Where Have All the Oungan Gone?: Charismatic Christianity and Moral Representations of Vodou in Haiti
This article examines the conflation of oungan (priest-healer) with bòkò ("sorcerer") among Haiti’s Charismatic Christians. The phenomenon, however, is hardly new, having been a strategy in earlier campagnes anti-superstitieuses by the Catholic Church. More recently, the "spiritual wa...
| Main Author: | |
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| Format: | Electronic Article |
| Language: | English |
| Check availability: | HBZ Gateway |
| Journals Online & Print: | Drawer...
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| Fernleihe: | Fernleihe für die Fachinformationsdienste |
| Published: |
University of Californiarnia Press
2023
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| In: |
Nova religio
Year: 2023, Volume: 26, Issue: 4, Pages: 8-32 |
| Online Access: |
Volltext (lizenzpflichtig) |
| Summary: | This article examines the conflation of oungan (priest-healer) with bòkò ("sorcerer") among Haiti’s Charismatic Christians. The phenomenon, however, is hardly new, having been a strategy in earlier campagnes anti-superstitieuses by the Catholic Church. More recently, the "spiritual warfare" strategies of Haiti’s Charismatic Christians, who measure all things according to a strict moral binary, constitute a significant intensification of the Christian moral assault on Vodou. By contrast, anthropologists and other pro-Vodou voices in the twentieth century insisted on a careful distinction between the two ritual specialists. Despite their very different motivations, however, I argue that both the Christian conflation of oungan and bòkò and the anthropological effort to define a "pure" Vodou rest upon the same binary moral framework. Because of this shared framework, both ultimately fail to capture the relational moral perspective that Vodou has long held in the face of the violence of slavery and the shifting complexities in contemporary Haiti. |
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| ISSN: | 1541-8480 |
| Contains: | Enthalten in: Nova religio
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| Persistent identifiers: | DOI: 10.1525/nr.2023.26.4.8 |