{"id":508,"date":"2017-11-01T16:19:00","date_gmt":"2017-11-01T20:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/?p=508"},"modified":"2017-11-01T16:19:00","modified_gmt":"2017-11-01T20:19:00","slug":"vodou-power-objects","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/2017\/11\/01\/vodou-power-objects\/","title":{"rendered":"Vodou Power Objects"},"content":{"rendered":"

Power Objects Lecture:<\/span> Charging and Discharging in Afro-Caribbean Religions<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n

On Wednesday October 19th Dr. McAlister, came to lecture on <\/span>\u201c<\/span><\/i>Charging and Discharging in Afro-Caribbean Religions.\u201d Dr. McAlister who is a professor at Wesleyan University and is an expert in the studies of Haitian Vodou, this is only part of the reason the Dr. McAlister was invited to come to speak in connection with the exhibit though. Dr. McAlister was able to study Vodou power objects over a period of years in a way that not many other researchers do, while she was on a trip to Haiti she accidentally bought a charged object that held the spirits of two zonbi, which she was unaware of until she began her research of the object. This makes her even more relevant to the exhibit at the museum as she is an expert in Haitian Vodou and she was able to bring parts of Vodou that we were not able to see when you look just at an altar in her lecture that she gave. \u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

In her lecture she spoke first about her article, \u201cA Sorcerer’s Bottle\u201d, which tells the story of how she unknowingly became the owner of these two zonbi. She spoke about the different kinds of spirits and told us the the bottle contained petwo spirits. Petwo spirits are hot, they are very quick and effective, but they are angry. Petwo spirits are most commonly associated with what most people know as \u201cblack magic\u201d, those who capture petwo spirits will eventually suffer the consequences as the spirits take a lot of the energy and life force from the person who has trapped them. After explaining to us how the objects are charged, she moved on to how one would go about discharging the objects. She explained how spiritual charges can be transferred, and explained the differences between discharging something and desacralizing. When something is discharged the spirit is liberated desacralizing is when the spirits are transferred into another object so that the original object could be used in a museum for example. Once we had all the background knowledge that we needed, Dr. McAlister showed us a video of the discharging process that she had taken when she brought her bottle back to Haiti to be discharged, being able to watch the process of the spirits being discharged allowed me to better understand dischargement as a process. As well as this, being able to watch this ritual gave me a better understanding into Vodou and the traditions as a whole, especially having to do with the spirits after a person has died in Vodou tradition. <\/span><\/p>\n

This lecture related directly to our class because only days before had we read her first article, \u201cA Sorcerers Bottle\u201d, this gave those of us who had read the article a better basis to understand her lecture on. This lecture went further connecting to a reading we did written by Professor Abiodun titled \u201c\u00c0\u1e63\u1eb9: Verbalizing and Visualizing Creative Power through Art\u201d goes onto explain African art that we do not normally think of when we think of traditional art, he explains through the article that African and Yoruba art is alive, and while this particular bottle came from Haiti and Vodou which is a diasporic religion based off of Yoruba traditions. This means that Vodou evolved from Yoruba, which means that it carries some of those traditions, in Dr. McAllister’s article her friend when viewing the bottle says, \u201c\u2018You know, that thing it never stops\u2019 remarked one friend as she spoke absently about something else. Indeed, the bottle moves and swirls in its own way.\u201d (McAlister, 2) this connects the bottle back to it\u2019s Yoruba roots as the bottle seems to be alive and every moving. <\/span><\/p>\n

McAlister posed many interesting questions throughout her lecture and I wish we had a bit more time to go through and fully watch and discuss the videos from the discharging process a bit more. I would like to ask her what she thought caused the contents of the bottle to ignite like they did during the video of the discharging process. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Abiodun, Rowland. “\u00c0\u1e63\u1eb9: Verbalizing and Visualizing Creative Power through Art.” <\/span>Journal of Religion in Africa<\/span><\/i> 24, no. 4 (1994): 309-22. doi:10.2307\/1581339.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

McAlister, Elizabeth. \u201cA Sorcerers Bottle\u201d<\/span> Sacred Arts of Ancient Vodou<\/span><\/i> (1995): 304-24<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Power Objects Lecture: Charging and Discharging in Afro-Caribbean Religions On Wednesday October 19th Dr. McAlister, came to lecture on \u201cCharging and Discharging in Afro-Caribbean Religions.\u201d Dr. McAlister who is a professor at Wesleyan University and is an expert in the studies of Haitian Vodou, this is only part of the reason the Dr. McAlister was […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4544,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-508","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4544"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=508"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":509,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/508\/revisions\/509"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=508"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=508"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.uvm.edu\/vlbrenna-rel095fall2017\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=508"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}