1942

Walter Cannon publishes his essay “‘Voodoo’ Death,” a scientific analysis that sought to make sorcery and voodoo legitimate objects of knowledge. According to Cannon, voodoo death was a state of intense emotional “excitement” (Dror). He sought to “subjugate alternative knowledge” via a concept (emotion) that “held a leading and visible position in feminized, oppositional, and alternative political and medical discourses” (79, 80). . . voodoo’s blackness, its American habitation, its popular register, its Christian associations, and its subversive significations were never mentioned in Cannon’s published Essay. Cannon . . . fashioned voodoo death into a characteristic phenomenon of ‘primitive’ societies, granting a similar status only to presurgical patients or soldiers during war. . . Postwar authors took a radically different stance. Instead of relegating voodoo death to the exotic, they universalized voodoo death, ultimately transforming it into one of the distinct characteristics of modern life – sudden death resulting form the acute stress of modernization” (81).