Anthropological insights-Voodoo (rituals)

[Reading this in-depth study presupposes knowledge of the content presented in the cultural test relating to this practice]

Detailed description of the practice.

Rituals are often performed by priests and priestesses who summon spiritual entities to obtain healing, information and influence over natural forces, and frequently feature the performance of dances that accompany the moment of interaction with the spirits. It is believed that those who participate in the ritual can make contact with the loa, supernatural spirits with whom human beings can interact and who are particularly important to believers, while the supreme deity (Mawu) is too distant and unknowable.
The loa play a very important role in the Voodoo religion in that, through continuous and constant interaction with them, believers can find their bearings, communicate with the divine and fulfill their destiny, to the extent that the loa can be said to direct the practitioner's life.
Rituals follow well-defined preparatory practices, which vary according to the social group where they occur, and are frequently accompanied by sacrifices, often of animals, that serve to appease the spirits and curry their favour. A ritual, for instance, may involve practitioners playing drums, singing and dancing to encourage a loa to possess one of their members and thus communicate with them.
Offerings to the loa often include fruit, liquor and even animals. At the same time, offerings are also usually made to the spirits of the dead. Each voodoo ritual has a unique and at the same time similar character: in rituals, nothing is exactly the same because each ritual is seen as an unrepeatable experience, even if it is guided by a similar order, plot or pattern. From the moment a person, for various reasons, comes into contact with a priest for a ritual, they share an unprecedented space, full of different signs and materials, plants, sacred stones, new smells and flavours, in an atmosphere that is revealed little by little and where chants take centre stage. This spirituality does not only refer to the transcendent ideas, customs and worldviews commonly included in the rather ambiguous concept of religion, but also to a broad spectrum encompassing ethical and aesthetic value systems, models and stereotypes of various kinds, intuitive or emotional emotions and intelligence, specific worldviews, customs and habits.
Devotees who engage in this type of practice believe that it is necessary for the self to leave the body in order for the loa to possess the worshippers predisposed to possession, and during the practice the possessed are wont to acquire the motions and mannerisms of the loa, often remembering nothing of what they said or did once they come out of the trance.
In its initial phase, trance manifests itself with symptoms of a purely psychopathological nature, broadly reproducing the clinical picture of hysterical attacks. The possessed, at first, give the impression of having lost control of their motor system, but after being shaken by spasmodic convulsions, they are thrown forward, spin wildly, suddenly stiffen in place with their body stretched forward, falter, recover, lose their balance again and finally sink into a state of semi-fainting. Sometimes these attacks express themselves abruptly, sometimes they are heralded by precursor signs such as a distracted and anxious expression, a slight tremor, laboured breathing, sweat on the forehead or the face assuming a contorted and painful expression. The nature of the nervous attack also depends on the ritual condition of the possessed, and is usually more violent for the inexperienced. The rhythm of the drums and the intensity of the dance constitute the basic element of the ritual and the propitiatory framework for the 'descent' of the loa on their worshippers.

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Voodoo death according to Walter B. Cannon.

In 1942, the physiologist Walter Bradford Cannon published an article entitled ‘Voodoo Death'.[1] Although his paper was neither an ethnographic field report nor a discussion of anthropological hypotheses, it created a lively debate in anthropological and medical science, which may be of interest here to reflect on the role of fear in relation to voodoo rituals. 'Voodoo death' is a medical article, an investigation of physiology applied to an object of study in ethnography.

Cannon, in fact, uses the accounts of anthropologists to refer to a phenomenon 'so extraordinary and so foreign to the experience of civilised people as to seem unbelievable':[2] men who are subjected to voodoo rites, witchcraft and other forms of black magic can die (and so much so that in almost all the cases he cites, they do die). Whether it is Hausa warriors who believe they have been victims of an evil spell, Maori women who have eaten forbidden fruit, Kanaka reed drivers who have fallen under a spell, or Australian aborigines injured with 'cursed' spears, they all meet the same fate: they die within a short time of the ritual.
The physiologist then asks himself whether these reports are reliable and whether there is an 'extra' factor that has not been taken into account in these deaths, for example whether these people were not in fact poisoned. Faced with this possibility, he momentarily discards the reports of anthropologists and focuses his attention on medically trained observers.
Epistolary communications with various doctors who worked in the area of these villages, however, confirm to him that the poisoning hypothesis must be discarded: death can only be attributed to a state of social pressure brought about by ritual, and this state would be characterised, according to Cannon, by fear, one of the most deeply rooted emotions in the organism and one that can be associated with very serious physiological disorders (a subject Cannon studied long and intensively).
Next, Cannon therefore refers to anthropologists. He cites Lucien Lévi-Bruhl and William Lloyd Warner, and from the latter he borrows his theory of the community's two attitudes towards the main actor in the voodoo ritual: radical exclusion from social life and subsequent acceptance as belonging to the 'sacred totemic world of the dead'. All these premises provide Cannon with the framework for the key question, the question that encapsulates his conviction and opens up the debate between the sciences: can fear kill?
From here on, Cannon enters his territory, that of the physiology and analysis of fear, emphasising the deleterious effects of the intense and persistent action of fear on emotional arousal, and referring to his experience as a military doctor in the First World War. In order to make the Western reader understand how fear can play a decisive role in the state of psycho-physical health, the article goes on to present cases of terrified soldiers in war situations and a case of post-surgical shock in soldiers, i.e. a series of the author's clinical indications not contextualised in 'other' territories but in the Western world. Cannon wants to show that the phenomenon is not an experience 'so foreign' to Western people, but that 'voodoo death can be real', and that it can be explained by the physiological impact of great emotional arousal, a state of intense and persistent fear that results in emotional arousal shock that resolves into a hypovolaemic condition that causes death.
None of this is demonstrable, according to the criteria of science, either medically or anthropologically. Cannon's is probably a provocation that still keeps an interesting debate on 'voodoo death' alive today. In our case, thinking about the conditioning of fear in relation to socially conditioned events can make us reflect on how much emotions and social pressures can only be understood by contextualising the place in which they occur, i.e. by trying to understand the 'other' in his or her way of thinking and acting and applying that relativistic anthropological gaze that allows us to enter into the 'other' mentality.

NOTEs

[1] Cannon, W. B., 1942, 'Voodoo death', in American Anthropologist, vol. 44, no. 2.
[2] Ibid., p. 169

Voodoo (rituals)Anthropological insights

Voodoo (rituals)

Anthropological insights