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drapo Vodou

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Polk, Patrick Arthur. 2000. “Fabric and Power: Vodou Flags, Collective Symbolism, and Rites of Authority in Haiti.” Ph.D. dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles.

The study of Haitian Vodou—imagining its historical development, interpreting the poetics of its mythology, analyzing its social functions—leads, almost invariably, to the consideration of the effects of hegemony. The symbolic representations and actual manifestations of local and global power have continually impacted Vodou. The aesthetics and ritual implications of Vodou flags (drapo Vodou) in many ways encapsulate the social and political history of Haiti; a past marked by displacement, fragmentation, simulation, and hybridization. This dissertation is presented as a focused study of drapo Vodou in which I examine how the flags embody or signify the adaptive merging of African and European cultural behaviors. In my analysis, I concentrate on evolution and iconography of drapo Vodou and the stylized ways that banners are paraded during ceremonies. These foci offer perhaps the most direct means of getting at the full historical, social, and theological implications of the flags. My central thesis is that, in both form and function, drapo Vodou are patterned after the banners used by the institutional centers of power (e.g. the military and the church) that have dominated Haitian society since the colonial period. I argue that the national and regimental standards carried by colonial and post-colonial military forces, the processional banners employed by Catholic religious orders, and the ensigns used by Masonic lodges have all served, to varying degrees, as models for drapo Vodou. Each of these root traditions, it can be argued, is patently European in origin. Nonetheless, as used in Vodou rites, ceremonial flags play a crucial role in the continued recognition and worship of African or African-inspired deities (lwa ) within Haiti. For this reason, I believe that the study of drapo provides a unique opportunity to delve into the processes by which Vodou practitioners (Vodouists) have transformed European material representations of power (both mundane and otherworldly) into symbolic manifestations of the lwa. The hypotheses regarding the evolution, iconography, and ritual significance of drapo Vodou presented in this dissertation are based on data generated from library and museum research in the United States and fieldwork in Haiti.
Platoff, Anne M. 2015. “Drapo Vodou: Sacred Standards of Haitian Vodou.” Flag Research Quarterly 2 (3–4, No. 7): 1, 3–23. NAVA Digital Library. https://www.nava.org/digital-library/FRQ_007_2015.pdf#page=1.

The field of vexillology is, by nature, a multidisciplinary one. It is difficult to understand the significance of an individual flag or group of flags without examining the context within which those objects were created and are used. This paper will present a case study of a multidisciplinary investigation of one type of flags. Haitian Vodou flags (drapo Vodou) are little known to vexillologists, but have been studied by scholars in the fields of art, anthropology, African-American studies, and other disciplines. An investigation of prior scholarship from these areas demonstrates that this category of flags is not only significantly different than the flags usually examined by vexillologists, but they also have much to teach us about the study of flags as a multidisciplinary exercise.

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Last update from database: 11/12/26, 4:10 AM (UTC)

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