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The Vodou Ethic and the Spirit of Communism: The Practical Consciousness of the African People of Haiti. By Paul C. Mocombe. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2016. ISBN 978-0-7618-6702-9. 147 pp. $28.99.
Review by Ama Mazama
This book, comprising five chapters, presents itself as a structural Marxist analysis of Vodou in Haitian society, with the ultimate purpose of applying the author's own "phenomenological structural sociology" (6) to Vodou. Thus, unsurprisingly, and typical of most works couched in European paradigms, The Vodou Ethic and the Spirit of Communism is articulated around two principal dichotomies. The first one opposes Haitians to African people worldwide, with the strange claim that Haiti is the only place in the world where Africans have rejected European cultural values and held on to African culture. Indeed, according to the author, "the majority of the black people in Africa and the African diaspora, contemporarily, internalize and recursively reorganize a European way of life as black (other) agents of the Protestant Ethic and the spirit of capitalism seeking equality of opportunity, recognition, and distribution with their former white colonizers" (32). "On the contrary," he continues,
the majority of the Africans on the island maintained their African structuring structure [sic], what I am calling here the Vodou Ethic and the spirit of communism social class language game, which they reified as the nature of reality as such via the language of Kreyol; the ideology of Vodou; its ideological apparatuses, i.e., lakous, peristyles, ounfo, Iwa yo, herbal medicine, songs, dances, and zombification; and modes of production, i.e., komes, husbandry, and subsistence agriculture. (33)
The second dichotomy,...