ABOUT // UF Alissa Jordan

Atlas of Skins:

A SENSUAL MAP OF BECOMING PERSONS, BECOMING WEREWOMEN,
AND BECOMING ZONBI IN A HAITIAN VODOU COURTYARD

This study addresses embodied beings/becomings in a rural Haitian courtyard, led by a Petwo Vodou manbo in her ancestral village outside of Arkayè. I explore how persons cultivate and maintain each other as vibrant and relational selves in a shared sensual ecology through daily social practices and their concomitant rhythms. Towards this goal, the text passes through phenomena of infant care, eating practices, magical crafting, anti-werewolf campaigns, and zonbi manufacturing as exceedingly precious intrasubjective experiences of bonding and care which are the very flesh of life. Within the rural Arkayè region, animate relational existence is rooted in the substance known as nanm. Everyday tasks become binding social exchanges of nanm: food-food, mouth-mouth, ailing heart to ailing hand. A vast local ecology of selves and substances participate in these everyday tasks, creating a dwelling space composed of many agents who assemble, reassemble, and disassemble each other’s bodies as part of the regular work of living. Full bellies, healthy bodies, and magically protected spaces are not treated as signs of connection with others, they are themselves the substance (and substantiation) of interconnectedness. Through practices of cleaning, feeding, baptizing, protecting, and assembling one another, life is made palatable, sensational, concrete, and meaningful. I argue that Haitian Vodou practice, with its sensorial attention to permutations of flesh, brings to the surface a connection between self-making and a deeply socialized sensorium.