Where Have All the Oungan Gone?

Author:

Lowe Lenny J.

Abstract

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.

Publisher

University of California Press

Subject

Religious studies

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