Many migrants practice more than one religion simultaneously, integrating into multiple religious communities with differing agendas. This article examines the Haitian migrant community in Montreal, Canada, focusing on the parallels between Vodou and Catholicism. It analyzes how religious concepts and performances overlap and explores the role of specific Vodou spirits that act as cultural mediators. The work challenges the notion of exclusive religious belonging and emphasizes space as a key factor in diversifying religious meanings within multicultural settings.
This paper examines spirit possession in Cuba as a way of imagining the history of slavery. It proposes three conceptual steps. The first, 'formulaic' historical imagination, treats possession as a direct expression of slavery as historical trauma. The second, 'mimesis', adds the possibility of reversal and empowerment, where the slave becomes an anti-slave. The third step, 'apomimesis', introduced by the author, displaces the previous two by creating a condition where the non-slave emerges through negative dialectics. The argument draws on ethnographic material and broader theoretical approaches, aiming not to replace but to displace existing frameworks.