As both a spiritual power and a social right, acɛ̀ is bought and sold on Vodún’s globalizing market. Béninois and international Vodún practitioners alike seek and obtain acɛ̀ through transformative ritual processes, and they continue to confirm acɛ̀’s influence daily through ceremonial action such as prayer, the pouring of libations, and animal sacrifice. As Vodún’s most cherished commodity, the local and international flow of acɛ̀ is controlled through secrecy. Acɛ̀, like secrecy, is shared, embodied knowledge. Paradoxically, acɛ̀ is contained within every living thing on earth. However, acɛ̀ must be bestowed by another who has already been given acɛ̀.
Among Béninois, and between them and foreign spiritual seekers, access to secrecy and authentic forms of acɛ̀ is hotly contested. The historical struggle for regional supremacy between the Fon and Yorùbá peoples manifests in local discourses of power and authenticity—each, at times, laying claim to having access to the most powerful or the most authentic religious secrets or spirit cults. For spiritual seekers such as Christopher, the power that is inherent in “real secrecy” is what is most valuable. Along with consecrating his initiation experiences as authentic and spiritually powerful, ritual secrets serve to validate his status as a priest, regardless of what he truly believes about the secrets he now knows. Like the Ivorian bluffeurs described by Sasha Newell, who are “known for the illusion of wealth they produced rather than what they actually possessed” (2013: 139), Christopher and other foreign spiritual seekers must perform the religious power of the secrets that was revealed to them during their initiations. In both cases, validity becomes “a performative speech act” in which secrecy gives “the objects consumed their imaginative potency, the invisible possibility of authenticity” (148).
Like the vodún who are believed to live at the crossroads, spiritual tourist encounters find meaning at the crossroads of power, secrecy, and globalization. Through the creative manipulation of power, both Béninois and foreign spiritual seekers negotiate access to secrecy, which in turn creates “fluid transnational networks” that have helped to transport Vodún “from local to global audiences” (Hüwelmeier and Krause 2010: 1).
In both local and global spaces, a ritual is efficacious because of the acɛ̀ it confers; a ceremony is powerful because of the acɛ̀ it maintains; objects and bodies are authenticated by the acɛ̀ they contain; and the spirits are made important by the acɛ̀ they bestow—and all of these ritual possibilities are protected, empowered, and made possible by secrecy.
Understanding Spiritual Tourism in Bénin
Since the Béninois government began to make a concerted effort to attract foreign tourists to Bénin in the 1990s, tourists from a wide range of nationalities and racial identities have come to Bénin for what one might call “Voodoo tourism.” While the Béninois government originally sought to attract Haitians with the slogan “Bénin-Haïti: Tous du même sang” (Bénin-Haiti: All of the same blood), its initiatives instead began to attract tourists from all over the world. From my experience, most of the tourists I met were from the United States, France, or Brazil, although Forte mentions having encountered foreign spiritual seekers who were “from France, Italy, Austria, and Germany” (2010: 141). Most of the spiritual seekers I knew came to Bénin alone or in pairs, and they self-identified as white, while, with a few exceptions, the African Americans I met tended to travel in larger groups focused on Bénin’s slaving past (e.g., Bruner 2005; Reed 2014). For specificity, I have been explicit about the racial identities of the spiritual tourists I mention throughout the book. However, Béninois tend to classify all non-Africans, including African Americans, as yovó (Fon) or òyìnbó (Yorùbá)—meaning “white person” or “outsider.” As Kamari Clarke has noted, “Many Nigerian Yorùbá … insist on black American exclusion from Yorùbá membership, citing the popular trope that the transport of black people as captives to the Americas and the many generations of acculturation they endured led to the termination of cultural connections between Africans and African Americans. For this reason, black Americans … no matter what their complexion, are often referred to as òyìnbó” (2004: 14). For these reasons, I never observed a difference in the ways Béninois treated or initiated African Americans, Euro-Americans, or Europeans. To my Béninois informants, all foreigners, regardless of their ancestry, enjoyed “a particular class status, cultural standing, education level, and outlook” (Pierre 2013: 77) that connected them all historically to whiteness.
While I believe that it would be enriching to unpack the different ways European, Euro-American, and African American foreign spiritual seekers internalize their initiation experiences through their own racial lenses and in juxtaposition with each other, that analysis is beyond the scope of this book. Because I focus on the ways in which Béninois have contributed to Vodún’s global expansion, I have decided to do as they have done, so I consider all foreign spiritual seekers to be foreigners—regardless of their race—with similar relative economic and national privilege.
In seeking to provide an ethnographic account of Vodún that attends critically to foreign involvement in the religion, I struggled to find a word to describe those diverse individuals who were traveling to West Africa to become initiated. On the one hand, “tourist” seemed too insubstantial. To many of the foreigners with whom I spoke, “tourist” did not quite capture their sincerity or, in their words, the “sacredness” of their trip. As one American man expressed, “I am here to become a priest. Not to visit a tourist trap.”
On the other hand, “pilgrim” seemed to imply that foreign spiritual seekers were traveling to Bénin to confirm established religious beliefs or to find physical relief from hardships, pain, or worries (Turner and Turner 1978). But for many foreign initiates, their trip to Bénin marked their first steps into Vodún. They were looking for what Alan Morinis called a “place or a state that [they] believe to embody a valued ideal” (1992: 4). Their initiation experiences are cultivated in their imaginations long before they arrive in Bénin. By reading voraciously, interacting with other future and past initiates on Facebook, and searching YouTube for any videos that might reveal a small glimpse of the rituals they seek to undergo, spiritual seekers achieve a sort of revelation and a longing for West Africa and the secrets that are protected by the forest. In this sense, they are pilgrims. But they are also true neophytes. They arrive speaking little to no Fɔngbè or French and they have a clumsy understanding of basic cultural rules and social norms. Unlike what one might expect from pilgrims, they do not come to Bénin in search of solutions or remedies or even to confirm their trust in the spirits. Instead they come hoping to find new ways of relating to the divine.
Like C. Lynn Carr (2015), who examined what she called “cultural newcomers” to Lucumí in the United States, I found that many foreign spiritual seekers came to Vodún looking for religion. They yearned for a sort of Durkheimian effervescence (1965 [1912]) that simultaneously brought them closer to the divine but further from Western Christian conservatism (e.g., Fuller 2001). Despite the religious foci of foreign spiritual seekers’ trips to West Africa, describing them as pilgrims seemed just as deficient as calling them tourists. Indeed, for many of them, the domain of the tourist and that of the pilgrim had begun to blur in meaningful ways (e.g., Badone and Roseman 2004). Or, was it that, in the words of Victor and Edith Turner, “a tourist is [always] half a pilgrim, and a pilgrim [always] is half a tourist” (1978: 20)? Indeed, I prefer to think about a tourist and a pilgrim as two