Cord of Blood - Possession and the Making of Voodoo by Nadia Lovell (2002), Magia afrykańska i karaibska

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CORD OF BLOOD
Possession and the Making of Voodoo
N
ADIA
L
OVELL
Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
P
Pluto
First published 2002
by PLUTO PRESS
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,
Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Nadia Lovell 2002
The right of Nadia Lovell to be identified as the author of this work
has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from
the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1842 8 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 1841 X paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available
10987654321
Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester
Printed and bound in the European Union
by Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England
CONTENTS
1. Introduction
1
2. Blood and Place, Persons and Gods
18
3. Making Gods, Knowing Gods
48
4. Grounding Vodhun, Unmaking Gender
72
5. Healing Modernities, Engendering Difference
100
Notes
127
Bibliography
139
Author Index
148
Subject Index
150
1 INTRODUCTION
I arrived for the first time in Momé Hounkpati, the village which was
to be my home for the next 12 months, in early October 1989.
1
The
original aim of this research was to concentrate on the ‘couvents de
féticheuses’, as they have been described in early Francophone
literature (Garnier and Fralon 1951, Verger 1957), a term now readily
adopted by most educated Togolese to describe the compounds
associated with shrines where initiation takes place. Voodoo ‘cults’,
2
as they are often referred to in Western popular discourses, have often
been represented as a religion of darkness, fear, black magic and
malevolent mysticism, where images of zombies, the walking living
dead or bloody sacrifices, including, it is sometimes said, human
victims have taken pride of place. A plethora of films, articles and
documentaries has served to reiterate the wildness of voodoo in the
Western imagination. Coffee table books further reinforce such rep-
resentations, despite their sometimes semi-academic credentials,
making use as they do of a wealth of powerfully striking photographs,
taken from ‘real events’, and evocative language. Yet, as we shall see,
drama, play and display are indeed also part and parcel of the practice
of religiosity. The ‘making of voodoo’ takes place at many levels, and
these deities linger in the imagination under many guises.
Garnier and Fralon, writing as colonial administrators in Togo in
the 1950s, provide colourful accounts of how young women are
tattooed, scarified and clad in ways which clearly demarcate them
from other members of their communities. The female devotees are
also described as embodying the terrifying moral properties of the
gods: prone to possession, theirs can be a vindictive business, and
they are said to strike terror in those who refuse to abide by their
taboos. Equally, they are prone to desecration and, consequently,
are often punished by violent death if they fail to comply with the
exigencies of their deities. Not surprisingly however, Garnier and
Fralon provide little detail as to how such initiation fits into the
wider scheme of sociality, nor do they discuss how the devotees’
overt display of religiosity relates to the presence of white colonisers
on their territory. A product of their time and conditioning, the
drawings and illustrations in Garnier and Fralon’s book display the
typical attributes of the exoticised, and colonised, subject: ‘fetish’
1
2
Cord of Blood
priests playing on drums encircled by humans skulls, devotees with
pythons draped around their necks, half-naked female bodies taking
to the streets in trance...
Verger’s scholarly work on Yoruba orisa and Fon vodun
3
appears
only a few years later (1957). With its heavy emphasis on initiatory
processes, Verger firmly bases his data in the religious sphere,
providing vivid and detailed accounts of the symbolic significance
of religious practice and mythology, but still leaving a taste for more,
for how these institutions tally with other aspects of social
interaction. Yet another early ethnography is provided by Maupoil
(1943), an ethnographer and colonial administrator in Benin whose
authoritative account of Fa divination displays his masterly grasp of
the mathematical aspects of divinatory practice. Again, little social
context was provided relating to the use made of divination in
everyday (or, indeed, specific) social contexts, or relating to the
background of diviners themselves, and making little mention of the
religious institutions surrounding divination and linking it to the
‘voodoo’ complex. At a time when life-histories were not yet in
fashion, the systematic cataloguing of practice was very much
favoured. Augé’s more recent work (1988) derives an obvious
inspiration from Verger, viewing religious practice in this part of
Africa as an expression of morality and ideology.
Vodhun
, as these deities are termed locally,
4
are treated by Augé as
a relatively homogeneous complex: explanation and analysis make
little differentiation between various groups, and vodhun in Benin
and Togo are amalgamated to become expressions of shared cosmo-
logical and mythological beliefs. While it is the case that vodhun as
belief, practice and religious complex
5
is indeed present from Nigeria
to present-day Ghana, the continuities it displays and which serve to
enhance a sense of shared identity are paired with important
differences used to mobilise ethnic differentiation. Vodhun can thus
hardly be treated as homogenous practice or ideology.
Thus armed with theoretical reflections on the mostly
francophone literature on this region, and an intellectual training
firmly based within British academic tradition, I had originally
intended to attempt a wider contextualisation of vodhun religion in
everyday practice, while simultaneously pursuing a particular
interest in the ‘couvents de féticheuses’ which seemed to be
frequently mentioned in the literature relating particularly to Benin
and Togo. This, I thought, would constitute the focus of my work,
as it delved into the depths of gender issues, while also relating to
wider discourses of religious practice and, I suspected, medical
knowledge. The latter was, originally, an idea formulated as the
result of inference, rather than being explicitly stated in other
accounts on this region. Moreover, if the expression and creation of
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