Upon our arrival, people scurried about looking for chairs and fresh water so they could greet us in the customary way. Bernard explained to the villagers that we were interested in learning more about the vodún they worshiped. An old man came from a mud-brick home positioned across the courtyard. He shook our hands, led us into his temple, and showed us a series of wooden carved statues (bòcyɔ́) that were half-buried in the dry red, cracked earth. After offering little explanation of what we were looking at, he became irate that we were not taking pictures.
“Aren’t [my vodún] good enough to photograph?” he asked through Bernard.
“Of course they are!” Christine, one of the tourists, responded. Then, while taking pictures, she looked at me and asked in English, “I thought we weren’t supposed to take pictures of things like this. Is this place even real?”
“Let’s watch and find out,” I replied.
After a few moments of picture-taking, we were ushered into the next room, where the Vodún priest demonstrated how to pray and dance for the spirits. His prayers were unusually loud. He danced while holding two buffalo horns as if he were mimicking the way they would have grown had humans had horns. His display seemed to be a caricature of countless dances I had seen before. He was clearly performing and catering to foreign, perhaps racist, sensibilities. After his dramatic performance, he settled down into a small wooden chair, reached into a black cloth bag, and retrieved small balls of tightly spun red thread. “These are charms that will protect you from accidents,” he explained. “I sell them for 5,000 CFA,” he quickly added.
After his failed sales pitch, he took us to a small courtyard where he showed us more shrines, drawing our attention to one shrine in particular that hung from the branches of a tree. He explained that the shrine was “bloody” because he had just sacrificed a chicken to the nameless arboreal spirit that morning. The “blood” was red—very red, not brownish-red like dried blood often looks when applied to white cloth. The tourists never commented on the redness of the blood—perhaps it was just as they expected it to be—and I never pointed it out but it made me suspicious. As I internally struggled with this site’s authenticity, the tourists discussed it openly.
“I don’t think that place was real,” Michelle stated.
“Why not?” I asked curiously.
“He didn’t care that we took pictures. The shrines were too clean and the priest just wants to sell us charms! It looks like a scam to me. This place is like a theme park—it isn’t real,” Michelle concluded.
For Michelle and Christine, this site was too open and too free. To have what they would call an authentic experience, they wanted to be told that they could not take pictures. They wanted to be restricted. They wanted to experience and then negotiate their way through the social friction that secrecy generates. In the case of Vodún, foreign travelers hope to be met with just enough resistance to authenticate the experience but not so much so that access is denied completely.
I too had my suspicions, but I never confirmed or denied them to Michelle or Christine. After they had retired to their room that evening, Bernard and I met at the hotel bar for a drink. I asked him, “Bernard, just between you and me, that place you took us to today; was it real?”
“Of course! I don’t bring tourists to fake places,” he retorted, defending his choice.
Bernard was invested in the perceived authenticity of the site so that he could make a living. Yet tourists, myself included, were skeptical. Or perhaps part of the site was real and part was a fabrication created for tourists. Ethnographic moments such as this one have long inspired scholars to explore the relationship between tourism and authenticity (MacCannell 1999 [1976]; Urry 2002; Bruner 2005). Dean MacCannell is famous in tourism studies for his “backstage”/”frontstage” dichotomy (1999 [1976])—in which “real” culture is hidden backstage from tourists while they are allowed to participate in a frontstage version of local culture. Still others, like Edward Bruner, have attempted to eschew MacCannell’s preoccupation with the authentic, calling it a “red herring, to be examined only when the tourist, the locals, or the producers themselves use the term” (2005: 5). What seems to be happening in the case of Michelle and Christine seems to rest between MacCannell’s model (all tourist productions are inherently “inauthentic”) and Bruner’s model (all tourist productions are inherently “authentic”). Michelle and Christine were not, at least from their perspective, given a “backstage” performance of “authentic” Vodún. The performance that we all experienced, whether staged or not, was an attempt to present to us the authentic “Voodoo” of our imaginations. Unfortunately, in this case, the Vodún priest failed to present a believable version of Vodún. His performance was not only lacking in resistance, but also a “hyperreality”—a caricature—of U.S. and European imagination (see Eco 1983 [1973]).
Divination, Cultural Brokerage, and the Marketing of Knowledge
Michelle and Christine’s Vodún encounter had been devastating for them. Pointing to the priest’s attempt to sell them charms, and to their absolute freedom of movement in the temple, for fifteen minutes they talked about how “inauthentic” or “fake” the temple seemed. Although Bernard spoke to Michelle and Christine in French—sometimes using me as a linguistic intermediary when their understanding of French proved inadequate—he intermittently spoke rudimentarily in English as well. Keying into Michelle’s and Christine’s body language, and picking up on their dissatisfaction from the English he was able to understand, Bernard suggested the women go see a “real diviner”—“one of the best,” Bernard explained. Eager to move past their experience in the “Voodoo village,” the women agreed ecstatically.
“It’s just a short walk up the road,” Bernard offered.
Over the next fifteen to twenty minutes, both Bernard and I explained to Michelle and Christine what they should expect from the diviner (bokɔ́nɔ̀). They began worrying about which types of questions they should ask him and which areas of their lives needed, and deserved, this kind of spiritual attention.
“Just let the diviner do his job. Don’t worry about what you should ask—he’ll know what you need to ask,” I explained. They each looked at me and smiled in agreement as we continued down the narrow trail that led into the forest. After approximately ten minutes we arrived at the diviner’s home. He was at least eighty years old and stood no more than 5’5” tall. He wore an old torn, khaki, uniform like outfit and carried his divining tools in a well-worn, faux-leather briefcase. He greeted us with a customary cup of water and began talking to us about the reason for our visit.
“The