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
