"Performances of Prohibition: Law, “Superstition,” and National Modernity in Haiti" by Kate Ramsey

Kate Ramsey

Deposited 2002

Abstract
My dissertation focuses on the series of penal laws which prohibited popular ritual practices in Haiti between 1835 and 1987, first as sortileges (spells) and later as pratiques superstitieuses (superstitious practices). It poses two key questions concerning the institutional and social histories of these statutes. First, why was the ban on popular ritual maintained as a fixture of the Haitian Code pénal for over one hundred and fifty years when the sustained application of these laws against socially-sanctioned religious practices was politically impossible for Haitian authorities? Second, what significance did these laws have for popular religious communities in Haiti, both at times when they were strictly enforced, and also, as was more generally the case, when they were not?

The project situates these questions in relation to the long history of Western discourses that have demonized African diasporic religious practices. It considers the way in which the laws promulgated against les sortilèges and les pratiques superstitieuses materialized the force of such colonial and ecclesiastical ideologies. In studying the historical circumstances under which this penal regime was first promulgated and then twice revised, in both cases to be tightened, the dissertation contends that these statutes functioned as both a sign and, at times, instrument of the élite state's determination to enforce “civilized” modernity in Haiti.

Drawing on ethnographic and archival research conducted in Haiti and the United States, it examines the political force and, frequently, paradoxical effects of these laws at three critical conjunctures: the late nineteenth century, following the return of the Roman Catholic Church to Haiti in 1860; the 1915–34 United States occupation of Haiti; and the Catholic Church's 1939–42 “anti-superstition campaign” under the post-occupation governments of Sténio Vincent and Elie Lescot. In each case, I am particularly concerned with how Haitian peasants and the urban poor managed to shape the enforcement of this penal regime according to popular conceptions of justice. The dissertation concludes with an analysis of the legacy of these laws in Haiti today.