NOTE: Paper under construction. Please do not quote.

This paper has already changed since this draft was printed and it will change more in future months as I incorporate current research. However, in the meantime I welcome your comments and suggestions ebay@emory.edu.

Questioning Syncretism: Vodou in Haiti and Roman Catholicism in Benin Edna G. Bay Emory University

Rites for the dead have a common denominator everywhere in the country, but each community brings to them something of its own or emphasizes traditions that elsewhere are forgotten. Harold Courlander

Syncretism has long been a contested descriptor of the result of encounter between cultures. Used with different and changing connotations by disciplines that include cultural anthropology, religion, and linguistics, the term's earliest meaning signaled simply some form of joining of peoples or ideas. Applied to religious encounter in the seventeenth century, syncretism in Christian theological debate referred pejoratively to changes in religious practice. By the late nineteenth century it came to be viewed, rather more positively, as an element in the history of Christian culture, though in the twentieth century syncretism became a problem widely debated in Christian missiology literature. Meanwhile, syncretism was brought into anthropological thinking by Melville Herskovits in the mid-twentieth century. For him, it signaled a stage on an acculturation continuum that assumed a tendency toward assimilation by dominant Western cultures (Shaw and Stewart 1994; Droogers and Greenfield 2001). Applied to religious encounter between Christianity and non-western, particularly African, spirituality, syncretism suggested a blend of generous helpings of two or more traditions. French ethnographer Alfred Mtraux, for

example, was typical in arguing for Haitian Vodou that "The equivocal reputation which Voodoo has acquired is in fact due to just this very syncretic quality by which it mixes together, in almost equal proportions, African rites and Christian observances" (1972, 324). In the postwar celebratory world of national independences, religious syncretism became an honored academic label of human ingenuity for area studies scholars. Overused and over time found to be problematic as an analytic tool, the term was dropped by many area studies scholars in the 1970s and 80s. At least two recent projects in anthropology have taken a new look at religious syncretism in light of contemporary postmodernist thinking that has focused on creolization, hybridization and other forms of cultural blending (Stewart and Shaw 1994; Greenfield and Droogers 2001). Though reluctant to offer hard definitions, both return to ideas that suggest encounter leading to new religious forms. Shaw and Stewart, for example, speak of "synthesis" (1994), while Droogers and Greenfield focus "on the religious beliefs and practices of those alive today who are the products of the contact, mixing or interpenetration between Africans, EuroAmericans and others" (2001, 9). They thus assume that at least one outcome of encounter is the creation of new cultural forms, though they do not argue for the mixing in "equal proportions" that Mtraux presumes. Shaw and Stewart on the one hand and Droogers and Greenfield on the other add a further dimension to the syncretism debate by raising questions of the power relationships between cultural groups. Perhaps responding to claims that syncretism is most frequently invoked as a term of disparagement for blendings of African religious forms and Christianity, Shaw and Stewart argue that complicating factors in the processes of synthesis between local and totalizing religions are the power differentials in colonial and postcolonial settings. Droogers and

Greenfield similarly raise what they term "a political view of syncretism" that brings in questions of cultural dominance and hegemony. How does political dominance affect individuals' and groups' propensity to adopt religious practices from others? Historians of Africa in the 1970s saw political resistance in religious practices; more recent scholars have been intrigued by the possibility that religious practices represent cultural resistance. The complexities of power run deeper, though, as these projects point out, and involve individuals making decisions about what ritual practices to adopt; scholars writing about religions they practice; and practitioners becoming scholar-entrepreneurs. Politics is involved, too, in how the result of encounter is interpreted by whom and when, which underscores Shaw and Stewart's focus on a "politics of religious synthesis" that emphasizes discursive constructions of religion. Most recently, theorists of syncretism have argued that indeed all religions are syncretic ( ). This paper builds on these useful directions in anthropological thinking to consider the historical experience of encounter between Roman Catholicism and African spirituality at two very different moments and locations: colonial Saint-Domingue/early Haiti and contemporary southern Benin/former Dahomey.i Religious encounter in these two settings offers a unique arena for comparative study. Haitian Vodou until recently was generally understood as a mixing of Roman Catholicism with African religions, and particularly with the religious system of the Ewe/Adja/Fon/Yoruba area of West Africa. The words Ewe, Adja and Fon in fact are ethnonyms used to describe peoples resident in southern Togo and Benin who, along with other groups, speak lects of a language known as Gbe. Yoruba is similarly a language name that originally referred to closely-related groups to the immediate east, mainly in southwestern Nigeria, and that is now used generally as an ethnonym. Gbe-speaking and Yoruba-speaking peoples share a religious system associated with the honoring of deities called respectively vodun and orisa.

Roman Catholicism as practiced in southern Benin is a twentieth-century product of missionary endeavor now largely indigenized through an African priesthood drawn from the same Gbe- and Yoruba-speaking cultures. In effect, scholarship until the recent past has assumed that Haiti and southern Benin both came under the major influence of the same two religious traditions, the one African and the other Christian. However, the careers of these parallel religious encounters contrast dramatically. Haitian Vodou is a religion that is not recognized by the Roman Catholic Church as Christian, even though its followers insist that they are Catholic. Its two most visible and frequently cited resemblances to Catholicism are its use of Church liturgy in Latin or French at the opening of services and an apparent identification of African spirits with Christian saints. In Benin, Vodun and Catholicism have by and large remained separate, though the Church in the past 40 years has worked to inculturate Vodun forms into Roman Catholic practice. How could it be that encounter between the same two religious traditions resulted in opposite outcomes? Drawing on the voluminous secondary literature on Haitian Vodou and on field and archival research on Beninese Roman Catholicism, this paper explores the paradox of these seemingly contrary results. Along the way, it goes so far as to raise the question of whether or not syncretism in fact exists in the encounters represented by these case studies. It hypothesizes some of the means and motives that people employ as they appropriate new elements to their spiritual practices and thus reform and reformulate their religious systems, and it raises questions of cultural power. Thus the paper suggests that people have a series of responses to religious encounter and offers several operative concepts drawn from these case studies: resonance, the recognition of principle across religious traditions by practitioners; surface recognition, the assumption of identity on the basis of superficial similarity; fusion, the blending of

understandings from different traditions; evolution, which incorporates the insight that all religions are changing all the time; efficacy, which holds religious practice to a standard of performance; and eclecticism, which seems a fundamental underlying approach to spiritual matters from an African perspective.

The Haitian Story During the last two decades new scholarship, particularly by scholars working in Central Africa, has had a profound impact on our understanding of processes initiated by cultural and religious contact in colonial Saint-Domingue and has immensely complicated conventional thinking about the sources of Haitian Vodou. This recent work suggests multiple processes set off by encounter, between two major African religious systems on the one hand and between African religion and Roman Catholicism on the other. Most importantly, it suggests that only one of those processes -- the encounter between African religious systems took place on Hispaniola. In addition, this new scholarship points to a revised picture of the nature of Vodou in colonial Saint-Domingue and early Haiti. The classic Haitian ethnographic sources of the early to mid-twentieth century all assumed that the African foundation for Haitian Vodou was the religion of the Slave Coast, the Gbe/Yoruba system of spirits that gave the name Vodun to Haiti along with the African basis for its Kreyol language (Herskovits 1937; Deren 1953; Courlander 1960; Mtraux 1972).ii The assumption was that Dahomean spirits or vodun, renamed lwa in Saint-Domingue, met and mixed there with Roman Catholic saints and liturgy. Apart from the apparent Catholic influences, variations from the practices of Vodun as it was known in West Africa were considered relatively minor and were attributed to the practices of numerous other African

ethnicities, to the influence of European folklore and institutions that included Freemasonry, and to the absorption of Amerindian influences. Even descriptions of the various ceremonial nanchon (nations) with names linking them to specific African ethnicities reinforced the emphasis on Dahomey. The Rada division, with a name drawn from Allada/Arada, a kingdom conquered by Dahomey in the early eighteenth century, took ceremonial precedence and was clearly linked to lwa from West Africa. The other major division was Petro or Lemba; both names were linked to Central Africa, yet Petro and Lemba's connections tended to be described vaguely as having "many African deities but these usually come from some other part of Africa than ancient Dahomey" (Mtraux 1972, 86-90). Beginning in the 1960s a series of studies by anthropologists and historians began to document first the demographic impact and later the cultural influence on the Western Hemisphere of Central Africans, the peoples typically referred to in the contemporary literature as Kongos and Angolas.iii The recognition that more than half of the African-born slaves in Saint-Domingue at the beginning of the Haitian Revolution were Central Africans suggested that on the basis of demography alone, the emphasis on cultural influences from West Africa had been overstated. And indeed, scholars of Central Africa provided a wealth of documentation of the impact of religious practices from that area in the Western Hemisphere generally and in Saint-Domingue specifically (Janzen 1982; Thompson 1983; Heusch 1989; Thornton 1988 and 1998; MacGaffey 2002; Vanhee 2002; Rey 2002).iv A new picture of Haitian Vodou has taken form from this emerging scholarship, one in which the African elements of Vodou can be seen as deriving in the main from two major culture areas of Africa, West Africa (Gbe/Yoruba) on the one hand and Central Africa (Kongo/Angola) on the other. Moreover, the new scholarship on Central Africa offers compelling evidence that the addition of Roman Catholic elements to

African religious practice occurred prior to the departure of Central African slaves for the Western Hemisphere. In 1984 John K. Thornton re-called scholarly attention to the establishment of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo that began with the baptism of its king in 1491 and continued uninterrupted to the present (See also MacGaffey 1986, 191-216). By the late 1980s he was pointing out that "African Christianity" had had a significant impact in the development of African-derived Christian traditions in the Americas (1988). He further suggested that "there was considerable syncretism in Christian practice in Kongo." As if to anticipate contemporary scholars' skepticism about the "authenticity" of any form of Catholicism that might have been brought by Central Africans on slave ships, he noted that the Vatican accepted this Central African Catholicism as orthodox up until the nineteenth-century changes in attitude toward nonwestern people that preceded late European imperialism (1984; 2002. See also Vanhee 2002, 257-58). Finally, Thornton closed the circle by pointing out that in addition to the thousands of Central African Catholics presumed to have been sent to the New World over the course of the slave trade, large numbers of Catholic Kongolese warriors had been sold directly into SaintDomingue in the late eighteenth century and had had an important influence on military practice and ideology in the Haitian Revolution (1993). Working with records from further south, the areas of Portuguese Angola and Benguela and their hinterland, Linda Heywood similarly argued that a creolized Portuguese-African culture in Central Africa emerged in the eighteenth century (2002b). Like people from the Kongo area, these Central Africans practiced an "Africanized" Roman Catholicism that many carried with them as slaves into the Western Hemisphere, mainly to Brazil but in all likelihood also to Saint-Domingue.

Thornton also suggested that significant conversion took place along the West African coast in ways comparable to the Kongolese experience (1988; 1992; 1998), and hence that Gbespeaking slaves also would have arrived in Saint-Domingue familiar with Christian practice. Donald Cosentino has gone so far as to argue in the context of Saint-Domingue that "Crucifixes, rosaries, plaster images of the saints . . . these and other sacramentals were assimilated by Africans in Dahomey and Kongo before the Middle Passage" (1995, 35-36). Unlike the case of Central Africa, however, there is no evidence for any successful mass proselytization in the Gbespeaking West Africa. And despite several abortive missionary efforts to convert monarchs in places like Allada and Ouidah, there is no evidence for effective conversion even among elites in the areas where Gbe- and Yoruba-speakers originated, in the eighteenth century or before (Law 1991).v Hein Vanhee has confirmed from archival and primary sources the practice of African Catholicism in Saint-Domingue, where observers specifically associated the practice of Christianity with slaves from Kongo (2002). Indeed, the classic contemporary authority on the colonial period, Moreau de St.-Mery, typified such comments when he wrote that "Il y a beaucoup de Congos qui ont des ides de catholicit, notamment ceux de la rivire du Zaire. Elles leur sont venues des Portugais, mais elles n'ont pas banni celles du mahomtisme et de l'idoltrie; de manire que leur religion forme un assemblage assez monstrueux" (1797, I:53).vi Modern scholars have tended to agree with Moreau's characterization, albeit in more polite language, by arguing that Catholic liturgy, imagery and some sacraments (most notably baptism) were central to Kongolese practices, but as part of a world view that at base was wholly African.vii Instruction in Catholicism in Kongo and the other areas of Central Africa touched by Christianity in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was mainly in the hands of African

catechists and lay assistants, who would explain the tenets of the faith while missionary priests on tour would arrive occasionally to perform sacraments (Thornton 1988, 271; 1984). What then, were the elements of this Afro-Catholic spiritual culture that Central Africans brought with them to the Western Hemisphere? In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Kongo, "along with Christianity, [there existed] puberty rites for girls, polygyny, the twin cult, various ordeals, nyombo funerals, grave cults, personal and public charms, divination, and rainmaking" (MacGaffey 1986, 205).viii Funerals and rituals associated with the dead that took place in cemeteries were central in Kongo culture, were accepted by priests as Christian, and were reflected in contemporary Saint-Domingue accounts of slaves' fascination with graveyards and their habit of performing elaborate ceremonies for the dead. For example, priests in lateeighteenth century Kongo celebrated All Saints Eve with parishioners, accompanying families to cemeteries to say the rosary (Thornton 1998, 88). As in Kongo, much of the instruction in Catholic prayer and liturgy in Saint-Domingue and early Haiti would have come through the services of lay specialists, those individuals who became known as prt savanne and who continued to be responsible for reciting Latin or French invocations during Vodou ceremonies (Vanhee 2002, 260-63). Territorial spirits (bisimbi) were important named deities in Kongo in the period, along with numerous anonymous spiritual beings also called bisimbi. Thornton believes that people associated the former, the named spirits of the land, with Catholic saints (1998).ix Certainly the name Simbi survived and was personalized as a lwa in Saint Domingue. Also closely linked to the world of spirits were twins and other anomalous births whose importance was reflected in elaborate cults. St. James the Greater (Santiago), who had supposedly intervened on a battlefield to save Christian Kongo during a succession struggle in the early sixteenth century, was the patron saint of the kingdom. He would have arrived in Saint-

Domingue in the experience of slaves accustomed to celebrating July 25 as St. James Day. Central Africans also brought their common practice of the use of charms for healing, presumably including also their use of religious medals as charms (Thornton 1984, 157). Their cultural knowledge incorporated sorcery as well, and the use of poisons for which some individuals in Saint-Domingue became notorious in the late eighteenth century. The possibility that Roman Catholic elements initially made their way into Vodou practices because they were part of the religious culture of Central African slaves offers a compelling explanatory simplicity. It fits the contemporary evidence more comfortably than the previous hypotheses that assumed that Vodou was the product of a European-based Catholicism meeting a series of African religions in Hispaniola. Effective instruction in Catholicism as mandated by the Code Noir, at least for the vast majority of slaves in the plantation system, was clearly not effective during the colonial period (Vanhee 2002, 260). The possibility that Catholic elements were added in the 1804-60 period of official Church isolation, the other usual explanation for the inclusion of elements of Catholicism, does not follow logically. Why would people who had fought more than twelve years to throw off European domination embrace the religion of their oppressors, and particularly after they had defeated them? The impact of the new scholarship on Kongo has also detached our understanding of Vodou and its nature from the emphasis on its links to revolt and revolution. Rather, it emerges more clearly as "an amalgam of 'national' cults that tried to answer everyday problems such as sickness, theft, or adultery, as well as the pressing constraints of Dominguois colonialism" (Vanhee 2002, 254). With the exception of David Geggus (2002, 36), however, scholars of the Caribbean have been slow to embrace the new findings of Africanist scholars and particularly the suggestion that Catholicism entered Saint-Domingue from Africa as well as Europe.x Earlier interpretations

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remain: that Catholicism, mandated by the Code Noir, was being absorbed during the colonial period, and that the ex-slaves during the 1804-60 period forged Vodou out of African religions mixed with memories of Catholic instruction (Hurbon 2001, 161; Dubois 2004, 101-2). Vodou as resistance is an ever-present theme. At its mildest, scholars follow Roger Bastide's famous argument for Brazil (1978), that Africans pretended to be Christian in order to practice African rites: "Thus, superficially, many of the ritualistic aspects of Catholicism appeared in voodoo, but consciously adapted and reinterpreted by the slaves to accord with their own religious beliefs. In this way, Catholicism served as a kind of mask, or faade, behind which their own beliefs and practices could flourish" (Fick 1990, 43. See also Joint 1999, 32). Catholicism among blacks, and Vodou with or without Catholic syncretism, continue to be invoked as political resistance associated with revolt: "The explosive dangers of Roman Catholicism's syncretic potential was demonstrated . . . by the ease with which it was grafted on to African systems of belief and ritual to form vodun, the black folk religion of the French West Indies which provided much of the impetus for the Haitian slave upheaval of 1791" (Craton 1997, 235. See also Hurbon 2003; Desmangles 1992; Laguerre 1989). The image of Vodou as impetus to violent revolt is enshrined in popular accounts of the ceremony at Bois Caman that took place shortly before the outbreak of revolt in August 1791 (e.g. Hurbon 1993). Even a scholarly study of Haiti's religion states matter-of-factly: "The 1791 Revolution began with a Vodou ceremony at Bois Caman in the northern part of the island. After sacrificing a pig, the participants went into the towns and cities of the north and indiscriminately slaughtered every white man, woman, and child" (Desmangles 1992, 29). Geggus's careful parsing of the sources for Bois Caman, however, situates it as the religious accompaniment to an earlier strategic planning session, and argues convincingly that it would have been a ritual that assured protection

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to those who were going to fight (2002, 80-92. See also Vanhee 2002, 253-54; Thornton 1998, 99-100). Thus the cultural-religious picture of the merging of African peoples in western Hispaniola has shifted to suggest two major streams of forced African immigrants to SaintDomingue: one consisted of West Africans who in the main served their vodun and orisa, but who would have included smaller numbers of practitioners of other African religions; another was comprised of Central Africans, many of whom practiced a form of Christianity that "allowed the Africans to retain their old cosmology, their old understanding of the structure of the universe and the place of the gods and other divine beings in it" (Thornton 1988, 278). The Caribbean encounter between these two major streams would have begun in the colonial period, and possibly intensified during the years of the Revolution. The Vodou that emerged with independent Haiti was far from a uniform or static institution, however. This African-derived religious system consisted of a malleable set of practices that varied from locality to locality and would continue to absorb and incorporate cultural influences, yet be recognizable by practitioners as reflecting a common underlying understanding of the worlds of the living and the spirits.xi Ironically, in contrast to the question of how and when Roman Catholicism and African spirituality became Haitian Vodou, little scholarly interest has been shown in the processes of encounter between West and Central African religious systems in the setting of colonial SaintDomingue. Yet twentieth-century African ethnography has given us a depth of evidence that allows us to recognize and delineate significant similarities and differences between West and Central African spiritual approaches as they manifested themselves in the setting of SaintDomingue. The fluidity of elements that make up Haitian Vodou was in fact characteristic of

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both West and Central African cultures, where an eclectic sensibility fostered an openness to new spiritual elements. This pragmatic sense of efficacy, that spiritual processes that work should be adopted, would have provided a foundation for encounter between West and Central Africans in Saint-Domingue and a vehicle for the absorption of influences from many other cultural traditions. Beyond that common sense of spiritual pragmatism, however, there were significant differences between the practices of West and Central Africans. Probably the most important of the reactions of West and Central Africans to each other's way of serving spirits was resonance, a sense of recognition in principle but not necessarily close identity with another's practices. It surely must have characterized understandings about the role of ancestors, for example. Both cultures conceived of parallel worlds of the living and the dead, but differed in their understandings of proper interactions between them. West Africans saw the relationship between the living and dead as one of common effort and mutual reinforcement, where sacrifice and prayer to the dead could strengthen the ability of the ancestors to assist the living, whose success in the visible world would in turn improve the situation of those in the land of the dead (Maupoil 1943, 57). In contrast, Central Africans were concerned to be sure that the two parallel worlds did not interfere with each other, and that the punitive tendencies of the ancestors be kept in check, or better yet be turned against enemies (MacGaffey 1986, 170). At the same time, descendants in both cultures might attribute personal affliction to ancestral actions. The conceptual vagueness of the meaning of "ancestors" in Kongo must have found resonance in conceptions of the Gede (Guede) among peoples from Dahomey, where Gede referred to autochthonous inhabitants of the Abomey plateau, peoples who were said to have emerged from the earth. In Haiti the Gede in this ancestral sense became linked to Central African-derived ancestral ritual and the centrality of cemeteries. However cemeteries, which

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offered Central Africans access to the powers of the politically-important dead, did not exist in Gbe-speaking cultures (burial was within family compounds). The central symbol associated with Kongolese cemeteries was a cross, "one arm representing the boundary [between the worlds of the living and the dead] and the other the path of power between the worlds" (MacGaffey 1986, 116). That Kongolese vertical "path of power" in a three-dimensional sense became the poteau mitan, the central pole around which Haitian vodou ritual revolved, and the replacement for the tree in open-air ceremonies characteristic of public ritual in Gbe-speakers' Vodun rites. The cruciform symbol would have evoked for West Africans the uncertainties of crossroads that in turn were associated with the vodun Legba (Eshu Elegba among Yoruba-speakers). But the horizontal line as ground drawing would also have resonated with the Dahomean use of ve, a medium of maize flour mixed with palm oil, to mark off space, separating ritual from common areas or, similarly, spaces that were politically potent from those of quotidian life. In Haiti ground drawings based on symmetrical Kongolese cruciform designs were elaborated (probably with European Baroque influence) into the complex veve that are used to call the spirits, functioning in ways comparable to the metal asen of Gbespeakers that similarly attract and hold spirits in contemporary Benin and to a lesser extent Haiti. Resonance also must have characterized the encounter between West and Central Africans in the area of possession. In both cultural universes, a high god was separated from humanity by a series of mediators. Possession as a form of spirit mediumship existed in Central African religious culture but differed significantly from the possession-performances associated with the vodun in Gbe areas. Moreover Kongolese bisimbi, though they might possess humans, were far from humanoid and varied in form from spirits identified with specific territories, to forces charged with bringing charms to life, to beings associated with twins and similar

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anomalous beings (MacGaffey 2002, 213). In contrast, the highly anthropomorphized vodun/orisa of West Africa had characteristics that were vividly human writ large, beings whose faults and virtues were subject to endless discussion in popular myth. Neither African practice of possession, however, approached the contemporary ubiquity and theatricality of possession in Haitian Vodou. While one study has attributed this to the impact in eighteenth-century SaintDomingue of commedia dell'arte (Wilmeth 1977), another has suggested that possession in the context of the horrors of the slave regime in Saint-Domingue, which individuals faced without the protective intervention of ritual leaders, might well account for the relatively less controlled nature of possession in Haitian culture (Brown 2001, 253). Finally, resonance would have prompted West Africans accustomed to calling the spirits at the opening of ceremonies to recognize the functions of Afro-Catholic liturgy and prayers that began church services. As is evident from these examples, processes of change in response to new social settings also characterized the development of Vodou practice in Saint-Domingue/Haiti. These changes, which I term evolution, in this sense appear to have been related to a phenomenon of more or less conscious invention and manipulation that has been described for Gbe and Yoruba cultures (Barber 1981; Bay 1998, 21-24, 318-19). Evolution allowed the transformation of the vague class of Kongo bisimbi spirits into Simbi, for example, a personalized lwa made patron-saint of maize, rain and magicians (MacGaffey 2002, 219). More striking is the history of the tragic mulatta figure, Ezili (Erzulie) Freda, who was virtually unknown in West Africa except for her name, a corruption of two place names in present-day Benin. Ezili Freda was the beautiful lightskinned seductress whose desires for wealth and admiration were boundless, but whose possession performances always ended in inconsolable tears. As such, Ezili thrived as a living

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spiritual embodiment of the race/caste social system of colonial Saint Domingue and the racebased class system of independent Haiti. In addition to resonance and evolution, a process of fusion appears to have operated in the encounter between West and Central African religions. Fusion occurred when conceptual identity was nearly exact. For example, an elderly Yoruba-speaking diviner described a conception of the cosmos to a French scholar in the early 1930s: the earth bearing the visible world floats on waters, with ancestors located in some vague area above the earth and the gods in a place called If under the waters (Maupoil). Writing about Kongo cosmology, in which invisible beings inhabit the sky, the area under the earth, and the waters, MacGaffey talks of a "three-zone model" which "appears to be related . . . to a division of spiritual beings between eternal creatures, who live with Nzambi in the sky, source of the rain, and the dead, who were once alive and now exist underground and in terrestrial waters" (1986, 46). Similarly, power objects infused with medicines that focused magical powers were common in both cultural universes (Blier 1995; MacGaffey 1986). Known in Haiti as paket kongo, they incorporated common ideas about tying or pounding to concentrate and focus power. Heusch has wondered in print why Kongo and Dahomean did not merge in Haiti and in asking overlooked the fusion of rainbow serpents in both cultures, and more importantly, practices associated with twinning (1989, 295). MacGaffey's discussion of twinning practices in Kongo culture could with minor adjustments serve as a detailed description of twinning practices in West Africa (2002, 214-18). Twins, albinos, deformed children, and children who return to earth repeatedly were all perceived as abnormalities in both West and Central Africa. In Central Africa, all were associated with water, while deformed children, called tohossu in Dahomey, were said to be

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kings of the water; both cultures claimed to return such anomalies to the waters from which they had come. And perhaps the best example of fusion, the lwa Ogou, will be discussed shortly. A final reaction to encounter, which I would call surface recognition, characterized the response of West Africans to the Central African Catholic emphasis on saints. Surface recognition would have prompted Gbe-speaking and Yoruba-speaking peoples, with their deep knowledge of the characteristics and symbols of personalized spirits, to see their vodun and orisa in verbal or visual imagery associated with saints. Perhaps the best example of surface recognition was the "syncretism" of St. Patrick with Danbala, the beloved Dahomean rainbowserpent associated with wealth and the wisdom of the most ancient of ancestors. Chromolithographs showing St. Patrick standing among snakes and gesturing toward water were read without reference to the saint's cleansing of Ireland of serpents but rather as imagery associated with Danbala, the sacred snake who linked waters to the sky. Other examples abound. Legba, the lwa who ceremonially opened the way to the other spirits, was seen in Catholic images of St. Peter holding a key. The importance of the cult of the Virgin Mary in Haiti (Rey 1999) similarly reminds us of Vodou's distance from the Catholic meanings of sainthood. The opulence of the jewelry, garments and other attributes of the Mater Dolorosa del Monte Calvaria were linked to the sexual promiscuity and insatiable material demands of Ezili Freda.xii Thus supposed "syncretism" between saints and African spirits was one-way, reinforcing the understanding of the African deity, not the saint. Mtraux pointed out that it was lwa, not saints, who possessed servers and that "loa do not borrow the attributes and characters of the saints to whom they are supposed to correspond. It is . . . the other way about: the saint, stripped of his own personality, takes on that of the loa" (1972, 326).

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An exception to the surface recognition of lwa in Catholic saints is Ogou/St. James, who represents an extraordinarily synergistic instance of fusion, a triple reinforcement of characteristics of West Africa's Ogun with Catholicism's St. James understood as savior of the kingdom of Kongo. A god of iron, healing, smithing and hunting in Yoruba culture, Ogun met the Kongolese St. James in Saint-Domingue.xiii The saints appearance on an African battlefield had given a sixteenth-century Kongolese king an important victory and the saint the status of Kongolese national patron-saint. An ocean away, resonance and reinforcement of warrior traditions in a setting of physical resistance to an intolerable slave system would have made Ogou/St. James perhaps the most perfectly fused of deities. Yet both drew on African, and not strictly or directly European Catholic, sources. In sum, the encounter in colonial Saint-Domingue between Central and West African religious systems, because it was based on a common approach to spirituality, facilitated a flexible blending that incorporated major elements of both. Operating together in the noncentralized complexity that became Haitian Vodou, West African Vodun and Central African Afro-Christianity both were created and recreated by the actions of followers who pragmatically appropriated or eliminated spiritual practices according to African norms of efficacy. In that sense, the meeting and mixing of West and Central African religious systems stands as an example of syncretism in its common definition as a joining of major portions of two different religions. Within that joining, however, the visible Afro-Catholic elements were subsidiary to the overall nature of Vodou as an African-derived religious system based on a spiritual vision held in common by West and Central Africans. Some scholars have argued that Vodou as it evolved in Haiti included Roman Catholicism as a parallel pratice, that elements of Catholicism were juxtaposed but not integrated (Mintz and Trouillot 1995, 128; Desmangles 1992; Heusch 1989).

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What seems far more likely from the descriptions of Vodou services in the literature, however, was something different: that elements of Roman Catholicism had been appropriated first by Central Africans and then by servers of the lwa in Saint-Domingue in light of their perceptions of Catholic practices. The visual presence of the lwa represented by Catholic imagery, and the use of Catholic prayers and liturgy to call the spirits were not arbitrary choices, but rather logical additions based on an African understanding of the nature and working of the world of spirits. Thus it is little wonder that Vodou became such a problem for the Roman Catholic Church, with vodouists insisting that they were Catholic and making claims to shrines and spaces sacred to the Vatican. With its return to Haiti in 1860, the Church was faced with the problem of how to disconnect its identity from the practices of Vodou, how to reclaim itself from the clutches of this blended tradition. The representatives of Rome found allies in the upper classes, in the light-skinned political elites who by then had claimed ultimate control over the nation. But the prestige of leadership and wealth were not enough to pry Haitians from their attachment to the lwa, and Haitian Vodou has been subject to periodic campaigns to eradicate it in the nearly 150 years since.

The Beninese Story One hundred years after Saint-Domingue ceased to be a colony of France, the French created the colony of Dahomey. Roman Catholicism there followed a very different trajectory from that of France's Caribbean possession. As noted above, missionary efforts to convert rulers or to proselytize among the masses in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had failed along the Slave Coast. Christianity was known and practiced only in coastal slave-trading entrepots by the factors who came and went. European and Afro-European residents in Dahomey's main port

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of Ouidah, for example, were serviced until the eve of the colonial period by itinerant Portuguese priests appointed from the Portuguese island possession, So Tom (Bonfils 1999). In the early nineteenth century in the inland capital of Dahomey, which had control over the entire region of what would become southern Benin, a shrine to Jesus was imported from Ouidah and was tended by a wife of the king, like shrines to all the individual vodun (Bay 1998). In effect, the god of Christianity in precolonial southern Benin was known but existed as one of many vodun, recognized as such and given no special privileges. After all, in West Africa a god must prove him or herself, and prior to the French colonial conquest at the end of the nineteenth century, the god of Christianity did not appear to be particularly powerful. It was only beginning in 1861 that missionaries of the Socit des Missions Africaines of Lyon took up residence in Ouidah. Even then, the king of Dahomey forbade them to proselytize on the inland plateau that was the heart of the kingdom. The early French colonial period thrust Roman Catholicism to the forefront, despite an officially secular state. Within a generation, being Christian was associated with modernist leadership (there was also a substantial Methodist missionary effort in southern Benin), and with the elites who increasingly won positions at religious and state institutions of education. Servers of the vodun, who had to undergo long periods of initiation, had no time for western schooling. Thus over time vodun became associated with lower class status, illiteracy and rural ignorance (reference). Though the god of Christianity in the twentieth century was associated with the name Mawu, the female and stronger half of the Vodun creator couple, there was never a blending of Catholicism with vodun along the Kongolese model. The one crucial exception was associated with kinship and the importance of family. As was the case in sixteenth-seventeenth century Kongo, devout Catholics in Dahomey/Benin did not see contradictions in the veneration of the

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ancestors that was so central to the solidarity of lineages in Fon culture. Sacrifices and feeding the ancestors at regular intervals, praying for their intervention in human affairs, and consulting the dead on family decisions through divination was not initially considered by Beninese Catholics to be antithetical to Christian beliefs or practices. Indeed, 20th century scholars have consistently pointed to the centrality of the cult of the ancestors in southern Benin (Hriss 1911, Herskovits 1938, Brand 1991). Yet such ritual practices have not remained unchanged in a modernizing state. Funerals and ceremonies for the collective dead were two linked rituals central to the sustenance of kin groups, for both were directed to assuring order and well-being in a word of invisible forces, and making it possible for the ancestors, those spirits most invested in the support of any kin group, to protect and aid the living. Within these ceremonial cycles, however, new trends emerged over the course of the 20th century. Funerals had always been expensive. A Catholic priest complained as early as 1968 that people were forced to sell gold jewelry, palm groves, and other items of great value in order to cover the costs of relatives rites. Even worse, On a vu des personnes ges mourir dans labandon et la mendicit, mais dont les funrailles ont t des plus grandioses (de Souza 1968, 88). Sometime during the final third of the century, funerals began to change from a two-part ceremonial cycle. The standard practice had involved an immediate burial with an additional major ceremony, in some locations called a second burial or final funeral, some months later. Over time, presumably because of the difficulty of bringing far-flung kin together more than once, and because technology made it feasible to keep a body unburied for a long period, funerals began to involve only a single cycle of ceremonies that occurred well after death. By all accounts these new funerals, which became common in urban areas, increased costs dramatically. Whereas preparations for funerals had earlier included

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only Znd, festivals of giving on behalf of the bereaved to support the rituals, now more elaborate practices, including massive payments on the part of the husbands of daughters in a family demanded under the guise of bridewealth became the norm. Elaborate church funerals, in which the entire congregation was expected to file forward to give even more public gifts, preceded processions to Abomey, Ouidah or rural areas for burials and local feasting. At the same time, the frequency of services of thanksgiving and supplication for the ancestors became more frequent, though each individual cycle became less costly. Kapleple, a relatively elaborate offering of gifts to the ancestors, used to be done every three years or so. Kapleple was a much-reduced version of Customs or Hwetanu, the annual ceremonies that were a centerpiece of activity in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Adult family members were expected to come to Kapleple with a major contribution: food, drinks, money and an animal for sacrifice, generally a chicken or goat. Sacrificial animals would be killed and their blood offered to the ancestors, whose spirits were said to alight on asen, portable metal altars. Prayers, food and drink would be offered before the asen, the responses of the ancestors would be divined, and time would be allotted for the resolution of family problems. Of late, Ahanbiba, which means literally looking for strong drinks, calls for a smaller offering of food and drink on an annual basis, with less pressure on individuals to attend in person, and less emphasis on collective family decisions (Abb Babatunde, Bohicon, 9 June 1999). In sum, it appears that the ceremonial cycles associated with honoring of the dead and seeking their support have been altered towards a recognition that family members are less likely to be living in close proximity and in daily contact with each other. A family member in a distant location can ensure that the ancestors receive his or her prayers and praises by sending money to kinspeople living at the home compound, and rest assured that the ancestors have been approached on behalf of the collective

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family. Thus cynics assert that devout Catholics who claim to have abandoned all vodunassociated beliefs may practice their faith in the full knowledge that their ancestors are being cared for on their behalf. The ceremonial changes associated with the dead and the ancestors reflect and reinforce a trend over the course of the 20th century, a slow weakening of family solidarity. Salaried individuals often spend their working lives in urban areas or outside the colony/nation-state, making physical contact rare and loosening individuals sense of obligation. Wealth in cash is more difficult to estimate than that harvested in cotton or maize, which means that family elders have less ability to determine appropriate levels of assessment for kin projects. Family members living elsewhere send remittances home, but some kinsmen suspect that they send little of what they have, and others are sure that portions of payments remain in the pockets of those to whom the remittances have been entrusted. As money becomes a greater and greater measure of wealth, individuals have began to focus more on training for occupations that promise cash income. The draw of urban dwelling and its relative freedom from family constraints has became increasingly attractive. By the second half of the 20th century independent Christian churches and protestant evangelicals were becoming more and more influential in southern Benin, often drawing converts from Catholicism. Indeed, the resumption of free political expression after the fall of a Marxist-Leninist military dictatorship in 1990 highlighted the political importance of religious affiliations and opened the way to a period of active proselytizing by Christians of all denominations, by some Muslims, and even by practitioners of vodun. Interestingly, the Christian and vodun groups all focused on family-like relationships in their attempts to build congregations, offering structures that performed functions formerly at the core of kin relations.

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Urban-based independent churches, for example, mimicked kin relationships by providing financial and housing support for unemployed members. To do so, they exacted considerable donations from their successful and well-to-do converts, as kin groups have always done. Well before the formal state reopening to religion, however, the Roman Catholic Church in Benin was concerned with conversion and with the relationship of the Church to the culture of vodun, and particularly to kinship patterns. The Church, of course, uses the metaphor of family for religious relationships and, given the strict Catholic hierarchy, its version of kin structures probably resonates more accurately with converts experience of patrilineal kinship than does protestant egalitarianism. But it is not only ersatz kinship that is the focus of Church efforts to convert Beninese. Nor is it communion with spirits for, in contrast to the evangelicals, the Roman Catholic Church does not recognize the existence of African spirits of any kind. Rather, beginning in the 1970s the Church launched an impressive movement to appropriate aspects of Beninese ceremony and ritual as part of its conversion efforts. In the 1920s and 30s a French Catholic missionary, Father Aupiais, was extraordinarily influential in charting a direction for Catholic missionizing. Working in the main with elite education, Aupiais articulated a vision of conversion made comfortable by the incorporation of aspects of African culture into liturgy. His students responded by collecting ethnographic data and writing, often eloquently, about the history and cultures of southern Benin. As if directly prompted by Aupiais and his work, the liberalizing Council of Vatican II (1962-1965) issued a Declaration on the Relation of the Church to Non-Christian Religions that exhorted Catholics that through dialogue and collaboration with the followers of other religions, carried out with prudence and love and in witness to the Christian faith and life, they recognize, preserve and promote the good things, spiritual and moral, as well as the socio-cultural values found among

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these men (www.vatican.va . . .). Within five years after the end of Vatican II, activist priests and laymen in the area of Bohicon/Abomey had launched Mewi Hwendo (literally black furrow), an ambitious movement to research Beninese local culture in order to promote conversion among the masses. Scholarly research on cultural practices by priests and university-associated laity virtually exploded; regular meetings of researching intellectuals took place in the context of university scholarship both in Benin and Paris. Indeed, the Church-inspired scholars in conjunction with local intellectuels communautaires have made major contributions to the literature on culture and religion in southern Benin in the last 30 years. The goals of the movement are significantly more far-reaching than the desires of Father Aupiais to make Catholicism less foreign to local peoples. It stresses rather the Christianization of cultures or the inculturation of the faith (Babatounde and Adoukonou 1991, 5). In contrast to the view of the protestant evangelicals, Mewi Hwendo argues that, rather than being une entreprise diabolique, traditional religion represents a first response to Gods grace (Adoukonou 1991, 68). The task of the Church, therefore, is to research and understand tradition in order to encourage it to blossom into an expression Gods will and a manifestation of Roman Catholic doctrine. In the context of southern Benin, Mewi Hwendo effectively proposes the insertion of Roman Catholic beliefs into the ritual and symbolic forms of Fon culture. For central symbol, Mewi Hwendo has chosen the closed gourd or calabash that is a multivalent symbol associated with ideas of sacrifice and offering, and ultimately linked to conceptions of the cosmos, reminding Fon peoples of the ties between the worlds of the living and the spirits. The symbolic motif for Mewi Hwendo is an image of two halves of a gourd tilted on the arms of a cruciform tree, pouring out a liquid. Explained as une image de cette Pque africaine quest appele tre la Thologie africaine, the calabash gourd is the essence of the philosophical base of the

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movement. La calebasse ferme tait pour le Danxom des rois le symbole de la Divinit, du Vodun. Ce mystre tenu cach depuis les sicles en Dieu, vient dtre rvl maintenant, cest le mystre du Christ crucifi (Adoukonou 1979, II, frontispiece].xiv Some examples provide insight into inculturation as it has been practiced in late 20th century Benin. Well before Vatican II, indeed beginning in the 1940s, the Church in the Abomey area had incorporated hanye, royal praise music, into services. Hanye songs continue to be performed, both at court and as part of Catholic liturgy, accompanied by a gong and several gourds covered with nettings of strung cowries or beads. Drums and bamboo lyres complete the orchestral accompaniment for singing that has transformed praises for the royal dynasty dead to tributes for the God of Christianity (Segurola 2000, 226). Under the influence of Mewi Hwendo, people are also encouraged to bring gifts comparable to those offered to vodun and ancestors into the Church. Thus prepared foods, goats and chickens have become offerings in services, sometimes brought before the altar by people wearing dress comparable to that used in ritual by adepts of the vodun (Field diary, June 1999). When I first did field research in Abomey in 1972, I learned that on the death of a familiar, one would purchase a meter of cotton cloth and present it with a small sum of money to the family as a burial cloth or shroud. Indeed, people noted that a burial cloth in fact should be made of locally woven cloth, and it was still possible at that time to buy lengths of locally-woven fabric made of raffia and indigo-dyed hand-spun cotton thread, said to be the original fabric used for shrouds. The offering of cloth was symbolic, though Melville Herskovits in 1930 saw longer lengths of cloth donated by the children, wives and the institutionalized best friend of the deceased that were in fact used to wrap the corpse (1938, 1: 357) and informants as late as the mid-1980s in Abomey confirmed the practice (Field notes, 25 July 1984). Caskets became

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customary at some point in mid-century, and the symbolic lengths of gift cloth were then simply piled with the body in the casket. For Mewi Hwendo, the giving of cloth is an act of charity. The deceased was charitable in life, yet those who remain at his death do not know if he will be accepted by God. Thus the giving of cloth is a way of saying, Lord, if something is lacking in the acts of charity that the deceased performed, here are gifts so that You will accept him. The interpretation derived from the Churchs study of local cultural practice thus is compatible with Christian thinking. But the giving of cloths presents practical problems. Often, the casket cannot be closed because of the numbers of cloths, and people acknowledge that in the past the gravediggers generally took many, sometimes sharing some with the head of the family, who distributed them as needed to less well-to-do members of the kin group. The Church has intervened in this process to set a strict minimum of cloths that may be buried with the body. Those that are left, usually the great majority, are to be divided into three portions. One portion is to be given to the head of the family so that he may dispense charity to less well-off kinsmen. A second portion is to be conferred on the Dongan or Donkpegan, the head of the youth group whose charge it is to work as gravediggers. The third portion is to be given to the Catholic relief organization Caritas, which helps the poor. A similar division is to be made of the cash presented by friends of the family. Thus, from the Churchs perspective, what was good and useful in a Christian sense about traditional funerary services is preserved and made Catholic (Babatounde, 9 June 1999). Indeed, the Church encourages Catholics to donate larger lengths of cloth, the two-meter minimum length for a wrapper at least, and ideally to give a pice, a full six meters, at the time of a burial (Mitchozunu, 9 June 1999).

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Interestingly, it is in association with the cult of the dead that inculturation meets one of its limits. Underlying the regular offerings and prayers, and the annual cycle of sacrifices and feasting at every lineages ancestral home is the understanding that the spirits of the dead are capable of assisting their kinsmen in the world of the living, a belief that cannot be squared with Church teachings. A Mewi Hwendo lay member who earned his doctoral degree in France explained to me that in terms of the objectives of the movement, Its fine to want to remember the dead, and to try to immortalize them with images. However, when it comes to worshipping them, making sacrifices to them, that is contrary to beliefs of Christians. Certainly you can honor a parent or relative with an asen [a ritual sculpture], but a line is drawn at sacrifices. Thus its easier to immortalize them with a photo or a cross (Mitchozunu, 9 June 1999). Others in coastal Benin confirm that the Church is encouraging people to discard asen, which function ritually as points where the spirits of the dead may reside or rest, and replace them with photos or crosses. By extension, the collective offering of prayer and sacrifice to the ancestors either the Kakpleka or Ahanbiba cycles of ceremonies is deemed unnecessary, and indeed is not in keeping with the practices of Christianity (Babatounde, 9 June 1999).

Conclusion As I step back at look at these two examples of religious encounter, both involving Roman Catholicism and African religious systems, I see several patterns that suggest more complex readings of the outcome of encounter than would be suggested by ideas like syncretism or symbiosis. First, at a simple level, any assumption of an easy mixing or synthesis seems nave. Haitian vodou, which is built on a meeting largely between Kongo/Angolan Afro-Catholicism and Fon/Yoruba vodun, is not recognizably Catholic in the eyes of the Church. As such it might

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be described as an African religion that has appropriated symbols and forms from Catholicism to express essentially African principles of spirituality. The Church by and large has been unable to extract Catholicism from its embedding in vodou. In contrast, Beninese Roman Catholicism is consciously moving in the opposite direction. It attempts to empty forms and symbols associated with vodun culture in order to fill them with Christian meaning. The process is understood by its proponents as a necessary part of conversion that is directly comparable to the Churchs absorption of foreign cultural elements everywhere that Roman Catholicism has historically taken root. Second, from the Churchs perspective, the ties of kinship and their association with beliefs in the powers of the dead have proved to be perhaps the most difficult obstacle to full conversion. In 16th and 17th century Kongo/Angola as in 20th century southern Benin, people understood Christianity as a religious system compatible with understandings of family relationships that transcend death. The ability of family members in the here-and-now to interact with kinsmen in an afterworld was an accepted and expected part of life. Thornton reports that in 16th and 17th century Kongo, "beliefs about ancestors were resistant to Christianity's own teaching about the resurrection of the dead" (2002, 80). In 20th century Haiti Mtraux asked a "fervent Catholic" Haitian "whether he had finally finished with Voodoo." The man "replied that he would always be faithful to the Catholic Church but nothing could make him give up the worship of loa who had always protected his family" (1972, 323). But these visions of a realm of the dead with ancestors capable of affecting the world of the living have brought African converts into direct conflict with Christian conceptions of the afterlife. These two examples suggest that religious encounters always involve elements of power. Religious systems do not appear to meet and merge, like tributaries joining to form a great river.

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Rather, believers or servers of spirits pick and choose. They adopt and incorporate new elements in ways that do not fundamentally disturb or disrupt a core set of practices and beliefs. Indeed, all religions could be said to be constantly in the process of slow changes along with the cultures from which they spring. Resonance and recognition are reinforcing processes, not agents that necessarily overturn or discard. Even fusion, which I would argue is rare, represents a joining of elements conceived by believers as identical. Always, however, the process is an additive one, where an eclectic sensibility is relatively carefully controlled by a dominant belief system. A Catholic bishop in Haiti observed to Mtraux that "It is not we who have got hold of people to Christianize them, but they who have been making superstitions out of us" (1972, 331). In Benin the Church has devised an approach to conversion designed to maintain the coherence and centrality of Catholic belief even as it observes and appropriates symbolic elements drawn from vodun practice. In this sense, one might wonder if such a thing as syncretism even can be said to exist. References Adoukonou, Barthlmy. 1979. Jalons pour une thologie africaine. 2 vols. Paris: Editions Lethielleux. _____. 1991. Dialogue avec les Religions non-Chrtiennes. In Une Exprience africaine dinculturation, vol. 1, 63-84. 4 vols. Cotonou: Q.I.C. Apter, Andrew. 1991. Herskovitss Heritage: Rethinking Syncretism in the African Diaspora. Diaspora 1, 3, 235-60. ______. 2002. on African origins: creolization and connaissance in Haitian Vodou. American Ethnologist, 29, 2, 233-60. Barber, Karin. 1981. How Man Makes God in West Africa: Yoruba Attitudes towards the Orisa. Africa, 51, 3, 724-44. Bastide, Roger. 1978. The African Religions of Brazil. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bay, Edna G. 1998. Wives of the Leopard: Gender, Politics and Culture in the Kingdom of Dahomey. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. ______. 2008. Asen, Ancestors and Vodun: Tracing Change in African Art. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Blier, Suzanne Preston. 1995. African Vodun: Art, Psychology and Power. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Blot, Jean Yves. 1998. Le Syncrtisme Catholique-Vaudou. Bulletin du Bureau national d'ethnologie, 1, 13, 13-42. Bonfils, Jean. 1999. La Mission catholique en Rpublique du Bnin. Paris: Karthala. Brand, Roger. 1991. La Socit Wemenu, son dynamisme, son contrle: Approche ethnosociologique dune socit du sud Bnin. 3 vols. Ph.D. diss., Universit de Paris V. Brown, Karen McCarthy. 2001. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn. Berkeley: University of Californina Press. First edition 1991. Cosentino, Donald J., ed. 1995. Imagine Heaven. In Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Pp. 25-55. Ed. D. J. Cosentino. Los Angeles: Fowler Museum. Courlander, Harold. 1960. The Drum and the Hoe: Life and Lore of the Haitian People. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press. Craton, Michael. 1997. Forms of Resistance to Slavery. In General History of the Caribbean, vol. III, 222-70. Ed. F. W. Knight. London and Basingstoke: UNESCO and MacMillan Education. Deren, Maya. 1953. Divine Horsemen. The Living Gods of Haiti. London and NY: Thames and Hudson. Desmangles, Leslie G. 1992. The Faces of the Gods. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Droogers, Andr and Sidney M. Greenfield. 2001. Recovering and Reconstructing Syncretism. In Reinventing Religions: Syncretism and Transformation in Africa and the Americas, 21-42. Ed. S. M. Greenfield and A. Droogers. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Dubois, Laurent. 2001. Vodou and History. Comparative Studies in Society and History. 43, 1 (January), 92-100. ______. 2004. Avengers of the New World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press. Fick, Carolyn E. 1990. The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution from Below. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Fu-Kiau, A. 1969. Le Mukongo et le monde qui l'entourait. Kinshasa: Office National de la Recherche de de Dveloppement. Geggus, David Patrick. 2002. Haitian Revolutionary Studies. Bloomington: Indiana U. Press. Greenfield, Sidney M. and Andr Droogers, eds. 2001. Reinventing Religions: Syncretism and Transformation in Africa and the Americas. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Hriss, A. le. 1911. Lancien royaume du Dahomey. Paris: Larose. Herskovits, Melville J. 1937. Life in a Haitian Valley. NY: Alfred A. Knopf. ------. 1938. Dahomey, An Ancient West African Kingdom. 2 vols. NY: Augustin. ------. 1941. The Myth of the Negro Past. Boston: Beacon Press. Heusch, Luc de. 1989. Kongo in Haiti: A New Approach to Religious Syncretism. Man, NS, 24, 2 (June), 290-303. Heywood, Linda M., ed. 2002a. Introduction. Pp. 1-19 in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Ed. L. M. Heywood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ______. 2002b. Portuguese into African: The Eighteenth-Century Central African Background to Atlantic Creole Cultures. Pp. 91-113 in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Ed. L. M. Heywood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heywood, Linda M. and John K. Thornton. 2007. Central Africans, Atlantic Creoles, and the Foundation of the Americas, 1585-1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hurbon, Lannec. 1972. Dieu dans le Vaudou Hatien. Paris: Payot.

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______. 1995. Voodoo: Search for the Spirit. NY: Harry N. Abrams. Published in French in 1993: Paris: Gallimard. ______. 2001. The Catholic Church and the State in Haiti, 1804-1915. Pp. 154-90 in Christianity in the Caribbean: Essays on Church History. Ed. A. Lampe. Kingston: UWI Press. ______. 2003. The Church and Slavery in Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue. Pp. 55-68 in The Abolitions of Slavery. Ed. M. Dorigny. Paris: UNCESCO. Janzen, John M. 1982. Lemba, 1650-1930: A Dream of Affliction in Africa and the New World. New York: Garland. Joint, Gasner. 1999. Libration du vaudou dans la dynamique d'inculturation en Hati. Rome: Editrice Pontificia Universit Gregoriana. Labouret, Henri and Paul Rivet. 1929. Le royaume d'Arda et son vanglisation au XVIIe sicle. Paris: Institut d'Ethnologie. Laman, K. E. 1953. The Kongo I. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells. ______. 1957. The Kongo II. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells. ______. 1962. The Kongo III. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells. ______. 1968. The Kongo IV. Uppsala: Almqvist and Wiksells. Law, Robin. 1991. Religion, Trade and Politics on the 'Slave Coast': Roman Catholic Missions in Allada and Whydah in the Seventeenth Century. Journal of Religion in Africa. 21, 1 (February), 42-77. MacGaffey, Wyatt. 1986. Religion and Society in Central Africa: The BaKongo of Lower Zaire. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. ______. 2002. Twins, Simbi Spirits, and Lwas in Kongo and Haiti. Pp. 211-26 in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Ed. L. M. Heywood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maupoil, Bernard. 1943. La Gomancie l'ancienne cte des esclaves. Ph.D. diss., Universit de Paris (reissued by the Institut d'Ethnologie, Muse de l'Homme, Paris, 1961). Mtraux, Alfred. 1972. Voodoo in Haiti. NY: Schocken. First edition in English, NY: Random House, 1959. Mintz, Sidney and Michel-Rolph Trouillot. 1995. The Social History of Haitian Vodou. Pp. 12346 26 in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Ed. L. M. Heywood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moitt, Bernard. 2001. Women and Slavery in the French Antilles, 1635-1848. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Moreau de Saint-Mry, M. L. E. 1797. Description Topographique, Physique, Civile, Politique et Historique de la Partie Franaise de l'Isle Saint-Domingue. 4 vols. Philadelphia. Reprint edition. Paris: Socit Franaise d'Histoire d'Outre-Mer, 1984. Price-Mars, Jean. 1954 [1928]. Ainsi parla l'oncle: essais d'ethnographie. NY: Parapsychology Foundation. First published, Compiegne: Imprimerie de Compiegne. Rey, Terry. 1999. Our Lady of Class Struggle. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press. ______. 2002. Kongolese Catholic Influences on Haitian Popular Catholicism: A Sociohistorical Exploration. Pp. 265-85 in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Ed. L. M. Heywood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Segurola, B. and J. Rassinoux. 2000. Dictionnaire Fon-Franais. Madrid: Ediciones Selva y Sabana, Sociedad de Misiones Africanas.

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Shaw, Rosalind and Charles Stewart. 1994. Introduction: problematizing syncretism, pp. 1-26 in Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. Eds. C. Stewart and R. Shaw. London and NY: Routledge. Souza, Isidore de. 1968. Le Sud-Dahomen face au problme de lau-del. In Regards sur la Vie Dahomenne. Cotonou: Service Culturel de lAmbassade de France. Stewart, Charles and Rosalind Shaw, eds. 1994. Syncretism/Anti-Syncretism: The Politics of Religious Synthesis. London and NY: Routledge. Thompson, Robert Farris. 1983. Flash of the Spirit. NY: Random House. Thompson, Robert Farris and Joseph Cornet. 1981. Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington. National Gallery of Art. Thornton, John K. 1984. The Development of an African Catholic Church in the Kingdom of Kongo, 1491-1750. The Journal of African History, 25, 2, 147-67. ______. 1988. On the Trail of Voodoo: African Christianity in Africa and the Americas. The Americas, 44, 3 (January), 261-78. ______. 1992. Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1680. Cambridge: Cambridge U. Press. ______. 1993. "I Am the Subject of the King of Congo": African Political Ideology and the Haitian Revolution. Journal of World History, 4, 2, 181-214. ______. 1998. Les racines du vaudou. Religion africaine et socit hatienne dans la SaintDomingue prrvolutionnaire. Anthropologie et Socits, 22, 1, 85-102. ______. 2002. Religious and Ceremonial Life in the Kongo and Mbundu Areas, 1500-1700. Pp. 71-90 in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Ed. L. M. Heywood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vanhee, Hein. 2002. Central African Popular Christianity and the Making of Haitian Vodou Religion. Pp. 243-64 in Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora. Ed. L. M. Heywood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilmeth, Marlyn Walton and J. Richard Wilmeth. 1977. Theatrical Elements in Voodoo: The Case for Diffusion, Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 16, 1, 27-37. Interviews in Benin Abb Babatunde, Bohicon, 9 June 1999 Romuald Mitchozunu, Abomey, 9 June 1999
i

The name Benin came into use in 1974 for the land area formerly known as Dahomey, which was a French colony from the 1890s until 1960. Dahomey in turn had been taken as a name from the precolonial kingdom that occupied roughly the lower third of the contemporary nation-state. The name Dahomey is a readily-recognized term in contemporary Haiti, and is used as a generic term to refer to peoples from the West African coastal area. ii Writing in the late 1920s, the earliest of the ethnographers, Jean Price-Mars, argues that Vodou represents a mixing of similar African beliefs from all along the entire western coast of the continent of Africa, hidden behind a faade of Code Noir-mandated Catholicism, though he credits Dahomey with having provided the name for the religion (1954). iii In her introduction to the edited collection, Central Africans and Cultural Transformations in the American Diaspora, Linda M. Heywood provides a useful brief survey of the literature on the impact of Central Africans in the Western Hemisphere (2002a).

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Nearly all the data used in assessing the cultural impact of Central Africans is based on a sizeable twentieth-century body of ethnographic work produced by Western and Congolese scholars such as Heusch, MacGaffey, Laman, Janzen and Fu-Kiau. While projecting evidence backwards in time to make arguments about seventeenth- or eighteenth-century practices would be considered a serious problem in most studies of historical cultures, scholars find it reasonable to assume that commonalities between Central African and Haitian cultures in the twentieth century are evidence of practices brought into colonial Saint-Domingue. The relative isolation experienced by Saint-Domingue/Haiti beginning with the revolt in 1791 and continuing in various forms effectively into the twentieth century meant that, unlike other Caribbean nations, influences from mid-nineteenth century African migrants are absent. Thornton (2002) has recently described the nature of Kongolese and Mbundu religious thought as reflected in 16th and 17th century documents compared to the 20th century record. I have found that the absence of certain elements in Haitian vodou is useful corroborative evidence suggesting their relatively late introduction into Dahomean religious culture (Bay 2008). At the same time, it is important to note that religious practices both in Africa and Haiti have changed over time (Bay 1998, 2008; Mintz and Trouillot 1995; MacGaffey 1986). v The re-publication in 1929 of a seventeenth-century Catholic catechism, creed and prayers (Labouret and Rivet) translated into the Gbe lect spoken in Allada during that period is suggestive of serious missionary endeavors and may have misled scholars. However, the text was prepared in Spain with the assistance of two native speakers as part of what became a failed 1660 Capuchin mission (Law 1991, 47-48). vi Terry Rey finds it striking that scholars are comfortable accepting the idea that Kongo culture had an impact in the New World but cannot accept the idea that those same Kongolese may also have been practicing Christians (2002). vii Thornton was earliest to make this argument, drawing on research by David Birmingham, Wyatt MacGaffey and Ann Hilton (1984, 151). viii Nyombo (cloth-wrapped funerary bundle) refers to the practice of wrapping the bodies of important persons in massive layers of cloth for burial. For a brief historical survey of the practice, see Thompson and Cornet (1981, 52-76). ix I am skeptical of the possibility that Catholic saints were associated with named territorial spirits in Kongo since spirits associated with specific locations, as was common among the Igbo, for example, tended to disappear in the New World. x Dubois (2002), for example, accepts the idea that Central African slaves might have brought military skills and European concepts of kingship with them to Saint-Domingue but he never mentions the possibility that Catholicism could also have been part of that imported cultural mix. xi Mintz and Trouillot (1995) make an excellent start on charting the social history of Vodou over the course of Haiti's 200-year history. Heusch has drawn attention to the existence still in the late 20th century of "pure" Kongo and "pure" Dahomean rites in the vicinity of Gonaves (1989, 299302). Indeed, what is clear from the ethnographic literature is the reality that Haitian Vodou was never, and is still not, a single centralized religion. The term Vodou (vaudoux) was used as early as the eighteenth century as a generic to describe any number of different African-derived rituals (Vanhee 2002, 248). Variation still occurs in local settings, a phenomenon that was characteristic of Saint-Domingue given the realities of control in a plantation economy where slave laborers far outnumbered free people. A mountainous terrain and export-dominated economy made sea travel far more practical than the development of a road infrastructure in the colonial period and

iv

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reinforced the isolation of plantation communities. Those realities were only slightly modified by the presumed mixing of peoples and spirits during the twelve years of warfare prior to independence in 1804, while the emergence of an alienated rural peasantry in the nineteenthcentury only reified the earlier isolating tendencies. Nevertheless, servers of the lwa and scholars alike refer to the entire corpus of African-derived religious practices as Vodou. xii A colleague from Benin similarly tells a story of taking an elderly rural woman who was not familiar with Catholic teachings into the cathedral in Benin's capital, Cotonou. She walked throughout in wonder, pointing out statues that for her were representations of various vodun (Joseph Adande, personal communication, September 2002). xiii Gu, the comparable vodun of Dahomey, became a central warrior deity only in the nineteenth century when militarism increased with economic decline (Bay 1998). xiv Interestingly, this argument closely parallels that made by the Jesuit priest Mateus Cordoso in 1624 when he asserted that the Kongolese knew of the True God but prior to contact with Europe they had not had the chance to know Christ (Thornton 1984, 152).

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