MÉTRAUX, ALFRED

(1902–1963)

Swiss ethnographer ofVodouin Haiti and surveyor ofAmazonianand Guyanese shamanism, conducting fieldwork in the late 1940s. Métraux was the author ofVoodoo in Haiti(1959), a work still cited by more recent scholars of Haitian andCaribbean possessionreligions. His definition of a shaman is “a person who maintains by profession and in the interest of the community an intermittent commerce withspirits, or who is possessed by them.” Métraux notes that the intensity of “religious experience” makes shamans both privileged and marginal. His account of theinitiationandperformanceof shamans includes the ingestion oftobaccoand “bark infusions,”vomiting, journeying(especially to theother world), possession,healingby fumigation andsucking(especially to remove “invisibledarts”), and theambiguityof shamans who might besorcerers. Métraux also says that the shaman “is above all the individual who uses, for the benefit of all, the superior power of the spirits and who thwarts their evils if necessary.”