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.
CHAPTER 1
Touring the Forbidden
The reproduction of Vodun cults is increasingly becoming dependent on external tourism … as incomes deriving from religious service cannot alone sustain communities and their religious life. Vodun priestesses and priests take advantage of the opportunities that cross their paths and take up the challenge that the initiation of foreigners or the participation in tourism activity might carry.
—Forte 2010: 141
The untold story of Vodún’s contemporary expansion begins with a rise in what many Béninois simply call “Voodoo tourism.” Ouidah’s tourists typically follow a well-worn script. Most of them visit the Python Temple, where Dangbé, the python spirit, is served;1 King Kpassé’s sacred forest, which is the seat of the vodún known as Lǒkò;2 and the slave route (La Route des Esclaves) that was established in the early 1990s with support from the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (Landry 2011) and other foreign governments (especially Germany and France). While these three destinations form a “must-see” triumvirate of tourist sites in Ouidah, other places such as the palace of Daágbó Xùnɔ̀, the so-called supreme chief of Vodún in Bénin, are also becoming popular, as tourists become increasingly adventurous, following the advice of tour books about Bénin (e.g., Butler 2006), and as more Vodún priests and temples make themselves available to tourists in the hopes of earning extra money.
The average tourist is content to have a photo taken with a snake from the Python Temple wrapped around his or her neck; to walk through Kpassé’s sacred forest to see a permanent exhibition of Vodún-inspired art sculptures erected in the early 1990s for “Ouidah ’92: The First International Festival
