Moving to Learn: Performance and Learning in Haitian Vodou

SUMMARY While conducting research in Haiti, I became initiated into Haitian Vodou and started a long apprenticeship with a local priestess. Learning about Vodou as an ethnographer and as an initiate presented many challenges that were directly linked to the way I needed to learn Vodou. In this article, I examine the ways practitioners (myself included) of Vodou approach learning. I have come to understand learning in Haitian Vodou as an embodied, sensuous, and active phenomenon. When I realized how important the body was in Vodou, I started questioning my own anthropological methods. I reacted by putting down my pen and notebook and becoming active. These methods have led me to favor learn‐as‐practitioner types of methods that allow me to do anthropology through my body. Indeed, as anthropologists in the field, we not only experience culture with our notebooks we also experience culture through movement and action. For me, culture is something that is only understood, albeit always partially, through rich and embodied experiences.