The Domesticated Uncanny - Voodolls - Swedish-Brand Pseudo-Magic by Ylva Habel (2013).pdf - Magia - historia magii(1) - insideCOREi3

YLVA HABEL

THE DOMESTICATED UNCANNY

VOODOLLS, SWEDISH-BRAND PSEUDO-MAGIC

This article is part of the project

Sacred things

www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/etnograiskamuseet

“Sacred Things in the Postsecular Society” ran at the Museum of Ethnog-

raphy dur ing 2010 and 2011, with funding f rom the Swedish Ar ts Counci l .

The project was led by Associate Professor Lotten Gustafsson Reinius,

curator at the Museum of Ethnography, and comprised studies by Ylva

Habel, Ph.D., lecturer in media and communication studies at Södertörn

University College, and by Erik Ottoson Trovalla, Ph.D., an ethnologist

from Uppsala University. See also the articles Sacred Things in the Post-

secular Society: An Introduction (https://www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/

forskning-samlingar/forskning/publicerat/heliga-ting/) by Gustafsson Rei-

nius and Iconoclasm and Boundary Maintenance: Nigeria in the Wake of

the Muhammad Cartoons ( https://www.varldskulturmuseerna.se/forskning-

samlingar/forskning/publicerat/heliga-ting/) by Ottoson Trovalla.

INTRODUCTION

In the wake of Sigmund Freud, schola r s i n the humani t ies have cla imed

that the uncanny in culture always “comes home” – it returns as some-

thing already familiar, but in demonized, alienated form (Freud 1919;

Clover 1992; Viddler 1994; Hanson 1999; Royle 2003). Many themes

from the horror genre in literature, ilm, and other media have been

analysed along these lines, and the focus has been on how social

problems concerning sexuality, race, and gender have come up to

the surface in allegorized or metonymic guise. Homi Bhabha has as-

serted that the dark “migrants” in postcolonial Europe can be under-

stood in terms of this logic of representation: their presence disturbs

the picture of a united European identity, and according to him they

are a spooky reminder of colonial history and its lingering repercus-

sions in the present day. 1

1 Homi Bhabha writes: “At this point I must give way to the vox populi: to a rela-

tively unspoken tradition of the people of the pagus – colonials, postcolonials, mi-

grants, minorities – wandering peoples who will not be contained within the Heim

of the national culture and its unisonant discourse, but are themselves the marks

of a shifting boundary that alienates the frontiers of the modern nation. They are

Marx’s reserve army of migrant labour who by speaking the foreignness of lan-

guage split the patriotic voice of unisonance and become Nietzsche’s mobile army

of metaphors, metonyms and anthropomorphisms. They articulate the death-in-

life of the idea of the ‘imagined community’ of the nation; the worn-out metaphors

of the resplendent national life now circulate in another narrative of entry-permits

and passports and work-permits that at once preserve and proliferate, bind and

breach the human rights of the nation. Across the accumulation of the history of

the West there are those people who speak the encrypted discourse of the melan-

cholic and the migrant. Theirs is a voice that opens up a void in some ways similar

to what Abraham and Torok describe as a radical anti-metaphoric : ‘the destruction

in fantasy, of the very act that makes metaphor possible – the act of putting the

original oral void into words, the act of introjection’. The lost object – the national

Heim – is repeated in the void that at once preigures and pre-empts the ‘unisonant’

Against what cultural background can we understand the renewed

interest in vodou-related representations of zombies and demons of

the kind that we have seen in contemporary horror ilms and other

popular media? What cultural functions does this serve? These are

some of the questions I posed as part of a research and exhibition

project at the Museum of Ethnography, “Sacred Things in the Post-

secular Society”. In accordance with the overall aim of the project, to

question how museum institutions present, handle, and contextual-

ize collections of different sacred objects from world religions in our

postcolonial times, the aim in my part of the project, “Popular Vodou”,

was to illuminate how Western (or Euro-American?) understandings

of vodou are culturally and historically situated. My research interest

was at the intersection between the expressions of established vodou

and those of the “voodoo” of popular culture, and it was speciically

focused on points of contact between historically rooted, spiritually

charged phenomena from the African diaspora, and their globally

circulating counterparts in contemporary popular culture.

What cultural negotiations take place when vodou is transformed

into voodoo? Who are the audiences? In late modernity there are

a number of examples of media presentations which involve young

audiences and the category of “young adults” in a cultural cycle with

expressions, spheres of association, and imagery to do with vodou,

which used to belong to relatively limited genres in horror and gore

but in recent years have been spread and iltered through mainstream

culture. My article proceeds from this genre spread, focusing on a

case study of the small dolls, VooDolls, that have been produced in

Sweden in the last couple of years, and on everyday magic.

which makes it unheimlich. ” DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the

Modern Nation, The Location of Culture , Routledge, p. 236.

MUSEALIZATION, RACE, AND SPECTACLE

Although the project “Popular Vodou” was clearly oriented to the

present, it was informed by a historical perspective on the cultural

context in which museums and academia produce knowledge about

world religions and objects charged with power. I shall therefore be-

gin by saying something briely about what is worth remembering

in this context. Postcolonial research has shown how the colonial

production of knowledge about the world’s “primitive” peoples was

based on intensive discourse production of difference in textual, pic-

torial, and material presentations. Particularly signiicant was the

collecting of artefacts, which were used both for research purposes

and to mobilize a spectacle culture for a curious European audi-

ence (Mudimbe 1999; Tobing Rony 1996). In this way scholarship,

popular culture and imperialistic aspirations combined forces in the

growing institutionalization of collecting and charting activities. As

anthropology was taking on a more permanent shape, a musealiza-

tion project also started, with the aim of providing a new way to sys-

tematize knowledge about other peoples as an evolutionary project

and to display them in historical sequences (Lidchi 2007).

During the period before 1900, museums emerged as educational

institutions pursuing scholarly research and popularizing the results

(Bennett 1995/2002; McDonald 2007/2011). The project of register-

ing, depicting, and in various ways representing the world’s peoples

and their everyday and religious customs was thus twofold; it was

academic but simultaneously intended to attract visitors, and these

two aims merged and overlapped in both discreet and spectacular

ways. People and objects from colonized territories were claimed;

they were circulated and combined in museums, at international ex-

hibitions, in everyday spectacle culture, and in art contexts.

An important aspect of the way of representing the Others was

that the actual act of display and the media situation acquired the

function of proving what was claimed by researchers, explorers, and

missionaries (Gustafsson Reinius 2005). Scientiically substantiated

The Domesticated Uncanny - Voodolls - Swedish-Brand Pseudo-Magic by Ylva Habel (2013).pdf

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