If you still think that “all Haitians” are trapped in “voodoo worship” please read Laura Wagner’s description of her experiences in Haiti following the earthquake. Laura is a PhD candidate in anthropology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and she has been in Haiti conducting research on human rights.
Her report doesn’t mention anything about Haitians turning to “voodoo” in the days following the earthquake. If “voodoo” is so pervasive a force in all Haitians lives, funny that she didn’t notice it and document. She’s a trained cultural anthropologist, so I take her description as meaning that people were living their lives in a fairly voodoo-free way.
Instead, Wagner describes what she saw, including the “fierce generosity” of the Haitian people with whom she interacted. Her essay paints a picture of a moral high ground that I am not confident I would find following such a crisis in my home town of Washington, DC. True, the Washington Post carried an article over the weekend about how neighbors in one part of DC got together following our double snowstorm to help those without power and the elderly.
Today’s Post carried no articles about Haiti in the first section, but it did provide substantial coverage about how Washington area residents are fed up with being stuck at home and how they just want to get back to their normal routines.
Being stuck at home in a place where earthquakes don’t happen would be a blessing to thousands and thousands of Haitians.
Image: “Haiti Earthquake,” from flickr user IFRC, licensed with Creative Commons.
anthropologyworks 
Though much more on the right tone than the general US media, this post seems to perpetuate the notion that there is something wrong with voodoo, whether it was seen since Jan 12th or not. Perhaps the notion that something is wrong with voodoo is so widespread because of the western media’s denigration of it, portraying it as backward? In my experience, voodoo was a structure of Haitian culture. Whether it was witnessed or not in the aftermath of crisis seems besides the point. Rather the lack of understanding around cultural theory by the US media in particular that seems more distressing than whether voodoo could be said to indeed be verified as having been absent from Haitians’ lives after the earthquake. Why we would want to take the time to do such verifying, is beyond my understanding, especially when it is so integral to their society.
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