Paper short abstract:

In Benin, since the early 1990s, the official acknowledgement of an intangible heritage of slavery’s past goes hand in hand with the cultural promotion of voodoo. The paper focuses on the discursive and religious transformation of local acted memories within a process of “diasporization” of origins.

Paper long abstract:

In Benin, since the early 1990s, the Ouidah 92. Rencontre Afrique-Amériques. Festival des arts et de la culture vodun and the itinerary of The Slave Route under the aegis of Unesco, have been significant occasions aimed at connecting voodoo with the commemorations of the slave trade. Today, the official acknowledgement of an intangible and moral heritage of slavery's past goes hand in hand with the promotion of sacred sites and various events that expresses the (sometimes rediscovered) vivacity and legitimacy of ancient beliefs and cults. This relationship between the uses of memory and the worship activities can be observed through conflictual discourses on history and on the contemporary practices of ritualization and signification of "traditional" and popular religion as a form of globalized culture. Thus the question of the memory of the slave trade influences the local modes of transmission and representation of so-called voodoo social manifestations. In this context, the institutionalization of "memory places" appears to be marked by various discrepancies among made sacred restitutions of both transatlantic (diasporic) and communal interpretations of slavery. If these spaces are supposed to link present identities and memories of the past, the analysis of ethnographic situations observed in the towns of Ouidah, Grand Popo and Abomey shows how a discursive and cultural transformation of the "pagan" past communicates with a process of updating of the origins.