The Spirits and the Law by Kate Ramsey

Author:Kate Ramsey [Ramsey, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, General, Anthropology, Cultural & Social, History, Caribbean & West Indies, Religion
ISBN: 9780226703817
Google: enfRAgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2014-02-07T05:42:31+00:00

FIGURE 11. Dantès Bellegarde, Camille Lhérisson, and Jacques Roumain, Port-au-Prince, 1941. Photo by Alfred or Rhoda Métraux. Courtesy of Daniel A. Métraux.

One of the tasks with which the new bureau was immediately charged was the development of ethnological instruction.173 Only a week after the bureau’s institutionalization by décret-loi, the Haitian daily newspapers announced that a group of scholars, headed by Jean Price-Mars, had created an Institut d’Ethnologie as a private higher-education faculty for ethnological training.174 That first term, Jacques Roumain taught a course on pre-Columbian ethnology; Suzanne Comhaire Sylvain, a linguist and folklorist, offered one on phonetics and linguistics; Catts Pressoir, who later wrote a book on Haitian Protestantism, taught the history of world religions; and Louis Mars, Price-Mars’s son and future author of the psychologically based study La crise de possession, offered a course entitled “psychology of primitives and paranoias.” There was also a biology course taught by Camille Lhérisson, as well as offerings in “morphology and ethnology” and “genetics and biometrics” (see fig. 11).175 Through public programs, frequent public lectures, publications, and performances, the Bureau and the Institut d’Ethnologie became the epicenter of ethnological and folklore studies in Haiti.176 These institutions reflected, in their affiliates and membership, the wide ideological heterogeneity and internal tensions of what by this time had been collectively nominated the mouvement folklorique.

On the one hand, there was Jacques Roumain, who saw Haitian color politics as an idiom of the class struggle and took a dim view of those who, in his view, cynically privileged the problem of color in public discourse to obscure the economic basis of inequality in Haiti.177 Roumain’s critique implicated a number of his colleagues at the bureau and institute who were members of the Griots group.178 Named after the traditional storyteller musicians of West Africa, the Groupe des Griots, was founded in 1932 by Louis Diaquoi, a journalist, and Lorimer Denis and François Duvalier, then students of law and medicine, respectively; the three had been in conversation about ethnology and politics since the late 1920s. Diaquoi died shortly after the group’s formation, and Denis and Duvalier were thereafter joined by two poets, Carl Brouard (who had been, with Jacques Roumain, a founder of La Revue indigène) and Clément Magloire fils (later, Magloire Saint Aude). In 1938, with financial support from Brouard’s father, then mayor of Port-au-Prince, the group founded the journal Les Griots, which became an early (1938–1940) mouthpiece of the post-occupation political mouvement of noirisme, positioning Denis and Duvalier as its foremost ideologues.179 Ethnology, they maintained in articles throughout the late 1930s and 1940s, scientifically corroborated the central noiriste political doctrine that Haiti’s social structure and political institutions should reflect what they identified as the biologically and psychologically African nature of its masses. State power, consolidated throughout Haitian history in the hands of the milat elite, ought instead, they argued, to be held by representatives of the black middle class, who shared the interests of the peasants and were uniquely capable of acting on their behalf.180

The coldness with which

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