Self, <i>Lwa</i> and Haitianness: The Adherence Process and Reinvention of the Self by Haitian Vodou in Montreal.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract Over recent decades, Haitian immigrants who settled in Montreal have introduced the practice of Vodou to the city, both as a religion and a spiritual healing practice. During nine months of fieldwork in Montreal, I examined the manner in which the therapeutic use of Vodou plays a role in the “indigenization” of this religion; that is, how believers utilize it as they adapt to new circumstances and become involved in transnational networks. An analysis of believers' narratives highlights the key position of the therapeutic use of Vodou in the process of adapting to life in Montreal. As patients search for ways to solve their problems, using Vodou therapeutically to heal, cure, prevent, or remediate becomes a common way to enter the religion. Vodou healing rituals are based on a relationship with spiritual entities, called lwa in Haitian Creole. As such, the therapeutic use of Vodou requires learning about the role and powers of these spirits. The patient's participation in a ritual process of healing positions them to become more and more involved in religious belief and practice. Vodou offers a system of interpretation for illnesses, issues, and personal problems that leads the client to a “reinvention of self,” which has the characteristics of a conversion phenomenon. As the migrant defines himself or herself within this socio‐cultural construction of belonging, two dimensions are important to this process. The first establishes Haiti as a reference point for identity that is constructed and shared in the diasporic community. Secondly, adherents develop a “dividual” self through the practice of Vodou.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".