Vodun. Timothy R. Landry
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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 Béninois man I met through a mutual friend two years prior to beginning my research, helped me find the right diviner. A few weeks after he offered to help me find a teacher, he was ready to tell me about the man he had found. Émile was in his late forties and had been an initiated Fá diviner for more than fifteen years. He practiced the Fon version of Fá and was well known in the area. He had many clients largely due to a radio show that he hosted on a local station where he gave spiritual advice to callers. The diviner seemed perfect—he was knowledgeable and quite established.
I immediately told André that I would be interested in meeting Émile to discuss the possibility of working with him during my stay in Bénin. However, André told me that he did not want the two of us to meet until the day of my initiation ceremonies—yet André would not reveal his reasons. Because I had never heard of anything like this happening, I was suspicious of André’s motives. Several days later—after many lengthy and persuasive conversations—my suspicions were confirmed when André admitted to me that he did not want Émile to know I was “white and rich.” He believed that if Émile knew I was a white American, he would want to charge me double—or maybe triple—his normal fee and “capitalize on my wealth.”
I found myself in an uncomfortable and ethical conundrum. Should I allow André to continue with his plan? Or should I insist that he reveal my identity to Émile? After changing my mind at least a dozen times, mimicking the choice of a typical spiritual tourist, I ultimately decided to go along with André’s plan. One month later, Émile and I met at midnight to begin the ceremonies that would make me a Fá diviner. As André and I had anticipated, Émile was upset. Émile announced, quite publicly and loudly, that he would have asked for a higher fee if he had known that I was white. Nevertheless, Émile agreed to continue with my ceremonies, and over the next several hours we became much more comfortable with each other. He was proud of what I accomplished and eager to tell his friends that he had initiated his first yovó. I began my time with Émile as a “polluting presence”—one whose skin color, and all that my white skin symbolically represented, marked me as an outsider. By the end of my ceremonies, my “difference” had lessened, but it was clear that it would never vanish. Unfortunately, my apprenticeship with Émile was short-lived. He lived more than an hour away from Ouidah and, while I attended several of his ceremonies and even some of his future initiations, I needed a teacher who lived closer.
After searching for several months, a longtime friend introduced me to Jean and the village of Fátòmɛ̀, near Ouidah. When I met Jean, he instructed me that, in order to work with him, I would need to redo my initiations