Sent Spirits, Meaning‐Making, and Agency in Haiti

Abstract

In Haiti, a “sent spirit” is an experience of misfortune, such as an illness or accident, which is interpreted as intentionally sent by someone supernaturally. Sent spirits are fundamentally social narratives, reflecting links among social inequality, structural violence, and solidarity. This article focuses on the ethnographic stories of two women who experienced the death of a daughter, with one attributing the death to her own inability to care for her daughter, and the other to a sent spirit. A key question is whether these different explanations of misfortune create different possibilities for recourse to action. I explore how, in the context of gangan makout (“shaman with a sack,” free Vodou services), a sent‐spirit attribution created a means of enacting agency following misfortune. However, as contemporary Vodou institutions have shifted to a gangan ason (“shaman with a rattle/bell,” fee‐for‐service) model, sent‐spirit attributions no longer constitute a feasible avenue for enacting agency. Instead, they leave individuals facing new manifestations of structural violence in the form of marketization of rituals for healing and justice that have become out of reach for the poor. However, sent‐spirit narratives continue to perform the work of culture by displacing blame from suffering individuals. [Vodou, agency, structural violence, supernatural, Haiti]

Examining the Etiology and Treatment of Mental Illness Among Vodou Priests in Northern Haiti

“…Sent illnesses are most commonly expedited in the form of a batri —sometimes also referred to as kout poud (attack of powder) or kout batri (Davis 1988 ; Meudec 2007 ; Kaiser and Fils-Aimé 2019 ; Jean-Jacques 2019 ). Very little research exists on batri .…”

“I base my life on sadness”: Apparently paradoxical sources of resilience among young Haitians

“…Derivois et al's (2020) extensive work has used locally adjusted questionnaires and scales, measuring resilience scores, to define so-called determinants of resilience. 3 Others have investigated potential sources and expressions of resilience, such as the interview-based studies of Rahill et al (2016), Kaiser and Fils-Aimé's (2019) ethnographic study of the use of traditional religious meaning-making to remove blame from individuals, or the study by Karray et al (2016) that facilitated expressions of trajectories for survival and hope among street children through art workshops and interviews. Common to these researchers is their critical remarks on the leading Western definitions of resilience, and the need to use Haiti's remarkably complex history as a basis to understand contextually relevant sources of coping.…”

Maladi Nanm, Maladi Zonbi, & Maladi Lalin: A qualitative study of cultural concepts of distress in northern Haiti

“…Supernatural interactions in everyday life are not unique to Haiti, but are common throughout sub-Saharan Africa where witchcraft and sorcery are generally assumed to be true rather than something to be believed in or not (Bourguignon, 1959;Falen, 2018;Kaiser & Fils-Aimé, 2019;Okello & Seggane, 2015;Ventevogel, 2016). In the Vodou cosmology in Haiti, the body "is a permeable space that is accessible to agents that can penetrate it and move around inside it" (Vonarx, 2007, p. 23).…”

“…Existing English-language studies have also documented “folk diagnoses”—albeit to a lesser extent—related to mental health in Haiti originating from Vodou cosmology including malkadi , pèdisyon , and maladi voye , for example (Coreil et al, 1996; Kiev, 1961; Pierre et al, 2010; Singer et al, 1988). Maladi voye , in particular, represents the unique formulation of sent illnesses or “sent spirits” common in the Vodou cosmology, as well as in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, in which a spirit is intentionally sent by someone supernaturally with the intent to cause misfortune in the form of an accident, illness, or death (Farmer, 1990; Galvin & Michel, 2020; Kaiser & Fils-Aimé, 2019; Meudec, 2007; Vonarx, 2007). This was incorporated into the DSM-5 in 2013 through the term maladi moun , which loosely means “human caused illness” in the sense that the illness was caused by another human who sent it onto the afflicted party via supernatural means (Nicolas et al, 2006; Teodoro & Afonso, 2020; Toffle, 2015).…”