Vodou Culture 201: This Or That
US majority culture, which is heavily influenced by Abrahamic religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism), spends a fair amount of time trying to categorize things. Black or white. Right or wrong. Hispanic or non-Hispanic. Rich or poor. Good or bad. Those categories are used to make all sorts of decisions, ranging from what help is available to you in society to what sort of person you can be expected to be: whether you should be considered to be law-abiding, for instance, and whether the law should default to thinking you’re telling the truth.
This is not entirely the fault of the Abrahamic religions, but you don’t have to dig very hard in them to find a cosmic good versus evil plot arc. In that arc, there is a running battle which people participate in for one side or the other. It’s not a far leap from that idea to characterizing people into sides and making moral judgements about them. Because people love to trust their eyes, that very quickly turns into some species of “people that look like this are bad.”
Once someone is in a category, baybeeee, it’s hard to leave it. We don’t like to make exceptions for people as a society, and we never let people forget what we think they are.
Vodou, as I’ve learned it, is not interested in those big judgements. Very little in nature is just one thing, and things change over time, one category inevitably bleeding into another. While you will definitely find vodou making statements about whether something is correct in vodou culture or on the consequences of an action, it is understood that things change over time and labeling things is often a waste of time.
Grand judgements about good and evil are always a waste of time, a distraction from dealing with whatever is happening, often in service of making someone feel better about something: I am good, they are evil, therefore I do not have to care about them or treat them well.
Vodou, again as I’ve learned it, says: “if you don’t want to treat someone well or care about them, don’t. You don’t need to enlist god. You own the consequences of it.”
US majority culture does not know what to do with that, and often labels vodou culture as uncaring, unnecessarily harsh or violent, or callous. Vodou is not interested in the cosmic good versus evil plot which is so often used in instead of nuance. US majority culture views anyone or anything disinterested in that kind of judgement as inherently evil or bad (the rampant racism frequently gets enlisted here, too.)
For its part, vodou culture views US majority culture as uninterested in personal responsibility, since it so often blames god, science, or nature for what is a personal decision.
