Ugh!

Here’s a response is sent to the curators of this site after my sister sent me a link to a page people had made on facebook about my dad who died thirteen years ago when I was ten. It’s hastily thrown together, I know, and I’m late for free biking breakfast, but it bothers me how easily people conflate different religious practices, particularly afro-carribean and afro-Brasilian ones, in a sensational degredation of people who fancy themselves practitioners. As the people responsible for the website and the facebook page are as yet anonymous, I don’t feel bad about publishing my response to them, and in fact I feel the need to do so:

[to fosterthemovie@gmail.com] Is this you Sara [my cousin, once removed]? Kinda tacky and tasteless. Plus maybe dad conflated the two as well, but Voodoo and Santeria are two different religions. So unless you can show me clear documentation that Mark practiced some sort of personal hybrid between the two, I think it’s best to desist in calling it a voodoo cult. Or maybe this “movie” will contain a discussion of a quick history of religious practices in the Americas that emphasized a African roots. With voodoo and santeria, the former is Hatian in origin, and the latter is Cuban. But rhetorically, both religions speak to African roots using come Christian symbology while actually forging new religious beliefs for their followers. Part of the organizational strucutre emphasizes secrecy, as the religions also have their roots in slave groups that were being forced Christianity coopted some of the religous space provided to them by their owners to practice a religion more their own, gathering strength from at least rhetorical stress on the African historicity. I have done some academic research on both Santeria and Candomblé, and the emphasis on Africa seems to have been synthesized in the ninteenth century by a cetain middle class of multilingual, bicontinental (Africa and America) blacks who sought political strength from the unification of West African history at the expense of the nuance of more localized political structure and the unification of the history of slaves and blacks in the Americas. Then came white neocolnial anthropologists who marvelled at the “syncretization” of Christian and African religious beliefs, also at the expense of nuanced and self-critical looks at what knowledge of the religions were being produced. The early anthropological research, while very flawed, did increase interest however and alot of work has gone into correcting some of their mistakes in their approach.

Sadly, the work people have done to make a space for these religious practices in a pluricultural world can easily be degraded by organizations working against the space for non-majority religious beliefs and practices. Police organizations love to conflate Voodoo and Santeria in overblown scare tactics that end up being racist and anti-immigrant, and the news likes to coopt this shorthand in telling sensational stories of ritual killings and etc. A man died, and lest that we feel so personally injured by him that we need to lash out and degrade his religious beliefs or whatever lead him to the point where he decided death was his best option, I don’t feel comfortable sensationalizing those beliefs against him. It comes across as immature at best and ends up reinforcing Christian hegemonic principles and derading the right to personal religious beliefs and practices.

Craig

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