Overview

"""The most ambitious, insightful, and interesting account of the nature and centrality of religion for transnational migrants yet written . . . a pathbreaking study.""--Josh DeWind, director, International Migration Program, Social Science Research Council This book and accompanying compact disc provide a rare excursion in the innovative ways a community of Haitian migrants to South Florida has maintained religious traditions and familial connections. It demonstrates how religion, ritual, and aesthetic practices affect lives on both sides of the Caribbean, and it debunks myths of exotic and primitive vodou (often spelled ""voodoo""), which have long been used against Haitians. As Karen Richman shows, Haitians at home and in migrant settlements make ingenious use of audio and video tapes to extend the boundaries of their ritual spaces and to reinforce their moral and spiritual anchors to one another. The book and CD were produced in collaboration to give the reader intimate access to this new expressive media. Sacred songs are recorded on tapes and circulated among the communities. Migrants are able to hear not only the performance sounds--drumming, singing, and chatter--but also a description, as narrators tell of offerings, sacrifices, prayers, and the exchange of possessions. Spirits who inhabit the bodies of ritual actors are aware of the recording devices and personally address the absent migrants, sometimes warning them of their financial obligations to family members in Haiti. The migrants' dependence on their home village is dramatically reinforced while their economic independence is restricted. Using standard ethnographic methods, Richman's work illuminates the connections among social organization, power, production, ritual, and aesthetics. With its transnational perspective, it shows how labor migration has become one of Haiti's chief economic exports."

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9780813033259

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Reviews

In this marvelous book Richman masterly pilots the reader through global, national, local, and personal levels of knowledge and experience. Detailed yet absorbing, documented yet seamless, scholarly yet accessible... I laughed and I cried. How many academic works elicit such emotions? - Journal of World Anthropology Has much to say about the transformative potential of song and ritual in Haiti and its diaspora.... The book's appeal should extend to those outside the academy as well. - The World of Music A unique ethnographic enquiry into the rarely mentioned mating of economics and religion. - New West Indian Guide Tells the metastory of Pierre Dioguy, nicknamed Ti Chini, or 'Little Caterpillar,' a Haitian migrant laborer working in the rural American South.... Little Caterpillar and his extended family in Haiti become Richman's subjects (and collaborators) in crafting a nuanced analysis of power, resistance, performance, and religious change. - H-Net Reviews

Author Information

Karen E. Richman is director of the Center for Migration and Border Studies at the Institute for Latino Studies, on the faculty of Africana studies, and a fellow of the Helen Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame. She has also worked as an advocate for immigrant workers in the United States.

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