Vodún, Spirited Forests, and the African Atlantic Forest Complex

Abstract:Vodún has been described as indefinable, endlessly flexible, and borderless. In this paper, I develop an analytical framework for understanding global Vodún, thereby challenging claims that Vodún is, at its core, inexplicable. To accomplish this, I combine over a decade of ethnographic research in Bénin and Haiti with my status as an initiate of Haitian Vodou and my time as a diviner's apprentice in Bénin. Joining these three modalities, I explore the centrality of the forest as a key symbol in Vodún cosmology, how the forest's symbolic and ontological potency is maintained in Bénin and beyond, and how a forest-focused analysis of Vodún offers anthropologists new insights into how and why African Atlantic forest religions have been so successful globally. I lay out a new strategy for understanding Vodún that reframes the religion as an ontological product of forest cosmologies, and, in so doing, I argue that Vodún is best understood as a smaller part of a greater African Atlantic religious system that I call the "African Atlantic Forest Complex."