Open Encyclopedia of Anthropology - Slavery

Anti-Blackness

Rebecca Tishler — Thu, 04 Dec 2025 01:11:24 +0000

Anti Ku Klux Klan protesters marched in Philadelphia on 5 November, 1988, after white supremacist groups agreed to call off a rally that would have been held the same day. Picture by Lori Schaull

Sebastian Jackson

University of Virginia

Initially published 4 Dec 2025

http://doi.org/10.29164/25antiblackness

Abstract:

‘Anti-Blackness’ refers to a pervasive and deeply entrenched form of dehumanisation and exclusion targeting people racialised as ‘Black’, particularly those of African, Afro-diasporic, and Australasian descent. While often categorised under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, some scholars argue that anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation rooted in the histories of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonial domination. Globally, it manifests in structural inequalities and in the everyday experiences of communities shaped by the afterlives of slavery.

Anthropology has historically been complicit in producing and legitimising anti-Black ideologies—constructing Blackness as inferior or subhuman while centring a fictive white ideal. Yet, anti-racist anthropologists have long challenged these paradigms, exposing their role in sustaining racial hierarchies. Today, anti-Blackness continues to shape disparities in healthcare, housing, education, incarceration, and cultural representation. At the same time, anthropology’s theories and methods—especially ethnography—offer tools to document, analyse, and challenge anti-Blackness in everyday life. This entry traces the discipline’s entanglement with anti-Blackness, emphasising both its role in reinforcing racial domination and its potential as a critical site for resistance, repair, and reimagining justice.

Introduction

Anti-Blackness is a global structure of domination that positions Blackness as a threat, a problem, or a deficit. It operates through and encompasses a wide range of practices and systems—including violence, exclusion, exploitation, and neglect—that have targeted people of African and Australasian descent across time and place. Though often discussed under the broader umbrella of ‘racism’, anti-Blackness constitutes a distinct formation: it has been foundational to the development of colonial empires, modern capitalism, and liberal democratic institutions (Wilderson 2010; Vargas 2018; Allen and Jobson 2016). Anti-Blackness shapes policing practices, incarceration, and economic deprivation, but also standards of beauty, moral hierarchies, and social relations in everyday life. From the commodification of enslaved people to the surveillance of Black life, anti-Blackness remains central to the organisation of the modern world.

Anthropology has played a contradictory role in relation to anti-Blackness. As a discipline, it has contributed to racial classification, legitimised colonial domination, and excluded Black scholars from its intellectual traditions (Harrison 1992; Mullings 2005). Yet anthropology’s core methods—especially participant observation and ethnographic attention to lived experience—also offer tools for understanding how anti-Black structures are produced, contested, and navigated in everyday life. This entry explores that tension. It traces how anthropology has both reinforced and challenged anti-Black ideas, drawing from Black feminist theory, critical race studies, and decolonial ethnography to highlight how Black communities generate practices of endurance, resistance, care, and worldmaking.

Within white supremacist thought, African and Australasian Blackness has long symbolised radical alterity—a condition imagined as incompatible with civilisation, reason, or beauty (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Smedley 1993). In this racial schema, Black people were often cast as subhuman, or as existing outside the category of the human altogether (Douglass 1854; Fanon 1952; Jung and Vargas 2021; Weheliye 2014; Wilderson 2020). These ideas were not merely ideological—they were embedded in laws, institutions, languages, and cultural norms around the world (Hall 1997; Morgan 2002; Spears 2021).^[1]

Consider, for example, Jim Crow segregation laws in the United States. This body of legislation, introduced between roughly 1877 and 1967 and predominantly across the US South, restricted the access of Black Americans to all major institutions of public life. It disenfranchised Black people politically, limited their economic possibilities, reduced their access to education, and supported a climate of anti-Black terror sustained by state officials and white militias. Anthropologists have argued that, under these laws,‘“Blackness” is the master-symbol of derogation in the society, and the “typical” Negro characteristics of dark skin color and of woolly or kinky hair are considered badges of subordinate status (Davis et al. [1941] 2022, 16). Such forms of anti-Blackness continue to shape institutions, economies, hierarchies, languages, desires, and intimacies in everyday life, even today.

This entry examines anti-Blackness in historical and contemporary perspective, showing how anthropologists and ethnographers have both enabled and challenged the racial orders that sustain white supremacy (Mullings 2005a; Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Pierre 2020). Contemporary anthropologists draw on the Black radical tradition and interdisciplinary literatures on Black ontology (i.e. the study of what it means to exist as a Black person) and Afropessimism (i.e. the study of fundamental structural aspects of society that perpetuate anti-Black racism) to examine how anti-Black violence and stigma organise modern life and death (Fanon 1952; Sexton 2008; Vargas 2018; Wilderson 2020). While the social construction of race has been examined across disciplines, anthropology’s ethnographic methods allow for sustained attention to how anti-Blackness is lived, embodied, and resisted in everyday life.

Slavery and anti-Blackness

Slavery was not always synonymous with Blackness (Patterson 1983; Smedley 1998; West 2002). In antiquity and the medieval period, Blackness was often associated with symbolic or spiritual meaning, rather than biological inferiority. The ancient Greek historian Herodotus described Ethiopians as beautiful and noble; the fourteenth century Maghrebi intellectual Ibn Battuta praised the justice of West African Muslims; and medieval Europe venerated Black saints such as the Egyptian St. Maurice and the Black Madonna (Bindman and Gates 2010; Snowden 1970). Even when Blackness carried negative connotations, it was not yet biologically overdetermined and pathologised. The association of Blackness with heritable enslavement developed gradually through European colonialism and the Atlantic slave trade, as slavery became racialised in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Smedley 1998; Gates and Curran 2022).

By the nineteenth century, after centuries of institutionalised chattel slavery, i.e. a form of slavery where slaves are considered to be the ‘property’ of their ‘owners’, Blackness had become a symbol of perpetual bondage and degradation. To be Black in most Euro-colonial societies meant being marked by ‘social death’—alienated from kin, honour, history, and futurity (Patterson 1983; Trouillot 1995; Wilderson 2020). Early anthropologists and ethnologists—especially those associated with the ‘American School’, led by Samuel Morton, Josiah Nott, and Louis Agassiz—helped naturalise this association by grounding it in pseudoscientific theories of racial difference, transforming a historically contingent condition into an allegedly immutable ‘truth’ (Gould 1981; Painter 2010; Smedley 1993).

In the wake of slavery, Black life continues to be evaluated through a white supremacist gaze—simultaneously feared and exploited, always in relation to its utility for colonial-capitalist accumulation (Du Bois 1903; Robinson 1983; Sharpe 2016). This was the case in the late nineteenth century when recently freed American slaves and their offspring were kept in highly exploitative working conditions, constituting ‘a segregated and servile caste, with restricted rights and privileges’ (Du Bois 1935, 32). It continued in the twentieth century, when Black Americans served as a capitalist underclass both in the American industrial and service economies, but also in the privatised for-profit prison economy that relies disproportionately on Black labour (Gibson-Light 2023; Oshinsky 1996). And it persists today, as Black lives around the world continue to be considered largely disposable, whether they are Haitian emigrants seeking a better life or disadvantaged Black children in the favelas of Brazil being subjected to police abuse (Joseph and Louis 2022; Smith 2016). Anti-Blackness developed as a system of racial domination shaped by intersecting hierarchies of race, gender, class, religion, and ethnicity—privileging whiteness, and especially white men, above all (Baldwin and Mead 1971; Mullings 2005a; Shange 2019).

In the post-slavery world, Black bodies were recast as a ‘social problem’, requiring political and scientific intervention (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1898, 1903; Harrison 1992). In the US, this became the so-called ‘negro problem’; in the British Empire, the ‘native problem’. Both framed Black and Indigenous populations as inherently disorderly and unfit for self-rule—justifying ongoing racial domination. Anthropology was complicit in this global racial order. Emerging alongside imperial conquest, it helped classify, study, and govern the ‘savage’ or ‘primitive’ subject (Baker 1998; Blakey 2010; Smedley 1998; Trouillot 1991). As Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot observed, ‘the savage was the alter ego the West constructed for itself… the raison d’être of anthropology’ (1991, 28, 40).

Yet anthropology also became a space for critique and resistance. Black, Indigenous, and other minoritised scholars have used ethnographic tools to expose structures of racial domination and articulate alternative visions for humanity (Mullings 2005a; Harrison et al. 2018). Understanding anti-Blackness through anthropological and historical frameworks is vital to building an anti-racist, abolitionist, and decolonial anthropology (Bolles 2001; Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001; Perry 2016).

Anti-Blackness and the colonial foundations of anthropology

To understand contemporary expressions of anti-Blackness, we must first trace its genealogy through European ‘Enlightenment’ thought. Central to Enlightenment philosophy was the presumption that Black and Indigenous peoples existed ‘without history’, outside the temporal and moral horizons of Western modernity (Fabian 1983; Fanon 1952; Hegel 1894; Trouillot 1995; West 2002; Wolf 1982). Racial difference was increasingly cast not only in cultural or religious terms but as a biological fact, justifying colonial conquest as a civilising mission. Anthropological knowledge, especially in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, became an instrument for racial surveillance and control. Black and Indigenous bodies were rendered as objects of study, classification, and debate, often in the service of slavery, settler colonialism, racial capitalism, and genocide. Thus, anthropology helped to uphold the normative distinction between ‘primitive’ and ‘civilised’ people and situated it along the colour line. In its studies of Black and Indigenous people, anthropology all too often ignored white rule and allowed anthropologists to serve as diplomats and public relations experts for white rule (Willis 1972; see also Baker 1998; Anderson 2019).

The modern scientific racism to which early anthropology contributed emerged alongside Enlightenment rationalism. Carl Linnaeus’s Systema naturae (10th ed., 1758) classified humans into continentally-bounded ‘varieties’. He described Africans as ‘Black, phlegmatic, lazy… sly, sluggish, neglectful’, and contrasted them with idealised Europeans, ‘governed by rites’. Relying on dubious colonial travel accounts, Linnaeus also claimed African women had ‘elongated labia’ and ‘breasts lactating profusely’.^[2]These dehumanising descriptors shaped later anatomical and racial science, grounding anti-Blackness in the language of empirical objectivity and universal classification (West 2002; Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

European theories of Black inferiority found fertile ground in the antebellum (1815-1861) United States. Thomas Jefferson—Founding Father, slaveholder, and third US president—substantially shaped American racial thought. In Notes on the state of Virginia (1781), he notoriously speculated: ‘I advance it therefore as a suspicion only, that the blacks… are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind’ (222). This conjecture framed racial hierarchy as reasoned observation rather than prejudice, lending intellectual legitimacy to chattel slavery and segregation (Walker 1830; Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014).^[3] Jefferson’s views were not merely abstract. He enslaved over 700 people and exploited the reproductive capacities of African-descended women. His long-term relationship with Sally Hemings—an enslaved woman of mixed ancestry—produced several children, all of whom inherited enslaved status through their mother (Cohen 1969; Woodson 1918; Finkelman 2014).^[4] This dynamic of sexual domination, denial of paternity, and commodification of Black life exemplified the intimate operations of anti-Blackness at the heart of American democracy.

Jefferson’s influence extended beyond the Monticello plantation in Virginia, which he owned, and even beyond the plantation system that dominated the economic development of the American South from the seventeenth until the twentieth century. As president, he severed trade relations with the newly independent Black republic of Haiti, fearing its revolutionary example would inspire slave uprisings across the Americas, and especially in the US South (James 1938; Scott 2004, 2014; Trouillot 1995). His statesmanship and racist writings laid the groundwork for the so-called ‘American School of Anthropology’ which codified pseudo-scientific racial theories and enshrined anti-Blackness in American science, law, and education (Chamberlain 1907; Finkelman 2014, 198).

While Jefferson laid the ideological foundation, the ‘American School’ formalised these ideas. Central was ‘polygenism’—the theory that racial groups like ‘Negroes’ and ‘Caucasians’ were biologically distinct species with immutable traits (Gould 1981; Keel 2013; Painter 2010). Polygenists claimed that Black people were naturally inferior and biologically suited for subjugation. Samuel G. Morton, often called the ‘father’ of American physical anthropology, used manipulated skull measurements to ‘prove’ that Africans ranked lowest in the human hierarchy (Stocking 1968; Smedley 1993; Blakey 2020). These claims helped justify slavery and segregation as the natural order (Morton 1839; Ralph 2012).

Closely linked was the theory of ‘hybrid sterility’, which pathologised racial mixing, and popularised the belief that ‘mulattoes’ were biologically unfit hybrids (Nott 1843). For example, an 1843 article in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, claimed: ‘[T]he mulattoes are intermediate in intelligence between whites and blacks… they are less capable of endurance and are shorter lived… the women are bad breeders and bad nurses… the two sexes when they intermarry are less prolific’ (Nott 1843, 29–30). From such claims, it was concluded that interracial reproduction should be prohibited. These arguments later informed eugenics (i.e. ideas about improving the biological makeup of humans through selective breeding) and anti-miscegenation laws, embedding anti-Blackness in US legal and scientific infrastructure (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Nobles 2000; Pascoe 2010).

Yet these theories were never uncontested. Black intellectuals like Frederick Douglass (1854; 1881) and Anténor Firmin (1885) repudiated scientific racism and established and defended the rights of Black people. Rather than accept white supremacist race science, they argued that differences among racialised groups stemmed from historical and environmental conditions—not biology (Allen and Jobson 2016; Drake and Baber 1990; Fleuhr-Lobban 2000). Similarly, theories of polygenism and hybrid sterility were attacked as fallacious by noted scholars who condemned white anthropologists for being ‘blinded by passion’ and relying on false ‘audacious paradoxes’ (Firmin 1885, 68). Against the myth of hybrid sterility, Firmin wrote: ‘The fecundity of mulattoes is a fact so well known… that one can only be surprised that a scientist… can question it’ (68). Despite these rebuttals, obsession with Black bodies and racial mixture continued to dominate anthropological debates into the twentieth century (Anderson 2019; Baker 2020). Nevertheless, the early vindicationists, as they were known, laid foundations for an anti-racist and decolonial anthropology—one that exposed race science as spurious ideology serving domination.

Although polygenism lost credibility by the late nineteenth century, Darwinian evolutionary theories did not end scientific racism. Racial hierarchies were rearticulated through social Darwinism and eugenics (Stocking 1968; Gould 1981; Dennis 1995). Darwin’s theory of common ancestry debunked polygenism but recast human difference as evolutionary hierarchy. In The descent of man, Charles Darwin wrote:

At some future period… the civilized races of man will almost certainly exterminate, and replace, the savage races… The break between man and his nearest allies will then be wider… between man in a more civilized state… and some ape as low as a baboon, instead of as now between the negro or Australian [Aboriginal] and the gorilla (1871, 156).

Such comparisons gave scientific credence to anti-Black and anti-Indigenous tropes, framing colonial violence as evolutionary progress. Social Darwinists like Herbert Spencer used these ideas to justify imperialism and capitalist inequality as inevitable (Dennis 1995; Magubane 2003). The rise of eugenics, a term and theory coined by Darwin’s cousin Francis Galton, reinforced this logic. Eugenicists envisioned humanity as a grand evolutionary tree, with elite Europeans at the top and Black and Indigenous peoples as stunted lower branches. These arboreal metaphors ‘naturalised’ racial hierarchies in society (Moore, Kosek and Pandian 2003).

In Europe, anthropologists also illustrated ‘morphological’, ‘aesthetic’, and ‘intellectual’ trees to represent and legitimise these imagined racial hierarchies (Mantegazza 1881; see Fig 1). In these hierarchies, ‘Hottentots’, ‘Bushmen’, ‘Negroes’, ‘Caffres’, ‘Papuans’, ‘Australians’, and ‘Negritos’ are placed at the bottom, and ‘Aryans’—white Europeans—at the top (Taylor and Marino 2019, 116–7). In short, social Darwinism replaced polygenism but not racism—it simply gave anti-Blackness new scientific language.

racist_tree_diagram.png

(Fig 1). Paulo Mantegazza’s “Morphological, aesthetic, and intellectual hierarchies of the human race.” (1881).

The Black body

Building on the racial typologies of polygenism and the biological determinism of social Darwinism, physical anthropologists and early social scientists increasingly turned their attention to the Black body as an object of empirical study and political concern. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the Black body became a central site through which scientific racism was naturalised and institutionalised. Rather than treating race solely as a taxonomic abstraction, anthropologists and state officials began to treat the bodies of Black people as repositories of deviance—biological, moral, and civilisational (Baker 1998). These discourses were not merely academic; they helped legitimise the structural realities of post-emancipation Black life, including structural poverty, segregation, political exclusion, and the ever-present threat of rebellion. Within this context, the Black body was framed not just as different, but as existentially dangerous—a problem to be studied, managed, and contained.

In post-Emancipation America (1865–1955), this racialised scrutiny took the form of what policymakers and social scientists called the ‘negro problem’ (Baker 1998; Du Bois 1903; 1935). The presence of millions of recently emancipated people in a supposedly democratic society raised an urgent socio-political question: What to do with the Blacks? Integration? Segregation? Expulsion to Africa? In response, segregationist laws known as ‘Black codes’, Jim Crow laws, lynch mobs, and the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan’s terrorism reinforced racial domination through legal, social, and extra-legal means—perpetuating exclusion from education, labour, property, and political life (Davis et al. [1941] 2022; Du Bois 1935; Woodward 1955).

The so-called ‘negro problem’ was thus a cultural trope shaped by deep-rooted ‘negrophobia’—the psychic and social condition in which Black bodies become projections of white fear, guilt, and fantasy, and the enduring legacies of slavery and settler colonialism (Butler 1993; Du Bois 1903; Fanon 1952; Ralph and Chance 2014). Black bodies became overdetermined by contradictory myths and stereotypes: biologically inferior yet physically threatening, hypersexual yet degenerate, human yet animal. They were objectified as specimens for medical and anthropological study and symbolically constructed as social threats to white civility and national order. As Frantz Fanon (1952) and Winthrop Jordan (1968) note, Black people were positioned somewhere between human and beast—feared, surveilled, and exploited.

American popular and scientific literatures alike portrayed Black men as ‘savages’ with uncontrollable lust for white women (Baker 1998; Fanon 1952). The myth of the Black rapist served to justify lynchings and other extrajudicial forms of racial terror (Wells 1909; Davis 1981). The Black male body was pathologised as criminal, immoral, and uncivilised (Muhammad 2010). These narratives were reinforced by legal mechanisms such as ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws, which limited Black people’s rights to get married, the ‘one-drop rule’, which asserted that anyone with a Black ancestor should also be racialised as Black, and the criminalisation of poverty through vagrancy and loitering statutes—all of which enabled the de facto re-enslavement of Black people through the convict leasing system, through which prisons could lease the forced labour of mostly Black prisoners to wealthy individuals and corporations (Blackmon 2008; Oshinsky 1996).

The trope of the Black criminal normalised systemic anti-Blackness and legitimated mass incarceration as a form of racial governance (Jordan 2014; Muhammad 2010). Structural racism, predicated on anti-Blackness, displaced responsibility for Black suffering onto Black people themselves. Structural racism refers to the ways that institutions, policies, and social arrangements collectively produce and reproduce racial inequality. Eugenicists, for example, used demographic data on Black mortality to predict the supposed ‘extinction of the Negro’ by the twentieth century (Brandt 1978; Ralph 2012; Muhammad 2010). These morbid fantasies ignored the systemic conditions of racialised death and pathologised Black existence that persist until today (Dennis 1995; Mbembe 2019). For example, young Black and Latinx men in East Harlem, confronting systemic unemployment, are made to navigate illicit economies —such as the street-level drug trade and other informal survival strategies that emerge in response to exclusion from the formal labor market—while their bodies are surveilled, punished, or absorbed into carceral systems designed for profit maximization (Bourgois 2003).

The commodification of Black bodies has long underwritten the global capitalist economy, from the extraction of labour under slavery to contemporary racialised markets in entertainment, sports, surveillance, and incarceration. Numerous ethnographic studies have examined how Black bodies are treated as fungible assets—valued for their productivity, aesthetic, or capacity for violence, yet systematically devalued as persons. In the US, for instance, Black bodies are hyper-visible in popular media yet constrained by controlling images that reflect and reproduce racial hierarchies (Gray 1995; Jackson Jr. 2005). In popular culture, recurring stereotypes such as the ‘mammy’—the loyal, self-sacrificing domestic servant—and the ‘welfare queen’—depicted as lazy, hyper-fertile, and parasitic—serve to naturalise Black women's social subordination and rationalise structural inequality through familiar visual tropes (Collins 2000).

Even in the American healthcare system, Black patients are often treated as less-than-human within clinical settings, where capitalist logics and anti-Black racism intersect to devalue Black patients’ pain, experiences, and lives (Rouse 2009). These racialised medical encounters are shaped by ‘ethical variability’, whereby clinicians justify unequal care by invoking culturally biased notions of responsibility, credibility, and worthiness.

Afrophobia

‘Afrophobia’ refers to a deep-seated hatred and fear of anything associated with Blackness or Africanness. The concept is closely related to ‘negrophobia’, both emerging from long-standing European traditions of imagining African peoples as inferior, dangerous, disorderly, or contaminating. Its discursive roots trace to Greco-Roman and medieval European portrayals of Africans as monstrous and uncivilised (Stewart 2005, 43; Cantave 2024, 863). In the modern world, Afrophobia encompasses not only aesthetic prejudice but also a globalised fear of African peoples, cultural traditions, and their capacity to unsettle white supremacy and Euro-American hegemony. In Latin America, this manifests in the stigmatisation and criminalisation of African-derived spiritual traditions such as Santería in Cuba, Candomblé in Brazil, and Haitian Vodou (Beliso-De Jesús 2015). These traditions—born in the crucible of slavery and colonial violence—are not simply forms of worship but cultural systems of Black survival, resistance, and world-making (Boaz 2021; Stewart 2005; Cantave 2024).

Historically, anthropology was complicit in shaping Afrophobic knowledge regimes. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ethnographers often depicted African spiritual practices as primitive ‘superstitions’, aligning with colonial regimes that sought to eradicate them. Classic ethnographies in French and Iberian colonies portrayed Vodou and Candomblé as irrational or pathological—reinforcing racist state policies. Early anthropological writing rarely took these belief systems seriously as coherent cosmologies, instead treating them as exotic curiosities or proof of Black primitivism (Brown 2003).

Yet anthropology has also helped challenge these frameworks. Contemporary Afro-diasporic ethnographers and critical anthropologists have reclaimed the study of African-derived religions as a site of political and epistemological contestation. In this vein, scholars have foregrounded how practitioners understand their own rituals as ethical, affective, and intellectual forms of life-making. They also show how gender, sexuality, and embodiment are transformed through spiritual practice (Pérez 2016; Daniel 2005; Tinsley 2008).

In the Dominican Republic, Afrophobia is materially enacted in everyday life—especially through racialised anxieties about beauty, hygiene, and spiritual purity (Candelario 2007). Dominican beauty salons serve as intimate spaces where Afro-Haitian features and aesthetics are policed and effaced. Here, Haitian migrants are stigmatised not only for their Blackness but for presumed associations with Vodou, often framed publicly as satanic or uncivilised. These anxieties are entangled with fears of national degeneration and cultural contamination. Ethnographic observations such as these show how the body becomes a moral frontier where race, nation, and spirit converge—and where Afrophobic violence is inscribed onto skin, hair, and comportment.

In this context, anthropological studies that centre the lived experiences of Afro-religious practitioners offer critical tools to decolonise knowledge and confront Afrophobia. They reveal African diasporic religions not as threats to national order but as vital repositories of historical memory, resilience, and political possibility. At their best, ethnographic methods can expose the micro-practices of racial domination while amplifying Black cultural life on its own terms.

Misogynoir and Black feminist anthropology

‘Misogynoir’ refers to the specific forms of violence and dehumanisation that Black women experience at the intersection of anti-Black racism and misogyny (Bailey 2021). Historically, Black women’s bodies were subjected to scientific, sexual, and symbolic violation. A paradigmatic example is Saartjie Baartman (c.1789–1815), a Khoi woman from South Africa exhibited in nineteenth-century Europe as the ‘Hottentot Venus’ (Gilman 1985; Magubane 2001; Strother 1999). Her semi-nude body was displayed to curious European audiences, and after her death, her remains were dissected by French anatomist Georges Cuvier and exhibited at the Musée de l’Homme in Paris until 1974. Baartman’s treatment exemplified how the Black female body was racialised, sexualised, and rendered a scientific object—central to the development of comparative anatomy and early anthropological inquiry.

Contemporary Black feminist anthropologists have shown how this colonial gaze continues to shape representations of Black women. They point out that Black women’s bodies have historically been ‘disciplined’ through contradictory social discourses—from Christian morality and motherhood to racist stereotypes of hypersexuality and labour, and that white and Black women are constructed in opposition to each other: white women as symbols of domestic virtue and Black women as oversexualised ‘workhorses’ (Shaw 2001). Consequently, Black women in postcolonial Zimbabwe, as well as the post–civil rights era in the United States, navigate persistent gendered-racial expectations, often by asserting alternative moral, religious, and familial frameworks to reclaim bodily autonomy and dignity (Shaw 2001).

Other ethnographic studies also reveal the complex ways Black women resist, negotiate, or internalise these intersecting oppressions. For instance, Afro-Caribbean girls in New York are simultaneously hyper-visible and invisible in public space—fetishised as style icons and simultaneously policed as disruptive. Their creative expressions through fashion, music, and dance are often criminalised, yet also serve as strategies of survival and identity (LaBennett 2011). Similarly, young Black women in a transitional housing shelter in Detroit use performance and expressive culture to resist the stigmatisation of Black girlhood (Cox 2015). These ethnographies illuminate the lived experience of misogynoir and demonstrate how Black women mobilise care, kinship, and creativity in the face of structural violence.

Importantly, Black feminist scholars have also highlighted the intra-racial dimensions of misogyny. Black women are often expected to subordinate their experiences of gendered violence to broader racial struggles, leading to silences around the harm they endure from Black men (Collins 2000; Combahee River Collective 1977; Crenshaw 2014; Davis 1981; Lorde 1984). Anthropologists have argued that ethnography is particularly well-suited to expose these overlapping systems of oppression by attending to the quotidian textures of abuse, labour, survival, and joy in Black women’s lives (Mullings 2005b; McClaurin 2001). Black feminist anthropologists aim to make Black women’s lives ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21), a political and methodological project that resists both invisibility as well as hyper-surveillance. Gertrude Fraser’s (1998) ethnographic research on Black midwifery and the racial politics of reproductive health exemplifies this approach. She shows how Black women’s bodies and labour are routinely devalued in clinical and institutional settings. Attending to the embodied and generational knowledge of Black women healthcare workers illuminates how racism, sexism, and professional hierarchies intersect to marginalise Black women’s authority and care work. By centring Black women’s voices, labour, and intellectual production, Black feminist anthropology challenges the discipline to reckon with its own racial and gendered hierarchies—and to imagine new possibilities for more ethical, inclusive, and liberatory knowledge-making (McClaurin 2001). Yet, despite these contributions, Black women anthropologists have historically been marginalised within the academy. Their scholarship remains under-cited and undervalued in disciplinary canons (Harrison et al. 2018; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic exclusion reflects broader patterns of anti-Blackness and sexism that pervade the discipline of anthropology itself.

Racial capitalism

‘Racial capitalism’ refers to the process by which capitalist economies have always been structured by and dependent upon racial hierarchies and the exploitation of Black labour. First developed by Cedric Robinson (1983), the concept critiques the idea that capitalism is a racially neutral economic system only later corrupted by racism. Robinson argues that capitalism emerged from European feudal orders that already encoded racial difference, and that Black people have been subjected to a distinct form of economic subjugation central to the global capitalist order. In this view, anti-Blackness is not a by-product of capitalism but foundational to its formation and endurance (Du Bois 1935; Williams 1940; Robinson 1983; Matlon 2016).

Anthropologists have documented how Black life is shaped by systems of racialised accumulation and dispossession, from plantation slavery to contemporary neoliberalism. Insurance policies on enslaved Africans in the nineteenth century US South illustrate the fusion of racial logics and financial speculation (Ralph 2012). Enslaved people were rendered fungible labour and abstract instruments of credit and actuarial calculation. Their value derived not from their humanity but from their capacity to generate returns for owners and insurers. Slave insurance reveals how Black life was financialised in ways that shaped modern capitalism, including the development of life insurance, risk management, and governance of future value.

Historian Destin Jenkins (2021) builds on this understanding with a historical analysis of how municipal debt became a tool of racial governance in twentieth century San Francisco—a framework that offers important insights for anthropological approaches to racial capitalism. Drawing on archival research, Jenkins shows how bond markets and credit-rating agencies influenced public infrastructure decisions, disinvesting from Black neighbourhoods while underwriting white wealth accumulation. Racial capitalism thus operates not only through exploitation but through financial infrastructures that dictate whose futures are investable.

In the Caribbean, economic policies associated with globalisation, tourism, and austerity have likewise entrenched anti-Black hierarchies (Slocun 2006; Thomas 2019, 2021). In urban Jamaica, Black youth are simultaneously criminalised and commodified—as symbols of urban danger for tourists and as security laborers in the very industries that exclude them. In this way, Blackness is linked to economic disposability while also being monetised within global security regimes (Jaffe 2015).

Similarly, labour struggles in Guadeloupe are shaped by colonial legacies and racialised inequality, as Black workers mobilise both class and race to challenge French imperial domination (Bonilla 2021). Ethnographic research with rural St. Lucian women in the banana export industry also reveals the racialised and gendered dimensions of global capitalism (Slocum 2006). Here, Black women navigate the intersecting pressures of neoliberal trade regimes, postcolonial marginalisation, and local class hierarchies, and underscore how global capitalism reproduces racial and gendered inequalities. For example, many women farmers must absorb the risks of volatile export prices, perform the unpaid labour required to meet stringent quality standards, and contend with male intermediaries who control access to markets and resources, leaving them disproportionately vulnerable within global commodity chains.

Anthropologists working in the tradition of structural violence—a concept popularised by Paul Farmer (2004)—have shown how racialised violence is embedded in political and economic systems, not just individual attitudes. Structural violence refers to the historically produced social arrangements—such as poverty, segregation, and unequal access to healthcare—that systematically harm marginalised populations by constraining their life chances and exposing them to preventable suffering. While structural racism is a specific form of this violence, rooted in racial hierarchy and anti-Blackness, structural violence more broadly encompasses the multiple social forces that produce patterns of inequality and harm. Farmer’s work in Haiti traced how colonialism and neoliberalism shape health outcomes through institutional neglect and economic exploitation. Building on this, Adia Benton’s (2015) ethnography of Sierra Leone’s HIV response reveals how global health regimes reproduce racialised and gendered hierarchies, exposing whose lives are deemed valuable or not.

The Harlem Birth Right Project, led by Leith Mullings (2001; 2005b), further developed this approach in the US context, analysing how race, gender, and class intersect to produce structural vulnerability. Their research linked high rates of infant mortality among Black women in Harlem to housing insecurity, over-policing, and barriers to quality prenatal care. Other ethnographers have likewise shown how structural racism is embodied through cyclical poverty, over-policing, and healthcare inequality (Bourgois 1995; Scheper-Hughes 1992). Together, these studies reveal how anti-Blackness is infrastructural—woven into the built environment, labour markets, and social services—and how racial capitalism renders Black life both exploitable and expendable.

‘Colour-blindness’ and colourism

Anti-Blackness is a fact of everyday life across the postcolonial world (Fanon 1952; Essed and Goldberg 2002; Keaton 2023). Yet for much of the twentieth century, anthropology’s ability to study racism seriously was constrained by post-Boasian liberalism and its doctrinal commitments to anti-essentialism and ‘colour-blindness’ (Allen and Jobson 2016; Anderson 2019; Baker 1998; Mullings 2005a; Shanklin 1998). These liberal frameworks, dominant since the 1960s, often dismissed structural racism as a serious object of anthropological inquiry. As scholars have argued, late twentieth-century racial ideologies increasingly took the form of ‘colour-blind racism’ or ‘racism without races’—systems of inequality that deny the significance of race while reproducing its effects through ostensibly race-neutral institutions, discourses, and practices (Bangstad and Fuentes 2023; Bonilla-Silva 2015; Omi and Winant 1986). With the rise of Black Studies in the 1960s and 1970s, and the inclusion of more Black and Indigenous anthropologists, critical ethnographic research has increasingly foregrounded the structures and lived conditions of anti-Blackness—reshaping academic knowledge and the local-global politics of race.

Contemporary anthropology is especially well positioned to examine the overlapping and divergent manifestations of anti-Blackness worldwide. While unified by a global racialised formation, the expressions of anti-Blackness in Ghana, Brazil, the US, Haiti, Ethiopia, Jamaica, and Europe vary significantly, shaped by distinct colonial histories, nationalist projects, and local racial regimes (Jung and Vargas 2021, 2022; Mills 2021). Jamaica, for example, enjoys sovereignty without emancipation from US imperialism (Thomas 2019), while African Americans have experienced emancipation from slavery without sovereignty (Shange 2019, 8). These divergent trajectories shape distinct yet interconnected experiences of anti-Blackness which emerge from the afterlives of empire, revealing how racial domination is reproduced across multiple global sites (Thomas and Clarke 2013).

Anti-Blackness manifests through surveillance, discipline, and the differential valuation of Black life. Black people are routinely seen as threatening, unruly, or out of place (Browne 2015; Butler 1993; Sharpe 2016). These racialised perceptions give rise to punitive structures—both spectacular and mundane—that discipline Black bodies. In eighteenth century New York, for instance, Black, Indigenous, and mixed-race individuals were legally required to carry lanterns after dark to illuminate their faces (Browne 2015). Today, such logics persist in policing, education, and carceral systems. For example, in her study of a San Francisco school, Savannah Shange (2019) describes how Black and Latinx youth are disciplined through ‘carceral progressivism’, i.e. the use of multicultural rhetoric that claims to lament structural racism, but still insists on zero-tolerance and police-based approaches to disciplining Black people and justify racial control. In Australia, Aboriginal youth are incarcerated at 20 times the rate of their white peers, revealing how settler colonialism continues to target Black and Indigenous life under the banner of multiculturalism (Holland et al. 2024; Hage 2000; Povinelli 2002; Wolfe 2016).

Ethnographies in the Caribbean and Latin America show how anti-Blackness animates postcolonial statecraft and global capitalism. In Jamaica, American militarism and neoliberalism have shaped violent policing regimes (Thomas 2019) while in Brazil, anthropologists have documented how militarised policing specifically targets Black favelas (Alves 2018; Smith 2016; Gillam 2022). Perhaps the most striking example comes from Salvador da Bahia, Brazil, a place that is marketed as an ‘Afro-paradise’—a transnational fantasy that celebrates Afro-Brazilian culture for tourism and national identity—even as the state continues to subject Black communities to pervasive violence and surveillance. Indeed, Black communities have long been sites of routinised, yet spectacular, racialised violence (Smith 2016). Here, Afro-Brazilians resist anti-Blackness through protest and performance practices—particularly bloco afro processions, Carnival-based counter-performances, and community mobilisations against police violence—in everyday life.

In the US, Laurence Ralph (2020) shows how the Chicago Police Department systematised torture against Black men from the 1970s to 1990s. In Detroit, Aimee Cox (2016) details how unhoused Black girls choreograph strategic movements through hostile urban spaces to claim dignity and survival. These ‘choreographies’ are not only acts of endurance but also everyday refusals of disposability. Together, these ethnographies show that anti-Blackness is not limited to spectacular violence but is embedded in quotidian institutions that constrain and surveil Black life. Anthropology, when critically engaged, offers tools to document these dynamics and to amplify Black knowledge, resistance, and worldmaking.

‘Colourism’ is another important facet of anti-Blackness. It refers to prejudice and discrimination based on skin tone, often within Black and Brown communities (Glenn 2009; Jablonski 2021). Coined by Alice Walker (1983), ‘colourism’ names the global preference for lighter skin in proximity to whiteness (Bajwa et al. 2023). People experience it daily: in family life, dating, beauty, housing, healthcare, education, media, and policing (Caldwell 2007; Anekwe 2014; Monk 2015; Spears 2020). Though the term is modern, colourism is centuries old, shaped by slavery, colonialism, and racial science. In colonial Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), French jurist Moreau de Saint-Méry (1796) identified eleven gradations of racial mixture, praising the ‘mulatto’ as the ideal hybrid. He wrote:

Of all the combination of white and nègre it is the mulatto who brings together all of the physical advantages; of all of these crossings of race he is the one who has the strongest constitution, the most appropriate to Saint-Domingue's climate. To the sobriety and the strength of the nègre he joins the physical grace and the intelligence of the white (1798; Garrigus 2006).

Such fantasies fused early scientific racism with erotic desire, projecting European superiority onto the bodies of the enslaved. As many scholars have argued, early racial science was animated by anxieties over miscegenation, bodily purity, and racial control (Fanon 1954; Jordan 1968; Stoler 2002; Wolfe 2016). Moreover, ‘racially hierarchical social orders, which are rooted in the control and exploitation of (racially identified) peoples and places […] generate complex dynamics of hate and love, fear and fascination, contempt and admiration […] that seems to have a specifically sexual dimension’ (Wade 2009, 2).

Colourism is historically and geographically contingent. In the US, the ‘one-drop rule’ collapsed racial ambiguity into a rigid Black-white binary (Hochschild and Powell 2008; Jordan 2014). Yet lighter-skinned Black people—particularly women—have often been granted greater social capital and proximity to whiteness (Larsen 1929; Walker 1983). In South Africa, Haiti, Brazil, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, ‘pigmentocracies’ used gradations of skin tone to structure social life (Bacelar da Silva 2022; Jackson 2024; Sheriff 2001; Telles 2014). Terms like ‘coloured’, ‘milat’, ‘mulato’, and ‘mestizo’ mark intermediate racial categories, creating buffer classes that were closer to whiteness but denied its full privileges (Glenn 2009). This stratification fostered internalised racism and horizontal antagonisms (Spears 2020; Walker 1983).

Ethnographic research shows that in Latin America, racial identities are often expressed through skin tone rather than fixed categories, and are shaped by context, class position, and local understandings of ancestry. As Peter Wade (2009) notes, racial classification in the region is fluid, relational, and embedded in broader national ideologies of mestizaje that link colour, class, and sexuality. In many settings, individuals may be identified differently depending on region, social status, or interpersonal interactions. In Mexico, descriptors like ‘moreno’ or ‘güero’ serve as racial signifiers that shift with context (Sue 2013). In Brazil, ideologies of ‘racial democracy’ have long obscured structural inequalities perpetuated by anti-Blackness and colourism (Hordge-Freeman 2015; Sheriff 2001; Twine 1998). In the Dominican Republic, anti-Haitianism reinforces the association of Blackness with cultural and national undesirability (Aber and Small 2013; Candelario 2007).

Skin bleaching is a global phenomenon, not confined to Black Atlantic societies. In India, the Philippines, South Korea, Peru, and Ghana, lighter skin is linked with beauty and modernity (Glenn 2009; Jha 2015; Mishra 2015; Pierre 2015). Many products contain mercury, hydroquinone, or potent topical steroids, causing severe dermatological damage—including chemical burns, skin thinning, and ochronosis—as well as systemic risks such as kidney failure, hypertension, and neurological toxicity. Despite these severe health risks, the global skin-lightening industry exceeds $8 billion annually and is expected to continue growing.

Colourism reveals that anti-Blackness cuts across national borders and ‘people of colour’ (‘POC’) categories. Although the term ‘POC’ is often mobilised to foster cross-ethnic alliances and highlight shared experiences of marginalisation, the term can also flatten important differences by subsuming distinct racial histories under a single label. In particular, it can obscure the structural and quotidian nature of anti-Blackness, diluting attention to the specific forms of violence, exclusion, and state surveillance directed at Black communities.

This points to the fact that anti-Blackness is not just a legacy of colonialism—it is a structuring logic of the modern racial order (Vargas 2018). Everyday manifestations of anti-Blackness, whether through skin tone, surveillance, or institutional neglect, underscore the systemic nature of racial violence. Anthropology, at its best, offers the methodological tools to document and disrupt these patterns.

Conclusion

Anthropology has long been complicit in the perpetuation of anti-Blackness and white supremacy, at times functioning as a tool of racial domination and colonial conquest (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Gupta and Stoolman 2021; Mullings 2005a). Yet anthropology also holds liberatory potential, precisely because it seeks to understand how social structures and relations, political hierarchies, and hegemonic cultures are experienced by people themselves (Harrison 1991; Cox et al. 2022; Mullings 2005a). By engaging with theories of anti-Blackness—especially those developed beyond the discipline—anthropology can interrogate its own historical complicity while contributing to contemporary Black freedom struggles worldwide.

The Movement for Black Lives—a global social movement against the ongoing structural devaluation of Black life and the resurgence of white nationalist politics—underscores the urgency of this task (Beliso-De Jesús, Pierre and Rana 2025; Jung and Vargas 2021; Williams 2015). From anti-police violence protests in the US to anti-racist demonstrations abroad, this movement highlights both the persistence of racial violence and the resilience of Black communities.^[5] Anthropological perspectives are essential here—not only to bear witness to how Black people experience and endure anti-Blackness, but also to illuminate how they resist and reimagine these structures in everyday life.

Black feminist anthropologists have long shown that centring Black humanity requires analysing intersecting oppressions and committing to politically engaged scholarship in Black communities themselves (Bolles 2001; Harrison 1991; McClaurin 2001). Despite this, Black women anthropologists have themselves been marginalised or excluded from the discipline’s canon, and their work remains undervalued (Harrison et al. 2018; McClaurin 2001; Smith 2021; Williams 2021). This epistemic erasure not only marginalises scholars but also silences the communities they represent. It exposes how dominant notions of merit and rigor remain shaped by Eurocentric, anti-Black, and sexist assumptions (McClaurin 2001). In response, Black feminist anthropologists continue to counter this devaluation by making Black women’s lives and voices ‘both visible and audible’ (McClaurin 2001, 21).

Calls for abolitionist anthropology, informed by the Movement for Black Lives, remind us that the discipline must embrace more liberatory frameworks for representing human experience (Cox et al. 2022; Harrison 1991). Black practices of fugitivity, marronage—historically, the flight of enslaved people who formed autonomous communities in resistance to colonial domination—storytelling, witness-bearing, and radical ‘freedom dreams’ envision life beyond the ubiquitous ‘weather’ of anti-Blackness. These visions are grounded in the lived realities and cultural imaginaries of Black people (Allen and Jobson 2016; Kelley 2002; Sharpe 2016). To remain relevant to the critical study of the human condition, anthropology must treat anti-Blackness not as peripheral, but as foundational to understanding the modern world (Jung and Vargas 2021; Wilderson 2003). In this way, anthropology can not only interrogate its own colonial legacies, but also serve as a tool for amplifying the voices, experiences, and aspirations of Black communities globally, contributing to the broader struggle for racial justice.

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Note on contributor

Sebastian Jackson is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a faculty affiliate of the Carter G. Woodson Institute at the University of Virginia. He holds a Ph.D. in African and African American Studies and Social Anthropology from Harvard University. His research examines race, intimacy, and the afterlives of colonialism, segregation, and apartheid in South Africa, the United States, and the broader Black Atlantic world. He has published on racism, white supremacist ideology, and postcolonial kinship in academic and public-facing venues.

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[5] 2020. “Vision for Black lives.” Movement for Black Lives. https://m4bl.org/v4bl/.

Editor:

Rachel Cantave

Work/labour

Rebecca Tishler — Mon, 01 Jul 2024 14:09:10 +0000

Women farmers plow fields in preparation to plant corn in Gnoungouya Village, Guinea on June 15, 2015. Photo by World Bank Photo collection.

Jasmine Folz Rachel Smith

University of Manchester, University of Aberdeen

Initially published 1 Jul 2024

http://doi.org/10.29164/24worklabour

Abstract:

Most of our lives are spent working, as we frequently engage in purposeful activity to build and maintain our physical and social worlds. The anthropology of work and labour provides a comparative perspective on how people make a living within their natural and social environments, while bringing into focus how people everywhere are interconnected and impacted through global historical processes. Its history and theoretical purchase have been shaped by theoretical shifts within the discipline and by wider political-economic transformations. This overview traces these shifts and begins by discussing how early ethnographic fieldwork helped to overturn Eurocentric assumptions about work. The anthropology of work and labour helped criticize theories of social evolution, but in the process, it often excluded the impacts of colonialism and capitalism on people’s lives. It also developed the idea of the division of labour to understand and critique how different forms of labour are allocated and valorised. From the mid-twentieth century, anthropologists increasingly developed a critical perspective on capitalism, its alternatives, and its consequences. A major contribution of the anthropology of work and labour is that it elucidated perspectives and experiences of people in the peripheries and margins of capitalism. Research into work in industrial centres has clarified the ways in which industrial processes have played out in different regions and political-economic contexts as well as how power is accrued and maintained by elites and professionals. The entry concludes by highlighting key anthropological contributions to understandings of work and labour during the contemporary era, often referred to as ‘late capitalism’.

Introduction

What is considered ‘work’ or not work (play, leisure) varies culturally and historically, and may not be separable as a discrete domain vis-à-vis domestic life, ritual, and religion (Applebaum 1992; Wallmann 1979; Gamst 1995). If a corresponding term for ‘work’ is identifiable, it may carve out a different sphere of human activity from that denoted in English, or be accorded different kinds of value(s) (e.g. Povinelli 1993; Strathern 1982). While definitions of work differ historically and cross-culturally, everywhere activities that could be described as work or labour are frequent and socially necessary domains of human^[1] activity. Consequently, attention to work and labour is important and useful for comparative purposes, and for thinking through how people are interconnected across the globe (Narotzky 2018).

In the English language, the terms ‘labour’ and ‘work’ are often interchangeable, but they also carry different connotations. ‘Work’ tends to cover a more diverse range of purposeful activities including gainful employment, voluntary and community service, crafts and creative activities, domestic and subsistence tasks. ‘Labour’, by contrast, more often describes physical toil, performed out of necessity, coercion, or domination (Gamst 1995; Wallman 1979, 1). It can be argued that anthropology reflects the same divergent tendencies in the differential valorisation of work and labour. While anthropology of work has often encompassed a wide variety of ways in which people transform social and natural environments and the meanings and values they accord to these activities, the term ‘labour’ has more often been used by anthropologists influenced by the writings of Karl Marx who interrogate work through the lens of labour exploitation and class struggle.

The anthropology of work and labour as an organised subdiscipline can be traced from the late 1970s, with themed publications (e.g. Burawoy 1979a; Nash and Fernandez Kelly 1983; Wallman 1979), and the founding of the Society for the Anthropology of Work in 1980, which publishes the Anthropology of Work Review. Interest in work and labour waned through the 1990s and early 2000s, as part of a ‘postmodern turn’ in anthropology which distanced itself from Marxian concepts such as labour, class, and capitalism. However, there has been a resurgence in recent years. In 2018, the European Association of Social Anthropologists (EASA) ‘Anthropology of Labour Network’ was established, and since then there has been a proliferation of publications on work and labour (e.g. Graeber 2018; Harvey and Krohn-Hansen 2018; Kasmir and Gill 2022; Lazar 2023).

This overview approaches the anthropology of work and labour by tracing how it has responded to shifting political and economic contexts and disciplinary concerns. The entry first examines how anthropologists have situated work within a comparative study of different cultures and societies. It then discusses how the division of labour is a useful comparative frame to understand how different forms of work are allocated and valorised differently across sociocultural contexts. Subsequent sections discuss how ethnographic studies have elucidated the expansion of capitalism, its uneven effects, and on-going transformations. These sections highlight that the anthropology of work can reveal the often-neglected lived experiences of people on the frontiers and margins of capitalism. The entry then explores how industrialisation gave rise to profound global shifts in forms of work and labour relations, but also wrought vast socioeconomic consequences. It concludes with a discussion of renewed interest in the on-going transformations, meanings, and values of work in contemporary life in the context of late capitalism.

Foundational approaches

Early anthropology tended to focus on questions of work and livelihood in what is often termed ‘preindustrial’ or ‘non-market’ societies. In the nineteenth century, anthropologists and ethnologists such as Lewis Henry Morgan and Herbert Spencer propounded theories of social evolution. They often focussed on technological developments as a way of classifying societies into stages and ranking them from a ‘primitive’ original state through to ‘civilised’ (read: white, European) societies. The emphasis was less on work as a social process and more on technological and material differences as evidence of social evolution.

The early twentieth century saw a shift away from this evolutionary emphasis on material technology, as well as conjectures about the origins of man, to a focus on empirical field research. Franz Boas developed the theory of Historical Particularism^[2] as a critique of social evolution theories. Bronislaw Malinowski (1925) also derided the emphasis on material culture of nineteenth-century ethnologists. Contrary to their assumptions he showed that labour in small-scale societies (deemed ‘primitive labour’ at the time) was neither unorganized nor lacking in sophistication. Malinowski argued instead that work should be understood as part of an integrated social system, regulated by gender, kinship, and ritual norms and roles. He was deeply interested in the question, ‘what motivates people to undergo often arduous unpleasant periods of labour?’ (1925, 927); a question he inherited from a long-standing German intellectual tradition (Hann 2021; Spittler 2008; Smith 2024). This interest would culminate in his two volume book Coral Gardens and their magic ([1935] 1965), which provided a detailed account of early 20th century Trobriand agricultural methods. The book continues to be influential, illustrating that even seemingly simple forms of agriculture do not follow automatically from peoples’ ecological conditions. Instead, it highlights that people’s work is deeply influenced by local politics and customs, as well as understandings of magic and kinship. Malinowski’s student, Audrey Richards, was also a key early figure in the anthropology of work, publishing two books on the subject. She initially theorised that ‘biological instincts’, especially hunger, were key drivers for work (1932; see 1939, viii). However, she would later overturn her ideas and argue that custom and institutions shape incentives to work, which in turn influence diet and appetite (1939).

Even when questions of work were not the main focus of ethnographies, they often described in great detail how a given society organised its social and material resources to meet its needs. This is true for ‘functionalist’ and ‘structural-functionalist’ works, i.e. works which ask how individuals and social institutions allow people to meet their needs, including how they maintain social cohesion. For instance, Edward Evans-Pritchard provided a detailed account of cattle-rearing practices among the Nuer in Sudan during the 1930s. He suggested that the Nuer’s social and political system at the time could only be understood in relation to their prevailing mode of livelihood, and relationship with their environment (1940, 4). The Nuer, Evans-Pritchard argued, depended on cattle for many of life’s necessities, and their love of cattle and desire to acquire them shaped not just their work, but also their relations with neighbouring peoples, their ritual lives, and their understandings of personhood.

The early twentieth century saw a theoretical shift from evolutionary to more comparative and relativist anthropological analyses. Yet, a lingering underlying assumption that societies could be ordered according to their predominant mode of livelihood persisted. It often implied a transition from hunter-gather or foraging societies, to farming and agriculture, and finally a ‘modern’ industrial society, based on waged employment. Proponents of cultural ecology and neo-evolutionary theories of culture in mid-century American anthropology offered materialist explanations for cultural change (e.g. Steward 1955; White 1943). They emphasised how labour and technology are applied to exploit a given environment. While neither of these theories survived the test of time intact, their materialism significantly influenced later generations of anthropologists who relied more explicitly on the work of Marx. Following Marx, these studies held that economic, material, and technological relations could determine how work was organized, and classified societies accordingly, for example into being pre-capitalist, feudal, capitalist or communist (Bruun and Wahlberg 2022).

The debates which animated early anthropological theorising about work and labour are on-going, and anthropologists continue to dispel the common assumption that modes of subsistence and division of labour can be ordered into progressive temporal stages. For instance, the proposition that technological developments led to less time spent on production would be challenged by the much-debated argument that hunter-gatherers were in fact more ‘time affluent’ than people of modern industrial societies (Sahlins’ ([1972] 1976; Bird-David 1982; Kaplan 2000). Anthropologists have also argued that there may be no universal trajectory from farm-based or otherwise ‘traditional’ livelihoods into a seemingly natural endpoint of salaried wage labour. They came to this conclusion by documenting the rise and importance of ‘informal’ and highly precarious jobs around the world over the past decades (Ferguson and Li 2018). In working with archaeologists, anthropologists have also shown that human freedom and creativity may be the governing features of socio-cultural change, rather than access to land and calories (e.g. Graeber and Wengrow 2021). Recent publications continue to emphasise anthropology’s potential for highlighting and critiquing the frequently Eurocentric and teleological narratives of progress and development.

While anthropology has successfully challenged many grand but often stereotypical narratives, such as the assumption that hunter gatherers are locked into a primordial ‘struggle for existence’, anthropologist David Graeber and archaeologist David Wengrow (2021, 136-7) warn us that we must take care not to present a romanticised visions of small scale societies instead. Doing so would equally risk obscuring the wide variety of social structures and livelihoods that human groups such as different foraging societies have chosen. Graeber and Wengrow also suggest that the grand narratives shaped by social evolution theories often serve to present social inequality as natural, or as an inevitable consequence of the transition from foraging to agriculture. They counter that such theories were actually developed as a conservative response to Indigenous critiques of European ‘civilisation’ and inequality (2021, 5, 61).

Division of labour

The concept of ‘division of labour’ is salient across economics, sociology, and anthropology. It is also central to debates around egalitarianism and the origins of social inequalities. In anthropology, important discussions around the division of labour include whether there is a ‘naturalness’ to gender roles, how social cohesion is achieved and if conflict can be avoided, and whether capitalism builds on or supplants prior economic formations, such as processes of racialisation and class formation.

Recurring features of the division of labour include that different tasks are primarily done by one gender, and that women often do work that can be more easily combined with childcare. This idea initially appeared to anthropologists to be one of several cross-cultural universals (e.g. Murdock and Provost 1973; Whyte 1978). However, early analyses of gendered divisions of labour have been criticised for overgeneralising and naturalising social stereotypes (e.g. Anderson et al 2023; Estioko-Griffin and Griffin 1981; Slocum 1975). Moreover, feminist anthropologists have pointed out how important women’s domestic work has been to the economy, but how little public value it has been given historically (Ortiz 1994). The gendered division of labour should therefore be treated not so much as a technical allocation but as a form of social and political organisation, which ascribes differing power, prestige, and cultural appropriateness to tasks and products. Arguably, this is also true of the specialisation and allocation of roles according to criteria other than gender, including age, religious or social status, ethnicity, or caste (Wallman 1979, 14-5; e.g. Firth 1939; Parry 1980).

In the early twentieth century, many anthropologists tended to see ‘tribal’ or ‘peasant’ societies as relatively homogenous, and the limited division of labour as allocation of complementary roles that contributed towards social cohesion. This resonated with the emphasis by sociologist Emile Durkheim, that a division of labour was conducive to social solidarity. By contrast, especially in the 1970s and 1980s, anthropologists increasingly employed Marxian analyses that emphasised inequality and conflict between those that control the means of production and those that perform the bulk of the labour. A number of analyses have suggested that where capitalist relations of production are not dominant, there is less separation between production and reproduction and between the use-value of goods and their exchange-value, and therefore also less alienation among workers (Taussig 1977; Wallman 1979). For example, among Aymara speaking peasants studied in the Andean Highlands of Bolivia in the 1970s, festive work parties known as chuqu were important ways of organizing agricultural work. Such parties complete with delicious meals, drink and music minimized alienation. Instead, they enabled different households to help each other, and to affirm personhood and the power of community relations (Harris 2007).

However, some anthropologists have also applied Marxian analyses to the gendered division of labour in non-capitalist contexts. Several of them argued that around the world, women tend to do the bulk of productive labour, but men appropriate much of their product for their own profit (e.g. Josephides 1985; Meillassoux 1981). Others cautioned against imposing Marxian frameworks and categories on all societies to analyse gender relations as if they were class based (e.g. Sillitoe 1985). For example, anthropologist Marilyn Strathern (1988, 140) suggested that Marxian (and liberal) analyses were based on Eurocentric ‘proprietorial’ understandings of labour, assuming that labour could be owned and alienated like a commodity. Such assumptions, Strathern argued, did not apply to the Melanesian understandings of work and gender relations that she was familiar with. In Mount Hagen, the Western Highlands province of Papua New Guinea, artifacts of manufacture did not conceal human relations, as Marx had argued. Instead, they made relations visible, thereby limiting the usefulness of Marxian interpretations in contexts where capitalism is not dominant.

In the same period, feminist anthropologists revisited questions of the gendered division of labour and women’s social status under capitalism, frustrated that much prevailing theory was premised on the male, waged industrial worker (Brodkin 1998; Leacock 1986). Some studies focused on how the division of labour changed, especially with respect to gender roles, when rural societies became engaged in commodity production or labour migration (e.g. Guyer 1980; Strathern 1982). While anthropologists often highlighted the role of women’s work in the domain of reproduction, some have pointed to how this separation between production and reproduction can be compounded under capitalism, with women especially taking on unwaged domestic labour. But since the 1980s, more studies have focused on how women have been drawn into the workforce, often to perform highly gendered and feminised forms of labour, such as in garment and electronics factories (e.g. Ong 1987; Lynch 2019), tea-picking (e.g. Chatterjee 2001; Jegathesan 2019), and ‘pink-collar’ office work (Freeman 2000). Often, such studies have found that women’s work is systematically devalued in the process.

Under capitalism, production regimes are based on, exploit, and exacerbate forms of social inequalities and differences, not just of gender, but also of race, age, ethnicity, citizenship status, class, as well as differences between people living in the capitalist core compared to those in its periphery (Kasmir and Gill 2022, Mullings 1986). This has long been recognised by anthropologists, who have been interested in how low-status migrants can be treated as surplus populations or cheap, disposable labour reserves (e.g. Richards 1939, 23; Barber and Lem 2018; Meillassoux 1972). With increasing globalisation, such transformations became understood in a world historical context as a shifting ‘international division of labour’. Within it, young women in developing countries play a fundamental role (Nash and Fernandez-Kelly 1983). They are the labour force that drives the integration of global production, consumption and waste disposal processes, as they often constitute the lowest paid segment of those countries that pay the lowest wages.

More recently, anthropologists have highlighted the emergence of a global ‘division of reproductive labour’, in which care work, including childcare and nursing, and domestic labour are increasingly disproportionately carried out by racialised or migrant women (Parreñas 2012; e.g. Amrith 2010; Barber and Bryan 2012; Gutierrez Garza 2019). The delegation of feminised care and domestic work can be understood within the context of wider socioeconomic shifts. Given that more middle-class women have entered full-time employment, they require cheap labour to take on gendered household and caring work. For Nicole Constable (2009), the rise in migrant care and domestic work is part of a wider ‘commodification of intimacy’ under globalised capitalism. This draws a relationship between, the commodification of domestic work, and the burgeoning demand for other forms of typically feminised, and transnational labour including sex work and surrogacy.

Frontiers and margins of capitalism

Especially after World War II, it became increasingly difficult for anthropologists to justify studies which focused mostly on ‘tribal’ and ‘traditional’ rural societies, treating them as discrete and isolated from wider global political and economic forces. On the other hand, anthropologists’ historic interest in peripheral and marginalised peoples have improved our understanding of forms of work and labour that prevail outside of metropolitan and industrialised centres of capital. They have shown how uneven global processes of extraction, dispossession, and exploitation really are. In particular, anthropology has contributed much to understanding capitalism from the perspective of the ‘frontier’. It has attended to the displacement and dispossession of local people, often Indigenous people, ‘peasants’ or smallholders, as they get caught up in the process of capitalism’s drive for expansion and accumulation through the appropriation of resources, land, and labour.

The increasing incorporation of many ‘tribal’ and ‘peasant’ societies into commodity production and labour regimes required anthropologists to take the impacts of wider political economy into account. While Malinowski’s ethnographies obscured the impact of labour migration and commodity production in the Trobriands, his students including Audrey Richards (1939) and Isaac Schapera (1947) foregrounded such impacts in their studies of rural African societies, sharing findings with colonial administrators. Thus, Richards documented how intermittent job opportunities in mines affected Bemba family dynamics in 1930s Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia. Whenever young men took up mining jobs, their fathers-in-law tended to assume more dominant roles in the lives of their married daughters and grandchildren. At the same time, those who remained behind and did not work in the mine had to share a greater amount of agricultural work among one another (Richards 1939, 134). In the 1950s, the more critical ‘Manchester School of Social Anthropology’ shifted the focus from concerns of breakdown in tradition to new urban and class identity formation in African towns and mining sites, particularly in the Central African Copperbelt. They documented how European ways of life were soon considered prestigious and desirable by local populations (Mitchell and Epstein 1959). However, anthropologists, including Mitchell and Epstein were later critiqued for underplaying the degree to which colonialism imposed white domination and violence on Africans, not just economically, but also politically and culturally (Magubane 1971).

From the mid-twentieth century, and especially the 1970s, the expansion of capitalism into areas previously deemed tribal, subsistence, and peasant economies led to a new interest in how different modes of production intersect. The 1968 protests which included civil rights and anti-war movements, as well as anti-colonial and peasant political movements and revolutions more broadly, incited critical perspectives on colonialism and imperialism (Cooper 1984; Rio and Bertelsen 2018). French structural Marxists pioneered inquiries into how colonial labour regimes thrived when linking with kinship-based modes of production, obtaining cheap labour without incurring the costs of social reproduction (e.g. Meillassoux 1972). Other anthropologists revisited the ‘agrarian question’: i.e. what happens to farming and peasant economies with the expansion of capitalism on land and labour frontiers, including the extent to which they are proletarianised, and how they resist these transformations. This period also saw much cross-fertilisation of ideas across disciplines including with History and Subaltern Studies, especially around questions of resistance and class formation (e.g. Hobsbawm 1959; Guha [1983] 1999; Scott 1976). Some applied a world historical lens to modes of production, examining how labour regimes in capitalism’s core and periphery are historically linked (Mintz 1978; Wolf 1982). This also allowed them to theorise about the role of slavery in the development of global capitalism. Mintz (1978: 95) for example, studied slavery in the Caribbean historically to show that thinking about work purely in terms of ‘modes of production’ does not capture its everyday meanings. It also obscures the multiple forms of resistance that slaves employed, and downplays the connections between different forms of labour in any given setting.

This period saw greater interest in previously neglected questions of slavery and unfree labour more generally, including a variety of bonded, forced, and trafficked labour (see Kopytoff 1982). Recent discussions of slavery and unfree labour have highlighted continuities and consequences in the twenty-first century including racialisation and racial capitalism (Pierre 2020; Ralph and Singhal 2019), and the ongoing prevalence of plantation regimes and bonded labour (Besky 2014; Chatterjee 2001; Jegathesan 2019; Li 2017). However, some have argued that we should not see unfree labour as a state of exception. Instead we may want to note how contemporary capitalism continues to depend on varieties of dehumanised, undercompensated, and coerced labour (Calvão 2016). This includes not only modern slavery, people trafficking (Howard and Forin 2019) and child labour (Berlan 2013), but also state-mandated labour migration programmes (Li 2017, Smith 2021), and even wage labour in its ideal form (Graeber 2006).

One reflection of anthropology’s historic interest in ‘othered’ and marginalised peoples has been that a significant portion of its research has been about ‘dirty work’, that is, work considered physically or socially polluting and stigmatising. Commonly, this includes work associated with death (Parry 1980), waste (Butt 2023; Millar 2018), and sex (Day 2007; Kelly 2008; Montgomery 2001; Shah 2014). This research problematizes ideas of exploitation and agency by attending to the complexities of how such work operates in various levels of legality, social stratification, commodification, and notions of respectability.

Various forms of production and labour regimes continue to exist, especially in the Global South, where so-called ‘free’ capitalist wage labour regimes are not the norm. Waged, let alone formalised, employment may be a widespread aspiration, but it remains out of reach for most people (Ferguson and Li 2018; e.g. Kauppinen 2021). Keith Hart (1973) proposed the influential concept of the ‘informal sector’ to describe self-organised work by the urban ‘sub-proletariat’ in Ghana, as an alternative or supplement to state-bureaucratised wage labour. Thinking of labour as being either formal or informal allows us to realize how scarce regular and non-precarious forms of work really are.

Anthropology’s long history of studying people on the peripheries of capitalism emerged in part from a division of labour between anthropology and sociology, with anthropology focusing on ‘traditional’ societies, leaving questions of bureaucracy and ‘professionals’ to sociologists. Laura Nader (1972) advised anthropologists interested in how power operates to turn their gaze towards those whose work it is to accrue and wield power. This call to ‘study up’ tellingly entailed new practical and ethical issues, often putting anthropologists in a position of weakness vis-à-vis their interlocutors. Recent decades have seen a burgeoning anthropological interest in elites and white-collar workers, which will be discussed in more detail in the final section.

Industrial labour

Industrial labour is defined as work performed with technology and production processes that emerged in Europe in the eighteenth century fuelled by colonial expansion. Industrialisation is associated with social changes and geographic shifts from rural regions to urban centres. It has resulted in vast and uneven socioeconomic change, environmental consequences, and led to the rise of management as a discipline. Anthropological attention to industrialisation highlights how workers at global and local levels have shaped and been shaped by state and market forces.

Early management studies shaped how anthropologists approached industrial organisations throughout the twentieth century (Harding 1955). Elton Mayo’s Human Relations theory stands out here (Holzberg and Giovanni 1981; Burawoy 1979a). Mayo studied worker productivity at the Hawthorne plant of the Chicago-based Western Electric company in 1927. Influenced by functionalist thinking, Mayo’s approach assumed that workers had an inherent need for emotional connection. It thereby emphasised psychological approaches to worker motivation. This had been neglected by Taylorist scientific management, which used ‘time and motion’ studies to rationalise tasks assigned to individuals as if they were machines. Later anthropologists would criticise Mayo and his followers for assuming harmony in the industrial workplace (Burawoy 1979a). On the one hand, this lack of attention to conflict mirrored the interest of structural-functionalist work in the creation of social cohesion. On the other hand, it may have partially reflected the political economic conditions in American and European industrial centres. From the interwar and postwar period until the 1970s, increased productivity through scientific management techniques and mass production was matched by rising wages and better incentives and conditions for workers. This arrangement, sometimes referred to as ‘Fordism’, was a phenomenon not much discussed by anthropologists at the time, although it was analysed by Antonio Gramsci as a form of corporate hegemony (Harvey 1989, 126).

From the 1970s, more scholars focussed on the conflict of interest between the managerial class and workers: how industrial modes of production disciplined and exploited workers, and the extent to which they acquiesced or resisted. Michael Burawoy’s (1979b) ethnography among Chicago factory workers showed how labourers may consent to their exploitation, impeding collective organisation and action. Within the ever-moving spheres of capital expansion and accumulation, anthropologists have revealed a multitude of ways people accommodate and resist industrialization processes. For instance, Aihwa Ong (1987) described how managerial discipline and control was subverted and resisted by Malay factory women. The women Ong studied were caught between often-conflicting demands of factory work and traditional gendered expectations and were under surveillance at work and in their communities. They resisted in subtle and dramatic ways, including becoming possessed by spirits in ‘hysterical’ episodes whilst at work, causing disruption to the capitalist logics of the factory.

While modernisation theories assumed that the relinquishing of tradition and the emulation of a Western individualism was a necessary prerequisite for industrialisation, most anthropologists argued against this ethnocentric teleology. By and large they held that it was best to analyse the historically and culturally specific conditions that accommodate different paths to industrialism (Holzberg and Giovannini 1981, 336-9). Contemporary analyses of industrial work continue to be enriched by attention to themes and insights that gained prominence in early ethnographies of ‘tribal’ and ‘peasant’ societies, such as kinship, religion, and gift exchange (Carrier 1992; Martin et al. 2021). Ethnographic writing shows how rituals, sacrifices, and other religious and magical practices can be seen as key to the success of an industrial endeavour, helping people make sense of danger and suffering (e.g. Bear 2018, Ong 1987; Taussig 1977). For instance, June Nash (1979) provided ethnographic insights into the lives of Bolivian tin miners during the 1970s, whose exploitation and dependency underpinned Latin American industrialization. Her study showed that in spite of suffering from great physical and economic hardship, miners were not alienated from their cultural roots, and had not lost their sense of self-worth as part of their work. That is because they made sense of their work by drawing on a mix of ideologies and cultural resources, including socialism and communism as well as Andean and Christian beliefs in deities operating above and below ground.

How industrialisation changes or is folded into local identity categories varies. In his research on a bicycle factory in West Bengal, Morton Klass (1996) found that despite management assuming that workers were a homogenous class, the latter used their caste identity to organise themselves and their labour. However, based upon thirty years of fieldwork in the steel town of Bhilai, Jonathan Parry (2020) argues that even in a hierarchically complex society like post-Independence India, class analysis—in this case between securely and insecurely employed labourers—is the most analytically salient way to understand differing life paths and chances. Other anthropologists have looked at how ethnic, religious, and racial tensions are stoked and mitigated in industrial settings (Sanchez 2016; Yelvington 1995). They have also provided significant insights into how processes of non-capitalist industrialisation, as well as the subsequent transition to post-socialism, were experienced in Eastern and Central Europe (e.g. Morris 2016; Rajković 2018). China’s remarkably rapid industrialisation process since 1978 has also been explored through ethnography, with a focus on the role of labour control and flexible supply chains in the context of the distinctive Chinese state-driven modernisation programme and transnational processes (e.g. Ong and Nonini 2003; Rofel 1999; Rofel and Yanagisako 2019).

Transformations of work under late capitalism

The past forty years have witnessed immense changes in work and the labour process, marked by flexibilisation, outsourcing, increasing use of information technologies, self-branding, and the severing of obligations between employers and employees. These shifts are related but not reducible to neoliberalism. This period has been termed ‘late capitalism’, to frame changes in both work and theoretical concerns. It has been a pivotal period for the anthropology of work and labour. Much of the research produced under and about late capitalism has clear echoes of earlier themes of how work is organised, including the growth of market logics and global inequality. However, it highlights how neoliberal policies, globalisation, and financialisation processes have increased precarity on a global scale, even encroaching on traditionally secure classes of work and workers. Working in precarious times has, in turn, led many to use the frames of ethics and affect to both analyse and interrogate the push towards self-cultivation and emotional management in the workplace. It has also led authors to question (neo)liberal assumptions regarding the necessity and value of work more generally.

Neoliberal policies and financialisation processes implemented in the 1980s ended a Fordist pact between labour, industry, and government in the Global North, in which rapidly rising corporate profits went hand in hand with rising living standards for most people in high-income countries (Harvey 1989). Increased computational capacity and accelerated neoliberal policies shifted the anthropological gaze towards how outsourcing and globalisation were being implemented and experienced unevenly between and within the Global North and South. Ethnographies of the Global South investigated how workers at various points along global value chains experienced intensified exploitative relationships with multinational organisations that needed raw materials and labour to implement the technologies of globalisation (e.g. Ong 1987; Ferguson 1999; Freeman 2000). Meanwhile, anthropologists of work in the Global North were exploring the aftermath of deindustrialisation (Doukas 2003; Mollona 2005; Nash 1989) and the growth of the high-tech industry. The latter facilitated globalisation and offered new but unevenly distributed opportunities to IT workers (Amrute 2016; Folz 2008; Hakken 2000; Xiang 2007).

Following the 2008 financial crisis, many anthropologists became interested in how such transformations were experienced in terms of rising uncertainty and precarity. The shift to more insecure, short-term work has occurred in conjunction with new technologies including artificial intelligence (AI) and platform-based work. Several recent studies have highlighted how the technologies may be new but are not as ‘smart’ as they may appear and in fact are dependent upon precarious workers engaged in unstable piece-rate work (Irani 2015; Gershon 2017; Gray and Suri 2019). Studies of gig workers shed light on the contextual nature of why workers resist or welcome the flexibility associated with precarious work. For example, a recent study of Argentinian taxi drivers fighting Uber’s destabilising encroachment (del Nido 2021) contrasts with that of Thai motorcycle taxi drivers who prefer the freedom offered by precarious, dangerous work over the constraints of factory jobs (Sopranzetti 2017). Precarity is increasingly a concern among professionals, including academics. Some anthropologists have turned their gaze inward to the labour process of producing academics and the marketisation of education, demonstrating how precarity can foster exploitative knowledge production (Gershon 2018; Platzer and Allison 2018).

More anthropologists answered Nader’s (1972) call to ‘study up’ with an increased interest in white-collar professionals. Since the 2000s, ethnographies have explored the working lives of investment bankers and traders (Ho 2009; Zaloom 2006), bureaucrats (Mathur 2016), and the ‘consultants’ who fill the gaps created by late capitalist organisational structures that are no longer premised on in-house expertise (Chong 2018; Stein 2017). In much of the world, attaining white-collar and professional employment is highly aspirational, with families mobilising resources and contacts in the hope of attaining economic security, social status, and upward mobility (e.g. Kauppinen 2021).

One fertile area of inquiry in recent decades has been where questions of labour intersect with the burgeoning interest in ethics and self-cultivation, affect, and hope. Anthropologists have shown how people incorporate work into their ethical and aspirational life-projects and cultivating their sense of self (e.g. Kauppinen 2021; Zaloom 2006). This can be seen as the continuation of established scholarly interest in motivations for and meanings of work, as exemplified in the work of Malinowski and his students. But a focus on labour can also offer a critical purchase on these themes, showing how ethical, emotional, and relational capacities can be harnessed to extend and legitimate neoliberal restructuring and flexible accumulation. Scholars have noted that neoliberalism encourages the formation of ‘entrepreneurial selves’ using personal development techniques and self-discipline (Freeman 2015; Mackovicky 2016). For example, the ‘personal branding’ industry exemplifies how individualisation and self-management are mobilised in response to an increasingly impersonal labour process (Gershon 2016).

Work often demands ‘affective’ or ‘emotional’ labour, in which often gendered capacities for care, affective and emotional management become commercialised and harnessed for profit (Hochschild 1983; Zaloom 2006). Workers as diverse as Mexican NGO staff and Indonesian steelworkers turn out to be moved by affect, and are constituted as neoliberal subjects in the process (Richard and Rudnyckyj 2009). Meanwhile, governments have increasingly abdicated the provision of public services to the private and the third sector, commanding affective labour in the form of voluntary work. For example, the Italian state sought to mobilise public feelings and post-Fordist desires for social belonging toward eliciting unremunerated voluntary work in the social service sector (Muehlebach 2011). Of course, feelings of exploitation and personal investment in work are not mutually exclusive. Instead a more nuanced understanding of feelings in the neoliberal context may be required, as people who yearn for meaning and connection can sometimes even find it in the midst of exploitative circumstances (Freeman 2020).

On the other hand, some have responded to the end of the Fordist pact, increasing precarity, and jobless growth by questioning assumptions about the value and necessity of work under late capitalism. Graeber (2018) famously argues that a significant portion of jobs done in the Global North, particularly white collar jobs that have proliferated in recent decades, are essentially pointless and contribute little to society. He sees the valorisation of such work as rooted in Protestant and capitalist ethics, which value work and suffering for its own sake. Combined with a neoclassical idea that pay is compensation for the disutility of work, this has resulted in the most socially valuable forms of work, such as nurses, teachers, and cleaners, often being the least remunerated. Meanwhile, ‘proper jobs’ promised to the Global South as a telos of economic development have failed to materialise (Ferguson 2015; Li 2018). Several scholars have thus proposed universal basic income as an alternative to a politics of premising economic citizenship and social incorporation on wage labour (Ferguson 2015; Li 2018). However, other ethnographic accounts show that there is a popular tendency across a variety of sociocultural contexts to predicate ideas of ‘deservingness’ on participation in labour (e.g. Fouksman 2020; Hann 2018). This suggests that the presence of a work ethic cannot be reduced to Protestant or (neo)liberal ideologies. Indeed, in some contexts, labour is seen as fundamental to the achievement of full, independent, adult personhood (Jiménez 2003; Martin et al. 2021).

Many of these issues associated with late capitalism were exacerbated by the covid-19 pandemic, which revealed the limitations inherent to flexible supply chains and labour arrangements and upended the lives of workers and consumers globally. The pandemic further disrupted assumptions about the necessity and valorisation of work by raising the question of what kinds of work and workers are ‘essential’ (Collins 2023). The simultaneous valorisation of and disregard for socially essential workers also brings into stark relief processes of flexibilisation, precarity, and individualized risk. The precariously employed were made more precarious as they were thrust into dangerous circumstances by stay at home and return to work orders (Garimella et al. 2021; Iskander 2020; Rath and Das Gupta 2022). It is important to note, however, that for workers accustomed to near-constant crises of one kind or another, such as small-scale miners in Ghana, the pandemic has been experienced as just one of many interruptions to their livelihood (Pijpers and Luning 2021). The pandemic also exposed the fragilities and limits of the state and late capitalism's reliance on civil society and the third sector (Lachowicz and Donaghey 2022). That so many people were moved to contribute additional care and reproductive labour, often without being remunerated, further highlights neoliberal logics, which elicit and exploit individualised ethical, emotional, and relational propensities, as well as capacities for self-discipline.

Conclusion

The anthropology of work and labour reveals the concreteness of how people make a living in the context of their immediate natural and social environments. It elucidates diverse perspectives on work from within and beyond capitalism. In particular, ethnographies show how social roles and identities everywhere are made meaningful through the labour process, and how they are valued differently through time and space. This entry has charted how anthropologists increasingly wrestled with the transformations wrought by colonialism and capitalist expansion often left out of earlier theoretical frameworks. However, insights drawn from the holistic frameworks of early ethnographic studies in small-scale societies continue to enrich contemporary accounts of work. Ethnographies conducted in the heart of industrial and commercial centres can capture the integration of production and social reproduction, and the perpetuation of kin-like, ritual, and gift-like social relations and practices where one might assume either alienation or self-maximisation. Ethnographic methods also reveal the contradictions in how paid and unpaid work can simultaneously elicit experiences and feelings of exploitation, alienation, discipline, and tedium, as well as forms of emotional and relational attachments, meaning, fulfilment, and creative expression.

To some extent the anthropology of work and labour maps onto broader theoretical developments in anthropology, as it can be divided into evolutionary, functionalist, Marxian, feminist, and ethical approaches. Yet, it also reveals how these theoretical ‘turns’ themselves reflect and respond to broader political economic transformations. The anthropology of work and labour is particularly susceptible to such societal shifts, as it focuses on how people everywhere are interconnected, and how modes of livelihood are themselves the outcome of global historical processes. An anthropological understanding of work and labour therefore sharpens our understanding of emerging questions surrounding the future of work. It teaches us how we may respond to rapid technological transformations, political and economic uncertainties, conflicts and resource competition, as well as pandemics and climate change.

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Note on contributors

Jasmine Folz is a Research Associate in the Human Computer Systems group at the University of Manchester. Her research deals with the political, economic, and social aspects of high-tech workers generally and the Free and Open Source Software community in particular. She has conducted fieldwork in the United States and India.

Dr. Jasmine Folz, Department of Computer Science, Kilburn Building, Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL, United Kingdom. jasmine.folz@manchester.ac.uk

Rachel E. Smith is a Lecturer in Anthropology at University of Aberdeen. Her doctoral research focused on the local perspectives on work, development, and social change in a rural Vanuatu community with a high degree of engagement in New Zealand’s seasonal labour mobility programme. More recently, she has looked at the production and export of kava, a crop traditionally grown and consumed across the Pacific.

Dr. Rachel Smith, Department of Anthropology, Edward Wright Building, Aberdeen AB24 3RX, United Kingdom. rachel.smith1@abdn.ac.uk

[1] The degree to which work and labour is uniquely human has been long contested. Marx defined labour as distinctly human because although a bee may construct a hive that puts a human architect to shame, only the human architect can imagine the end product and thus their work is borne of conscious purpose (1992, 284). By contrast, Lewis Henry Morgan (1868, viii) saw in a beaver’s dam communicative labours that were “suggestive of human industry”. Timothy Ingold (1983) rejects Marx’s distinction between animal instinct and human work, arguing that if humans are both objectively part of the physical world and subjective agents, so too are at least some nonhuman animals, whose labour must be acknowledged as such. Others argue that what makes humans unique is not that they work but that their ability to expend and harness more energy than other animals allows more time for leisure necessary for developing our unique sociocultural lives (Kraft et al. 2021). Certainly, many anthropologists have focussed on human-animal relationships as central to discussions of livelihood (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1940; Fijn 2011; Blanchette 2020) and recent anthropological interest in multispecies relations has some revisiting Marx to ask, can (nonhuman) animals, and ‘nature’ more generally, be exploited? (e.g., Beldo 2017; Besky and Blanchette 2019; Hurn 2017).

[2] Historical particularism is the first American school of anthropological theory. Founded by Boas and popularised by his many students, it was developed in reaction to what Boas found to be an uncritical use of social evolutionary frameworks popular in the late 19th century. Historical particularism was premised on the belief that cultural differences and similarities had to be understood within the contexts of unique environmental, psychological, and historical conditions. It introduced the concept of cultural relativism, and the four field approach that combines cultural anthropology with archaeology, linguistics and physical anthropology and that still predominates in many American anthropology departments (McGee & Warms 2000: 131).

Editor:

Riddhi Bhandari

Haitian Vodou

Rebecca Tishler — Tue, 05 Apr 2022 08:03:32 +0000

Laënnec Hurbon

French National Centre for Scientific Research, and State University of Haiti

Initially published 5 Apr 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22haitianvodou

Abstract:

Haitian Vodou first took shape in the context of slavery. Once the religion of the royal family in Dahomey, in West Africa, it was then transformed by the slaves of the island of Haiti as a way of restoring a sense of identity and as a force of liberation. This explains the highly significant role played by Vodou in the largest ever successful slave revolt in history and in the creation of an independent Haiti. Initially, anthropology, based on an evolutionary perspective, regarded Vodou as the manifestation of a primitive and barbaric culture closely linked to magic and witchcraft, a view compatible with the European colonisation movement. As a result, Vodou was subjected to a number of waves of persecution by the Catholic clergy. However, over the course of the last decades, anthropology has demonstrated that the syncretism seen in Vodou, notably with its repurposing of the worship of Catholic saints, indicates the creation of a new culture that is capable of tolerance. Its pantheon and its rituals can be understood thanks to an anthropology based on theories of language and symbolic function. Anthropology also shows us that Haitian Vodou serves as a means of remembrance and that it forms part of the patrimony of humanity since the nineteenth century.

Introduction

With its worship of spiritual entities or divinities representing the different domains of nature (water, air, fire, etc.) and human activities (for example, sexuality, work, etc.), Vodou was first practiced in the countries of the Gulf of Guinea, namely Dahomey or present-day Benin, Nigeria, Togo, Guinea, and Ghana. In this area, society was, up until the eighteenth century, largely organised around families, lineages, villages, or ethnic groups. Each of these had their own divinities, referred to as Vodoun, which, in the Fon language in Dahomey, represented an invisible force, capable of manifesting itself in the bodies of certain individuals through trance and possession. Tensions and, in certain cases, wars between ethnic groups favoured a certain mingling on a religious level and some divinities successfully transferred from one ethnic group to another. Particularly in Dahomey, during the eighteenth century, these religions became centralised and were consequently placed under the domination of the royal family.

With the advent of the slave trade (that is to say, the trading of African people) and of slavery which began in the first decades of the sixteenth century, and which intensified partly as a result of the establishment of the French West India Company in 1664, millions of Africans would be deported to the Americas, taking their divinities with them. This led to the emergence of religions such as Candoblé in Brazil, Santeria in Cuba, and Vodou in Saint-Domingue, the French colony which would become the independent state of Haiti in 1804 and then, in 1821, would be divided into Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Understanding Vodou means first of all focusing on the transformations it underwent as a result of the experiences of Africans originating from many different ethnic groups, who were eager at a very early stage to establish the conditions for their freedom from slavery. Anthropological research will always be haunted, or at the very least intrigued, by the astonishing effort made by the slaves who managed to produce a new religious and cultural system which integrated at one and the same time elements handed down from the various ethnic groups now living together in the same area, those imposed by the institution of slavery, and those handed down from the Amerindians. This intercultural mix of very heterogeneous elements seems to encapsulate the unique nature of Vodou.

Anthropologists often distinguish between two stages in the formation of Vodou in Haiti. The first of these occurred during the period of slavery in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and the second began with the independence of Haiti in 1804 and has continued up to the present day, taking on new forms in a changing political context. By examining the Vodou pantheon and its rituals, this entry will focus its anthropological investigation on the significance of Vodou divinities on individual and collective life. In spite of the prejudices rooted in an anthropology originally based on the opposition between ‘barbarians’ and ‘civilised’ individuals, Vodou will be turn out to be a source for creating a new culture, a place of memory and part of humanity’s universal heritage.

Slavery and the development of Vodou

The living conditions in which the slave trade and slavery had plunged Africans in the Americas made it difficult, if not impossible, to maintain the religious and cultural inheritance of the ethnic groups from which they had originated. Slaves were effectively separated from their families and their lineage and were considered as personal property, and slavery was offered to them, according to most missionaries, as an opportunity to obtain access to the condition of true human beings. Thus, for example, the French Blackfriar Father Jean-Baptiste Dutertre was able to assert that ‘their bondage [was] the principle of their happiness’ and that ‘their disgrace [was] the cause of their salvation’ (1666, 35). At that time, Africa was regarded as a continent peopled by savages and barbarians and afflicted by what was then referred to as ‘the curse of Ham’, a legend based on the Biblical story of Canaan and his sons, and in particular Ham who was declared ‘cursed’ and destined for slavery. The same legend attributed black skin to Ham, and would be used, from the seventeenth century onwards, notably in Holland in 1666, as justification for the trade in and enslavement of Africans.

Conversion to Christianity would therefore lead to the gradual cultural assimilation of the African slave. Emerging in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, anthropology (see Duchet 1971) was dominated by an evolutionary perspective which saw Europe as the pinnacle of humanity, in contrast with Africa which was considered to be at the lowest point of the hierarchy.

The publication of the Code noir (‘Black code’) by French king Louis XIV in 1685 sought to legitimise the practice of slavery after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes. Enacted in 1598, the latter effectively brought an end to the wars of religion in Europe by establishing civil and religious peace. By revoking the Edict, Louis XIV made it possible to include in the preamble to the Code noir intolerance towards Protestantism and Judaism and an order to baptise and instruct slaves in the Catholic religion. Article 2 of the Code noir stipulates: ‘All the slaves that shall be in our islands shall be baptised and instructed in the Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith.’ Article 3 states: ‘We forbid any public exercise of religion other than the Roman, Catholic, and Apostolic Faith…’ (Sala-Molins 1987). This was a reference to both Protestant and Jewish religions. But as far as African religious practices were concerned, these were deemed non-existent: the Code noir regards them as supposedly ‘seditious’ practices, and as a result, any gathering of slaves was strictly forbidden.

It is important to emphasise the exceptionally harsh working conditions endured by slaves on plantations and in homesteads. Slavery resulted in an increase in wealth for France in Saint-Domingue, but also for the whole of Europe which, between the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, deported between twelve and fifteen million African slaves for the production of sugar cane, cotton, coffee, indigo, and cocoa (see, for example, the demographic data in Coquery-Vidrovitch and Mesnard 2013, 122). In Saint Domingue, slaves worked from morning until night under the strict supervision of slave masters armed with whips. In theory, masters resorted to a strategy which prevented slaves from finding themselves reunited with other members of the same ethnic group, since it was considered essential to use any possible means to ensure slaves were kept in a situation of total subjugation to the power of their masters. In practical terms, a slave was considered to have neither ancestors nor descendants. This is why certain sociologists speak, with good reason, of ‘social death’ to describe the total depersonalisation masters sought to impose on their slaves (Patterson 1982). These working conditions, similar to those within a concentration camp, would end up driving the slaves to look for ways to restore their lost identity, by weaving a new social fabric which would unite them in the struggle for liberation.

The cult of the dead in the development of Vodou

For the slaves, the cult of the dead was not only a link to African religious and cultural traditions. It also represented the foundation of new practices and perceptions which the slaves would introduce in their own way, as a result of the subjugation imposed on them by the institution of slavery. The cult of the dead was not just an African heritage but was also overlaid with a new significance. If the slave trade is a process of deportation that tore the individual away from his or her family, lineage, and clan, it is only to be expected that when a slave dies, every possible step must be taken in order to enable the restoration of links with the native land. Slave funerals in the colony involved rituals which were designed to re-establish contact between the dead slave and his or her ancestors. Such rituals sought out the divinities responsible for protecting lineage and ethnic groups. The religious and cultural heritage of Africa was gradually restored through this semantic chain, which represented the link between the dead person and his or her ancestors and their divinities. Many commentators and historians point out that the slaves believed they would return to Africa after their death and sometimes those who took their own lives expressed their hope of returning home by doing so.

In addition to burial, two other significant moments in the development of Vodou stand out. Slaves were allocated Sunday evenings as leisure time and these evenings provided them with the opportunity to organise dances, known as calendas. These dances enabled the slaves to revisit some of their African traditions, far from the gaze of the slave masters. The second key moment is what is referred to as marronage (Fouchard [1972] 1988): the process by which slaves fled into remote mountain regions where they were sometimes able to meet up with members of their ethnic groups but, in any case, could organise a life of freedom. Marronage has been the subject of a great many studies and is recognised as the expression of the desire for freedom and, therefore, as an unmistakable expression of protest against the condition of slavery (see for example Fouchard 1962 and Fick 2017).

The plantation masters in Saint-Domingue greatly feared marronage, and imposed severe punishments for it. But they had enormous difficulty finding out what was being plotted in the cultural and religious practices of the slaves, given that the latter demonstrated, for example, a sincere devotion to prayers, mass, and the worship of saints and of the Virgin Mary in churches and were eager to take part in religious processions. Chromolithographs representing the saints decorated the Catholic churches that the slaves were obliged to attend. These images provided the slaves with details that enabled them to keep depictions of African divinities alive. Hence the syncretism which, at first sight, still marks out Haitian Vodou, as it does Brazilian Candomblé and Cuban Santeria.

Vodou and the slave rebellion of 1791

From the beginning of the second half of the eighteenth century onwards, many religious readers from both Catholic churches and from marronage communities began calling for revolt, drawing on the support of large numbers of slaves. These leaders included Padre Jean who, in 1786, gave his name to a Vodou ritual known as Petro, and Colas Jambes Coupées, a maroon (i.e. a former slave who lived in freedom) who was regarded as a sorcerer and who encouraged slaves to abolish the colony. Of great importance was the famous Makandal who, as early as 1751, had prophesied the death of whites and the end of slavery. Makandal was suspected of being a specialist in recipes for poisons and magic potions and his name remains associated with the witchcraft practices and beliefs called makanda. Arrested and sentenced to be burnt alive, it was said throughout the colony that Makandal managed to escape the flames by transforming himself into a lizard. Recent research refers to a ‘Makandal site’ (Midy 2003) associated with the Haitian Revolution, since it was from the settlement named Normand LeMézy in the north of the country where he operated that the idea of a general slave revolt gradually began to spread. It is important to focus our attention on this key event in the history of Vodou, which will always be linked to the process of the anti-slavery revolution which in turn gave birth to the Haitian nation (see Fick 2014).

On the 14^th of August 1791 near Morne-Rouge, in a place called Bois-Caïman, around 200 slaves, commanders, coachmen, domestic slaves, and representatives of various sugar production workshops gathered for a Vodou ceremony organised under the leadership of Dutty Boukmann, a slave in a plantation in the north-east of the country and a Vodou priest (houngan). According to early accounts, available thanks to the writings of surgeon Antoine Dalmas who was present at the ceremony (1814), the participants sacrificed a pig to African divinities and swore to bring slavery to an end and to launch a general insurrection. They drank the blood of the sacrificed animal and pledged to keep the future rebellion a secret. Also officiating at the ceremony was a woman by the name of Cécile Fatima. Certain historians (Geggus 2002) provide a dramatised version of the ceremony, describing it as taking place during a stormy night. One week later, in the night of the 22^nd to 23^rd of August, the revolt broke out: all the sugar and coffee plantations, along with the workshops of Saint-Domingue, were burnt down over a wide area. Catholics were also involved in this revolution. They include a maroon known as Romaine the Prophetess who declared herself to be the goddaughter of the Virgin Mary from whom she received messages telling her to free 4000 blacks and mulattos from slavery.

The outcome of the rebellion was disastrous for the colony, with many hundreds (perhaps even as many as a thousand) colonisers being killed, and 1,200 coffee plantations and 161 sugar plantations destroyed by fire. The French government estimated the losses at 600 million pounds (Cauna 1987, 212).

Saint-Domingue at this date was a powder keg, with 500,000 slaves—many of whom had escaped and were living as maroons in camps in the mountains. There were also 40,000 emancipated mulattos and blacks and 30,000 whites, the latter divided into ‘poor whites’ (petits blancs: craftsmen, traders/merchants, sailors, and soldiers) and ‘the white elite’ (grands blancs: planters and administrators). The Code noir of 1685 had for decades controlled relationships between these groups on the basis of a strict racial hierarchy which went from whites, through mulattos, to blacks. As soon as news of the French revolution arrived in Saint-Domingue, all social and racial groups were galvanised into action. Nine years after the Haitian Revolution, in 1882, Napoleon attempted to reinstate slavery. His attempts to do so led to a war in Haiti, with 40,000 men sent out from France, that ended with Haiti’s independence. It is highly likely that secret Vodou societies were involved in this war.

Having established the historic roots and the historical importance of Vodou, we now turn our attention to the pantheon of this religion and the rituals associated with it. We shall then examine how anthropology accounts for this system of beliefs and practices.

The Vodou pantheon and its rituals

In Africa (notably in Benin and Nigeria), three types of Vodou can be identified: one associated with family or lineage (hennu-vodu), one with the village (to-vodu), and one with ethnic groups (ado-vodo). The divinities are divided into celestial groups (Mawu-Lisa being responsible for day and night, while Gu is in charge of organising the universe); then in terrestrial groups (wih Agwe or Agbe for the sea and the waters, or Sogbo for the rain) and finally in groups of divinities representing the storm (such as Ogou-Badagri, master of the thunder). In the case of Saint-Domingue/Haiti, the African divinities (called lwa, spirit, or mistè) are divided into the rada divinities (representing the Fon and the Yoruba people) and the Congo and Petro divinities (for the Bantu and Creole people, respectively). They represent a transformation of ethnic groups into families of divinities (called nanchon, or nations) and constitute a genuine pantheon. God is recognised as the ‘great master’ (Granmet) who leaves to the lwa, the secondary divinities, the task of dealing with earthly matters. Divinities therefore mediate between humans and their world. They represent an imaginary and symbolic field that serves as the foundation of social relations, and enables the mutual recognition between slaves and their solidarity during revolts.

The value of one lwa in the pantheon is a little like that of a word in a language: its value changes and can only be understood in a relationship of contradiction and of complementarity with the other lwa, and therefore with the entire family of divinities. So, for example, Legba, the ‘leader’ of the lwa, opens the gate separating humans from the world of the lwa. Represented by Saint Peter, he is also the guardian of temples (called ounfor) and of dwellings, and is invoked at the beginning of each Vodou ceremony. Legba is also ‘master of the crossroads’, places that are associated with danger but that are also home to objects known as wanga, which can protect against evil spirits and allow their owners to bewitch others. Amongst the important lwa is also Ogou, represented by Saint James the Great, as a warrior. His favourite colour is red and he is associated with fire, but he stays in contact with water where he is reunited with the lwa Ezili, the flirtatious and sensuous woman represented by the Virgin Mary, who is his mistress. Ogou is also the cousin of Zaka, lwa of agriculture, whose adoptive son is Brave Gédé, spirit of the dead and of cemeteries. Many of these lwa are associated with the Rada subsection of Vodou, but in Congo and Petro subsections of Vodou these spirits can also be present. So, for example, the Lwa rada, known as the twins (or marassas), are reputed to be fearsome (Heusch 2000).

**The Vodou temples (ounfor)**

The lwa are regularly honoured in ounfor, which are the Vodou temples where ceremonies take place. It would appear that ounfor were built all over Haiti after independence in 1804. In charge of the ounfor is an ounfan, who is the owner of the temple. A woman priest can also be the owner of an ounfor and is called a manbo. At the entrance of an ounfor there is often a tree, the calabash, which is the residence of lwa Legba.

The decorations of the ounfor, which consist of images of Catholic saints, might seem misleading as in reality these represent the lwa most often honoured there. Such images are housed in chambers (kay-mistè) in which are placed their favourite foods and their symbolic objects, mostly during ceremonies. The lwa Ezili, who is represented by a flirtatious woman, will, for example, receive a mirror. The ceremonies, which consist of dances and songs in honour of the lwa, take place in a large room called the péristil. In the middle of the péristil, acting as a connecting link between the earthly and the celestial worlds, stands a pillar called the poto-mitan, often decorated with two snakes (Dambala-Wedo and his wife, Ayida Wedo, joined together like fire and water). Divinities from mythical Africa pass through the poto-mitan after an epic journey under the waters of the Atlantic to be reunited with their servants in the temple. Around the poto-mitan stand the oungan or the manbo, the ‘chanterelle queen’ who directs the dances and songs, the initiated or ounsi ready to sing and to dance, and the other participants (pitit kay) who are welcomed as members of the fraternity (see below). Opposite them is an orchestra composed of three drums which are used as sacred instruments and play the tunes associated with the lwa in order to facilitate trances and possession. At the start of each ceremony, geometric patterns (vèvès) representing the lwa are drawn on the floor with coffee or flour, and these help to incite states of trance. Emblems of the lwas are placed on a table resembling an altar: food dishes and various objects such as bottles containing the souls of the dead placed under the protection of the lwa.

The major places of Vodou worship in Haiti include the temples of Souvenance and Soukri, both close to the port-city of Gonaïves. Each year, at Easter and in August, thousands of visitors and practitioners, including the Haitian diaspora, gather there to celebrate. In fact, throughout the year, celebrations marking the patron saints also attract Vodou practitioners who readily transform these into occasions of Vodou pilgrimage. For example, on the 16^th of July, the feast of the Saut d’Eau, dedicated to Our Lady of Mount Carmel, attracts many tens of thousands of pilgrims to a famous waterfall surrounded by trees believed to house Vodou divinities. Often the pilgrims also attend the local church, and display the same levels of enthusiasm and devotion as at the site of the famous waterfall.

What is the nature of the lwa, and what are their demands? In themselves they are neither good nor bad since their impact on our lives depends on how we follow their rules. Together, the lwa are part of a hierarchical system, and those who take precedence over others need to be honoured more lavishly.

**Honouring the lwa (Vodou rituals)**

How should the lwa be honoured, and what do they represent today in people’s individual and collective lives? An individual generally receives one or two lwa as part of his or her family heritage. These are referred to as the lwa-rasin, or ‘root-lwa’: some Haitian families have, tucked away somewhere out of sight in their room, a small alter called wogatwa on which is placed the image of a saint which is indeed the inherited lwa who they worship on a regular basis. On a collective level, there are fraternities to which individuals belong within an ounfor. People attend or actively participate in ceremonies which follow the Catholic liturgical calendar. On Christmas night, they ask for favours of the lwa; on the 6^th of January, the Feast of Kings is the occasion for a ceremony bringing together a number of families, and on the 1st and 2^nd of November, the festival of the dead gives rise to festivities worthy of a national holiday which take place in cemeteries (Metraux 1958, 216ss). Throughout the year, oungan and manbo are consulted and act as official interpreters for the language of the Vodou divinities in order to guide individuals in their daily lives.

To obtain the favours of the lwa, offerings must be made to them on a regular basis. These can involve pouring water on to the ground (jétédlo) in order to give the lwa a drink, an opening gesture in ceremonies. Animals (poultry, goats, or bulls) are sacrificed in order to provide food for the lwa (manger-lwa). Of course, each ritual must be strictly applied so as to avoid the risk of provoking the anger of the ‘spirits’. A ceremony generally culminates in one or more participants becoming possessed, a phenomenon which, for Vodou practitioners, means taking the form of a lwa, allowing oneself to be possessed by it (a process described as ‘overlapping’ with the lwa), by falling into a trance. At the first signs of such a trance, the Vodou practitioners present prepare to welcome the lwa and offer the objects and symbols associated with that lwa. Such an epiphany of a lwa is sign of a successful ceremony.

Certain Vodou practitioners go further than the traditional relationships they have with the lwa in the context of their family or fraternity. They may have a deeper relationship with a particular lwa. Normally it is the lwa who is believed to select the individual in question. In this way, a ‘mystical marriage’ with a lwa can take place, either as a result of a dream, an illness, an accident, or repeated failures in matters of everyday life. This ceremony takes the form of an ordinary marriage with a blessing of rings in the presence of witnesses. The lwa gives his or her agreement to the marriage through a dream or by taking possession of the mind of a participant. These mystical marriages are a way of transmitting the legacy of lwa since it is thanks to a godfather (or a godmother) who has already experienced an initiation that this transmission can take place, the newly married individual then becoming a godchild. He or she must set aside certain days of the week to make offerings to the lwa and must accept sexual abstinence.

Sometimes certain Vodou practitioners seek to buy lwa whom they have not inherited from an oungan or a boko, in order to acquire additional protection or to cast spells on potential enemies. There are, however, risks associated with this, since a lwa can in return make demands which are difficult to honour.

Initiation is a ritual which takes place after several days (or weeks) of seclusion in an ounfor. The individual who has been chosen by a lwa cannot easily escape that fate. But he or she can choose to become an initiated person (ounsi) which means being able to live the rest of his life with the lwa attached to his head like a permanent protection. The initiation period corresponds in fact to the time needed for the individual to become familiar with the customs of the lwa, the healing leaves and plants, the dishes; in short, all the objects linked to this particular lwa. A solemn ceremony marks the moment when the initiated person emerges, accompanied by their godfather and godmother. When they die, the initiated must undergo a ritual of separation (desounen) from the lwa, to allow him or her to peacefully depart from the world of the living. A long initiation period is also required for a Vodou priest to become an official interpreter of the lwa, a role usually passed down through families. Vodou secret societies can also be included in the context of initiation practises. These societies are part of the West African heritage and are referred to by names such as Chanpwel, Zobop, and Bizango, and they meet only at night. They operate under a strict hierarchy under the command of an oungan who takes the title of emperor. The aim of these societies is to defend Vodou and its temples, and they are often suspected of deploying the powers of witchcraft. As a result, they are regarded with fear. This association with witchcraft is widely used in Protestant preaching to convert Haitians from the lower classes to charismatic Protestantism (Hurbon 2001).

Advances in anthropology

Amongst the issues which have captured the attention of Vodou anthropology are the phenomena of possession, witchcraft, and syncretism. Possession was, until recently, thought to be associated with hysteria or a pathological phenomenon linked to psychiatry. This interpretation was based on the notion that convulsions or the loss of self-control were considered abnormal. It was not until the work undertaken by Claude Lévi-Strauss following Marcel Mauss, and inspired by new research in linguistics in the 1950s, that possession would come to be seen as a form of language. Moments of possession in a Vodou ceremony were seen as perfectly normal by members of the audience. Nobody would be upset by it, since what is normal must be understood according to the roles of the existing cultural system. By following this route of symbolic analysis opened by Lévi-Strauss, an explanation of the relationship of individuals and of society to the Vodou divinities could finally be established (see Hurbon 1972, 1987). During the process of possession, the lwa must recieve special greetings, particular drum rhythms and dance steps which enable he or she to be identified, and symbolic objects, such as a sword in the case of Ogou, the lwa of war. The actions of recognition of divinities in the form of ceremonies and rituals constitute a language, and enable the individual to recognise his or her place in society. By following these rituals, the Haitians affirm their identity, recall their painful and unique history, and acknowledge that they have access to the powers of the lwa to help them deal with the difficulties life holds. For losing the language of the lwa means putting yourself under the control of a dual relationship of self to self and quite simply losing language altogether. The lwa take charge of the individual’s life and place it in a field of meaning by classifying the different domains of social life and of nature in such a way that all events, happy or sad, find a meaning.

At the same time, possession implies a permanent fragility of the body which needs to be protected against the intrusion of bad spirits or of spells cast on the individual in question. Possession is never left to run its own course but must be to some extent coded, controlled, and mastered. Magic and witchcraft are, as a general rule, frowned upon by Vodou practitioners. They represent a negative and dangerous side of Vodou from which individuals should distance themselves as far as possible (Heusch 2000). But, based on the principle that the body of an individual can be penetrated or possessed by spiritual forces (in the form of the lwa or by the ‘spirits’ of the dead), an enemy can inflict on that same individual negative forces capable of causing sickness or even death. Initiation and mystical marriage exist precisely in order to strengthen the protection of Vodou practitioners. Nevertheless, it is important to acknowledge the famous distinction made by the anthropologist E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1972) between witchcraft and sorcery: witchcraft can be understood as a technique made up of ritual gestures, physical objects, and knowledge or gifts to the service of an individual, whereas sorcery is a power attributed to people supposedly capable of taking possession of an individual’s vital substance against his or her will.

The other important step in the anthropology of Vodou is the one achieved as a result of Roger Bastide’s work on syncretism. This blend of elements of the Catholic religion (prayers, images of saints, enthusiasm for baptism) and of purely African traditions (divinities or spirits dwelling in trees or in the water, and capable of taking over the body through possession) is easily misinterpreted. Indeed Bastide (1967) demonstrates for the first time that the cultural elements observed in Vodou are not simply juxtaposed: he applies the ‘compartmentalization principle’ in order to demonstrate that the black communities formed as a result of slavery easily passed from one religious system to another, without turning it into one single system. This ‘compartmentalization principle’ allows us to understand the capacity to use any one cultural element as a mask or a screen to help preserve an individual’s own African heritage, and at the same time as a way of reinterpreting this heritage on the basis of elements borrowed from the other system, and vice-versa. We are then confronted with a process of cultural creativity in which heterogeneous and hybrid elements can coexist.

Another interesting area of anthropological research focuses on the significance of the masculine and feminine in Vodou religions. Lidwina Meyer (1999) demonstrates that in the texts of Vodou myths, there is a gradual gender difference that exists which moves from masculine to feminine by means of a play of masks and of various roles relating to sexuality. This makes it possible to move away from the traditional opposition between feminine/masculine, mind/body, and self-identity /non-self. This analysis leads us to challenge the inferiorisation of women and the arbitrary place given to man as supposedly ‘universal’. It is indeed striking that few normative discriminations in terms of gender seem to exist in Vodou. Women can be priestesses and can take on all sorts of roles in an ounfor.

Misconception

During the first half of the nineteenth century, Vodou was merely tolerated by the first Haitian state leaders who were reluctant to acknowledge it as a religion at a time when Catholicism was the official religion recognised by the state. The country’s elites were aware of the subversive role Vodou had played during the revolution, and knew that it could potentially reveal the presence of powers parallel to those of the state. Nevertheless, Vodou remained firmly attached to the Catholic Church, functioning almost in osmosis with it. Moreover, since the 1820s, the Haitian government had embarked on various attempts to negotiate with the Vatican for the official recognition of Haitian independence, and it was only in 1860 that a concordat was signed between the Haitian government and the Vatican. From that date onwards, Haiti welcomed missionaries from Brittany to engage in public teaching and establish Catholic parishes throughout the whole country (see Delisle 2003). A new ‘civilising’ vision would be offered to the country by the Catholic clergy, and Vodou was portrayed as a hotbed of magic practices, witchcraft, and cannibalism. These were the prejudices already in circulation with regards to African practices and beliefs. According to the Catholic missionaries, Haiti should rid itself of what was referred to as its ‘African flaws’ represented by Vodou, in order to put itself on the same level as the ‘civilised’ nations. The interpretation of Vodou based on the contrast between the ‘barbarian’ and the ‘civilised’, which has long dominated the country, stems first of all from the perception of the missionaries and administrators of the colonial period, and then that of European visitors in the nineteenth century (like St John 1884).

Take, for example, this extract from a speech made by a French bishop, Francois Marie Kersuzan, in 1896:

This is our chief enemy, the one we must fight ceaselessly against, a fight to the death. Let us look at it face to face, in order to see it in its full horror and to enable us to conquer it successfully. Many people think that Vodou amounts to obscene dances and copious feast. Vodou is true devil worship with its sacrifices and its pontiffs and the dances are only the crude exterior of a hellish interior.

Such misconceptions are consistent with the colonisation movement based on a European project to ‘civilise’, which flourished during the nineteenth century. Anthropology, emerging at the end of the eighteenth century and in the nineteenth century initially supported this project insofar as it ‘ordered the diversity of races and of peoples, and gave them a rank, that is to say a role in history’ (Duchet 1971); in this instance, the role of the ‘savage’. From this perspective, the theory of a supposedly ‘scientific’ racism was formulated at the end of the nineteenth century.

In the immediate aftermath of this urge to ‘civilise’, Vodou would be subjected to two major waves of persecution by the Catholic Church, which had become the official state religion in 1860. In the first of these, in 1896, the church urged the Catholic faithful to explicitly reject Vodou practices and beliefs. Then in 1941, it launched a major national campaign with auto-da-fe, known as the ‘anti-superstition campaign’ (la campagne de ‘rejeté’) which insisted that each parishioner take an oath renouncing Vodou as a renunciation of ‘Satan and all his works’ (see Metraux 1958, 298ss; Ramsey 2011). This campaign was strongly criticised in 1942 by the ethnologist and writer Jacques Roumain, founder of the National Bureau of Haitian Ethnology, dedicated to collecting and protecting sacred objects associated with Vodou and to promoting research on all aspects of Vodou and on the cultural traditions of the country.

The surge of intellectuals: Vodou as a site of memory

The American occupation of Haiti from 1915 to 1934 would also provoke a resurgence of the pejorative view of this religion. At the same time, there was a surge in numbers of Haitian intellectuals with, for example, Jean Price-Mars publishing in 1928 a collection of essays titled Ainsi parla l’oncle (translated in 1954 as So spoke the uncle) in which he sought recognition for the African origins of Haitian culture and therefore for Vodou as a religion which Haitians had the right to call their own. Important publications (for example Métraux 1958; Verger 1957) introduced ethnographies of Vodou that acknowledged its role in the restoration of dignity to Africans deported into slavery, and its status as an original cultural creation as a testimony of their identity.

After the explicit attempts at political manipulation of Vodou during the thirty years of the Duvaliers’ dictatorship, Francois Duvalier declared himself to be its defender. Yet he did exploit it by making certain oungan his representatives in the towns and countryside (see Hurbon 1979). Today, the religion continues to suffer the effects of the huge wave of new Pentecostal churches. As a result of their preachings, these churches provoke a resurgence of the idea that witchcraft is very much the prerogative of Vodou. At the same time, Vodou maintains a horizontal position across the various religious systems competing within the country, in the sense that Vodou practitioners see no difficulty in declaring themselves Catholic and in accepting baptism and communion in church. In the same way, whereas the lwa are demonised in Pentecostal Protestantism, this nevertheless shares some beliefs pertaining to dreams and to trances of the holy spirit which are also found in Vodou.

With the process of democratisation that the country experienced after the end of the dictatorship in 1986, a number of Vodou priests were lynched for reputedly actively supporting the dictatorship. Since that time, Vodou has managed to create its own organisation in defence against the vandalism and intolerance of some religious denominations.

At the same time, Vodou seeks to obtain the same privileges as other religions, such as, for example, the right to officially celebrate baptisms, marriages, and funerals. Even today, political leaders still evoke the ‘mystical powers’ of Vodou in their speeches in order to gain legitimacy with the working classes. But, ultimately, the various art forms inspired by Vodou, such as painting, sculpture, music, dance or literature, have enabled it to gain recognition as one of the sites of Haitian individual and collective identity (Consentino 1995). Modern anthropology should set itself the task of exploring these links, and in doing so it will discover that Vodou is a place of memory not only for the Haitian nation but also for humanity at large. It did, after all, witness the struggles endured by the slaves for the recovery and recognition of their human dignity.

Conclusion

Vodou has inspired some important research into its relationship with naive painting, a relationship described by Andre Malraux in 1975 as ‘the most striking experiment in magical painting in our century’. Yet many Haitian artists often choose the route of ‘sophisticated’ painting while at the same time acknowledging the inspiration of Vodou (see the latest work of the art historian Philippe Lerebours [2018] and the sumptuous work of Gerald Alexis [2000]). Vodou should also be inventoried on a scientific basis with reference to its various therapeutic resources for the body and mind thanks to its knowledge of plants and their medicinal value. Several exhibitions of Haitian painting have taken place in France, in Switzerland, and in the United States, but where other cultural categories are concerned, anthropology should see new breakthroughs. Vodou undoubtedly remains a living culture that owes its richness to the integration of various influences, thanks to the scale of the Haitian diaspora (in the US, Canada, the Caribbean, and Latin America), which continues to turn to the beliefs and practices of Vodou.

Questions arise as to the role played by Vodou in the Haitian Revolution, the ambivalent attitudes of Haitian governments from independence in 1804 to the present day, and on the secret societies which still exert a powerful influence on the imagination of working-class Haitians. Important research also remains to be undertaken on the sacred objects of Vodou and on the places associated with its resistance to slavery which are now memorial sites: they can improve our understanding of the influence that the Haitian Revolution has had on present-day fights against racism.

Glossary

Boko: name given to Vodou priests (oungan) capable of providing offensive or defensive magic practices

Désounen: a ritual of dispossession conducted on an initiate in order to separate them from the spirit he or she was attached to

Lwa: spirit or secondary divinity

Lwa mèt-tèt: protective spirit received during initiation which ensures a lwa is attached to an individual in order to protect that person until their death

Lwa-rasin: a spirit passed down through the family

Manbo: Vodou priestess

Manje-lwa: ceremony during which dances and offerings (food and animal sacrifices of chicken, beef, or goats) are made in honour of Vodou divinities, under the supervision of an oungan or manbo

Ounfor: Vodou temple

Oungan: Vodou priest

Ounsi: Vodou initiate

Pedji: special room reserved for lwa

Péristil: space where Vodou ceremonies take place

Poto-mitan: pillar in the centre of the péristil through which spirits can travel to the human world

Pwen: supernatural power or protective force

Vèvè: symbolic drawing, referring to a lwa

Wanga: ordinary magic weapon

References

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Note on contributor

Laënnec Hurbon obtained a PhD at Sorbonne University and is Research Director of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS). He is also a professor at the State University of Haiti and specialises in studying the relations between religion, culture and politics in Haiti and the Caribbean. He is the author of various works, including Les mystères du vaudou, published with Gallimard, and Le barbare imaginaire, published with Editions du Cerf.

Note on translation

This text has been translated by Helen Morrison from: Hurbon, L. 2021.Vodou Haïtien. In The Cambridge Encyclopedia of Anthropology, edited by Felix Stein. Online: http://doi.org/10.29164/21vodouhaitien.

Helen Morrison, BA in Comparative Literature and French and M.Phil on Dadaist littérature, University of East Anglia, is a freelance translator (French to English) and has translated eight books for Polity Press.

Vodou Ayisyen

Felix Stein — Mon, 07 Mar 2022 14:40:07 +0000

Laënnec Hurbon

Université d’Etat d’Haïti

Initially published 7 Mar 2022

http://doi.org/10.29164/22vodouayisyen

Abstract:

Vodou ayisyen an pran nesans nan kontèks esklavaj la. Yon relijyon fanmi Wa nan peyi Dawome, nan Afrik oksidantal, esklav sou lil Dayiti yo te tranfòme l kòm yon zouti pou yo rekonstui tèt yo ak fos liberasyon an. Konsa, vodou a te jwe yon wòl primodyal nan pi gwo revolisyon eskav yo reyisi nan tout listwa ak nan kreyasyon Ayiti kòm peyi endepandan. Nan komansman, antwopoloji a ki chita sou yon pèspektiv evolisyonis te konsidere vodou a tankou pwodui yon kilti primitif, moun ki pa sivilize, menm bagay ak maji ak sosèlri, lide sa a te tonbe dako ak mouvman kolonizatè ewopeyen yo. Konsa, Vodou a ta pral sibi plizyè vag pèsekisyon anba men klèje legliz katolik la. Poutan, pandan dènye deseni yo, antwopoloji a te montre ke senkretis ki nan vodou a, espesyalman jan yo reanplaye lapriyè sen ki konn fèt nan legliz katolik yo, se siy kreyasyon yon kilti nouvo ki genyen tolerans nan nannan l. Nou rive konprann panteyon (gwoup lwa òganize) ak rityel li gras ak yon antwopoloji ki chita sou ansanm teyori langaj ak wol senbolik li. Antwopoloji a montre nou tou, vodou ayisyen an se yon fason yo konsève memwa, epi li se patrimwàn pou tout Ayisyen e ke tout pèp dwe respekte depi diznevyèm syèk la.

Pou kòmanse

Relijyon ki ap onore antite espirityèl ak divinite ki anndan diferan domèn lanati (dlo, pye bwa, dife, e ak latrye) ak sa moun fè (travay, fanmi ak latrye), tou dabò vodou^[1] a te pratike nan peyi gòf Benen yo, tankou Dawome oubyen aktyél Benen, Nijerya, Togo, Gine ak Gana. Nan rejyon sa a, oganizasyon sosyete a te chita avan dizuityèm syèk la sou fanmi, liyaj, vilaj ak etni. Yo chak te genyen pwòp divinite pa yo ki rele «Vodoun» ki te reprezante nan lang Fon an nan Dawome («Dahomey») yon fòs envisib, ki kapab itilize kò moun pou manifeste lè yon moun gen lwa. Kriz yo, nan kèk ka lagè ant gwout etni yo te pèmèt plizyè pratik nan koze relijyon rankontre, sa ki ta pral fè gen kèk divinite ki soti nan yon etni ale nan yon lot. Se sitou nan Dawome dizuityèm syèk la nou wè relijyon sa yo te konsantre anba men fanmi wa a.

Avèk trèt nwa yo (sa ki vle di komès ki tabli nan vann afriken) ak esklavaj ki komanse devlope depi premye deseni sèzyèm syèk la epi ki te kontinye vale teren, gras ak Compagnie francaise des Indes occidentales ki te kreye nan lane 1664 pou nou site limenm sèlman, plizyè milyon afriken ta pral depote an amerik. Divinite yo ta pral voyaje ansanm ak yo. Se konsa kèk relijyon ta pral parèt, tankou, Kandonble nan peyi Brezil, la Santerya nan peyi Kiba, epi Vodou nan Sendomeng, non koloni fransè ki ta pral vin Ayiti peyi endepandan nan lane 1804, epi ki ta pral divize an Ayiti ak Repiblik dominikèn nan lane 1821.

Pou w konprann vodou a, sa mande pou w panche dabò sou plizyè chanjman li konnen akoz eksperyans afriken yo ki soti nan yon pakèt gwoup etni diferan epi ki ta pral santi byen bonè nesesite pou kreye kondisyon pou yo libere tèt yo nan esklavaj. Rechèch nan antwopoloji yo ta pral manifeste anpil enterè pou gwo efò san parèy esklav yo deplwaye pou yo pwodui yon nouvo sistèm relijye ak kiltirel, ki mete ansanm an menm tan kèk eleman lakay diferan gwoup etni ki melanje sou teren an, sa enstitisyon kap mennen sistèm esklavaj la enpoze yo ak sa amerendyen kite kom eritaj. Se melanj plizyè kilti ak eleman ki pa sanble ditou yo ki bay vodou a orijinalite l.

Antwopològ yo separe fomasyon vodou nan peyi Dayiti a an (2) etap: Youn ki fèt nan peryod esklavaj la pandan disetyèm ak dizuityèm syèk la, yon lot ki komanse avèk endepansans peyi Dayiti nan lane 1804 ki kontinye jouk jounen jodi a ke kontèks politik la bay yon fòm nouvo. Pandan nap prezante pateyon (gwoup lwa òganize) vodou ak rityel li yo, nap mennen kesyon antwopoloji yo nan jan moun yo konprann divinite yo nan lavi pèsonèl yo ak lavi sosyete a. Malgre tout prejije ki tap sikile avèk antwopoloji a ki chita sou primitif ak sivilise, vodou a parèt kreyasyon yon kilti nouvo, yon espas memwa ak yon patrimwàn pou tout ayisyen e ke tout pèp dwe respekte.

Fomasyon vodou a ak esklavaj

Nan kondisyon trèt nwa a ak esklavaj la te lage afriken yo nan koloni a te rann difisil obyen menm enposib pou yo ta reprann eritaj relijye ak kiltirèl gwoup etni kote yo te sòti a. Esklav yo te pèdi kontak ak fanmi yo, liyaj yo, yo te konsidere yo tankou yon byen, epi kèk misyonè te prezante esklavaj la tankou yon opòtinite pou yo vin yon moun tout bon. Pa egzanp, Pè J.B Dutertre te deklare nan sans sa a: «Lavi esklavaj la se yon mwayen pou yo rive nan bonè a» epi «Se malediksyon yo kap fè yo jwenn Sali a» (1666: 35). Yo te prezante Lafrik tankou yon kontinan ki genyen yon bann sovaj ak primitif, epi ki anba sa nou te ka rele «malediksyon Cham», yon lejand ki apiye l sou istwa kanaran ak pitit li yo nan labib. Sa ki rele Cham nan yo te deklare li modi, desten li te fèt pou li vin esklav. Menm lejand sa a te bay Cham koulè nwa, epi se limenm ki ta pral sèvi depi disetyèm syèk la, tankou nan peyi Lawoland nan lane 1666 pou jistfye trèt nwa a ak esklavaj pèp nwa yo.

Konvèsyon esklav afriken yo nan relijyon krisyanis te dwe pèmèt yo ti kras pa vin gen kilti (ranmase kilti ewopeyen yo). Antwopoloji a ki te fenk ap parèt pandan dizuityèm ak diznevyèm syèk la te estriktire selon yon pèspektiv evolisyonis (Duchet, 1971) ki te pretann fè ewopeyen yo pase pou moun ki pi avanse sou latè nan echèl mounite a, pandan afriken yo menm nan pi ba echèl la.

Piblikasyon kod nwa Louis XIV ki te wa nan peyi Lafrans nan epok la te fè nan lane 1685 la te vize rann pratik esklavaj yo korek ak lalwa (legitim), yon ti tan tou kout aprè yo te retire Dekrè Nant (Edit de Nantes) la. Pibliye nan lane 1598, dekrè sa a te mete fen nan lagè relijyon nan Lewòp nan tabli lapè sivil ak lapè nan mitan relijyon yo. Lè yo retire li, Louis XIV te bay posibilite pou yo mete nan kòmansman kòd nwa a entolerans fas ak Pwotestantis ak Jidayis, epi bay lòd pou yo batize ak enstui esklav yo nan relijyon katolik. Atik 2 nan kòd nwa a pale konsa: «Tout esklav ki ap sou zile nou yo, ap batize ak enstui nan relijyon katolik, apostolik ak women». Pandan atik 3 a te deklare:«Nou entèdi pou tout relijyon ki pa katolik egzèse piblikman» (Sala-Molins 1987). La yo te vle pale de relijyon pwotestan ak jwif yo, paske pratik relijyon afriken yo te sanse pa egziste. Kòd nwa a te konsidere yo tankou pratik ki «pouse moun revolte» yon fason pou yo entèdi avèk fòs tou regwoupman esklav.

Li enpotan pou nou siyale kijan kondisyon travay esklav ki nan plantasyon ak lakay kolon yo te difisil anpil. Sistèm esklavajis la se mwayen ki pèmèt Lafrans vin rich nan Sendomeng, men tou tout Lewòp ki depote 12 a 15 milyon afriken anchennen ant sèzyèm e diznevyèm syèk, pou vin plante kann, koton, kafe, digo ak kakao (al gade pa ezganp, chif sou popilasyon yo nan Coquery-Vidrovitch ak Mesnard 2013: 122). Nan sendomeng, esklav yo te travay depi nan maten pou rive nan nwit anba gwo siveyans komandan ak frèt yo. Mèt yo te itilize yon estrateji pou anpeche esklav ki sòti nan menm gwoup etni yo travay ak viv menm kote, paske, pa nenpot mwayen an fòk yo te rete nan eta sèvitid la. An pratik, yon esklav pat genyen ni asandan, ni desandan. Se pou rezon sa a, kèk sosyolog pale de «mò sosyal», kidonk, mèt yo tap chèche retire nan esklav yo tout sa ki fè yo moun (Patterson 1982). Kondisyon travay sa yo, ki sanble tèt koupe ak kondisyon lavi moun ki nan kan konsantrasyon, te pouse esklav yo jwenn plizyè mwayen (estrateji) pou yo rekonstui tèt yo, sa ki vle di, kòde lòt lyen sosyal ki rann yo solidè nan batay pou liberasyon yo.

Seremoni pou mò yo nan fomasyon vodou a

Seremoni pou mò yo, sete yon fason pou esklav yo rete konekte ak tradisyon kiltirel ak relijye Lafrik yo, men tou, fondman nouvo pratik ak reprezantasyon yo te mete sou pye akoz de kondisyon demounizan enstitisyon esklavajis yo te mete yo. Seremoni pou mò yo pat yon senp eritaj Lafrik, li te vin genyen yon nouvo siyifikasyon. Si trèt nwa a sete yon depòtasyon ki rache endividi a nan fanmi l, liyaj ak klan li, yo te dwe atann lè yon esklav mouri, tout bagay ap mete an plas pou pèmèt yo resere lyen ak lakay yo. Lè antèman yon eskav ki mouri nan koloni an, sete okazyon pou fè anpil rityèl nan lide pou remete defen an kontak ak zansèt li yo. Nan yo, se divinite ki bay pwoteksyon nan liyaj ak gwoup etni defen yo yo tap chèche. Tikras pa tikras, yo te jwenn eritaj relijye ak kiltirel Lafrik la nan chèn siyifikasyon koneksyon mò yo ak zansèt yo ak divinite yo reprezante. Plizyè kwonikè ak istoryen siyale ke esklav yo te kwè yo kapab retounen Lafrik lè yo mouri, e sila ki te touye tèt yo yo, te konn fè konnen kèk fwa yo gen espwa pran chimen retou a.

Andeyò de koze entèman defen yo, nou wè de (2) lòt moman enpòtan nan fòmasyon vodou a. Premye moman gen pou wè ak sware dimanch yo te konn bay esklav yo, kòm tan lwazi yo, e sete pou yo okazyon pou yo danse, sa yo te rele (calendas) la. Dans sa yo te pèmèt yo rekonekte ak pratik Lafrik yo lwen je mèt yo. Dezyèm moman an, se sa yo rele mawonaj la (Fouchard 1988 [1972]), sa ki vle di, esklav yo chape poul yo al kache nan yon seri tèt mòn byen lwen, kote kèk fwa yo rejwenn ak kèk manm menm gwoup etni ak yo, antouka, kote yo òganize yon lavi lib. Mawonaj la te fè objè plizyè rechèch e yo rekonèt li kòm yon mwayen pou esklav yo te di yo vle libète yo, ki donk yon mwayen pou yo konteste kondisyon lavi yo kòm esklav (wè pa egzanp Fouchard 1962 ak Fick 2017).

Mèt ki te nan plantasyon nan Sendomeng yo te pè mawonaj la anpil e yo te prevwa gwo pinisyon pou sila ki ta riske fèl yo. Men, yo pat rive gen soupson sou fas kache pratik kiltirel ak relijye esklav yo, paske yo te tèlman manifeste angouman pou priyè, mès ak lapriyè sen ak Lavièj yo e montre yo souvan prese pou yo al patisipe nan posesyon. Imaj sen ki te dekore legliz katolik yo ke yo te fè esklav yo obligasyon pou yo lapriyè yo, te ba yo kèk detay pou kore reprezantasyon divinite Lafrik yo. Se konsa, senkretis la pral rete mak fabrik vodou ayisyen an, tankou «Candomble» brezilyen an ak «Santeria» kiben an.

Vodou ak soulèvman jeneral esklav 1791 yo

Apati segond mwatye dizuityèm syèk la, anpil lidè relijye ki sòti nan legliz katolik ak zòn mawonaj yo lanse mo dòd revolisyon an, epi mennen dèyè yo anpil esklav. Pami lidè sa yo, nou te jwenn, nan lane 1768, «Le Padre Jean» ki te chanje non li an yon rit vodou ki rele «petwo», «Colas Jambes Coupées» ki te pase pou yon sosyè e ki te mobilise esklav yo pou fini ak koze koloni a, e sitou, selèb Makandal ki te pwofetize depi 1751 sou disparisyon blan yo ak fen esklavaj la. Makandal te gen yon renome espesyalis nan resèt pwazon ak maji e non li rete kole ak pratik ak kwayans nan sòsèlri yo rele «makanda». Yo arete l epi kondane l pou yo boule li tou vivan nan lane 1758, Makandal, selon sa ki tap sikile nan koloni an, te rive chape nan flanm dife yo pandan li tounen yon leza. Gen kèk rechèch ki pa fèt lontan ki pale de yon «sit Makandal» (Midy 2003) revolisyon ayisyen an, paske se depi abitasyon yo te rele «Le Normand de Mezy» a, kote li tap opere nan Nò peyi a, lide soulèvman jeneral esklav yo ta kòmanse simaye tikras pa tikras. Fòk nou kanpe sou gwo evènman sa a nan istwa vodou a ki marinen ak pwosesis revolisyon anti-esklavajis la ki kreye nasyon ayisyen nan (wè Fick 2014)

14 dawout 1791, touprè mòn wouj, nan yon lokalite ki rele bwa kayiman, anviwon desan (200) esklav, kòmandè, kochè, esklav domestik, reprezantan divès atelye ki nan abitasyon sik yo elatriye… reyini pou yon seremoni vodou anba lidèchip Dutty Boukman, ki se yon esklav nan yon plantasyon nan nò peyi a ak ougan. Daprè premye temwanyaj nou genyen gras ak sa chirijyen Antoine Dalmas ki konnen seremoni an rapòte (1814), moun ki tap patisipe yo te sakrifye yon kochon pou divinite Lafrik yo epi sèmante pou yo mete bout ak esklavaj la ak òganize yon soulèvman jeneral. Yo te bwè san bèt ki sakifye a epi jire pou yo kenbe soulèvman jeneral ki pral fèt la an sekrè. Gen yon fanm ki rele Cécile Fatima ki te nan mennen seremoni an tou. Kèk istoryen (Geggus 2002), rapòte seremoni an nan yon vèsyon literè, ki ta vle fè kwè sete yon nwit kote loraj pat sispann gwonde. Yon semèn après, nan lannwit 22 pou debouche sou 23 dawout 1791, soulèvman an eklate: Tout plantasyon kann ak kafe, ak atelye sendomeng tap naje nan dife. Gen kèk bagay nan katolik la ki emèje tou nan kontèks revolisyon an. Yon mawon yo te rele «Romaine la Prophétesse» te deklare li se fiyèl Lavyèj Mari ki ta bal mesaj pou libere 4000 nwa ak milat nan esklavaj.

Bilan soulèvman an se yon dezas pou koloni an: yo touye plizyè santèn kolon (petèt menm mil), 1200 izin kafe ak 161 izin sik pèdi anba flanm dife. Gouvènman fransè a te evalye pèt yo a 600 milyon liv (Cauna 1987: 212).

Nan moman sa a sendomeng te yon depo sann, avèk 500000 esklav, ladan yo genyen kal monte yon bann kan mawon nan mòn yo, 40000 afranchi^[2] milat melanje ak nwa, 30000 blan ki divize an «ti blan» (atizan, komèsan, maren ak solda) ak «gran blan» (plantè ak administratè). Kòd nwa 1685 la te tabli depi plizyè deseni rapò ant gwoup sosyal yo apati yon echèl ki chita sou ras moun yo, sòti nan blan, pase pa milat, pou rive nan nwa yo. Depi lè nouvèl revolisyon fransè a rive nan Sendomeng, diferan kategori sosyal ak rasyal yo kòmanse souke kò yo. Nèf lane aprè revolisyon ayisyèn nan, nan lane 1802, Nappoléon te eseye retounen ak esklavaj la. Sitiyasyon sa te mennen nan yon lagè kont 40000 solda Lafrans te voye yo, sa ki ta pral konfime endepandans peyi Dayiti. Li pwobab pou sosyete sekrè vodou yo te jwe yon wòl nan lagè sa a.

Aprè nou fin chita rasin ak enpòtans vodou a nan istwa nou, kounya li bon pou nou panche sou panteyon relijyon sa a ak rityèl li. E nap mande tèt nou, kisa antwopoloji a di sou sistèm kwayans ak pratik sa yo.

Panteyon vodou a ak rityèl li yo

Nou dekouvri nan Lafrik (tankou Benen ak Nigerya) twa tip vodou: Fanmi oubyen liyaj (hennu-vodu), vilaj (to-vodu) ak etni (ako-vodu) (wè deskripsyon tip vodou yo nan Benen nan Desquiron 1990). Divinite yo divize an gwoup ki nan syèl (Mawu-Lisa okipe li de lajounen ak lannwit, Gu bò kote pal ap jere linivè) epi gwoup ki sou tè (Agwe oubyen Agbe se mèt dlo, Sogbo mèt lapli); poun fini gwoup divinite loray yo (tankou Ogou-badagri mèt tonè). Nan ka pa Sendomeng/Ayiti, divinite lafrik yo (ke yo rele lwa, espri oubyen mistè) divize an Rada (ki reprezante Fon ak Yowouba yo), ak divinite Kongo ak Petwo (youn aprè lòt, pou mond Bantou a ak mond kreyòl la). Etni yo vin transfome an yon seri gwoup fanmi divinite (yo rele « Nanchon » oubyen nasyon) e fòme yon kokennchenn panteyon. Yo rekonèt Bondye se (Gran Mèt la) ki bay lwa yo, kòm divinite ki vini aprè li, dyòb yo se jere tout sa ki gen rapò ak latè. Ant moun yo ak mond lan, genyen divinite yo ki jwe yon wòl entèmedyè epi fòme yon sistèm imajinasyon ak senbolik, ki se baz lyen sosyal la, jan esklav yo rekonèt yo youn nan lòt, ak jan yo mete tèt yo ansanm pou yo revòlte.

Valè yon lwa nan panteyon an, se yon ti kras tankou yon mo nan yon lang : Valè li ka chanje e se sèlman nan opozisyon ak jan li konplete lòt lwa yo, kidonk, avèk tout fanmi divinite yo wap rive konprann li. Konsa, Legba se lwa «chèf fil» tout lòt yo, ki louvri baryè ki separe moun ak mònd lwa yo. Se toujou limenm Sen Pyè reprezante, li se tou gadyen tanp yo (ke yo rele Wonfò) ak bitasyon yo e yo rele l nan kòmansman chak seremoni vodou. Legba, lwa chèf fil divinite yo, se mèt kafou yo (yon seri kote danje ki resevwa wonga pou geri yon moun ki malad oubyen al depoze wonga pou frape yon moun yo konsidere kòm ènmi). Pami lwa enpòtan yo, fòk nou mete Ogou, ke Sen Jak Majè reprezante kòm yon gran konbatan, koulè prefere li se wouj, li renmen dife men li toujou rete konekte ak dlo kote li jwenn ak mètrès li, lwa Ezili, yon fanm chèlbé, dous, ke lavyèj mari reprezante. Ogou, se tou kouzen Zaka, lwa agrikilti a, ki limenm adopte brav gede kòm pitit li, ki se espri mò ak simityè yo. Anpil nan lwa sa yo soti nan rit rada, men espri sa yo kapab tout mèm fè pati de rit kongo ak petwo. Konsa, lwa rada yo jimo oubyen marasa yo, yo konsidere yo kòm lwa mechan (Heusch 2000). Lwa Bawon Samdi ki se chèf fil lwa mò yo, limenm nou jwenn li ni nan rit rada, ni nan petwo a.

Tanp vodou yo (wonfò)

Yo toujou onore lwa yo chak lè yo dwe fè sa, nan wonfò yo, ki se tanp vodou a ak kote yo fè seremoni yo. Ta sanble se avèk endepandans lan nan lane 1804 yo kòmanse konstui wonfò nan peyi Dayiti. Chak wonfò genyen nan tèt li yon ougan ki se mèt li, yon fanm ka gen yon wonfò tou, lè konsa yo rele li manbo. Nan rantre chak wonfò, ou souvan jwenn yon pye bwa, yon pye kalbas, ki se kote lwa legba rete.

Ou kapab twonpe w lew wè yon wonfò dekore ak imaj sen katolik, men an verite se lwa yo yap onore nan imaj sa yo. Imaj sa yo ki prezante lwa yo sou fòm moun yo, yo kole yo nan kay mistè yo, kote yo pote manje yo renemen ak objè senbolik ki mache ak yo, pi souvan lè gen seremoni. Pa egzanp, lwa Ezili ki se yon fanm chèlbè ap resevwa yon glas. Yon gwo sal yo rele (peristil), se li yo itilize lè gen seremoni kote yap danse ak chante pou lwa yo. Nan mitan peristil la gen yon poto yo rele (poto mitan) ki senbolize koneksyon ant mond syèl la ak mond tè a, li souvan gen yon desen de (2) koulèv sou li (Danbala-Wedo ak madanm li Ayida-Wedo ki marande ansanm tankou dlo ak dife). Se nan poto mitan an divinite yo pase pou yo sòti Lafrik, lè yo fin travèse anba dlo atlantik, pou yo vin jwenn sèvitè yo nan tanp lan. Ougan an oubyen manbo a, rèn kap mennen dans ak chante yo, wonsi yo kap prepare yo pou chante ak danse, epi moun ki vin patisipe yo ke yo rele «pitit kay» ke yo resevwa tankou manm sosyete a, yo ranje tou won, ak poto mitan an nan mitan yo. Anfas yo, gen yon òkès ki genyen twa (3) tanbou ki jwe wol enstriman sakre kap jwe rit lwa yo, pou lwa ka vini nan tèt sèvitè yo. Nan komansman chak seremoni, yo trase vèvè atè a ak kafe ak farin, ki se yon seri desen ki mache ak lwa yo, pou fè yo vini. Sou yon tab, yo depoze tout afè lwa yo : Manje ak tout lòt objè, tankou boutèy nanm.

Lakou Souvnas ak Soukri, yo konsidere yo tankou de pi gwo lakou nan peyi Dayiti, yo tou prè vil Gonayiv. Chak ane, pou fèt pak ak mwa dawout, yo resevwa anpil vizitè ak sèvitè, san nou pa bliye ayisyen kap soti lòt bò dlo yo. Fok nou di tou, chak ane, vodouyizan yo anvayi fèt patwonal legliz katolik yo, se yon okazyon pou yo fè pelerinaj vodou yo. Pa egzanp, lè 16 jiyè ki se fèt sodo yo konsakre a Notre Dam Monkamèl, plizyè dizèn milye pèleren vodouyizan toujou fè deplasman pou yo ale nan yon so selèb ki antoure ak anpil pye bwa yo konsidere tankou kay divinite ki mache ak Sen an. Souvan, pèleren yo ale nan legliz la, ki nan lokalite a, ak menm ouganman ke yo ale nan so a.

Kijan de espri lwa yo ye, kisa yo egzije? Lwa yo nan yo menm, pa ni bon, ni pa bon, yo sèvi ak nou selon jan nou respekte prensip yo bay yo. Nan mitan lwa yo genyen grad, sa ki pi wo a toujou vle pou pran ka li pi plis pase sa ki pi ba li la.

Sèvis lwa yo

Kijan pou nou byen sèvi lwa yo e kisa yo reprezante nan lavi pèsonèl moun yo tankou nan lavi kolektivte a. Yon moun resevwa youn oubyen de lwa kòm eritaj familyal. Lè konsa, yo pale de lwa rasin Gen plizyè fanmi ayisyen, ki genyen nan yon chanm, yon kote je moun pap tonbe, yon ti lotèl yo rele «wogatwa», yo depoze sou li foto yon sen, ki se lwa eritye fanmi an ke yo fè sèvis pou li chak lè yo dwe fè sa. Sou plan kolektif, gen kèk fanmi ki se pitit yon seri sosyete nan yon wonfò. Yo vin gade oubyen patisipe komsadwa nan yon seri seremoni ki mache kot a kot ak kalandriye litili legliz katolik la : Nan lannwit fèt nwèl yo mande lwa yo favè, 6 janvye ki se fèt wa yo yo fè yon seremoni ki reyini plizyè fanmi, 1er ak 2 novanm ki se fèt mò yo, se okazyon pou yo fè bèl fèt ki sanble ak yon fèt nasyonal nan simityè yo (Metreaux 19598 : 216ss). Pandan tout ane a, ougan ak manbo ap resevwa moun ki vin fè leson epi jwe wòl yo kòm moun ki konprann lagaj divinite vodou yo pou oryante moun yo nan sa yap fè nan lavi yo chak jou.

Pou w jwenn favè lwa yo, fòk ou ba yo sa yo bezwen chak lè ou dwe fè sa. Nou kapab jete dlo atè pou n ba yo bwè, se jès sa a ki ouvri seremoni yo. Nou sakrifye bèt tou (volay, kabrit oubyen bèf) pou nou ba yo manje (manje lwa). Fòk nou presize, chak rityèl yo dwe fèt egzateman jan yo dwe fèt la, si se pa sa, nou riske fè espri yo fache. Yon seremoni toujou mennen nan moman kote moun ap pran lwa, ki se yon fenomèn kote lwa rantre nan tèt vodouyizan epi li pran fòm ak jès li (lwa monte sèvitè li kom si l monte yon chwal). Depi premye siy ki montre lwa pral rantre a, asanble vodouyizan yo kòmanse prepare yo pou resevwa l pandan yap prezante l objè li yo. Lè lwa yo manifeste se siy seremoni a reyisi.

Gen kèk vodouyizan ki pa kontante yo de senp rapò tradisyonèl yo genyen ak lwa yo nan fanmi yo oubyen nan kad sosyete. Yo kapab genyen yon relasyon pi sere ak yon lwa oubyen yon lòt. Nòmalman, se lwa a ki sanse chwazi moun nan. Konsa, yon maryaj mistik kapab fèt aprè yon rèv, yon maladi, yon aksidan oubyen echèk vire tounen yon moun ap rankontre nan lavi l. Seremoni sa fèt tankou yon maryaj òdinè, yo beni bag devan temwen yo. Lwa dwe fè konnen li dakò ak maryaj la, nan dòmi oubyen li danse nan tèt yon moun kap patisipe nan seremoni an. Maryaj mistik la se yon fason yo pase yon moun eritaj lwa yo paske, se gras ak yon parenn oubyen yon marenn ki inisye deja ke transmisyon an kapab fèt, nouvo marye a vin fiyèl. Li dwe rezève kèk jou nan semèn nan pou li bay lwa kèk bagay li renemen epi pa fè bagay. Sa konn rive ke gen kèk vodouyizan ki al achete nan men yon ougan oubyen yon bòkò^[3] lòt lwa ki pa lwa rasin li pou l kapab ajoute sou pwoteksyon l oubyen fè moun li konsidere tankou ènmi li mal. Se yon bagay ki riske paske yon lwa kapab mande w kèk bagay aprè ki ka difisil pou ou pou w ba li.

Inisyasyon an se yon rityèl fèmen nan yon wonfò, pandan plizyè jou. Moun lwa chwazi a, li pap fasil pou li pou l deside li pap sèvi. Men li ka deside vin yon inisye (wonsi kanzo) pou li kapab viv ak lwa a kole nan tèt li pou yon pwoteksyon san kanpe jiskaske li mouri. Inisyasyon an dire tan moun nan pran pou li aprann mès lwa a, fèy ak plant gerizon yo, manje yo, brèf tout sa ki konsène lwa a. Lè inisiye yo ap sòti (aprè yo te fin fèmen nan wonfò a) avèk parenn ak marenn yo bò kote yo, se yon seremoni solanèl. Lè inisye a mouri, yo dwe desounen li, ki se yon rityèl pou separe li ak lwa a, pou fasilite li travèse nan lòt mond lan. Se aprè yon bann tan inisye yon ougan ka vin yon moun lwa yo itilize pou bay mesaj, se wol moun jwenn an jeneral kòm eritye.

Nou kapab mete sosyete sekrèt vodou yo nan pratik inisyasyon yo, anpil moun kwè yo gen yon pouvwa senbolik. Yo fè pati eritaj Afrik Lwès yo, yo pote non chanpwèl, zobop ak bizango e se nan nwit sèlman yo reyini. Yo fonksoyne sou baz yon yerachi ki gen yon ougan nan tèt li ak tit anperè. Sosyete sa yo genyen pou objektif pwoteje vodou a ak tanp li yo, epi se yo menm ki gen pouvwa sòsèlri yo (wè Hurbon 1988 ak Justinvil 2020). Se sak fè yo pè yo. Imajinè sosèlri a se yon bagay protestan yo itilize anpil nan prèch yo, pou yo ka fè ayisyen kap viv nan katye popilè yo konvèti nan pwotestan (Hurbon 2001 : 227-44).

Avanse antwopoloji fè sou vodou

Pami pwoblèm ki kenbe atansyon antwopoloji vodou a nou jwenn fenomèn pran lwa a, sosèlri ak senkretis la. Sou koze pran lwa a, yo te panse ke sa gen pou wè ak yon pwoblèm mantal oubyen se yon kriz foli. Entèpretasyon sa a marande ak yon vizyon ki mete nan kategori anomal kapasite pou yon moun agite nan yon pwen pou l pèdi kontwòl tèt li. Fòk yo te tann travay Claude Lévi-strauss te tanmen aprè Marcel Mauss ak enfliyans nouvo rechèch nan lengistik yo nan lane 1950 pou konprann koze pran lwa a se yon fòm langaj. Pran lwa nan yon seremoni vodou se yon bagay nòmal pou tout moun ki prezan nan espas la. Sa pa etone pèsonn. Nou dwe konprann se yon bagay nòmal selon règ sistèm kiltirèl ki anfas nou an. Se nan suiv tras chimen analiz senbolik Claude Lévi-Strauss louvri a yo pral rive eksplike rapò moun yo ak sosyete a avèk divinite nan vodou yo (Hurbon 1972, 1987). Lè lwa a rantre sou moun nan, lwa dwe jwenn salitasyon espesyal, bat tanbou nan rit pa l la, danse dans li, epi objè senbolik li yo tankou manchèt si se lwa lagè a ki se Ogou. Seremoni ak rityèl yo ki se zak ki pèmèt rekonèt divinite yo fome yon lanagaj, yo pèmèt moun nan konn plas li nan sosyete a. Pandan yap suiv rityel sa yo, ayisyen yo di kiyès yo ye, pale de istwa pèsonèl ak moman difisil yo, epi santi yo gen fòs lwa yo avèk yo pou konbat ak lavi a. Sa vle di, pèdi langaj lwa yo riske mete moun nan nan yon batay ak pwòp tèt li, epi pèdi laganj tou bònman. Lwa yo pran responsabilite lavi moun nan, e li metel nan yon espas ki plen siyifikasyon ki pèmèt li bay yon sans ak tout bon ak move bagay ki rive nan lavi l.

An menmtan, konn gen lwa mande pou w toujou pwoteje kòw kont move lespri ak vye maladi yo ka voye sou ou. Rele lwa a pat janm yon bagay vay kevay, fòk li gen kòd li, kontwole, epi yon jan metrize. An jeneral, vodouyizan yo pa wè maji ak sòsèlri byen, pou yo, se yon kote negative ak danje nan vodou ke moun yo dwe kanpe lwen (Heusch 2000). Si nou pati de prensip ke espri kapab rantre sou yon moun (lwa yo oubyenn espri mò yo), yon ènmi kapab voye move espri (movè zespri nan lagaj chak jou ayisyen) sou yon moun pou fè l malad oubyen menm touye l. Inisyasyon ak maryaj mistik (maryaj ak lwa), se jis yon mwayen pou vodouyizan yo bay tèt yo plis pwoteksyon. Men nou pa dwe kite atè diferans etnològ Evans Pritchard (1972) fè ant maji (witchcraft) ak sòsèlri (sorcery); maji a se yon teknik ki gen ladan l gès, rityèl, objè materyèl ak konesans oubyen yon moun ki gen don, poutan sosèlri a se pouvwa pouvwa yo kwè sèten moun genyen pou souse fos vital youn lot moun.

Lòt pa enpòtan antwopologi vodou a fè, se travay Roger Bastide te fè sou senkretis lan. Melanj seremoni katolik (priyè, foto sen, angouman pou batèm) ak tradisyon ki pwòp ak Lafrik (divinite oubyen espri ki rete nan pye bwa, nan dlo, e ki kapab danse nan tèt moun) sa yo fasil sibi move entèpretasyon. Bastide (1967) montre pou pwemye fwa ke eleman kilitirèl nou wè anndan vodou yo pa senpman kole youn ak lòt, li aplike «prensip separasyon an» («principe de coupure») pou eksplike kominote nwa ki sòti nan esklavaj yo pase byen de yon sistèm relijye ak yon lòt. Prensip separasyon an pèmèt yo rann yo kont de jan yo kapab itilize yon eleman kiltirel oubyen yon lòt tankou yon mas pou konsève menm eritaj Lafrik yo, an menm tan pou bay yon nouvo entèpretasyon eritaj sa yo sou baz eleman yo prete nan yon lòt sistèm, vise vèsa. Alò, nou fas ak yon pwosesi kreyasyon kiltirèl ki mete ansanm plizyè eleman ki pa sanble epi ki pap ka fonn nan lòt.

Yon lot rechèch antwopoloji sou lanmou gade wol fanm ak gason jwe nan seremoni vodou yo. Lidwina Meyer (1999) montre nan liv sou mit yo, gen yon diferans kap parèt ti kras pa ti kras ant sèks maskilen ak sèks feminen nan fason yo mete pèsonaj sou sèn nan ak diferan wol yo ki ranje selon sèks yo. Sa fè nou sanse soti nan opozisyon tradisyonèl feminen/maskilen, espri/kò, idantite w/sa ki pa paw. Analiz sa a finalman kesyone wòl enferyè fanm yo ak plas ki pa chita sou anyen solid yo bay gason yo tankou yon moun inivèsèl. Men nou ka remake nan vodou a, pa genyen jan de diskriminasyon sa yo. Yon fanm kapab dirije (manbo) menmjan ak yon gason (ougan) epi jwe nenpot wòl nan wonfò a.

Prejije yo

Pandan premye mwatye diznevyèm syèk la, se sèlman premye chèf leta ayisyen yo ki te tolere vodou a men ki te gen krent pou akseptel kòm relijyon. Sete pito katolisis la kite relijyon Leta rekonèt. Elit nan peyi a konnnen ki wòl vodou a te jwe nan chavire sistèm nan nan moman revolisyon an, e yo te konnnen li ka debouche sou mete yon pouvwa paralèl sou pye. Yon lòt bò, vodou a te rete kole ak legliz katolik, e fonksyone prèske tankou pwason kraze nan bouyon ak li. Leta ayisyen te fè plizyè tantativ negosiyasyon ak Vatikan pou l te rekonèt ofisyèlman endepandans peyi Dayiti depi nan lane 1820 yo, e se jis nan lan 1860 yon konkòda ta pral siyen ant leta ayisyen ak Vatikan. A pati dat sa a, Ayiti te resevwa misyonè ki sòti Bretay nan peyi Lafrans pou vin fè entriksyon piblik ak mete kanpe pawas katolik nan tout rakwen peyi a (wè Delisle 2003). Klèje katolik la ta pral pwopoze yon nouvou vizyon de sivilizasyon nan peyi a, e fè vodou a pase pou yon kote yap fè maji, sosèlri ak kanibalis. Sete prejije sa yo ki te konn sikile deja sou pratik ak kwayans ki sot Lafrik yo. Daprè misyonè katolik yo, Ayiti dwe libere li de sa yo rele «tach afriken yo» ke vodou a reprezante, pou li mete tèt li nan menm nivo ak nasyon sivilize yo. Definisyon vodou ki chita sou opozisyon primitif/sivilize ki domine nan peyi a pandan lontan an soti nan fason misyonè ak administratè nan koloni a te wè l, epi misyonè ewopeyen yo nan diznevyèm syèk la (Spencer St John 1884).

Nap site pa egzanp yon pasaj nan diskou yon Evèk fransè te fè an 1896

Se la a ènmi prensipal nou an ye, li menm nou dwe fè yon lagè san kanpe avè l, yon lagè jiska lanmò. Gade l anfas, yon fason poun pi rayi l e plis detèmine pou n konbat li ak siksè […] Konbyen moun ki imajine yo ke vodou se yon bann vye dans ki pa sosyal ak pil manje. Vodou a se vrèman yon seremoni dyab: Li gen sakrifis li ak chèf siprèm li. Dans yo se sèlman deyò vilgè yon anndan lanfè (Kersuzan 1896).

Prejije sa yo mache men nan men ak mouvman kolonizasyon an yon fason jeneral, ki chita sou yon pwojè « sivilzatè» ewopeyen ki pran elan pandan diznevyèm syèk la. Antwopoloji a ki te fenk ap parèt nan fen dizuityèm ak nan diznevyèm syèk la te rete nan premye moman li yo pitit pwojè sa a, lè nou konsidere li te «mete nan yon lòd nan divèsite ant ras yo ak pèp yo, e ba yo yon plas, sa ki vle di, yon wòl nan listwa» (Duchet 1971), nan ka sa a wòl «sovaj la». Nan pèspektiv sa a, yon teyori rasis ki pretann li «syantifik» te prepare nan fen diznevyèm syèk la.

Vodou a pral sibi nan fyèv «sivilizasyon» an, de gwo vag pèsekisyon anba men legliz katolik, ki vin relijyon ofisyèl leta nan lane 1860. Nan lane 1896, li te pouse fidèl katolik yo voye jete pratik ak kwayans vodou yo, epi, nan lane 1941, li òganize yon gwo kanpay nasyonal pandan yap boule tout sa ki senbolize vodou yo ki rele «kanpay dè rejete», ki mande chak pawasyen fè sèman di li kite vodou tankou li «kite satan ak zèv li yo» (Métraux 1958: 298ss, ak Ramsey 2011). Jacques Roumain ki se ekriven ak fondatè biwo nasyonal etnoloji te kritike kapay sa anpil nan lane 1942, e biwo sa ta pral gen pou misyon ranmase ak pwoteje tout objè sakre vodou yo, epi fè pwomosyon pou rechèch sou tout aspè vodou a ak tradisyon kiltirèl peyi a.

Nouvo pozisyon entèlektyel yo: vodou a tankou kote ki kenbe memwa

Okipasyon ameriken nan peyi Dayiti soti 1915 pou rive 1934, ta pral okazyon tou pou vizyon negatif sou vodou a retounen sou sèn nan. Nan menm moman sa nou konnen yon nouvo pozisyon entèlektyèl ayisyen yo: Jean Price Mars pibliye nan lane 1928 yon liv konferans ki gen pou tit «Ainsi parla l’oncle», ladan l li pwopoze pou yo rekonèt kilti ayisyèn nan jwen sous li nan kilti afrikèn nan, kidonk, vodou a se yon relijyon tout ayisyen dwe reklame kòm afè pa yo. Kèk liv enpòtan (pa egzanp Métraux 1958; Verger 1957) prezante plizyè etnografi sou vodou ki rekonèt wòl li nan fè afriken yo te trennen sòti Lafrik vin nan esklavaj yo rejwenn diyite yo, e kòm yon kreyasyon kiltirèl orijinal ki kenbe idantite ayisyen yo.

Aprè plizyè tantativ manipilasyon politik avèk vodou a pandan trant lane diktati Duvalier yo François Duvalier deklare li se defansè vodou a men li ap itilize l tankou yon zouti politik lè li fè kèk ougan reprezante li nan kèk vil ak kanpay (Hurbon 1979). Gwo vag nouvo legliz pannkotis kontinye sekwe vodou a jouk jounen jodi a. Legliz sa yo, atravè prèch yo ap fè yo, fè moun yo gen reprezantasyon de sòsèlri kòm yon bagay vodou a kreye. Malgre sa, vodou a kenbe yon pozisyon transvèsal pa rapò ak divès sistèm relijye ki nan konpetisyon nan peyi a, lè nou konsidere yon vodouyizan pa gen okenn pwoblèm poul di l se katolik an menm tan, batize ak kominye anndan legliz. Menmjan vèsyon pannkotis nan pwotestantis la di koze lwa a se zafè dyab, men sa pa anpeche yo kwè nan rèv ak koze lespri rantre nan tèt moun nan, ke nou jwenn nan vodou a.

Avèk pwosesis demokratizasyon peyi Dayiti te konnen, aprè diktati a te fin tonbe nan lane 1986, yo te rache plizyè ougan paske selon sa ki di, yo te konn kore diktati a. Depi lè sa a, vodou a kreye pwòp òganizasyon pa l, pou defann yo kont destriksyon objè yo ak mank tolerans kèk lòt relijyon.

Malgre sa, vodou a tap cheche jwenn an menm tan menm privilèj ak lòt relijyon yo, tankou dwa pou yo jwe wòl ofis eta sivil lè gen batèm, maryaj ak antèman. Kèk lidè politik jouk jounen jodi a konn site vodou kòm «fòs mistik» nan diskou yo, yon fason pou yo legitime tèt yo nan mas pèp la. Men, sa ki pral fè boutofen yo rekonèt li kòm youn nan kote ou ka jwenn idantite pèsonèl ak kolektif pèp ayisyen an, se paske diferan kategori pwodiksyon atistik enspire de li pou yo pwodui, tankou: penti, eskilti, mizik, dans oubyen literati (Consentino 1995). Antwopoloji modèn nan pral oblije bay tèt li misyon etidye lyen sa yo, e lap dekouvri ke vodou se yon espas kote yo kenbe memwa non sèlman pou nasyon ayisyèn nan, men tou pou limanite. Aprè tou, li te yon referans nan batay esklav yo tap mennen pou rejwenn ak fè rekonèt diyite yo kòm moun.

Pou n fini

Vodou a bay okazyon pou plizyè rechèch enpòtan fèt sou rapò ki genyen ant li menm ak penti nayiv la. Nan sans sa a André Malraux te di nan lane 1975 ke sete «eksperyans ki pi enpresyonan, e se sèl limenm nou te ka kontwole nan penti majik ventyèm syèk la», men anpil atis ayisyen chwazi wout penti «sofistike» a, pandan yap rekonèt jan vodou a enspire moun (wè Lerebours 2018). Menmjan an, nap refere nou ak trè bel liv Gérald Alexis ki te parèt nan edisyon sèk da (cercle d’Art) nan lane 2000. Nou dwe tou, sou yon baz syantifik, fè envantè divès resous ki geri kò ak lespri ki genyen nan vodou a, gras ak konesans yo genyen sou plant yo ak jan yo ka itilize nan geri moun ki malad. Plizyè espozisyon te fèt sou penti ayisyen an nan peyi Lafrans, Laswis ak Etazini, men sou lot aspè kiltirèl yo Antwopoloji a dwe fè nouvo pa. Se sèten, vodou a rete yon kilti vivan ki vin pi rich, nan entegre dives enfliyans gras ak enpotans diaspora ayisyen an nan peyi (Etazini, Lafrans, nan Karayib la ak Amerik Latin nan) ki kontinye kwè ak pratike relijyon vodou yo.

Anpil kesyon kòmanse poze sou wòl vodou a nan revolisyon ayisyèn an, nan atitid woulem de bò gouvènman ayisyen yo depi lendanpans nan lane 1804 rive jis jounen jodi a, epi sou sosyete sekrè yo ke imajinè yo kenbe lespri ayisyen nan mas popilè yo. Nou dwe siyale tou, enpòtans yon rechèch sou objè sakre vodou yo ak sit ki senbolize rezistans ak sistèm esklavaj la ki se kote ki kenbe memwa : yo ka fè konnen pi byen, pwa revolisyen ayisyèn nan nan batay kont rasis kap fèt jodi a.

Vokabilè

Bòkò : se non yo bay ougan ki plis pratike maji, swa pou geri yon moun oubyen edel atake yon ènmi l

Desounen : se yon rityèl yo pratike lè yon inisye mouri pou wete lwa a nan tèt li

Kochè: se non ye te konn bay chofè kap kondui machin chwal ap trennen yo

Lwa : espri oubyen divinite (espri zansèt yo)

Lwa mèt-tèt : se espri inisye a resevwa jou inisyasyon li a pou pwoteje l, li kole inisye a ak yon lwa ki pou pwoteje l jiskaske li mouri

Lwa rasin : lwa yon moun eritye nan fanmi l

Manbo : prèt vodou fanm (pretès)

Manje-lwa : seremoni kote sèvitè lwa ap danse, pran lwa, ofi lwa yo manje yo renmen (li kapab vyann poul, bèf, cabri). Manje sa yo prezante nan yon seremoni pou onore espri yo oubyen geri yon moun lwa kenbe pou manje, anba otorite yon ougan obyen yon manbo

Ougan: prèt vodou

Pwen: pisans mistik yon moun al achete poul travay misitik oubyen fè aktivite ekonomik li fè pwogrè

Vèvè: Desen senbolik lwa yo

Pedji: Pyès espesyal lwa yo

Peristil: kay kote seremoni vodou yo fèt

Poto-mitan : yon poto nan mitan peristi l, se ladan l espri yo pase pou yo vin jwenn sèvitè yo

Wanga: rityèl maji pou geri oubyen atake ènmi

Wonfò: Tanp vodou

Wonsi: Inisye nan vodou

Bibliographie