Le vodou, le prêtre et l'ethnologue ; retour sur la polémique Jacques Roumain / Joseph Foisset (Haïti, 1942)

Description

As soon as the Concordat between the Holy See and the Republic of Haiti was signed in 1860, the Catholic clergy began a relentless fight against Protestantism and especially voodoo, which it considered to be superstition. It led three 'anti-superstition campaigns' in Haiti, the first of which began in 1896. The third campaign began in 1939, dividing the country and ultimately prompting the government to abruptly end it in 1942. It was in this context that a controversy erupted between the Haitian Marxist intellectual Jacques Roumain, director of the Bureau of Ethnology of Haiti, and the Spiritan Joseph Foisset, who had made a name for himself with his incisive writings against the Durkheimian school of ethnology and Marxism. This work aims to re-establish the socio-historical context of this controversy and determine what was at stake. And, for the first time, it allows the reader to follow the entire evolution of the exchanges between the two thinkers.