Material Culture 15-Min exhibit

Here are my notes from a 15-min exhibit in Material Culture class last week:

Description: Wooden stick base, or body. Top of base = image of a face carved into cork-like material. Broom-like bristle material protrudes @ bottom of heads and both sides of heads where ears would be. Various expressions depicted from surprise to sadness, or anger. Straw-like material hats atop the heads. Tag on one of the dolls reads “In Haiti.” Asymmetric eyes on most of the dolls. 

Deduction: These dolls are representative of a human form but also somewhat of a caricature. The straw-like material, used on every doll, seems important, as do the hats, which form a kind of halo above the head. Facial expressions depict a troubled emotion, or experience.

Speculation: The dolls represent an inner spirit manifesting outwardly. The facial expressions represent this difficult transition. The hat may provide protection for the subject. Color schemes all seem earth-like, which may reflect agrarianism of the maker (s).

Research:

• The French colony of Saint Domingue was the envy of all Europe by the eighteenth century. 
  • A mere 36,000 whites and equal number of free mulattoes dominated a force of approximately 1/2 million enslaved Africans. This labor force generated 2/3 of France’s overseas trade, mostly from sugar plantations.
• Voodoo is a complex mystical worldview, not a cult. It is a system of beliefs about the relationship between man, nature, and supernatural forces of the universe. 
• Haiti is the poorest country in the Western hemisphere with 82% of the population impoverished and struggling to find one meal/day.
• Brooms are associated with witchcraft/sorcery.
• “Voodoo” means God, or Spirit. 
• Voodoo is the dominant religion of the Haitian peasantry and the official religion of Haiti, along with Christianity.
• Voodoo, as a religion, is a syncretic mixture of African folk spiritual practices with Christian icons often used. 
  • This type of cultural mixing is also known as creolization.
• Voodoo has its own pantheon of Gods
• The practical/utilitarian purposes are personal or community guidance, influence over events, maintenance of societal norms and values
• There is a big focus on soul possession to eliminate negative energy
• Sorcery is used as social control in the form of zombification. Two forms of zombification:
  • Zombie Astral (spirit)
  • Zombie Corps Cadavre (body)
• Datura and Tetrodotoxin (puffer fish poison) were found to be used to zombify an individual
  • When an individual is sentenced to zombification (thought of as the worst social sanction….typically used in cases of debt, criminality, or immorality) by the Haitian secret society known as Bizango, they undergo a ritual in which a Bokor, or shaman, places them into a corpse/coma-like state of apparent death. There is no heartbeat, respiration, or brainwaves detectable in this state. 
  • Bokor also has the antidote to bring the person back out of this state of apparent death. 
• Wade Davis’ thesis from the book Passage of Darkness is that Voodoo is motivated by a fundamental quest for unity — a struggle to create order out of perceived disorder, integrity in the fact of diversity, consistency in face of anomaly.
• Voodoo was developed in the crucible of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and its concomitant violence and upheaval. 
• Haitian revolution saw the enslaved defeat one of the strongest European armies but revolt leaders wanted ascension to the top of the new social hierarchy rather than liberty for all people. 
• Contemporary Haitian peasantry, isolated from city-dwellers, look to Voodoo for their overall worldview and their place within it. Anyone who dies unnaturally via sorcery may be claimed as a zombie.
• Performance of magic ritual by the Bokor is what is seen to create a zombie, not poison. This is strictly viewed as a magical process dependent on the special esoteric powers of the bokor.
• Ti bon ange is the part of the voodoo soul that creates personality, character, and willpower.
  • It is this part, when captured, that gives the bokor power over an individual.