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Haitian vodou has been considered an African-American religion organized around a pantheon, sanctuaries, priests, fraternities, and rituals honoring the spirits (Iwa), the dead, and the ancestors. This construction of vodou, which is predominant in the literature, is based on a substantive approach to religion. It obscures the close connections between vodou and illness and does not adequately reveal how vodou is used in the daily lives of Haitians. By adopting a microsocial perspective on vodou and focusing on the knowledge and practices of vodou practitioners, the importance of vodou's therapeutic dimension becomes clear. Indeed, I am compelled to conclude that vodou is a health care system. Grounded in 16 months' research in the Haitian countryside and using a definition of health care systems identified in the medical anthropology literature, this new way of approaching vodou situates its religious and magical dimensions within its role as a health care system. This article deals with these different aspects, addressing the criteria that make vodou a health care system. In particular, I explore the practitioners who are recognized as healers and consulted as such; the sites where practitioners meet with the sick and treat them; the vodou theories on illness; and the curative, preventive, and care-giving practices based on those theories. This approach helps us to better understand how medicine, religion, and magic are linked in Haitian vodou and leads us back to debates about the construction of vodou, which are apparently well known in the scientific literature. All of this leads us to reflect on Western approaches to healing and caring. (Altern Ther Health Med. 2011;17(5):44-51.)
Religious spaces often serve as therapeutic sites where the sick go to seek help in managing illness and other misfortunes. Research concerning the functional aspects of religions commonly refers to their therapeutic and preventive dimensions, evident in the popularity of certain pilgrimages and certain religious movements that emphasize illness management - often defined as healing religions and healing churches.1 This functional aspect of religion is present in Haitian vodou, since its practitioners (oungan) are consulted as healers in the same way as are other Haitian Creole or biomedical therapists. The therapeutic dimension of vodou, however, is neglected in the literature, which focuses on vodou as an African-American religion organized around...