Sticking Pins in Voodoo : UCLA Show Challenges Old Stereotypes About the ‘Ritual Arts’

Mess up this story and you’ll pay, an inner voice warned. Someone will be laying on a curse, conjuring up an evil spirit. Poking pins in a reporter doll.

After all, who suffers if you pooh-pooh voodoo? You do. Anyone who has ever seen a zombie movie knows that.

So maybe it was a mistake to paraphrase singer Keely Smith the other day when Westwood’s top voodoo expert stuck out his hand and introduced himself.

“So, how long has ‘That Old Black Magic’ had you in its spell?” Donald J. Cosentino was asked.

Cosentino laughed. He has been asked plenty of questions like that during the 10 years he has studied the Haitian cultural and spiritual phenomenon--and struggled to assemble this country’s first serious collection of voodoo paraphernalia.

The result is an unusual exhibition called “Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou” on view through mid-June at UCLA’s Fowler Museum. It’s the first stop on a three-year tour that will take the exhibit to Miami, Chicago, Washington and New Orleans.

The depiction of voodoo rites and ritualistic objects such as bead-covered rum bottles and plastic doll heads is surprising.

So is the show’s message.

Voodoo, contends Cosentino, is a thing of beauty--a rich tapestry that has been badly misrepresented by Hollywood as something scary and dangerous.

“There are no pins stuck in dolls in voodoo. And zombies are a rather minor element of voodoo belief,” he said. “We thought a long time about how we’d deal with those stereotypes.”

The final decision: “The splendor of the ritual arts would themselves argue best against Euro-American voodoo fantasies,” according to Cosentino, a UCLA professor of African and Caribbean folklore.

Cosentino, 55, of Hollywood, traces his interest in voodoo to 1986, when he made the first of what would become many trips to Haiti. He had been studying other cultures since a stint in the Peace Corps had taken him to Nigeria 20 years earlier.

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The idea for a Los Angeles voodoo exhibition came in 1987 in an unlikely place, however: a cocktail lounge in Madison, Wis.

It was Halloween night and Cosentino and Fowler Museum deputy director Doran Ross were in town for an anthropology conference. Over drinks with another Haitian culture expert, Chicago art professor Marilyn Houlberg, Ross suggested a show at the UCLA museum.

As planning for the exhibit began, it became a family affair for Cosentino. Wife Henrietta--whom he met in the Peace Corps--was put in charge of cataloging it, and she settled on the vodou spelling for its name. Daughters Julia and Delia, both graduate students at UCLA, transcribed interviews and contributed drawings to the catalog.

The voodoo exhibition almost seemed cursed for a time, however.

The National Endowment for the Humanities twice rejected the project.

Officials found the initial concept for the show “too celebratory,” according to Cosentino. The second proposal was toned down. But it also was rejected after officials in Washington suggested that the exhibit did not evaluate voodoo on a “comparative humanistic scale of religions,” he said.

“One wonders to what comparable religious phenomena vodou should have been compared? The Inquisition? The silencing of Galileo? The Salem witch hunt? The Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’? Oral Roberts’ apparition of the 900-foot Jesus?” Cosentino wrote in the exhibition catalog.

“Of course we had been naive. An administration headed by a president who had denounced the ‘voodoo economics’ of his predecessor and prosecuted a war in Panama on charges . . . that its president kept a cache of ‘voodoo dolls’ was hardly likely to look favorably on an exposition of this sort.”

But in 1993 after President Clinton’s inauguration, the agency approved a $480,000 grant. After that, the political crisis in Haiti and a U.S. embargo on imports from there delayed the shipment of voodoo artwork and artifacts to Los Angeles.

The project also raised eyebrows at UCLA.

“The average English professor with patches on his jacket sleeves is not into voodoo,” acknowledged Cosentino. “It’s an attitude: ‘Don’t say anything bad to Cosentino or he’ll make you drop dead.’ ”

The show describes voodoo dolls as vehicles that carry messages to the spirit world. It asserts that ideas of pins being stuck in them to cause harm “are a Hollywood fantasy.”

Zombies--spirits or bodies said by voodooists to have been raised from the dead and put to work--are only lightly touched upon. “A lot of Haitians would say yes, there are revivified dead,” Cosentino said. “I have my doubts.”

The exhibit’s touchy subject matter has led museum officials to prepare a detailed study guide for schoolteachers who view Fowler shows as a popular field trip destination.

“It’s a teaching challenge,” said Betsy Quick, the museum’s director of education. “People come in with such baggage about this.”

Skittishness has extended to some UCLA students. When university instructors decided to stage an interpretive dance in conjunction with the exhibit and Black History Month, a few dancers recruited from the campus backed out.

“A couple of families had problems” with the voodoo theme, said Nzingha Camara, professor of world art and cultures.

The exhibition has received enthusiastic reviews from newspapers during its first four months. Visitors say it has given them a new opinion of voodoo.

Melanie Green, 17, a University High School junior touring it on a field trip, said it changed her view of voodoo as a dark, evil practice. Her new take: It’s “colorful, not scary.”

But classmate Yolanda Gill, 16, was more skeptical. “They’re making me feel like voodoo is good. But I think there’s an underside to it,” she said.

Outside the exhibit hall, show publicist Christine Sellin offered a reporter a cloth voodoo doll sold in the museum gift shop. Don’t worry, she said. “No pins.”

No thanks.