
































Microsoft Word - Cearns_final.docx


 1 

 

(Dis)connections: migration, transnationalism, and global capitalism between 
Haiti and the United States 

 
KAREN E. RICHMAN, 2018 (2nd edition), Migration and Vodou, University Press of 
Florida, pp. 384, ISBN: 9780813064864 
 

In Migration and Vodou, Karen Richman presents a fascinatingly rich ethnography that draws 

on over two decades of multi-sited research across Haiti and the United States, embedded 

within an extended transnational family of migrant workers and remittance recipients. Through 

the lens of this one family, Richman draws us into a dynamic world of transnational 

interconnection that will be familiar to scholars of various parts of the Caribbean region.  

 

Richman’s ethnography details a community from Ti Rivyè, a coastal fishing village in the 

Léogane Plain in the south of Haiti. In recent decades, the region has seen many of its 

inhabitants migrate to the United States, in order to provide economic support for those left 

back at home. Most find work as agricultural workers in South Florida, although in the first 

instance Richman met her main interlocutor of the book whilst at a state-licensed labor camp 

in Virginia.  

 

The book opens with a detailed presentation of an exchange of ‘letters’ between these separated 

family members through the exchange of audio-cassettes. Richman details how these ‘letters’ 

mix spoken word and ritual song, creating a transnational performative space of rhetorical and 

ritual exchange. For communities stretched between rural Haiti and South Florida, creative 

uses of these audio technologies result in a reconfiguration of the boundaries of ritual 

performance space, allowing migrants to continue to serve their spirits (lwa) and participate in 

rituals even from a distance.  

 

Richman further argues that this genre (which was subsequently supplanted by the introduction 

of cell phones in the 2000s) was far more congenial for extending an emphatically oral creole 



 2 

aesthetic that prizes proverbs, figurative language, indirection, antiphony, and shifting between 

speech and song. An accompanying audio CD to the book also allows readers to hear these 

performances alongside the detailed textual analysis Richman provides, whilst situating these 

exchanges within a larger African diasporic genre of verbal exchange, analogous to African-

American ‘signifying,’ Jamaican ‘throwing’ or Barbadian ‘dropping’ of remarks.  

 

The migrants that Richman portrays within a Haitian diaspora occupy a difficult position: on 

the one hand they are essential to their communities’ survival back home (due to their economic 

remittances), yet they are at the same time subject to stigma and disdain for their decision to 

leave. As Richman points out, these individuals ‘slave away in hostile, foreign countries for 

the sake of people who resent them for ever having left’ (p. 26). Richman’s decision to focus 

her book around these audio exchanges thus serves as a particularly evocative lens not only 

onto the economic power relations developing in this increasingly transnational context, but 

also upon the microtensions that develop within families and communities as these power 

dynamics are navigated and communicated.  

 

Migration and Vodou makes several important contributions to anthropological debates. 

Firstly, Richman provides a detailed analysis of the development of a labor export economy 

within a region that has continued to become increasingly transnational in the decades since 

this ethnographic research was undertaken. Richman’s work reveals how members of a rural, 

peasant class in neo-colonial Haiti adapt to increasingly transnational and capitalizing models 

of production and globalization.  

 

For anthropologists of Haiti and the Caribbean more broadly, Richman provides a rich history 

of the region, considering how colonial practices alongside agricultural production of sugar 

and coffee have created the socioeconomic context demanding labor migration within a global 

system of capital reproduction. Throughout Chapters 2-4, Richman does an excellent job of 

combining such economic theories with local Haitian theories of production, in which feeding 

is a dominant metaphor, and traces this through various other syncretic African diasporic 

practices elsewhere in the region. In so doing, the author grounds her account within a 

discussion of the transformation of land and labor relations among the Haitian peasantry, and 

situates her later theoretical arguments within a context of Haiti as a producer and exporter of 

migrant labor, which in turn has created a structural dependence upon imports and remittances 

from migrant labor abroad.  



 3 

 

The author then moves to consider processes of ritual and kinship change in Ti Rivyè’s 

response to broader demographic and socioeconomic transformations during the early 20th 

century. Throughout Chapters 5-8, Richman explores the structures of Vodou religious 

cosmology and Haitian understandings of migration within this framework, and presents a 

central dialectic between “Guinea” (Africa), which represents the long-term orientation of 

peasant communities, hierarchies, and the importance of family and land, and “Magic,” 

representing shorter-term and more individualistic behaviours. Richman then proceeds to 

explore this dialectic of Guinea/Magic as a crucial backdrop against which to interpret 

relationships between those who remain on the island, and those who leave to seek a livelihood 

elsewhere, arguing that the watershed of ritual change in turn introduced new professional 

ritual leadership, and that discourses of “Guinean authenticity” served to legitimize these 

changes. Ritual songs (also presented on the accompanying CD) capture this tension, and 

Richman uses textual analysis of these verbal contests to document these changing relations of 

ritual and kinship in the light of increased migration.  

 

In Chapters 8 and 9, by way of conclusion, Richman returns to the relationships between those 

who have left and those who have stayed, arguing that ritual songs and the moral discourses 

that are so central to them are used to cast migrants as morally inferior, albeit economically 

necessary. In response, some migrants rebel against their home-kin and convert to 

Protestantism, which Richman sees as a strategy employed to contest criticisms made by home 

communities, whilst still positioning one’s actions within the wider moral discourses of Vodou, 

or what Richman calls the dialectic of Guinea and Magic. As Richman explains, the evil enemy 

is “not a discrete person but rather a vast, sorcerous system that turns poor Haitians neighbors 

against one another" (p. 266). 

 

The book could have made a more comprehensive effort to contextualise this central dialectic 

— Guinea and Magic — within other syncretic African diasporic practices and cosmological 

frameworks elsewhere in the region, and readers who are not familiar with the specifically 

Haitian context may find this dualism more frustrating than enlightening in places. One must 

applaud the author’s dedication to relaying rich ethnography within the terms of its own 

interlocutors, however, and in this regard the book offers one of the richest ethnographic 

accounts of transnational kinship networks in the region.  

 



 4 

The book also benefits from great scholarship in drawing together literatures on migration, 

transnationalism, and global capitalism, as well as from anthropological perspectives on 

religion and cosmology, and ethnomusicology. All of this is also situated within one of the 

richest and most concise discussions of agricapitalist and (neo)colonial history within Haiti 

that can be found. Some might critique the book for its narrow focus upon one single, rural 

community, yet Richman documents sociocultural processes so pervasive throughout Haiti and 

the Caribbean at large, that the book arguably benefits from this most specific lens upon one 

particular community, and the ethnographic rigour it then supplies to Richman’s wider 

theoretical analysis. Scholars of political economies in formation, transnational kinship 

structures, and the creation and performance of cosmologies and ritual spaces in emerging 

globalized contexts, will find rich ethnographic material and analysis to emulate Migration and 

Vodou.  

 

Jennifer Cearns is a postdoctoral researcher at University College London, whose own 

research has centred upon transnational migrant communities between Cuba and South Florida, 

and the informal circuits of material and digital exchange that underpin these communities. 

She is Leach Fellow in Public Anthropology at the Royal Anthropological Institute of Great 

Britain & Ireland, and author of ‘The Mula Ring: Material Networks of Circulation Through 

the Cuban World’ (2020) in The Journal of Latin American and Caribbean Anthropology.  

 

 

 

© 2020 Jennifer Cearns 

 


