Vodun. Timothy R. Landry
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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