Much of the coverage of the aftermath of the Haitian earthquake has tried to relate the success of relief efforts to to the religious attitudes of the country. Virtually all of it is paternalistic and poorly informed (as in the apparent decision at the Times Online that the best opinions to seek on the attitudes of Haiti’s believers were their theological opponents in Europe.)
Some of it is outright insulting, like a recent Reuters story that addresses complaints from “Voodoo priests” who object to mass burials of the dead:
“Dumping the dead in hurriedly excavated mass graves without proper rites is seen as desecration in a country where many believe in zombies — dead bodies brought back to life by supernatural forces who could persecute the living.”
The Reuters story implies that Beauvoir met with the Haitian president to relay houngans’ concern over zombies.
Voodoo is a real religion, with a strong emphasis on the afterlife. The care of ancestral spirits is very important in Voodoo, and proper respect must be given to the dead, because they are still present in spirit form. Funerary rituals prevent spirits from becoming ‘lost’ or forgotten, separated from the living forever. It would probably be unusual to find a faith that didn’t have similar objections to the rough handling of the dead.
There’s also the rudeness in referring to houngan Max Beauvoir as the “main leader of Voodoo” instead of using a proper title, but even that seems relatively minor compared to the condensation of a complex social issue into a condescending dig about superstition.
