Price-Mars: condemning Vodou is "a negation of intelligence" (Port-au-Prince, 1928)
Record: the document says itPattern: documents line upLens: our readingOpen: not yet proven
Year: 1928 · Places: Ayiti, Europe, Africa
SUMMARYPrice-Mars: condemning Vodou is "a negation of intelligence" (Port-au-Prince, 1928) [Connections: Ayiti spirit, first-person, Nov 5, 2026]
RECORDJean Price-Mars, Ainsi parla l'oncle (1928; English So Spoke the Uncle, 1983), written during the US occupation, accused the Haitian elite of "collective bovarism" (seeing themselves as something they are not) and argued the peasants' African-rooted folklore was the base of a national culture. He accepted Vodou as a religion; FIU's Island Luminous gives his view in English as "to condemn Vodou would be worse than an intellectual injustice, it would be a negation of intelligence." Wikipedia calls him the first prominent defender of Vodou as a full religion with "deities, a priesthood, a theology, and morality." INSIDER witness (Haitian writer and ethnographer)
PATTERNThe Haitian answer to occupation was to reclaim the people's religion as heritage
LENS (WW9)"Ainsi parla l'oncle": the elder speaks for the ancestors
OPENThe quote is a paraphrase-translation; find the original French and page
SOURCEIsland Luminous, FIU; Jean Price-Mars, Wikipedia.