Haitian Folklore

Haitian folklore encompasses the oral traditions, proverbs, songs, tales, and performance practices through which the Haitian peasantry transmitted memory, moral frameworks, and historical experience. Price-Mars argued that these traditions were not backward remnants but the living cultural core of Haitian identity — a people remember through proverb, song, and ceremony especially where elite institutions have treated those forms as shameful or unserious. Folklore studies became a vehicle for indigénisme and for the ethnographic reassessment of Vodou.