A case of sent sickness

The Manichean moral divide of formal Catholicism pervades the public debates about religion in Jeanty (and much of rural Haiti). The domestic cult of the ancestors and the worship of the lwa is the chief alternative discourse, and it both overlaps and subverts the formal Catholic perspective. The previous chapters have traced the actual strategies used by particular herbalists, midwives, houngan, and ordinary villagers to negotiate between these competing moral worlds. The positions they adopt towards their personal religious affiliation and the forms of healing power fall along a continuum: from virtuous Catholics who publicly demonize the lwa and disdain those who serve them, to the houngan who abandon the conventional moral divide altogether in the practical fight against sent sickness.

This chapter will explore both the ideologies of healers and the treatments they offer through the unfolding course of a serious, potentially life-threatening illness. Jerline Liron was a talented and ambitious young woman afflicted by a sent sickness, caused by the maleficent spirit of a dead child (a mò ti moun) which inhabited her body. Members of her therapy managing group deployed several medical idioms and bodily techniques as they struggled to heal this affliction and control her violent and disorderly conduct. Their responses are rooted in formal Catholicism, service to the spirits, as well as fundamentalist Protestantism, a relatively new presence in rural Haiti which is currently destabilizing and transforming the plural forms of religious healing. As her illness progressed, adherents of each religion advanced competing conceptions of the invading spirit, and they recommended different therapies in order to drive the spirit out.