Vodou Culture 101: Elders
Physical age means surprisingly little, in vodou cultures—a visibly aged person can be a child on the inside, and a child on the outside can behave with the gravitas and forethought of someone in their eighties. In this, vodou cultures are quite different from the US majority culture, which tends to attribute wisdom or something like it to wrinkles and gray hair.
Vodou culture views maturity as something you prove by what you do and what you do consistently. An elder consistently demonstrates the qualities associated with maturity, in the face of challenges from the family, society, or community they serve. Because vodou is a “prove it” culture, the people of the family, society, or community will continuously demand the elder to prove their maturity.
Some of the demand is inherent to the work of healing: people who become elders in a vodou community often are priests or hounsi, making them in essence either doctors or nurses, depending on the kind of healing they’re doing and their personal knowledge and skills. Hounsi can be quite capable doctors, and priests might make better nurses than they do doctors. Elders are the people who get called when someone is hitting a wall, experiencing a crisis, or has lost their mind one way or the other. This means they get yelled at, swung on, blamed for whatever’s happening in that person’s life, they are the target of rumors and innuendo born of envious or malicious intent, and are generally the place people displace their pain, rage, or trauma.
Some of the demand is inherent to the work of managing a community. Authority tends to be the target of unrest, no matter how gracefully applied. Abuse of authority is widespread across cultures, and the authority given an elder in a vodou community can be quite extensive. It’s not unusual for people to attribute malicious motives to the exercise of that authority, or even to assume that authority will always result in abuse and to attempt to force an elder into a position that “displays” or forces others to see them as sinister.
Some of the demand is inherent to living between cultures. An elder in a vodou community is often called on to arbitrate, not just between community members, but between the community member and the culture in which the member lives—in the case of those of us in the US, this means to deal with the US majority culture or any subculture which a member is interacting with. Despite being a part of a vodou community, a vodou elder cannot afford to be a member of any culture in particular. They cannot afford to be tightly tied to any culture nor to have allegiance to any culture, so that if they have to function between cultures they can serve their community.
Being an elder in a vodou community is demanding. There are never very many people who can meet that demand.
