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
