The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti

Kate Ramsey is a historian, and this University of Chicago Press book is the standing scholarly history of the legal repression of Haitian popular ritual, tracing colonial-era law through the postcolonial penal laws against sortileges, the United States occupation from 1915 to 1934, and the Catholic Church's anti-superstition campaign of 1941 to 1942. Its strength is that Ramsey documents this history from primary legal and archival records, giving a rigorously sourced account of how Vodou was legally targeted across successive regimes. Its limit is that it centers on the legal and political history of repression specifically, so a claim about Vodou's own theology or ritual practice needs a source focused on that content directly.