Haitian Vodou and Migrating Voices
This article looks at the relationship between Haitian vodou, sound recording, and migration. I argue that Haitian vodou has a special relationship with technologies of sound, understood in Jonathan Sterne's sense of media as embodiments of social desire. There is a parallel between vodou possession and the practice of pwen (throwing verbal insults), on the one hand, and, on the other, the tape recorder's ability to manifest a person through the sound of his or her voice, making him or her present both in Haiti for the Haitian vodou congregation and in the diasporic land, thus bridging the separation across oceans and time. This transnational character underscores how Haitian vodou, which has been much maligned and often misunderstood, is an incredibly flexible and adaptive religion, necessary as a means of cultural survival for citizens of one of most economically disadvantaged nations, harshly subject to insertion in global neo-liberal labour markets.