A UF assistant professor recently received about $240,000 to do research in Haiti.
The National Endowment for the Humanities awarded Benjamin Hebblethwaite, who works in the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures, $240,804 — the second-largest award it gave in Florida this year.
Creating the “Archive of Haitian Culture and Religion: Collaborative Research and Scholarship of Haiti and Haitian Diaspora” is a collaborative academic effort led by Hebblethwaite. His co-director is Duke University’s Laurent Dubois.
During the project, Hebblethwaite will observe and document the voodoo religion in Haiti. Collecting songs used in rituals is one of the project’s goals, he said.
“Many Haitians, some French anthropologists and others have gone to Haiti and recorded songs and transcribed them,” he said. “One of the major parts of this project [is] to gather and preserve this sacred literature of the voodoo religion. That’s the part that interests me the most.”
When Hebblethwaite learned he had won the award this summer, the project’s focus was on collecting texts and interviews with priests and practitioners.
Since then, Hebblethwaite and his colleagues have realized the importance of a new type of media — audiovisual materials.
“The text is sort of like a snapshot divorced from real ritual. Likewise, a photograph is an instant in time,” Hebblethwaite said. “But voodoo is movement. It’s a danced religion. It’s a drummed religion. It’s a sung religion.”
Richard Freeman, an assistant librarian at UF, will travel to Haiti with Hebblethwaite to collect audiovisual accounts of voodoo ceremonies. He said he thinks the pair will get there by November 2013.
Though new to voodoo and the religious aspect of anthropology, Freeman said it’s exciting.
“It’s what some academics would refer to as a ‘sexy topic,’” he said. “It’s got that bit of exoticness to it. It’s something more seriously that has not been studied that seriously by academics, or it has been but by a small group.”
With ceremonies lasting up to 10 hours and the technology needed to film only recently becoming available, Hebblethwaite said the audiovisual aspect of the project is a new approach to studying Haitian voodoo.
Hebblethwaite and Freeman will record as much as they can for any researchers who will access the archive in the future.
“Voodoo has specific ceremonies that take place on a monthly basis for different spirits, and we want to collect all of those ceremonies in their full duration for the entire year,” Hebblethwaite said.
The project does not put the entire focus on voodoo, but includes religion as a whole in Haiti.
Hebblethwaite said he will now have the opportunity to examine other religions.
“We know even less about Mormonism in Haiti,” Hebblethwaite said, mentioning the lack of data about Freemasonry, Islam and Christianity on the island.
“Nobody is collecting audiovisual information from all of these different religions,” he said.
The grant expires in three years, at which time the project may not be finished. There is no definitive end.
“It expands the project into possibly a lifetime of curation,” Hebblethwaite said.
