A few days ago a reader sent in a really bad BBC article about French President Nicolas Sarkozy threatening to sue a company for selling a “voodoo doll” using his image. The piece was mostly a snarky take-down of Sarkozy and his other attempts at litigation and included this sort of laughable throwaway paragraph at the end:
Voodoo has become associated with zombies and sticking pins into dolls to curse an enemy, but practitioners say this misrepresents their religion.
Okay, then. By comparison, MSNBC did a better job with the story. It uses the Sarkozy doll as a hook to talk about misconceptions of Voodoo.
It is unlikely that the publisher or Sarkozy have thought much about voodoo’s ancient roots during the doll fiasco, but the practice is in fact just one insignificant part of a complex belief system that makes up the mysterious religion, which is still practiced in many parts of Africa, Haiti, Jamaica and Louisiana, among others.
The story has tons of information, but it’s mostly just paragraph after paragraph of assertions without any sourcing. It would be nice to know where the reporter was getting the information and whether there are variances within Voudon.
Anyone can become possessed by spirits, who offer help to the living in the form of good fortune and protection from evil, according to voodoo myths. Voodoo priests guide the interaction between the living and the dead, and can call upon certain spirits depending on the community’s need, it is believed. . . .
Once spread throughout the Caribbean, the southeastern United States and parts of South America, displaced Africans felt a common thread through voodoo, though the religion morphed to include elements of Christianity to appease Catholic slaveholders.
I’m wondering why the use of the word “myths” in the first paragraph and am wondering why Catholic slaveholders are singled out here.
There is some helpful information about the use of dolls, though:
It’s that mysterious element of the religion that allows black magic myths such as the use of voodoo dolls to proliferate in popular culture, experts say.
In actuality, voodoo dolls were unheard of or very rare in Africa and Haiti, and had only a small surge in popularity when voodoo migrated from Haiti to New Orleans in the early 1900s. Even then, the dolls were often used for benevolent purposes, such as helping an infertile couple conceive. The concept of pinpricking-for-pain style voodoo dolls is mostly a product of Hollywood
Again, though, there are a dozen paragraphs with no sources cited. Unless the author of the piece is writing from their own expertise, that’s just not acceptable.
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Comments (5) |
October 25, 2008, at 1:43 pm
Hello, Mollie
First, I want to thank you for the respectful tone of both this and your previous post about Afro-diaspora religions (which you posted while I was away from home, so I didn’t see it till much later).
Then, I wanted to comment on the use of the word “myth” in the two block quotes in this current post. The first usage is correct. A myth is a teaching story that transmits the values or explains the practices of a religious culture. So myths are not judged by literal factual accuracy, but by efficacy. (Does anybody think a hare ever actually raced with a tortoise? But we still tell that story to our kids.)
In the second block quote, “myth” seems to mean an untrue statement, often a prejudicial lie such as “black magic myths.” That’s a popular misunderstanding of the word.
The problem with this misunderstanding is that it assumes that every statement is either literally factual or false. Myths that reflect and transmit authentic values are truer than facts, but in a different way.
October 25, 2008, at 2:02 pm
That’s an interesting question to me. Of course we don’t need a citation for reporting that election day is November 4th. And we absolutely do when reporting the outlandish attacks that one side is leveling at the other during the campaign. But there’s a messy gray area in between. I do agree with your analysis of this particular story. And having dealt with any number of emails stating something as true that is absolutely false, I think it’s best to cite the source if there’s any question whatsoever about the facts.
October 25, 2008, at 6:21 pm
I’ll lay odds the reporter got lazy, and simply read the Wikipedia article. Any odds you want.
Regarding the singling out of Catholic slaveowners, however, it may be worth mentioning that Haiti and Louisiana were largely Roman Catholic in the 18th-19th centuries, and that if we treat voodoo as a syncretization of African religion with Christianity from those areas at that time, then —logically — the form of Christianity it syncretized with was Catholicism.
A similar process at work in more Protestant-leaning areas probably helped create hoodoo, a kind of folk-magic with its own separate history and traditions. And instead of orishas-as-saints, we get Moses-as-conjuror and the Bible as a conjuror’s tool.
I don’t know enough about it to suggest this with much confidence, but I DID read the Wikipedia articles.
October 25, 2008, at 9:49 pm
PMSNBC’s “Voodoo doll” article was actually an article from LiveScience and written by LiveScience’s History Columnist, Heather Whipps. Whipps has a degree in Anthropology from McGill University, and lives in Montreal, QC. The range of science history topics in her column archive tends to be very broad and filled with factoids, some of which have been discussed (or critiqued) on various blogs. A few wide-ranging examples include:
- “Do Apes Challenge Our Humanity?”
- “The Long History of the 2008 Financial Mess”
- “Queen Jezebel: Biblical Bad Girl Had Power”
- “Historian: First English Bible Fueled First Fundamentalists”
- “An Itsy-Bitsy Birthday”
LiveScience.com is a media site owned by Imaginova, a digital media and commerce company. According to Imaginova:
“LiveScience.com chronicles the daily advances and innovations made in science and technology, converting often-complex concepts into ‘water-cooler science.’ It not only reports the news, it takes on the misconceptions that often pop up around scientific discoveries and delivers short, provocative explanations with a certain wit and style.”
Light and fluffy, for today’s “Change we can believe in” crowd.
October 26, 2008, at 11:38 am
Judy -
You’re committing what I.A. Richard would call the “one and only one true meaning” fallacy for the word “myth.” (You’re possibly committing the etymological fallacy as well).
“Myt” has different meanings in different contexts. A historian uses the term differently than an anthropologist. Both meanings can be correct, depending on the context. Old school historians use the term differently than anthropologists, and neither one is more “correct” than the other.
Here are some of the current meaning of the the word “myth” in the Oxford English Dictionary:
Now, I would agree journalists and/or sources for stories should be clearer about which meaning they intend, but if you want to argue there is only one meaning and all other meanings are incorrect, you’re on very shaky ground (and should read some I.A. Richards - Richards referred to this concept as the “one and only one true meaning superstition”).