Tag Archives: anthropology

Zora Neale Hurston and Haiti

Miss Zora Neale Hurston has gone afield from the scenes of her previous work . . . and turned in the inexhaustible mines of Voodoo and witchcraft in Haiti and Jamaica. Tell My Horse is a curious mixture of remembrances, travelogue, sensationalism, and anthropology. The remembrances are vivid, the travelogue tedious, the sensationalism reminiscent of […]

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Dr. Alfred Metraux’s Gourd Rattles

Title: Gourd Rattle “Asson” “Baksor” Donor Name: Dr. Alfred Metraux Culture: Haitian Object Type: Rattle Place: Croix-Des-Bouquets (Near Port-Au-Prince), Ouest Province, Haiti, Caribbean Accession Date: 1942-Jun-19 Topic: Ethnology Accession Number: 163278 Catalog Number: E382581-0 USNM Number: E382581 Specimen Count: 1 Notes: GOURD RATTLE, NARROW END SERVES AS HANDLE. COVERED WITH LOOSE RETICULATE NETTING OF COLORED […]

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The Société Congo of the Ile á Gonave

These societies bear individual names and operate separately. In fact there is no central organization and the term Société Congo only designates the kind of society. The purpose of these organizations is fourfold. First, they are cooperative labor groups; second, the members are afforded protection; third, they are mutual benefit societies; and fourth, they provide […]

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Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain, Africa and Haiti

Suzanne Comhaire-Sylvain vient de mourir en laissant une oeuvre considérable sur la littérature orale africaine et haïtienne. Ayant vécu loin des rumeurs de la politique haïtienne, elle est restée dans l’ombre pour nombre d’ethnologues d’Haïti, mais tous reconnaissent une grande dette à son égard : c’est elle qui a fourni une base indispensable et unique […]

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Voodoo Drums and the United States Occupation of Haiti

Entry for “Voodoo Drum” in the catalog of The Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.  Accession Date: September 11, 1917. Click here for a link to the entry.

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Joseph-Anténor Firmin

Certainly, the most important champion of Haiti’s modernist internationalism in the nineteenth century is the Haitian essayist Antenor Firmin. No other intellectual seemed so able to follow through on the revolutionary universalism of Haiti’s war of independence. J. Michael Dash, The Disappearing Island: Haiti, History, and the Hemisphere (April 2004). We can now draw a […]

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Haiti: Vodou

The years when Haitian culture was first emerging as a major object of anthropological study both domestically and internationally were actually a period of prolonged penalization and persecution for many who served the Vodou spirits. Kate Ramsey, “Prohibition, persecution, performance,” Gradhiva (2005)

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Haiti: Africa

Jean Price-Mars avowedly sought to renovate and redeem Haiti precisely by prescribing the place of Africa within the nation. Price-Mars looked to history to understand what he saw as the historical processes involved in creating a unique Haitian being and ethnos. Gérarde Magliore and Kevin A. Yelvington, “Haiti and the anthropological imagination,” Gradhiva (2005)  

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