bottle of gin, 2,000 CFA (West African francs), and a handful of kola nuts. We were asked to wait for Daágbó in a long rectangular room wherein the supreme chief frequently held audiences with guests and dignitaries. The full length of the left wall was painted with an aging dynastic mural on which Daágbó Xunɔ̀’s predecessors since 1452 were represented. Lined up against each side of the room were more than twenty chairs for the priest’s visitors. At the back of the room, sitting in front of the doorway that leads to Daágbó’s private residence, stood his throne and a low rectangular coffee table on which Daágbó kept a tattered spiral notebook, a bottle of gin, four small etched glasses, and two cellular phones.
“Why is Daágbó considered the supreme chief of Vodún?” I whispered to Marie while we waited.
“A long-ago grandfather of his was a magical whale who had the power to turn into a man. As a man, the whale took many wives and had lots of children. Daágbó is descended from the whale’s human children, and so he owns the sea [xù]. The sea is where all the other vodún [spirits] come from. So, we believe all vodún live here in his palace.”
“Does everyone recognize him as the supreme chief?”
“No, not everyone. But a lot do,” Marie responded.
After sitting patiently and chatting with Marie for more than half an hour, Daágbó emerged from behind the wooden beaded curtain that separates his private living space from the palace’s public meeting room. We greeted each other. I offered him the gifts Marie and I brought for him, and he reciprocated by pouring us two small glasses of gin.
“Welcome to Bénin,” he announced. “Why are you here?”
“I would like to learn about Vodún,” I responded. “I want to understand how Vodún is spreading throughout the world.”
Daágbó took a sip of gin, smiled, and said, “Vodún spreads because it works.”
“Can everyone benefit from Vodún?” I asked.
“Yes, Vodún is for everyone. People come to Bénin from all over the world to learn about the spirits. The spirits are for anyone who can protect them.”
Daágbó was right: Vodún had become a global phenomenon. The fragile, but flexible, spirits and the secrets that safeguarded them could be found almost anywhere in the world. Today, it would be difficult to find a global city not occupied by Vodúnisants. While the religion’s amorphous and flexible nature has undoubtedly been one of Vodún’s strengths, it has also not been without its challenges. As media, film, literature, and public discourse show, Vodún is a West African religious complex that has developed a problematic celebrity and a global presence due to a series of interrelated historical events (McGee 2012). From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, millions of enslaved West Africans were forcibly removed from their homes and sent to European colonies in Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, and the United States. In these places, new religions, such as Lucumí, Candomblé, and Vodou, formed out of the mixtures of European, Caribbean, and West African religious practices.
In the late 1920s and early 1930s “Voodoo” was propelled into the Western imagination by U.S. literature and film. William Seabrook’s 1929 publication of The Magic Island and the 1932 release of the film White Zombie profited from racist, pejorative, and exaggerated images of black magic, skull-laden altars, bloody sacrifices, and staggering zombies. Where literature presented adherents of religions such as Buddhism as the enlightened “Oriental” other, African religious practitioners were represented as illogical, bloodthirsty idol worshipers. By the late 1960s, a few U.S. black nationals traveled to West Africa for initiation into Vodún and òrìs̩à [Yr. spirit, god, or divinity] worship in order to reject Christianity’s structural whiteness and to empower themselves, through ritual, with African spiritualities (e.g., Clarke 2004). At the same time, Cuban Americans who could no longer return to Cuba, because of the U.S.-Cuban travel embargo, began visiting West Africa in search of initiation into spirit cults that mirrored those found in the Afro-Cuban religion of Lucumí. Then, by the late 1980s—as the U.S. New Age movement continued to surge—middle-class, white, U.S.-based spiritual seekers began traveling to West Africa looking for divine power while also rejecting the politics of what they called “organized religion” (see Clarke 2004: 4–16). Since then, the Béninois state has teamed up with the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to promote the country’s “Voodoo culture” as an international commodity, thereby inspiring travel agencies to market Bénin as the “cradle of Voodoo,” and some local tourism offices, such as the one in Ouidah, arrange initiations for foreigners who wish to become Vodún priests, devotees, and diviners (Rush 2001; Forte 2007, 2010; Landry 2011). Influenced by, and in some cases even supported by, these national trends, Daágbó and his predecessor—along with many other Béninois Vodún priests—have welcomed countless American and European spiritual seekers to Bénin (e.g., Caulder 2002). It is indisputable that Vodún’s international presence is on the rise and the religion’s global relevance is becoming increasingly more evident. This constellation of global events inspired this book.
As is illustrated in Daágbó’s claim that “Vodún is for everyone,” I explore the ways in which Béninois enhance Vodún’s global appeal and contribute to the religion’s multinational success. Since the late twentieth century, practitioners of African religions have enjoyed a greater Internet presence; spiritual tourism in Africa has been on the rise; African religions and spiritualities have enjoyed new global expansions; and African immigrants have contributed to the burgeoning religious diversity of some of the world’s most cosmopolitan cities. This ethnography is first and foremost a look at the ways in which African religions, such as Vodún, have begun to expand in new directions with the support of recent trends in spiritual tourism. However, it is also an exploration of contemporary Vodún, a religion that was born in the West African rain forest but has begun to thrive in new places around the world. That is to say, this book is not meant to be an ethnography of foreign Vodún practitioners as much as it is an ethnography of Vodún within today’s globalizing world. Vodún is becoming more popular in local, national, and transnational arenas—especially as spiritual markets, encouraged by processes of religious secrecy, serve to legitimize the transnational practice of Vodún. Vodún’s growing reach across national, ethnic, racial, and class lines makes the religion the perfect example of an indigenous religion gone global, where according to Daágbó, the spirits exist for “anyone who can protect them.”
Defining Vodún
While “Vodún” is the progenitor of the English word “Voodoo,” the religion in reality is nothing like what we have seen in movies such as The Serpent and the Rainbow or The Skeleton Key or, most recently, in the television series American Horror Story: Coven, where Papa Legba, the ever-important Haitian spirit (lwa) of the crossroads, was depicted pejoratively as a cocainesnorting demon who demands the ritual sacrifice of babies. There is no doubt that African religions and their adherents have suffered profoundly from U.S. and European racist conceptualizations of Africa that have proliferated in film, media, and political discourse (see Barthkowski 1998). As Adam McGee points out, because Voodoo “is coded as black, presenting voodoo in scenarios that are belittling, denigrating and, most especially, aimed to evoke terror is a way of directing these sentiments at blacks without openly entering into racist discourse” (2012: 240). Yet despite these challenges Vodún and its Caribbean derivatives continue to thrive.
Far removed from Hollywood’s racist imagery, Vodún is a religious system in which its devotees seek to achieve well-being in the world by focusing on the health and remembrance of their families (see Brown 2001). At the most basic level, “vodún” is a word from the gbè languages of the Niger-Congo language family, and it translates best as spirit, god, divinity, or presence. Before transnational traders, colonial powers, scholars, and Christian missionaries came to Bénin, Vodún was known simply as vodúnsínsɛn (spirit worship) and its adherents were described as vodúnsɛ́ntɔ́ (those who follow a spirit’s taboos). In precolonial Fonland, spirits—whether they be local or foreign—were all vodún. To the Vodúnisants, the spirit world truly offered limitless possibilities. Until colonialism, Vodún was not identified as a monolithic religion that could be placed in contrast to the Abrahamic religions. In fact, before Western involvement in West Africa, Vodún was best understood as a social system made of countless spirit and ancestor cults that existed without religious boundaries.
Vodún is part of an interconnected globalizing religious complex that I call the “African Atlantic forest religions.” The West African and West African–derived forest religions include religions such as Vodún, òrìs̩à worship, Sevi Lwa (Haitian Vodou), Lucumí (Santería), and Candomblé. These religions are characterized by their long-term connections to both West Africa and the Americas as a result of the transatlantic slave trade; the centrality of the forest in their cosmologies as one of the religions’ primary “key symbols”; and their emphasis on ritual secrecy, spirit possession, and divination (Ortner 1973). African Atlantic forest religions have been active participants in globalization for more than four hundred years and have begun to establish themselves in urban centers such as New York City, Paris, Montreal, Miami, Chicago, and Houston. In these spaces, practitioners of the African Atlantic forest religions collaborate among themselves and draw from long-established traditions such as Christianity, Islam, and Western Occultism (P. Johnson 2007). In the city, human diversity causes religious boundaries to blur, as adherents of religions such as Vodún become increasingly multinational and multiracial. For these reasons, throughout the book, when analytically meaningful, I draw periodically on examples from the entire African Atlantic forest religion complex while retaining my primary focus on how Fon Béninois and foreign practitioners practice a religion they now call Vodún.
Even as I define Vodún, it is important to accept that Vodún is remarkably indefinable. As a religion, it has been described as a “vortex” and a “sponge,” as being “open-ended,” forever “unfinished” (Rush 1997, 2013), and intrinsically “eclectic” (cf. Mercier 1954: 212n4; Blier 1995; Bay 1998, 2008; Rush 2013: 10–11). Dana Rush has argued convincingly that the religion’s remarkable abilities to absorb foreign gods, customs, and ideologies “were not just grafted onto a particular Vodun world view, but rather were the sustenance of the world view itself” (2013: 11). Vodún is a religion where Yorùbá divinities, through war or marriage, become new spirits for the Fon (Le Hérissé 1911; Mercier 1954; Blier 1995; Bay 1998, 2008; Law 2004; Rush 2013); where Jesus Christ becomes a vodún (Rush 2013); where Hindu gods can represent the spirits (Drewal 2008; Rush 2013); where Qur’anic script becomes a source of immense magical power; and where Islam inspires the worship of new witch-fighting spirits, such as Tron or Tinga (Tall 1995; Rush 2013: 78–86). Vodún is simply inexplicable. Highlighting this reality, Rush has suggested correctly that “an operable understanding of Vodun is based on the acceptance that, in order to make sense of Vodun, one must acknowledge that it cannot be fully made sense of” (2013: 56). Along with Rush, I accept that Vodún is seemingly defined by its obscurity. I make no attempt to restrict one’s understanding of religions such as Vodún by struggling to define them. Instead, I embrace the religion’s absorptive nature as a way of chronicling the ways in which Vodún has become increasingly important to a growing number of people across the globe.
Power, Secrecy, and Globalization
Vodún is a religion that has begun to build on the African Atlantic world as it includes new migrations, new expansions, and new localities. Religion, according to Gertrud Hüwelmeier and Kristine Krause, has thrived in today’s world “because globalization provides fluid transnational networks that help transport religious messages from local to global audiences” (2010: 1). This ethnography is, in many ways, an examination of how religious messages and secrecy are transformed by Béninois practitioners through ritual and economic exchanges into experiences that have become increasingly more salient to a growing number of people with various backgrounds.
Nearly fifteen years ago, Ulrich Beck (1999) defined globalization as a “dialectical process” that involves “social links” while also “revaluing local cultures” and promoting “third cultures” that must provide an “extension of space; stability over time; [and] social density of the transnational networks, relationships, and image-flows” (12). All these criteria, according to Jacob Olupona and Terry Rey (2008), have been fulfilled by indigenous Yorùbá religion, as Yorùbáland has expanded to include not only West Africa but also Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States. Many scholars have attended to the ways in which African and African diasporic religions have localized and been reimagined in new transnational spaces (e.g., Barnes 1997; Brown 2001; Murphy and Sanford 2001; Clarke 2004; D’Alisera 2004; Richman 2005; Olupona and Rey 2008; Parish 2011; P. Johnson 2013; Rey and Stepick 2013; Beliso-De Jesús 2015; Carr 2015; Pérez 2016). However, few ethnographies have examined the globalization of African religions from the perspective of Africans and through an analysis of events and ritual encounters that occur not in the religions’ new territories but on the African continent itself.
To fill this gap, I focus on spiritual tourist encounters in Bénin. In so doing, I argue, the transnational flow of African religion is encouraged by secrecy—a social force that anthropologists have long seen as restrictive and one that reinforces local notions of power and authority between the secret holders and the secret seekers (e.g., Bellman 1984; Beidelman 1997). Secrecy thrives in a social paradox. For secrecy to retain its social power, the very experience that is meant to be kept from public consumption must be, at least on occasion, revealed. To put it another way, “secrecy must itself be performed in a public fashion in order to be understood to exist” (Herzfeld 2009: 135). In Vodún there is not a shortage of public performances of secrecy. Tourists often see brightly colored Egúngún (ancestral) masquerades dancing in the streets, or they feel pushback from Vodún practitioners when they want to take pictures of shrines or even visit certain spirit temples. Vodún’s culture of secrecy is conspicuous, even to foreigners. As one becomes more intimately acquainted with the religion it becomes even clearer that ritual secrecy embodies tremendous social power. To be initiated into Vodún is to “find the spirit’s depths” (Mɔ̀ hùn dò), to be initiated into the secret ancestral Egúngún society is to become a “bride of secrets” (awosì), and to divulge the secrets of the spirits is to “break” or “shatter” the spirit beyond repair (gbà hùn). In the sacred forest, ritual allows for the depths of the spirits to be simultaneously exposed safely and made vulnerable through revelation (see Chapter 2). Through initiation, secrecy becomes the social shell that protects the spirits and the initiates who now know each other’s depths. The secret then becomes “an ‘adorning possession’ made more potent because its exact nature is unknown” (Newell 2013: 141) to those who seek the hidden.
As many anthropologists have shown, the secret itself is often less important than the processes of secrecy. Through what Michael Taussig called “active non-knowing” (1999: 7), Béninois often feign their knowledge of the spirit’s “public secrets” until they too are initiated and therefore given the social authority to reveal what is, ironically, “generally known, but cannot be spoken” (5). Béninois understand, and even draw power from, this paradox. To them, initiation provides them with the embodied authority and the right to admit to know publicly the spirits’ secrets. However, foreign spiritual seekers, who lack the habitus of their Béninois counterparts, struggle with this social reality. Without the required social networks from which secrecy draws its meaning, foreign spiritual seekers tend to focus on the secret itself. During the initiation of Christopher, a white American man in his thirties, into the secret Egúngún society, it was obvious that he was incredibly disappointed when René, his initiator, revealed to him that the society’s ancestor masquerades were animated not by the ghostly ancestors as everyone claimed publicly but by men. Once this public secret was revealed to him, one could see his face flush with anger. He glared down at the forest floor and then up at me.
“Are they kidding? This is what I paid for? I paid $500 to learn something I already knew! Is this a joke?” Christopher asked, under the cover of English.
He later confided in me that he thought his initiators were lying to him and that “there must be something” they were not telling him and that he felt as though he was being “scammed.” By this time, I had been initiated into the Egúngún society myself (see Chapter 2), and I had watched Jean initiate his own sons and nephews. Each of these initiations mirrored Christopher’s experience precisely. There was no doubt that Christopher received a proper initiation. Yet there was little I could do to convince him. Christopher’s perception of his initiators was already tainted by long-standing, racist, postcolonial politics in which Africans are imagined to be “corrupt” and “untrustworthy.” The “silent power” Christopher carried with him as a result of his own racialized “unspoken authority of habit” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1991: 22) made it nearly impossible for him to appreciate the initiation he was allowed to undergo—and his initiators knew it.
When I asked René why he was comfortable revealing secrets to foreign spiritual seekers like Christopher, he shrugged and replied, “He doesn’t live here. What is he going to do with what I teach him?” In this way, Béninois are able to redefine power as they initiate foreign spiritual seekers into systems that foreigners may not be fully equipped to understand. As a Béninois Vodún priestess one told me, “I can teach a white person how to be possessed by the spirits but it’ll never happen.”
In a similar way, Jung Ran Forte has argued, “Because of the substantial lack of knowledge, Westerner [initiates] are somehow less effective than Beninese ones…. Whites are not allowed to be possessed during public ceremonies, at least in Benin, when gods ‘mount’ human bodies, as during the confinement in the convent there is not apprenticeship of the modes of possession” (2010: 134). As both my and Forte’s Béninois informants reveal, there is a sense among some Béninois that foreign initiates may lack the social and embodied power to participate fully in particular rituals. For them, foreigners simply lack the habitus or embodied memory to undergo ritual events such as spirit possession.2 Regardless of these sentiments, or perhaps because of them, foreigners tend to focus less on effectively undergoing possession and more on successfully undergoing initiation. Before, during, and after initiation, foreign spiritual seekers commonly attempt to use their economic and racial power to coerce Béninois into revealing religious secrets. In Christopher’s case, he eventually offered René an extra 100 USD to “tell him the real secrets”—but was told unapologetically, “Christopher, you already know them all.”
While power, such as that exhibited by Christopher, often reveals itself as an oppressive and coercive force, in the case of Vodún’s global expansion, my research confirms Michel Foucault’s claim that power is also creative and productive. Béninois have creatively turned the tables on historic power relations, not just through their control of secrecy, but also through their willingness to charge foreign spiritual seekers large sums of money to learn secrets that even uninitiated Béninois typically already know. Because foreign spiritual seekers are not a part of the local community, where the “active milling, polishing, and promotion of the reputation of secrets” (P. Johnson 2002: 3), or what Paul Johnson called “secretism,” acquires its social meaning, it is often assumed that foreigners can do little social harm with the secrets they are given. Nevertheless, it does not take long for foreign initiates to realize that the promotion of secrecy and the subsequent community that secretism helps to create, both in Bénin and in their home countries, are important to their success as priests and to the validity of the ritual secrets and powers that are entrusted to them.
Christopher found himself in a conundrum. Despite his claims of being “scammed,” he could not disavow his initiator without discrediting his own status as an initiate, and he could not reveal the secret, regardless of how inconsequential he found it to be, without diminishing the economic and esoteric significance of the initiation he sought to provide to others in Vodún’s global religious market. Instead, all he could do was reemphasize the authority given to him by the initiation process to other foreign spiritual seekers, thereby inadvertently reifying the transnational social value of secrecy over the secret itself. Christopher discovered what his initiators already knew—secrecy establishes community.
As secrecy creates global Vodún communities, foreign initiates in particular speak about the value of West Africa as an important symbolic place in their religioscape (e.g., Appadurai 1996). Many foreign spiritual seekers, even after being initiated into Haitian Vodou or Cuban Lucumí, travel to Nigeria and Bénin for initiations, arguing that West Africa is where “real Voodoo,” “real secrets,” or “true spiritual power” is found. For these tourists, Bénin and Nigeria have become symbols that authenticate their practice and imbue their own positions as priests with social power and authority.3
Since the 1990s, in an effort to escape Nigeria’s perceived political instability and as a result of a strong marketing push by the Béninois government, an increasing number of spiritual tourists have begun traveling to Bénin for the same initiations, ceremonies, and spiritual powers they once traveled only to Nigeria to receive. Upon arriving in the Béninois side of Yorùbáland, spiritual tourists once again encounter the “Nigeria is more authentic” trope, but this time by Fon- and Yorùbá-speaking Béninois who themselves see Nigeria as the “origins” of many of the rituals, ceremonies, and cults in which spiritual tourists have become interested (e.g., Fá/Ifá, Egúngún, Orò). Indexing this perception among local Béninois, one Yorùbá man told me, “Nigeria is where the real power is. That is where all these spirits came from. That is where the real secrets live.”
Discussions of authenticity and power among Béninois practitioners often centered on acɛ̀, the Fon and Yorùbá concept of “divine power.” I would hear “Yorùbá oracles have more acɛ̀ than Fon oracles!” or “Fon magic has more acɛ̀ than Yorùbá magic!” Acɛ̀ (Yr. às̩e̩) has been explored by many scholars (mostly of Yorùbá speakers) who have described acɛ̀ in various ways. Às̩e̩ has been defined as “a supernatural force that can cause an action to occur” (Clarke 2004: 317); “the notion of power itself” (Barnes 2008: 181); “divine power” (Babatunde 1985: 98); “spiritual essence” (Drewal 1998: 18); and, perhaps most poetically, as “that divine essence in which physics, metaphysics and art blend to form the energy or life force activating and directing socio-political, religious and artistic processes and experiences” (Abiodun 1994: 319). Às̩e̩’s function is as dynamic and mysterious as its identity, described as a force that can be “impregnated” into or “absorbed” by objects (Doris 2011); às̩e̩ pertains to the identification, activation, and utilization of all innate energy, power, and natural laws believed to reside in all animals, plants, hills, rivers, natural phenomena, human beings, and òrìs̩à (Abiodun 1994: 310).
Às̩e̩’s usefulness is said to depend on “the verbalization, visualization and performance of attributive characters of those things or beings whose powers are being harnessed” (Abiodun 1994: 310). An important factor in initiations, divination sessions, prayer, ceremony, and even in the continuation of life, acɛ̀/às̩e̩ is a dynamic combination of the principles of both animism and animatism. All of the definitions given above are accurate—but, like the incomprehensible nature of acɛ̀/às̩e̩, all are insufficient. Thus I do not attempt to offer a definition as such of acɛ̀/às̩e̩, as that would be, by acɛ̀’s very nature, impossible. Instead, I hope to contribute to our ever-growing comprehension of acɛ̀/às̩e̩ by paying special attention to how acɛ̀/às̩e̩ affects the process of religious secrecy, and initiates’ understanding of their validity as priests, especially in the context of spiritual tourism.
In Bénin, acɛ̀ was described to me in two ways, and while using French, Fɔngbè, or Yorùbá. In one sense, acɛ̀ is perhaps best described as spiritual “power” (pouvoir). Here, Béninois would affirm that initiation, for example, imbues one with the “power” of the vodún, or that some Nàgó (Yorùbá) spirits have more power than Fon spirits, or that some spirits embody powers that are too intense for the uninitiated or the unprepared.4 Conversely, acɛ̀ was described to me as a way of understanding one’s spiritual “right” (droit) or “jurisdiction” (juridiction). In this sense, Fá diviners would argue that priests of other spirits, for example, do not have the right to read the sacred signs (dù/odù) of Fá, or that newly initiated priests do not yet have the right or the power to initiate others. However, even as I bifurcate our understanding of acɛ̀ into power versus right, in all these cases one’s right is given as a result of one’s power—thereby affirming the important relationship between a priest’s right and power to act in Vodún. It is this acɛ̀, or the right and power to initiate, to create spirit shrines, and to perform divination, that many spiritual tourists seek. Acɛ̀ is the spiritual force that, when installed into one’s body by initiation, transforms ritual actions and religious material culture (e.g., bodies, carvings, charms, divination tools, masquerades, shrines) into powerful and meaningful expressions of an initiate’s new identity and authority as a practitioner. As I will show throughout the book, spiritual tourists travel to West Africa to have their bodies become secrets by being imbued with the spirits’ acɛ̀ so that they may then transport the spirits across oceans, housed in sacred objects and sacred bodies that have been transformed ritually by acɛ̀. Simply put, acɛ̀ becomes Vodún’s spiritual—and secret—commodity.
As both a spiritual power and a social right, acɛ̀ is bought and sold on Vodún’s globalizing market. Béninois and international Vodún practitioners alike seek and obtain acɛ̀ through transformative ritual processes, and they continue to confirm acɛ̀’s influence daily through ceremonial action such as prayer, the pouring of libations, and animal sacrifice. As Vodún’s most cherished commodity, the local and international flow of acɛ̀ is controlled through secrecy. Acɛ̀, like secrecy, is shared, embodied knowledge. Paradoxically, acɛ̀ is contained within every living thing on earth. However, acɛ̀ must be bestowed by another who has already been given acɛ̀.
Among Béninois, and between them and foreign spiritual seekers, access to secrecy and authentic forms of acɛ̀ is hotly contested. The historical struggle for regional supremacy between the Fon and Yorùbá peoples manifests in local discourses of power and authenticity—each, at times, laying claim to having access to the most powerful or the most authentic religious secrets or spirit cults. For spiritual seekers such as Christopher, the power that is inherent in “real secrecy” is what is most valuable. Along with consecrating his initiation experiences as authentic and spiritually powerful, ritual secrets serve to validate his status as a priest, regardless of what he truly believes about the secrets he now knows. Like the Ivorian bluffeurs described by Sasha Newell, who are “known for the illusion of wealth they produced rather than what they actually possessed” (2013: 139), Christopher and other foreign spiritual seekers must perform the religious power of the secrets that was revealed to them during their initiations. In both cases, validity becomes “a performative speech act” in which secrecy gives “the objects consumed their imaginative potency, the invisible possibility of authenticity” (148).
Like the vodún who are believed to live at the crossroads, spiritual tourist encounters find meaning at the crossroads of power, secrecy, and globalization. Through the creative manipulation of power, both Béninois and foreign spiritual seekers negotiate access to secrecy, which in turn creates “fluid transnational networks” that have helped to transport Vodún “from local to global audiences” (Hüwelmeier and Krause 2010: 1).
In both local and global spaces, a ritual is efficacious because of the acɛ̀ it confers; a ceremony is powerful because of the acɛ̀ it maintains; objects and bodies are authenticated by the acɛ̀ they contain; and the spirits are made important by the acɛ̀ they bestow—and all of these ritual possibilities are protected, empowered, and made possible by secrecy.
Understanding Spiritual Tourism in Bénin
Since the Béninois government began to make a concerted effort to attract foreign tourists to Bénin in the 1990s, tourists from a wide range of nationalities and racial identities have come to Bénin for what one might call “Voodoo tourism.” While the Béninois government originally sought to attract Haitians with the slogan “Bénin-Haïti: Tous du même sang” (Bénin-Haiti: All of the same blood), its initiatives instead began to attract tourists from all over the world. From my experience, most of the tourists I met were from the United States, France, or Brazil, although Forte mentions having encountered foreign spiritual seekers who were “from France, Italy, Austria, and Germany” (2010: 141). Most of the spiritual seekers I knew came to Bénin alone or in pairs, and they self-identified as white, while, with a few exceptions, the African Americans I met tended to travel in larger groups focused on Bénin’s slaving past (e.g., Bruner 2005; Reed 2014). For specificity, I have been explicit about the racial identities of the spiritual tourists I mention throughout the book. However, Béninois tend to classify all non-Africans, including African Americans, as yovó (Fon) or òyìnbó (Yorùbá)—meaning “white person” or “outsider.” As Kamari Clarke has noted, “Many Nigerian Yorùbá … insist on black American exclusion from Yorùbá membership, citing the popular trope that the transport of black people as captives to the Americas and the many generations of acculturation they endured led to the termination of cultural connections between Africans and African Americans. For this reason, black Americans … no matter what their complexion, are often referred to as òyìnbó” (2004: 14). For these reasons, I never observed a difference in the ways Béninois treated or initiated African Americans, Euro-Americans, or Europeans. To my Béninois informants, all foreigners, regardless of their ancestry, enjoyed “a particular class status, cultural standing, education level, and outlook” (Pierre 2013: 77) that connected them all historically to whiteness.
While I believe that it would be enriching to unpack the different ways European, Euro-American, and African American foreign spiritual seekers internalize their initiation experiences through their own racial lenses and in juxtaposition with each other, that analysis is beyond the scope of this book. Because I focus on the ways in which Béninois have contributed to Vodún’s global expansion, I have decided to do as they have done, so I consider all foreign spiritual seekers to be foreigners—regardless of their race—with similar relative economic and national privilege.
In seeking to provide an ethnographic account of Vodún that attends critically to foreign involvement in the religion, I struggled to find a word to describe those diverse individuals who were traveling to West Africa to become initiated. On the one hand, “tourist” seemed too insubstantial. To many of the foreigners with whom I spoke, “tourist” did not quite capture their sincerity or, in their words, the “sacredness” of their trip. As one American man expressed, “I am here to become a priest. Not to visit a tourist trap.”
On the other hand, “pilgrim” seemed to imply that foreign spiritual seekers were traveling to Bénin to confirm established religious beliefs or to find physical relief from hardships, pain, or worries (Turner and Turner 1978). But for many foreign initiates, their trip to Bénin marked their first steps into Vodún. They were looking for what Alan Morinis called a “place or a state that [they] believe to embody a valued ideal” (1992: 4). Their initiation experiences are cultivated in their imaginations long before they arrive in Bénin. By reading voraciously, interacting with other future and past initiates on Facebook, and searching YouTube for any videos that might reveal a small glimpse of the rituals they seek to undergo, spiritual seekers achieve a sort of revelation and a longing for West Africa and the secrets that are protected by the forest. In this sense, they are pilgrims. But they are also true neophytes. They arrive speaking little to no Fɔngbè or French and they have a clumsy understanding of basic cultural rules and social norms. Unlike what one might expect from pilgrims, they do not come to Bénin in search of solutions or remedies or even to confirm their trust in the spirits. Instead they come hoping to find new ways of relating to the divine.
Like C. Lynn Carr (2015), who examined what she called “cultural newcomers” to Lucumí in the United States, I found that many foreign spiritual seekers came to Vodún looking for religion. They yearned for a sort of Durkheimian effervescence (1965 [1912]) that simultaneously brought them closer to the divine but further from Western Christian conservatism (e.g., Fuller 2001). Despite the religious foci of foreign spiritual seekers’ trips to West Africa, describing them as pilgrims seemed just as deficient as calling them tourists. Indeed, for many of them, the domain of the tourist and that of the pilgrim had begun to blur in meaningful ways (e.g., Badone and Roseman 2004). Or, was it that, in the words of Victor and Edith Turner, “a tourist is [always] half a pilgrim, and a pilgrim [always] is half a tourist” (1978: 20)? Indeed, I prefer to think about a tourist and a pilgrim as two points on a spectrum upon which individuals can meaningfully move as they search for religious experiences that are, to them, “really real” (Geertz 1973).
Foreign spiritual seekers and West African Vodúnisants often mobilize one term over the other; understand them as concentric experiences with a great deal of overlap; or reject either category all together. It is in these moments of creative contestation, where pilgrim and tourist, insider and outsider, initiate and noninitiate coalesce, that I argue the “really real” is found. It is where religious ownership gets hashed out. It is where access to secret religious knowledge and beings is negotiated. It is where the entrée into desired moments of religious effervescence is realized. It is where Vodún becomes global. Throughout the book I use the terms “spiritual tourist” and “foreign spiritual seeker” interchangeably out of convenience. In this way, I avoid the pilgrim-tourist divide but retain the precision I need to discuss how foreign and Béninois Vodúnisants interact and work to transform Vodún into a global phenomenon.
Ouidah and Its Historical Legacy
While spiritual tourism in Bénin might be a relatively new phenomenon, the history of foreign involvement in Vodún spans more than three centuries. I chose Ouidah as the ideal locale to examine Vodún’s global reach because of the city’s long-standing position as a multiethnic and multinational port; its 350-year connection to the Americas; and Vodún’s centrality to Ouidah’s landscape. Ouidah rests on the shore of the Republic of Bénin, the former West African “Slave Coast,” and on the coast of the present-day Bight of Benin along the Gulf of Guinea. With a population of approximately 92,000 people (as of 2012), Ouidah is a modest but vibrant town. Yet, despite Ouidah’s relatively small population, its particular precolonial, colonial, and postcolonial histories have made the city an important cosmopolitan player in Africa’s long-term global flows (cf. Hannerz 1990). As one of West Africa’s largest former slave ports, Ouidah has occupied an important international geopolitical space for nearly 350 years.5 The former kingdom of Xweɖá, from which present-day Ouidah drew its name, was conquered in 1727 by Agajá, the fourth ruler (axɔ́sú) of Dahomey.6 As a result, Dahomey took control of Xweɖá and the smaller kingdom of Savì—which lay seven kilometers to the north of Ouidah. Today, in part because of Ouidah’s political past, the town has become an ethnically rich area where one can find people who identify as Ajǎ, Gùn, Xweɖá, Maxí, Fon, and Yorùbá (Nàgó)—most of whom are Fɔ̀ngbè speakers. In addition to Ouidah’s local diversity, the city has also been influenced greatly by its historical connection to Portugal and Brazil. In 1818, Francisco Felix de Souza, a Brazilian man born to a Portuguese father and a Native American mother, aided Gakpe, the Dahomean king’s brother, in a coup d’état, which resulted in Gakpe taking the throne from Adándózàn (r. 1797–1818). Gakpe then took the name “Gezò” (r. 1818–58) and became the ninth—and most infamous—ruler of Dahomey (Bay 1998: 166–78). From 1820 until his death in 1849, de Souza sold African slaves to European buyers on Gezò’s behalf.
In 1835, during the height of Gezò’s reign, the Brazilian region of Bahia experienced a slave uprising that led to the “Great Revolt” (also known as the “Malê Revolt”).7 In the aftermath of the failed revolt, the Brazilian government deported back to West Africa those people of African descent who were suspected of having inspired the revolt. According to Robin Law, “the re-emigration then continued on a more or less voluntary basis through the rest of the nineteenth century” [and] “in the immediate aftermath of the rebellion … one party of 200 free blacks were deported from Bahia … to Ouidah” (2004: 179–80). This large influx of returnees to Ouidah from Brazil—and, for different reasons, from other lusophone countries such as Madeira, São Tomé, and Angola (Law 2004: 185–90)—greatly, and permanently, influenced the social and political lives of the people of Ouidah. For example, Portuguese architecture, with its distinctive “shuttered windows, ornate mouldings, colonnades and verandahs” (Law 2004: 187), still decorates the landscape, and descendants of Francisco Felix de Souza still inhabit Ouidah today.
An increase in the Portuguese and Afro-Brazilian presence in Ouidah was not the only cultural change that was supported and encouraged by the reemigration of ex-slaves from countries such as Brazil. Because Yorùbá captives had made up a large majority of Africans who were sent from Bénin to Brazil, Ouidah experienced an upsurge of Yorùbá-speaking peoples returning to the area. This, coupled with an influx of domestic Yorùbá slaves who worked for households such as that of the de Souza family, further added to Ouidah’s unique ethnic and national diversity. The incorporation of these diverse peoples into the kingdom of Dahomey points to the “Fon propensity to embrace and adopt influences from many directions: Europe by way of the Atlantic coast, Akan areas to the west, Yoruba-speaking lands to the north and east, and to a far lesser extent, Islamic West Africa to the north” (Bay 2008: 4).
As far back as documented history reveals, Fon society has always been one of inclusivity, absorption, and flexibility—a mentality that continues into the present, as Béninois become important players in the transnational and global flow of African religious ideologies such as Vodún. Contributing to Vodún’s expansion, Ouidah has been marketed as the “spiritual capital of [Bénin] with a thriving and lively Voodoo culture” (Butler 2006: 114), and it is highlighted on a “Cradle of Voodoo” tour provided by Explore, a British “adventure travel” company, as the home of Bénin’s “ancient snake cult.” Because of Ouidah’s long-standing and sometimes tumultuous relationship with the West, its position as an international and multiethnic border zone, coupled with its centrality to “Voodoo tourism,” makes the city the most compelling space in Bénin to observe the interplay between local religion, international tourism, and processes of globalization and transnationalism.8
Ouidah and Its Contemporary Importance
Despite Bénin’s current interest in spotlighting its Vodún heritage as a marketable international commodity, Vodún has not always enjoyed this national prestige. In 1890 the French invaded Dahomey and formally dethroned Gbɛ̀hánzìn (r. 1889–94) in 1892; after two years of hiding, Gbɛ̀hánzìn surrendered to the French in 1894, officially making Dahomey a French protectorate. After forcing Gbɛ̀hánzìn and his family into exile onto the West Indian island of Martinique, French officials installed their puppet king, Agoliágbò, as Dahomey’s twelfth and final local ruler. In 1898, Agoliágbò subverted French authority by objecting to an annual tax. The French reacted in 1900 by forcing Agoliágbò into exile in the Congo, and the kingdom of Dahomey was subsequently abolished.
Sixty years after France took control of Dahomey from Gbɛ̀hánzìn, Dahomeans were able to negotiate their full independence from France on August 1, 1960. After some years of political and economic turmoil, in 1972 Mathieu Kérékou gained control of Dahomey through a military coup d’état. Kérékou began making swift and exacting changes to Dahomey, including a 1973 ban on “all [Vodún] ceremonies for the duration of the rainy season” (Joharifard 2005: 23). Two years later, the Kérékou regime began forbidding the “wearing of traditional ceremonial clothing” and “ultimately required anyone holding a [Vodún] ceremony to acquire explicit authorization from local government officials” (23). In addition to these restrictions, the cloistering of Vodún initiates (an important part of Vodún initiations) was made illegal, animal sacrifice was tightly regulated, important secret societies were banned, and sacred forests were destroyed (Joharifard 2005). Following these regulations, in conjunction with Kérékou’s broad “war on Vodún” (Elwert-Kretschmer 1995; Strandsberg 2000; Joharifard 2005), in 1974 Kérékou announced that the country would adopt a Marxist-Leninist style of government, and in 1975 Dahomey was renamed the People’s Republic of Bénin.
After fifteen years of communist rule, in 1989 Bénin’s Marxist-Leninist government was abandoned and the country began transitioning to democracy, which, in 1990, led the National Assembly to choose Nicéphore Soglo as Bénin’s prime minister. In 1991, Soglo became Bénin’s first democratically elected president in a multiparty election. President Soglo swiftly lifted Bénin’s anti-Vodún laws and began working with international organizations such as UNESCO, the International Centre for the Study of the Preservation and Restoration of Cultural Property, and the Getty Institute to build and design La Route des Esclaves, a historically informed journey beginning at Francisco Felix de Souza’s former home and ending on the beach, where international visitors could explore Bénin’s slaving past (Forte 2007; Araujo 2010; Landry 2011). Vodún quickly became a second focus as the new democratic government planned “Ouidah ’92: The First International Festival of Vodun Arts and Cultures.” The festival, which occurred February 8–18, 1993, was such a success that Bénin’s parliament established “National Vodún Day,” which has been celebrated on January 10 of each subsequent year (Araujo 2010: 146). As Forte points out, “The historical conjuncture of the early 1990s and the opening of the country to an international audience have added new meanings and significances to … ‘traditional’ religious practice. The numerous cultural events organized during this period and the heritage projects sponsored by international agencies have transformed Vodun into a cultural artifact, a national heritage and tourist commodity” (2007: 132).9
Of course, for much of the global North, Africa has always been a disposable commodity (e.g., Rodney 1981; Bond 2006). From its people to its art, and now to its indigenous religions, Africa has long been a gold mine from which Africans themselves have rarely profited. In 1984, the sociologist Bennetta Jules-Rosette observed that “the international art market depends upon the Western demand for ‘exotic’ souvenir and gift items and the assumption that they should be procured abroad” (1984: 192). Over the past quarter-century, that claim has met an unexpected expansion in Bénin—where, surprisingly, the “market” identified by Jules-Rosette now includes religious practice. Since the early 1990s, with the help of local spiritual leaders, the government of Bénin has positioned its indigenous religions as a new type of consumable art, with initiation into those spiritual traditions the ultimate “souvenir … procured abroad” (192). Thus Americans of varying ethnic and racial backgrounds now travel to Bénin (and elsewhere in Africa) in search of “spiritual enlightenment,” constituting a new mode of travel that some scholars have called “spiritual tourism” (e.g., Geary 2008; Coats 2011).
Vodún, Ethnography, and the Critical Politics of Race
The emergence of spiritual tourism in West Africa has not come without its challenges. As international tourists travel to Bénin and Nigeria for initiation into Fon and Yorùbá esoteric traditions, the processes and legacies of racialization become increasingly visible. Reflecting what I consider to be the pervasive power of race in dynamic tourist encounters between international spiritual tourists and local Fon-speaking Béninois, I chose not to devote an individual chapter to racial politics. Instead, in the same ways that racial politics are interlaced through all aspects of postcolonial Africa, I wove my analysis of race—especially as it relates to the experience of power and social inequalities—throughout each chapter.
Bénin, like all contemporary West African nation-states, is, at least in part, the product of its former colonizers. French is the national and official language, and class and governance have been mapped neatly onto Western models of democracy, government, and mobility (cf. Lugo 2008). Bénin’s contemporary struggles with global racial inequities and international structures of “white supremacy” (Mills 1998) have been shaped greatly by many factors: Bénin’s legacy as a former French protectorate (1894–1904); fifty-six years as a French colony (1904–60); the effects of a French-orchestrated coup d’état of two former kings; twelve years of postindependence political and economic struggles (1960–72); a fifteen-year Marxist regime led by Mathieu Kérékou (1972–89), who sought to distance Bénin from the control of its former colonizers; and more than twenty-five years of various forms of neocolonialism as international institutions such as UNESCO support Bénin’s desire to market its indigenous religions and its slaving past to an emerging neoliberal spiritual economy (Rush 2001; Araujo 2010; Landry 2011).
With these historical legacies in mind, I have positioned “spiritual tourists,” who travel to Bénin and Nigeria to participate or become initiated in religions such as Vodún, as products of the Western world—where “whiteness” runs supreme, or as Charles Mills has argued, where “European domination of the planet … has left us with the racialized distributions of economic, political, and cultural power that we have today” (1998: 98). My own whiteness continuously shaped my experiences in Bénin. At times it complicated my desire to participate in Vodún, while at other times the power and global capital of my racial identity uncomfortably opened doors that would have otherwise been closed (e.g., Harris 1993).
Regardless of their own racial identities—be they European, Brazilian, Euro-American, or African American—tourists were consistently categorized as a yovó (white foreigner), which, in this context, always means “privileged” (Pierre 2013).10 In all cases, when foreign spiritual tourists and Béninois negotiated access to religious secrecy, the tourists’ whiteness and the Béninois’ blackness were always on the table, as it were, as they each discussed the cost and accessibility of initiation (Dominguez 1993). While Béninois typically conceptualized Western tourists (who may or may not be phenotypically “white”) as “rich,” Western tourists in effect (if unconsciously) frequently framed Béninois (and other Africans by extension) as “exploitable”—people who, because of their perceived poverty, should be selling access to rituals, ceremonies, and art objects for well below what their white counterparts were charging back in the United States and Europe.
The mapping of one’s race onto other aspects of one’s life (e.g., wealth) has been observed elsewhere by Jemima Pierre, who notes that “Whiteness is the recognition that racialization occurs both in tandem with and in excess of the corporal. In other words, race (in this case, Whiteness) articulates with racialized-as-White bodies, all the while moving beyond such bodies and expressing itself in other representations of itself—such as culture, aesthetics, wealth, and so on” (2013: 72). The pervasiveness of race and the structural effects of racism and global white supremacy throughout the African world have been thoughtfully documented (e.g., Rodney 1981; Fabian 1983; Harris 1993; Mills 1998; Hesse 2007; Pierre 2013). It is, therefore, not my intention to provide a detailed analysis of race, of blackness, or of racialization in Bénin. Rather, I aim to use the trope and social reality of race, and its relationship to the social capital of power, to understand more fully the social and global significance of spiritual tourism, transnationalism, and the multiracial consumption of the African Atlantic forest religions—especially as these religions become increasingly global.
To complicate the issue further, in a theoretical space so deeply shaped by critical race theory, I believe that overly spotlighting postcolonial racial politics and racial inequities of power may provide a final analysis that is simply too obvious. On the one hand, current scholarship on the subject is invested rightfully in positioning religions such as Vodún and òrìs̩à worship as globalizing and even nascent “world religions” (Olupona and Rey 2008). On the other hand, there is a reactionary tendency to mark European and Euro-American spiritual seekers as active participants in racist neocolonialism and cultural appropriation.
There is no doubt that analyses of racial, postcolonial, and neocolonial politics should be central themes in an African ethnography. However, we must also recognize that if African religions are to be global and urban then they will inevitably become multiracial. Being excessively critical of European and Euro-American involvement in religions like Vodún and òrìs̩à worship ignores an important ethnographic fact—Africans themselves are encouraging foreign involvement. And so an important dichotomy is born: to decry European and Euro-American involvement in African religions is to constrict forcibly African religions back to the proverbial African village. However, to allow European and Euro-American involvement without critique is to permit willfully and perhaps even encourage new forms of colonialism, where even African religions can be consumed by an empowered white world. In reaction to this epistemological challenge, in the following chapters I employ a critical research strategy that attends to postcolonial and neocolonial racial politics while also, for the first time, taking European and Euro-American involvement in Vodún and òrìs̩à worship to be serious West African expansions that have been encouraged by West Africans themselves.
My Approaches to Anthropology and Vodún
The secrets that enable the giving and embodiment of acɛ̀ are revealed only after a certain amount of time and after much trust is established. As I delved deeper into Vodún’s culture of secrecy, it became clear that I needed to focus primarily on one location. For this reason, most of the research for this book was conducted in the coastal town of Ouidah, Bénin, and its surrounding areas. To gain comparative insight and to explore why and when spiritual tourists chose certain places to become initiated, I supplemented my time in Ouidah with short research trips to Abomey, Savalou, and Cotonou.
In Ouidah, I spent much of my time living with Marie, my long-term research assistant, and her family. Marie is a woman in her early fifties who was born into one of Bénin’s Afro-Brazilian families and raised Catholic. In 2008, to the chagrin of her mother, Marie left Catholicism behind and became an initiated priest of Tron. Because she speaks Fɔngbè, French, and English fluently, she has, over the past decade, received more than twenty spiritual tourists who were interested in becoming initiated into Vodún. Apart from being one of the most prolific Vodún guides in Bénin, her language skills have also allowed her to conduct regular secular tours for large tour groups, churches, universities, and diplomats. Through Marie, I was able to meet many of the spiritual seekers and tourists whom I will discuss throughout this book.
Often with Marie’s assistance, while in Bénin I used both formal and informal research methods. To experience Vodún in context, I participated in hundreds of Vodún ceremonies, initiations, and festivals. My own initiation as a Fá diviner allowed me to maximize these field moments by permitting me to participate in ritual dance, singing, and sacrifice—including during those secret rituals, frequently held deep in the sacred forest, that were limited to initiates. I supplemented these experiences with thirty-five structured interviews, split almost evenly among men and women, in which I collected life histories, explored individuals’ opinions about foreign involvement in Vodún, and developed an understanding of how people maintain religious secrecy despite increased foreign interest. After seventeen months of interviews, countless conversations, and experiences of Vodún both as an observer and as an initiate, I concluded my research with a formal survey. For this portion of the project, I surveyed 125 respondents of different genders, ethnic identities, and religious affiliations. By ending with a survey, I was able to confirm my suspicion that, in the case of Vodún, religious secrecy has become an emerging global commodity.
While I gleaned a great deal of information from these research strategies, following a long tradition in anthropology, most of my contact with Béninois and foreign Vodún practitioners was conducted informally over meals and drinks, while hanging out deeply or during religious events. In this way, I was able to take advantage of serendipity and the natural flow of conversation while remaining as unassuming as possible. These more intimate moments with Vodún practitioners of all types helped me to appreciate the profoundly personal reasons that people have to devote their lives to the spirits and why Vodún’s global reach has become more present than ever. Hearing their stories and walking with new initiates into the sacred forest showed me that my personal and academic journey into Vodún was not so different than theirs.
Like many of the individuals I write about in this book, I was a child when Vodún and its acɛ̀ began to interest me. When I was twelve I spent hours huddled up in the corner of my parents’ closet reading my grandfather’s tattered copy of Gumbo Ya-Ya, a 1945 collection of Louisiana folktales. My small hands always thumbed straight to the appendices where a collection of “superstitions” lay buried by more than five hundred pages about Creoles, Cajuns, ghosts, and music that I was too young to appreciate. Reading about “love powders” made from hummingbird hearts (p. 539), garlic bundles to relieve toothaches (p. 534), and peach leaves to cure typhoid (p. 535) piqued my young imagination. This early interest in African religion eventually led me to Haitian Vodou. While conducting fieldwork in Haiti (2003–5) I became initiated as a Vodou priest (houngan asogwe). My initiation into Haitian Vodou marked the beginning of my long-term enthusiasm for intimate research methods, including apprenticeship as a mode of observant-participation, that I carried with me to Bénin where I became a diviner’s apprentice (Coy 1989; Keller and Keller 1996; Landry 2008; Lave 2011).
The decision of an anthropologist to become an apprentice is supported by a long-standing disciplinary tradition that dates back at least to Zora Neale Hurston (Hurston 2008a [1935], 2008b [1938]) and more recently to Judy Rosenthal (1998: 12) and Paul Stoller (Stoller and Olkes 1987). Like many of my predecessors who straddled the precarious line between observer and participant, I too was forced to grapple intimately with important issues such as postcolonial racial politics, cultural appropriation, and even my own belief or trust in the spirit world—all of which I examine throughout the book. Yet, despite the challenges, apprenticeship enabled me to experience Vodún, and especially Fá divination, from the “inside”—albeit not exactly as a local person would. Also I could explore the strategies that local Fá diviners employ to teach complex religious practices and belief systems to foreign initiates. When one gives in to the possibility of belief, I argue, religious apprenticeship can provide an ontological glimpse into the spiritual worlds of devotees. However, it does not come without its challenges.
Stoller, who served as a sorcerer’s apprentice among the Songhay in Niger, discussed some of the issues surrounding religious apprenticeship. In a 1987 memoir that he cowrote with Cheryl Olkes, he asked, “How far can we go in the quest to understand other peoples? Is it ethical for ethnographers to become apprentice sorcerers in their attempt to learn about sorcery?” (xii). I grapple with this and related questions throughout the book as I juxtapose my position as a Euro-American anthropologist living in Bénin and studying to become a diviner to those of other initiates—both Béninois and foreign.
As happens with many would-be initiates, my quest for an initiator did not come without difficulties. Béninois friends steered me to different Fá diviners, often invoking their personal relationships as evidence for their diviners’ authenticity and power. Conversely, I was also told to avoid certain diviners (usually indicated to me by name) who were said either to be drunkards, to perform Fá divination “only for the money,” or to be frauds and therefore powerless.
Thankfully, although having just arrived in Bénin, I did not have to find my new mentor alone. André, a forty-seven-year-old Béninois man I met through a mutual friend two years prior to beginning my research, helped me find the right diviner. A few weeks after he offered to help me find a teacher, he was ready to tell me about the man he had found. Émile was in his late forties and had been an initiated Fá diviner for more than fifteen years. He practiced the Fon version of Fá and was well known in the area. He had many clients largely due to a radio show that he hosted on a local station where he gave spiritual advice to callers. The diviner seemed perfect—he was knowledgeable and quite established.
I immediately told André that I would be interested in meeting Émile to discuss the possibility of working with him during my stay in Bénin. However, André told me that he did not want the two of us to meet until the day of my initiation ceremonies—yet André would not reveal his reasons. Because I had never heard of anything like this happening, I was suspicious of André’s motives. Several days later—after many lengthy and persuasive conversations—my suspicions were confirmed when André admitted to me that he did not want Émile to know I was “white and rich.” He believed that if Émile knew I was a white American, he would want to charge me double—or maybe triple—his normal fee and “capitalize on my wealth.”
I found myself in an uncomfortable and ethical conundrum. Should I allow André to continue with his plan? Or should I insist that he reveal my identity to Émile? After changing my mind at least a dozen times, mimicking the choice of a typical spiritual tourist, I ultimately decided to go along with André’s plan. One month later, Émile and I met at midnight to begin the ceremonies that would make me a Fá diviner. As André and I had anticipated, Émile was upset. Émile announced, quite publicly and loudly, that he would have asked for a higher fee if he had known that I was white. Nevertheless, Émile agreed to continue with my ceremonies, and over the next several hours we became much more comfortable with each other. He was proud of what I accomplished and eager to tell his friends that he had initiated his first yovó. I began my time with Émile as a “polluting presence”—one whose skin color, and all that my white skin symbolically represented, marked me as an outsider. By the end of my ceremonies, my “difference” had lessened, but it was clear that it would never vanish. Unfortunately, my apprenticeship with Émile was short-lived. He lived more than an hour away from Ouidah and, while I attended several of his ceremonies and even some of his future initiations, I needed a teacher who lived closer.
After searching for several months, a longtime friend introduced me to Jean and the village of Fátòmɛ̀, near Ouidah. When I met Jean, he instructed me that, in order to work with him, I would need to redo my initiations and convert my personal Fá from the Fon Fá to the Nàgó version. Interested in the differences between the two systems and eager to work with Jean, a babaláwo (Yr. Ifá diviner) with experience working both with Béninois and with foreign students, I agreed. This began my fifteen-month intensive apprenticeship that operated on a near-daily basis and continues today over the telephone.11
I was Jean’s fourth foreign initiate but the only one who was able to stay and work with him for an extended period of time. Over the course of my time with Jean, he taught me fragments of his spiritual truths. He taught me how to construct shrines; how to recognize and invoke each of Fá’s 256 binary signs that embodied Fá’s corpus; and how to perform divination for myself and others. Even so, there were certainly ceremonies and magical recipes that Jean held from me just as there were things that he taught me freely. One evening over hot tea, Jean admitted to me that there were things—special medicines and charms—that he would teach his children only. It was clear that some barriers could only be overcome by kinship. “Some things are only for my sons,” he noted. I agreed with—and even appreciated—his sentiment.
After spending just a few months in Fátòmɛ̀, Jean formally accepted me as his apprentice. Within a few days of working with Jean, he took the Fá I received earlier from Émile and converted my Fá from the Fon system to the Nàgó system.12 Doubtless, local practitioners benefit economically as the clients always pay the priest performing the conversion for his time and expertise. However, having participated in both systems, I understood such a process is required for reasons that extend beyond economics. The Nàgó ceremonies take more time, require more sacrifices, and are more involved. It is easy to see why some local people might feel that the Nàgó system is a more potent manifestation of Fá; even as an outsider I caught myself—perhaps stereotypically—favoring the complexities found in Nàgó Fá.
After working with Jean for only a couple of weeks, it became clear to me that becoming a Fá diviner, over being a devotee of any of the other spirit groups that are worshiped by Fon and Yorùbá peoples, would bring advantages. As Jean taught me, Fá diviners tend to have a broad general knowledge of all the spirits, so they can adequately advise their clients of necessary ceremonies and even perform basic sacrifices and offerings to a wide array of spirits on their behalf. In addition, their roles as Fá diviners often facilitate relationships with many different priests, temples, and practitioners—most of which were made available to me, thanks to Jean.
Jean and I began working together only two days after he agreed to serve as my mentor. “I want you here ready to work at 8 a.m.,” he said. “We have a lot to go over while you are here.” Over the next couple of days I reviewed a faded photocopy of La Géomancie à l’ancienne Côte des Esclaves by Bernard Maupoil (1943), which I had borrowed from a local Vodún practitioner just a few weeks earlier. I thumbed through Maupoil’s formative work on Fá divination and used other locally published sources to test my ability to recognize perfectly the 256 different patterns (Fon, dù/ Yr., odù) of Fá that are elegantly interpreted when a diviner, seated on a straw mat, casts a “divining chain” (Fon, akplɛ̀/ Yr., ò̩pè̩lè̩) onto the floor. The complexity of the 256 signs of Fá left me overwhelmed even before my apprenticeship began—but my anxiety also added to my excitement.
On the day we were to begin working, I arrived at Jean’s home eagerly, fifteen minutes early. I was ready to begin, but Jean had other plans. He left me to sit on a low cement wall where I waited for him for nearly three hours. I quickly learned that my training would be on his terms. I was always expected to be punctual, and he never was; his position as teacher and elder, and mine as student and child, was always clear. As the people in Fátomɛ̀ became my close friends, I learned to appreciate the time I spent in the village waiting for Jean to decide to include me in his day. Once I released my contemporary U.S. expectations of what an education should be—or how time should function—I realized the time I spent waiting in the village, seemingly far removed from lessons in divination, was just as important to my training as was learning how to pray, move, and act as a diviner would—a lesson I suspect Jean knew all along. During these times I learned about the prevalence of witchcraft, and I watched children pretend to perform divination with small seeds that they found on the ground. Eventually, I came to appreciate these moments as important backdrops to my formal lessons in divination.
Seeking Divine Power
Secrecy has contributed to, and even encouraged, Vodún’s global expansion. More and more, foreign spiritual seekers are becoming initiated and participating in the country’s growing Vodún tourism industry. As these numbers grow, an increasing number of Béninois Vodún practitioners, faced with the promise of economic success and international networks, have begun to reveal and market Vodún’s secrecy. In Chapter 1, “Touring the Forbidden,” I examine the politics of spiritual tourism in Bénin by showing how and why foreign spiritual seekers negotiate access to Vodún. By interacting with two British tourists, Michelle and Christine, who disappointedly felt little resistance when visiting a “Voodoo village”; with Luiz, a Brazilian man, who did all he could, and failed, to learn how to construct one of Vodún’s more sought-after and dangerous shrines; and with Marcella, an African American woman who was determined to disrupt Vodún’s long-standing rules and become initiated into a men’s-only spirit cult, I document the religious secrecy and the resistance one faces as one attempts to observe or experience Vodún’s secret objects, and also how religious experiences are authenticated for foreign spiritual seekers.
Many tourists come to Bénin hoping to participate in Vodún by observing rituals or purchasing religious objects. There are, however, those select few tourists who come to Bénin for the sole purpose of initiation. In Chapter 2, “Receiving the Forest,” I turn my attention to the initiations of both Béninois and foreign spiritual seekers. In this chapter, I begin to show why foreign involvement in Vodún should not be simply dismissed as a form of cultural appropriation or neocolonialism. Through ritual, Béninois merge both foreign and Béninois initiates with the forest and install spirits (vodún) in the bodies of both white and black spiritual seekers. Challenging colonial structures of power, the ritual provides Béninois with a meaningful space to, in effect, turn the tables on long-established structures of power by ritually colonizing the bodies of foreign spiritual seekers with African spirits and occult forces. Through this experience, foreigners are validated as Vodún practitioners as their bodies are imbued with what I call an “occult ontology,” or those hidden ways in which one’s being is transformed through mobile ritual secrets and religious commodities. Throughout the chapter, I draw on my initiation as well as the initiation of Jean’s son, Auguste, into the cult of Fá, the oracular spirit of knowledge. Through this process, as initiates move slowly and deliberately through an object’s or place’s social aura of secrecy, they become inoculated ritually to the social dangers and risks that come with being exposed to a ritual secret too soon. By slowly taking the secret into one’s body, even if unintentionally, and inscribing one’s successful encounter with a ritual secret onto one’s body by shaving one’s head, undergoing ritual baths, and by wearing special beads, one’s body undergoes ontological changes as it is transformed into a secret itself that can then be marketed within the emerging Vodún global marketplace. In this way, I join other anthropologists in arguing that it is the process of secrecy—and not necessarily the secret itself—that holds social importance. While secrecy is often thought of as a restrictive social force by which access to information is controlled, by focusing on what Johnson called “secretism,” I begin to lay out my argument: that it is paradoxically through secrecy that Vodún has become global.
After someone is successfully initiated, he or she often begins collecting objects from Vodún’s rich material repertoire. In Chapter 3, “Secrecy, Objects, and Expanding Markets,” I delve more deeply into the secret international Vodún market in which religious art, artifacts, and ritual paraphernalia are all sold to interested agents—including spiritual tourists trying to practice Vodún authentically in their home countries. I examine the importance of emerging technologies, especially Facebook, in the spreading of this market, and how local Béninois and Nigerian entrepreneurs have begun to profit from Vodún’s increased transnational efficacy. Examining this emerging market leads scholars to grapple with the ethical, and sometimes legal, challenges surrounding the buying and selling of secret religious artifacts, and how these objects factor into the wider discussion of authenticity, especially as Vodún locality shifts from somewhat bounded “culture areas” in West Africa to more fluid transnational spaces around the world.
An influx of spiritual tourists who are purchasing religious objects and becoming initiated into Vodún has encouraged both foreigners and Béninois to question what it means to believe. In Chapter 4, “Belief, Efficacy, and Transnationalism,” I walk the reader through my own journey with belief as I struggle, despite my initiations, to believe in the spirits and in witchcraft. In so doing, I explore the analytical value of belief in Vodún and consider how spiritual tourism and emerging capitalist markets have begun to transform Vodún’s beliefscape. Drawing on the ways in which Vodún in Bénin has connected belief to notions of efficacy, both Béninois and foreign practitioners actively negotiate their belief in the spirits. For some, their belief in Vodún and fear of witchcraft have led them to a belief in Christ, where protection from malevolent forces comes without the need to provide expensive offerings and rituals to the spirits. For others, Vodún’s transnational presence has opened the possibility of believing in spirits that they previously rejected in order to attract international clientele and monies. These changes, I argue, have led belief and transnationalism to creatively absorb additional layers of meaning, thereby simultaneously strengthening and transforming the ways in which belief and efficacy are understood by foreign and Béninois Vodúnisants.
People from different national, racial, and ethnic backgrounds have come to believe in Vodún. Their involvement in the religion has led to the global commodification of ritual secrecy. With secrecy limiting tourists’ access, while paradoxically rendering the experiences they have in Bénin as more authentic and more coveted, secrecy becomes the primary social mechanism by which Vodún expands. In Chapter 5, “Global Vodún, Diversity, and Looking Ahead,” I show how Vodún’s commodification has both enriched and complicated the religion’s global expansion. By examining the politics of cultural appropriation and cultural borrowing, I complicate the process of cultural appropriation and ultimately show that the complexity surrounding these practices is never an all-or-nothing proposition. Instead, I argue that, when mediated by local interested agents, the transnationalization of West African religions such as Vodún is only Vodún’s next step in its already long journey across space—a journey that, as Rush (1997) has argued, defines Vodún and encourages its continued local and global vibrancy.
This project owes a great deal to the legacies of scholars such as Melville J. Herskovits (1938, 1971 [1937]) and Pierre Fatumbi Verger (1995a, 1995b), who realized early on that practitioners of West African religions have long been important actors on the global stage. Herskovits in particular argued that cultural flows have the potential to transcend distinct continental divisions. Throughout this book, I build on the prescient approach of these earlier researchers by emphasizing both the challenges and benefits that are tethered to Vodún’s current multinational and multiracial development. While Vodún’s recent expansion is incredibly messy, filled with contradictions, and deeply enmeshed in postcolonial and racial politics, the religion has proven to be incredibly resilient. Indeed, Vodún has shown, time and time again, that the religion thrives within these contested spaces, where politics and power seem insurmountable.
