The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti

A long-view legal and cultural history of how colonial and Haitian authorities named, prohibited, reclassified, and periodically attacked popular ritual from Saint-Domingue through the twentieth century, while those same authorities could never fully control what they suppressed. Ramsey's central argument is a double movement: Vodou is repeatedly criminalized as superstition or disorder and at the same time selectively nationalized as folklore, patrimony, or authentic Haitian culture — a paradox that explains how the state could sponsor staged dance and ethnology while still backing police raids and church-driven anti-superstition campaigns against living practice.