Making the Vodun: The Concept of Assemblage, Beyond the Fetish and the God-Object

Through the analysis of two ethnographic cases, the aim of this article is to discuss the role of matter in vodun practices in West Africa. The focus is on the making of vodun through the manipulation and assembly of matter. Taking seriously the words of people involved in these practices, the article proposes to dissolve the dichotomies between material and spiritual, visible and invisible, human and non-human, bringing forward the notion of assemblage. Assemblage indicates a hybrid formation that mixes humans and non-humans, and ethnography seems to confirm the dialogic relationship between humans and non-humans, where the former recognizes the power inherent in the matter itself. In this way, humans lose some of their centrality, while vodun gain more autonomy, and the conceptualization of what a religious phenomenon is comes closer to the practitioners’ point of view. The notion of assemblage partly overcomes the problems that the category of fetishism had historically produced and expands the idea of the god-object (dieu-objet) in the direction of greater symmetry between the agents involved.