Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique

Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique (18 May 1965 – 5 January 2018) was a Haitian anthropologist and Vodou mambo.

Early life Beauvoir-Dominique's father was Max Beauvoir, a Haitian biochemist, and her mother was Elisabeth Marchand, a French national and a mambo. She was born in 1965 while he was working as a researcher at the Cornell Medical Center in New York City. She was raised along with her sister Estelle Beauvoir Manuel in the United States and Haiti. In 1973 Max Beauvoir abandoned his career in chemistry, returned to Haiti, became a houngan and founded a Hounfour. She had been a critic of the Duvalier dictatorship and returned to Haiti to help rebuild following the regime's 1986 collapse. The book was republished 2003.

In the 1990s she collected oral histories in communities near Bois Caïman, the site of the 1791 meeting and Vodou ceremony where the first major slave insurrection of the Haitian Revolution is believed to have been planned. Her scholarship has helped bolster the claim that the meeting was, in fact, an historical event and not apocryphal. They curated international museum exhibits dedicated to the religion in Chicago and Ottawa. In 2012 she was part of a group that successfully petitioned the Library of Congress to replace the outdated "Voodoo" with their preferred term, "Vodou", explaining that the former reflects a history of racism and is pejorative. Like her father, they both practiced Vodou; she was considered a mambo (or priestess) and, after the deaths of his wife (2018) and his father-in-law (2015), Dominique is considered the "heir" to Max Beauvoir, who had been the most important figure in Haitian Vodou at the time of his death.

Death Beauvoir-Dominique died of cancer on 5 January 2018. Her funeral in Mariani was attended by members of the government, Haitian Vodou officials, members of the Akademi Kreyòl Ayisyen, representative of Religions for Peace, journalist Liliane Pierre-Paul, former cabinet minister Marie Michèle Rey, former prime minister Michèle Pierre-Louis, and other Haitian and international luminaries.

Works Selected papers

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