Dorsainvil defends Vodou by calling it a neurosis

In 1913 the physician and teacher J. C. Dorsainvil published Vodou et névrose in Port-au-Prince, the first attempt to explain Haitian religion by the methods of European science. Borrowing from the French psychologist Pierre Janet, he treated spirit possession as a dissociative state and named it a racial psychoneurosis, a collective disposition laid down by slavery and colonial rule. He supported this with philological and historical work tying the Haitian pantheon to Dahomean sources in West Africa, and argued that those inheritances formed the substratum of the national mind. The purpose was defensive. Foreign writers were describing Haiti as a country of savages, and Dorsainvil handed them a rational account of what the drums were doing. The price of the defence was the diagnosis, which conceded that the religion of the majority was an illness. Jean Price-Mars took that apart within a generation. The book still stands at the head of the ethnological movement that made African inheritance a subject in the Americas.

Mother Leafy Anderson founded the Eternal Life Spiritual Church in New Orleans in 1918, the first of the Spiritual churches of that city. The form was protective. With Vodou practice exposed to prosecution, a congregation with a spiritualist name was legally safe, and the churches carried Vodou, Pentecostalism, spiritualism and Catholicism together: elaborate altars to ancestors, saints and spirit guides, women serving as priests and as mothers, prophecy and healing performed in ecstatic trance. Catholic Creoles of colour used a second cover, the seance, in which a medium delivered detailed messages in French from the dead. Rene Grandjean, born in France and resident in Haiti for several years, kept written records of those Creole seances. Zora Neale Hurston, working in the city in this period, put the arrangement plainly: the practice was in disrepute and parts of it were illegal, so a spiritualist name protected the congregation and worked as camouflage.

Justin Chrysostome Dorsainvil published a study of vodou in the journal Haiti Medicale in 1912 and 1913, the first attempt to treat the possession crisis as a clinical question rather than a moral one. He defined it as a religious and racial psycho neurosis marked by a doubling of the self, with functional alteration of sensibility and of movement, and a predominance of symptoms curable by persuasion. In 1924 he brought out at Port au Prince a philological explanation of vodou which took a different road. There he showed that vodoun is a Dahomean word meaning spirit, that the whole religion of the Fon flows from the cult of the vodoun, and that this cult stands as high as the most spiritualist. He asked at the end whether it was too much to say that such a people had arrived at a clear and precise monotheist conception. The two positions sit badly together, and the twelve years between them measure how fast the ground was moving.

Hurbon dates the first modern wave of Haitian rural exodus to the years spanning the American occupation, which he gives as 1915 to 1934. Thousands of peasants expropriated by the occupier and subjected to the corvée left to cut cane on American-owned plantations in the Dominican Republic and Cuba. The mechanism matters to his larger argument: the migration was produced by a political act, land seizure backed by forced labour, and not by a simple shortage of work. He uses this to attack the purely economic reading of Haitian emigration that dominated the literature, including Mats Lundahl's conclusion that mass migration is above all a result of poverty. If the first wave was political, Hurbon argues, then the far larger wave of his own day, driven by Duvalierist terror reaching deep into the countryside, must also be read politically. Where this account departs from the standard one: Hurbon rejects the economic explanation of Haitian migration advanced by Mats Lundahl and by common sense, insisting that political terror is the primary cause even for illiterate peasants and workers whom observers refuse to credit with political motives.