JEFFREY S.
KAHN
Smugglers, migrants, and demons:
Cosmographies of mobility in the northern Caribbean
A B S T R A C T
Haitian sea migration and US maritime policing have
emerged in tandem since the 1980s. During this time,
many Haitians have begun to assume that migration
voyages succeed only because of ritual exchanges—in
particular, transactions between migrants and
sea-traversing, other-than-human beings. These ritual
payments, along with other activities of border crossing
and control, have placed ships, routes, and offshore
detention centers in an interconnected constellation that
spans the northern Caribbean. These cosmographically deep
spatial configurations exceed concepts like “region” or
“sociocultural area.” Cosmographic depth, while not unique
to these spaces, is made visible in the array of entities,
forces, and moral sensibilities that compose them. Seeing
cosmographically highlights this depth, which is often
rendered inconsequential by dominant bureaucratic
registers of border securitization. [oceans, migration, space,
ritual economies, cosmology, Guantánamo Bay, Haiti,
Caribbean]
Nan ane milnèfsan katreven yo, de bagay te kòmanse
devlope ansanm: teknik Ayisyen sèvi pou pase pa lanmè pou
vin Etazini epi fason Gàdkòt Ameriken veye fwontyè teritwa
Ameriken an, patikilyèman konmansman patwouy nan espas
maritim yo nan Karayib la. Pandan tan sa anpil Ayisyen
koumanse konprann sa ki fè yon moun reyisi rive lòtbò dlo
se seremoni echanj—sitou, kontra ki genyen ant moun k ap
chache travèse Etazini yo ak “êtres non-humains,” tankou
djab. Sistèm peman rityèl yo ansanm ak tout lòt aktivite
pou travèse fwontyè yo e pou kontwole fwontyè yo fè yon
rezo ki koud ansanm gwo bato yo, wout yo ansanm ak sant
detansyon yo. Rezo sa anvlope tout zòn Karayib nò a menm,
epi li kreye yon espas ki gen yon pwofondè kosmografik.
Pwofondè sa a fè espas sa a depase konsèp tankou “rejyon”
oubyen “zòn sosyokiltirèl.” Menm si pwofondè sa a pa yon
bagay ki egziste inikman pou espas sa a, li parèt byen klè
ladan li grasa kantite gwoup, fòs, ak sansibilite moral ki
fòme li. Lè yon moun ap gade yon espas konm sa ak yon
pèspektif kosmografik, li ka wè pwofondè li vrèman, yon
pwofondè ki konn disparèt nan pawòl biwokrat yo lè y ap
pale sou sekirite fwontyè a. [oseyan, migrasyon, espas,
ekonomi rityèl, kosmoloji, Gwanntanamo Be, Ayiti, Karayib]
University of California, Davis
n a windy night in November 2010, Rodrigue, a skilled
O
mariner and boat caulker, ushered me onto the concrete
roof of his seaside dwelling.1 There he shared stories
of his two attempted migration voyages to the United
States. He began with his second expedition, a 1992
journey aboard a sail freighter packed with 44 fellow travelers. The
group had embarked from Haiti’s offshore island Cayemite with the
intent of being intercepted by one of the US Coast Guard vessels,
known as cutters, that were then conspicuously searching Haitian
territorial seas for clandestine migrants. They had left Haiti at 5 a.m.
and found themselves on the deck of a cutter by 10 a.m. Sailing
directly into the ship’s path, they hoped to subvert its role as a sen-
tinel within an extraterritorial migration control regime by recasting
it as an entry point into the US asylum bureaucracy, a common
maneuver that enabled thousands of Haitians to resettle in the
United States during the early 1990s. Two days later, Rodrigue was
undergoing an asylum-screening interview with the US Immigration
and Naturalization Service at Guantánamo Bay. Several months after
that, he was in Port-au-Prince, his asylum claim rejected and his
investment in the journey lost.
Rodrigue then moved on to the details of his first voyage, which
transpired under very different circumstances in late 1980, more
than a decade before the second. At that time, no US Coast Guard
vessels awaited him and his companions at sea because it would
still be a year before the launching of the offshore policing regime
that would come to be known as Haitian Migrant Interdiction Oper-
ations. With an open expanse of water before him, 20-year-old Ro-
drigue concerned himself above all with the Haitian coastal patrols
that might impede the voyage, ending it before it had begun. With
this in mind, the trip’s organizers had purchased an item known as
a kalbas van, or “wind calabash,” from a ritual specialist. Its pur-
pose was to magically create wind to propel the vessel and stormy
weather to conceal it. This would allow them to evade the Haitian of-
ficials who enforced the government’s ban on unauthorized depar-
tures. After receiving word that a contingent of police from a nearby
town was coming to arrest them, the group embarked. Then, when
they saw an approaching motorboat, they cracked the calabash
on the transom, unleashing a slick on the water and a torrential
AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 46, No. 4, pp. 470–481, ISSN 0094-0496, online
ISSN 1548-1425. 
C 2019 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved.
DOI: 10.1111/amet.12831

downpour that would render them invisible to pursuers.
Rodrigue and the others disappeared into the night, their
vessel hidden behind a moving curtain of rain and their sails
filled with a light but steady breeze that would carry them
across the Windward Passage and on to the Cuban shore.
These excerpts from Rodrigue’s narrative contain traces
of a practiced cosmography of northern Caribbean land-
and seascapes. The term cosmography refers here to the
multiple entities and forces that make up a mutable spatial
configuration and give it cosmic depth, a depth that exceeds
what is conventionally encompassed by the term geogra-
phy. This particular Haitian cosmography emerged over the
last three decades of the 20th century at the intersection
of American projects of securitization and Haitian projects
of transnational mobility and capital redirection. Rodrigue’s
wind calabash represents only a glimpse of the wider rit-
ual economies that infuse this space, populate it with vis-
ible and invisible beings, and shape its physics—the forces
that facilitate and impede movement within it.
The actors who help constitute these spaces include
the lwa (spirits that populate the pantheon of what many
academics call Vodou) and djab (shape-shifting, nefarious
entities who, in some instances, ply these waters like typ-
ical Haitian freighter captains, though they can transform
into fog or sea spray should they encounter US patrols).
Djab have become indispensable to certain modes of il-
licit circulation between Haiti, the United States, and the
Bahamas, guiding voyages through the US offshore surveil-
lance regime while locking the organizers of such ventures
in relations of precarious indebtedness that can be satisfied
only through the payment of human life.2 Other ethics of
familial and community solidarity appear as well as their
darker inverses, conditioning a sense of how human and
other-than-human beings ought to circulate across these
land- and seascapes.
Ritual exchanges of this sort bring to mind “oc-
cult economies” (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999) and
the “modernity of witchcraft” (Geschiere 1997). Of late,
however, scholars within certain strands of the “onto-
logical turn” have taken issue with how the “modernity
of witchcraft” framework has cast occult discourses as
metaphorical critique—that is, scholars in this framework
tend to view talk about witches or charms as really being
about something else, such as capitalist exploitation (Hol-
braad 2017; Holbraad and Pedersen 2017; Pedersen 2011;
Viveiros de Castro 2015). The ontological alternative rejects
both this metaphorical interpretation and the representa-
tions that permeate Western social theory more generally,
with their division of subject and object, sign and referent,
(false) consciousness and reality (Henare, Holbraad, and
Wastell 2007). Stories of witchcraft, wind calabashes, and
the interventions of djab in migration voyages are, in this
view, not misrecognition or critical commentary but merely
another “real.”3
Cosmographies of mobility  American Ethnologist
My goal, however, is to attend to how space is produced
by ritual within economies of human circulation across
the northern Caribbean. This reorientation is in line with
Stephan Palmié’s (2011, 124) suggestion to address “the
productivity—the pragmatics and illocutionary functions—
of” occult discourses rather than their implicit idiomatic
commentaries. This emphasis on “pragmatic function”
refers to the ways meaningful action always presupposes,
entails, and thus generates both cultural codes and social
positions (Silverstein 2004).
Like all sociocultural phenomena, ritual and other
economies emerge from pragmatic processes. In combi-
nation, they presuppose and produce spaces—meaningful
and instrumental constellations of places, routes, entities,
and forces. Duties to kin, community, and other-than-
human entities—what an older anthropological lexicon
risked oversimplifying with terms like spirit and deity—
dictate, facilitate, and constrain the itineraries of Haitian
migrants, smugglers, and mobile merchants. In fulfilling
these duties through voyaging, establishing relations, and
exchanging valuable items, Haitians generate a practiced
cosmography that has emerged dialectically with US-led
projects of border securitization in the region.
Sorcery and witchcraft play a role in how people imag-
ine, engage with, and experience space, as do ritual obli-
gations to sentient entities, be they other- or more-than-
human (Chu 2010; McAlister 2014; Munn 1986; Povinelli
2016; Taussig 1987). This is true with regard to interactions
that extend across both land and maritime spaces, includ-
ing relations between visible and invisible beings in sea-
spanning gift economies (Munn 1986) and transoceanic
networks of migrant mobility (Chu 2010). Nevertheless, the
tendency to portray maritime spaces as “‘empty’ of so-
cial relations” (Steinberg 2001, 38) has proved remarkably
durable. The production of space at sea all too often appears
as the production of a sociocultural void.
Oceans, however, are not empty zones through which
mariners, merchants, and migrants merely pass on the way
to sites where consequential things happen (Ben-Yehoyada
2017; Dua 2013, 2016; Helmreich 2009; Kahn 2019). Social,
commercial, and ritual interactions are not exclusive to firm
land. In many instances, interactions at sea produce spaces
teeming with, not devoid of, sociocultural complexity. The
voyaging, policing, and exchanging that transpire at sea (or
in formations that span land and sea) arrange earthy, lively,
and liquid elements into configurations of routes, forces,
and entities recognizable to those for whom they are of in-
terest. These spatial arrangements establish the historically
mutable affordances and impediments relevant to various
projects of mobility.
The concept of “region” does not adequately convey
what is going on with this production of maritime—or
hybrid, land-and-sea—spatial configurations in the north-
ern Caribbean. The idea of a region gives the impression
471
American Ethnologist  Volume 46 Number 4 November 2019
of a static geographical frame (Ben-Yehoyada 2017) that ex-
ists, objectively speaking, at a given time. Moreover, unlike
a Caribbean “cultural” or “societal area” (Mintz 1971, 20) or
merely a local subset of a wider “black Atlantic” counter-
cultural formation (Gilroy 1993), amphibious cosmogra-
phies are not geographic units within which certain traits
can be detected. Rather, when actors develop a feel for a
given space that renders it sensible as a somewhat stable
configuration, albeit one that is still mutable and open, that
sensibility is where a given cosmography is made manifest.
Cosmographies emerge from situated orientations that as-
semble various elements and forces in ways that facilitate
and constrain the actions of those for whom they emerge as
recognizable configurations.
The cosmographic orientation of those who inhabit
particular spaces becomes visible to the ethnographer in
the complex interplay between observed acts of becom-
ing mobile and the stories told about a given practice
of becoming mobile (or rendering other entities mobile).
For instance, through ongoing, repeated narrations of sail-
ing practice, narrations of the ritual facilitation of mar-
itime mobility, actual sailing, and actual exchanging with
other-than-human entities, aspects of spatial configura-
tions become associated with certain qualities over time—
heaviness, lightness, thickness. Spaces become palpable,
imagined in terms of their sensuous features. Routes, sites,
forces, beings (human and other than human), and the
qualities associated with them cluster together as an en-
semble with cosmic depth. Cosmographically deep assem-
bling is an effect of processes of spatialization that exceed
the boundaries of the terrestrial and the human in ways that
remake land and sea in the Caribbean and elsewhere.
Rooted circulation
In 2007, I was walking in a seaside provincial capital
on Haiti’s southwest peninsula when a young man, an
acquaintance, asked about the voyage I was planning to
make to a small town up the coast in the weeks ahead. He
quipped that we needed to watch out for Ti Kalap along
the way. Although I was then unfamiliar with the name, I
later learned that it refers to a band of local kidnappers who
abducted Haitians on sea and land during the 1970s at the
behest of a group of cannibalistic blan—the Creole term
for “foreigners,” often associated with light skin—who lived
in far-off Boutilliers, a wealthy Port-au-Prince suburban
neighborhood perched high above the capital. Ti Kalap was
the sound—“ti kalap, ti kalap, ti kalap”—one heard as these
bandits approached in the night.
It soon became clear that many in the area had grown
up hearing about Ti Kalap abductions. The general contours
of the narratives were similar. I was told that the blan from
Boutilliers had enlisted Haitians in the provinces to snatch
fishers in coastal waters, men and women on the highways,
472
and small children from streets and pathways. The blan
were sometimes identified as French expatriates and were
said to crack open their victims’ chests and eat their hearts.
Bernard, a key interlocutor of mine who grew up not
far from the waters where Ti Kalap would grab fishers from
their canoes, shared an evocative variant of these stories,
one that embodies its rooted dimension—its sense of an
anchored center toward which valued entities move. He re-
called that as a child he heard that the local head of the
kidnappers was a light-skinned Haitian who would sub-
due his victims with a “projector” that emitted a beam of
light, leaving those touched by it mòl (“soft,” or in this
instance, “limp”). The intermediary would then transport
these docile bodies for a fee to the home of a blan in Boutil-
liers, who was said to have a single tooth and a body so cor-
pulent that it filled the interior of the room in which he lived
out his sedentary existence. As in the other tales, this blan
fed on the bodies.
It is tempting to read these stories as commentaries
on the intersection in Haiti of color, class, and geogra-
phies of political and economic exploitation (including
rural-to-urban migration). Adeline Masquelier’s (2002, 829)
account of what she calls the “road mythographies” of
postcolonial Niger follows this type of analytical model by
presenting talk of bloodthirsty highway spirits as both the
condensation and critique of colonial pasts and uncertain
futures. Although, like Masquelier, I aim to examine in-
tersecting understandings of space and the interventions
of other-than-human entities, Masquelier asserts a causal
structure in which the practices that allude to capitalism
or modernity appear secondary, or epiphenomenal, to the
referents of these allusions. For a given space and its moral
implications to become apparent, however, it is not always
necessary to look outside occult narratives for some exter-
nal signified—capitalism or colonialism—that produces
them. The spaces that such discourses and practices create
are often far more interesting.
When Haitians move through, narrate, and imag-
ine provincial roads and interisland trade routes, for in-
stance, they are operating within and producing a cosmo-
graphic perspective larger than the set of actions they take
part in directly. Their movement and stories about their
movement—often brief, but at times detailed—add to the
local stock of knowledge with regard to what forms of mo-
bility are possible, the unequal distribution of access to spe-
cific means of becoming mobile (Chu 2010; Massey 1993),
and the forces and actors that constrain or facilitate their
use. Cosmographies become visible even when one is not
seeking implicit critiques of capitalist modernity or neo-
colonial modes of expropriation.
What, then, might we see taking shape in the Ti Kalap
enterprise? Its geography is held together by itineraries
of local mobility (that are cut short by kidnappings),
open provincial-capital supply chains (in this instance, of

human cargo), and an implied set of spatially distributed,
“conventionalized qualities” that signify—that is, “quali-
signs” of value (Chumley 2017, S5; Chumley and Harkness
2013, 6; Harkness 2015, 579; Munn 1986).4 The emphasis
on the fatness of the group’s leader, for instance—in one
rendering, as I mentioned earlier, his girth is said to fill
his residence—is meant to evoke qualities of heaviness
and grotesque thickness. In these tellings, corpulence and
whiteness dominate. These qualities are front and center
such that it would be almost impossible to think of the
supply chain of human bodies that these tales describe
without associating them with the physical characteristics
of the blan. The descriptions of the blan’s physical form
offer the stories a sensuous depth.
Moreover, the heaviness of the blan is paired with the
speed and motion of its minions—although such qualities
need not be mentioned by name—who travel about the pe-
riphery in search of bodies. When such qualities cluster to-
gether, they draw attention to, or signify, a form of rooted
mobility as a culturally meaningful and valorized abstrac-
tion (Chu 2010; Harkness 2015, 579). Their manifestation
conjures the feel of a directional network of circulation—
that is, one with forces that pull bodies to the capital while
pushing the henchmen who furnished them back out to the
provinces to replenish the supply.
The subordination of the kidnappers’ peripheral
activities to a largely immobile center is also geographi-
cally, racially, and bodily class-coded. A whiter, wealthier
neighborhood, Boutilliers is a space outside and above the
blacker, poorer seaside slums of urban centers. The white
and fat blan are associated with the large bellies of the class
of gran manjè, or “big eaters,” who are predominantly light
skinned and based in Port-au-Prince (Trouillot 1994; on
Africa, cf. Bayart 2009; Mbembe 2001, 102). What takes form
in these stories is a hierarchical geography of distal motion
that is part of a supply chain ending at a site of centralized,
largely fixed-in-place hunger. These cannibalistic beings
draw bodies toward them but do not themselves need to
move to ensure their own nourishment.
This tableau of a consuming center is unsurprising
given the concentration of political and economic power in
Port-au-Prince over the course of the 20th century (Anglade
1982), the massive migration from the countryside to the
city that has fed the offshore assembly industry owned by
elites and foreigners (Dubois 2012; Dupuy 1997; Lundahl
2013; Schuller 2012), and the general sense that Port-au-
Prince exerts a gravitational pull with devastating conse-
quences. At the same time, however, the stories of Ti Kalap
are not allegories. They are literal accounts of the consump-
tion of provincial Haitian bodies, and the henchmen in
the periphery are named individuals whose kin still reside
in the towns where the abductions took place. Moreover,
these tales crop up in stories I heard years after the 1970s,
when many believed the kidnappings had come to an end.
Cosmographies of mobility  American Ethnologist
Bernard, for instance, was afraid of encountering a Coast
Guard vessel while fishing off Cayemite in 1991, and he and
those with him, bearing the Ti Kalap stories in mind, had
declined the Coast Guard’s offer to take them aboard to re-
quest asylum because they feared being eaten by the blan.
Moreover, Ti Kalap remained sufficiently current in 2007
that my acquaintance teased me about it before my trip.
No doubt the plausibility of Ti Kalap tales is bound
up with the coexistence of the aforementioned parallel
class-, race-, and color-inflected geographies of circula-
tion and their mutual fabrication of thinkable pasts. This is
not to say that one must read these kidnapping stories as
merely echoes of, reflections of, or allusions to “real” forms
of exploitation—such as that undertaken by elite Haitians
or foreign-owned corporations that profit off the labor of
rural-to-urban migrants in the capital. And yet, the uptake
of Ti Kalap stories is not distinct from the uptake of other
accounts of mobility in which the capital’s offshore assem-
bly industry metaphorically consumes provincial Haitians.
These narratives reinforce one another. They also have their
own spatializing, pragmatic effects that, in this instance, are
part of a standardized, broader, yet still situated sense of
how places are linked and how entities move across these
linkages. Their rootedness, or “center”-bound directional-
ity, is also a foil for a very different but connected maritime
geography of mobility, to which I now turn.
Mobility unmoored
The activities of the blan of Boutilliers and their henchmen
enact a geography of circulation that pulls bodies toward
a consuming center. This geography is not the only spatial
arrangement relevant to those living in Haiti’s provincial
southwest. It coexists with a wider geography wrought
by attempted and successful overseas migration. Whereas
Boutilliers acts as the dominant weighted center in the
geography of Ti Kalap abductions, migration trajectories
bind together a network of routes and destinations that
have no single, fixed center. Nor are the dynamic forces that
constrain and facilitate the mobility of migrants as uni-
directional as the Ti Kalap economy, which is overwhelm-
ingly governed by a pull toward Port-au-Prince. The two
geographies, however, are not entirely distinct. Together,
they make up contrasting aspects of a broader spatial
configuration that extends throughout Haiti’s interior and
far beyond its shores.
Haitians have long traveled by sea to neighboring is-
lands (Jackson 2011; Tinker 2016), but migration voyages
to South Florida became commonplace only in the 1970s.
These voyages are known throughout much of Haiti as
kanntè, the Creole pronunciation of the Canter model Mit-
subishi truck, “an emblem of internal marketing of peas-
ant products” that, when applied to these journeys, became
a “symbol of ruined peasant laborers risking their lives to
473
American Ethnologist  Volume 46 Number 4 November 2019
sail toward Miami” (Richman 2005, 55). From 1972 to 1981,
tens of thousands of Haitians made their way to the Florida
coast on these kanntè, fleeing the repression of the Duvalier
dynasty and the grinding poverty to which the regime had
contributed during decades of kleptocratic plunder (Dupuy
1997; Fatton 2002; Trouillot 1990).
By the early 1980s, a coalition of Haitian pro-
democracy movement exiles and immigrant rights litigators
had emerged in the United States. They were committed
to fighting the Immigration and Naturalization Service’s ef-
forts to deport nearly all Haitian asylum seekers—whom the
government considered economic migrants and thus not
deserving of protection—and pursued their goals through
intensive litigation, advocacy, and direct action. The Rea-
gan administration responded to the lawsuits by moving the
Haitian asylum-processing regime out to sea to avoid le-
gal entanglements (Kahn 2016, 2019). This involved send-
ing the Coast Guard to police the waters in and around
the Windward Passage in 1981. The establishment of
these new offshore patrol routes transformed the relatively
open northern Caribbean waterways that Rodrigue, whose
story opened this article, crossed in 1980 into the highly
surveilled passages he encountered in 1992 (Kahn 2019).
From its launch, the US interdiction program pre-
vented nearly all Haitians intercepted at sea from reaching
the United States. The only exceptions have been brief
periods from 1991 to 1994 when some asylum seekers were
processed at the US Naval Station at Guantánamo Bay and,
later, on floating refugee-screening hubs near Kingston,
Jamaica (Kahn 2019). The surveillance that accompanied
the creation of this offshore maritime border has given rise
to a complicated array of smuggling techniques and ritual
economies.
One of the key changes in migration tactics was the
increasing number of Haitians attempting to reach the
asylum-processing camps of Guantánamo Bay beginning
in the early 1990s, when the US government, not want-
ing to bring thousands of asylum seekers held aboard its
Coast Guard cutters to the United States, unloaded them at
the naval station for interviews (Kahn 2019). The spike in
interdictions in 1991 that prompted this decision resulted
from a coup d’état against the first democratically elected
president of Haiti, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, and the violence
that followed his ouster (Koh 1994). Because refugee ap-
plicants were being transferred from Guantánamo to the
United States and because the Coast Guard’s policing had
intensified after the coup, there arose a new type of kanntè,
one that Haitians in the southwest of the country have de-
scribed to me as kanntè baz, or “base” kanntè, a reference
to their destination—the naval station. The Haitians’ goal
in pursuing the kanntè baz, described earlier with regard
to Rodrigue’s 1992 voyage, was not to evade US surveillance
but to allow themselves to be intercepted by cutters in order
to be screened at Guantánamo. They used this maneuver to
474
transform the Coast Guard cutters and the base into entry
points that would eventually lead them to the United States.
Kanntè baz were the exception during decades of
interdictions, declining along with the relocation of pre-
liminary screening interviews to the cutters since the mid-
1990s (Kahn 2019). When kanntè baz are not viable, some
Haitians attempt to make the entire 800-mile journey to
Florida without being detected by Coast Guard surface and
air patrols. These voyages are called kanntè vol direk (direct-
flight kanntè). According to those who organize them, their
success requires not only sailing prowess and raw luck, but
also the assistance of djab.
Jeankel, a fisher from Haiti’s southwest peninsula, orga-
nized a direct-flight kanntè in 2003, during the tumultuous
run-up to Aristide’s second ouster the following year. He
and 20 other sailors pooled their resources to purchase an
18-foot wooden sloop, the necessary provisions for the jour-
ney, and the protection of a djab. In Haitian Creole, the term
djab denotes a wide range of human, more-than-human,
and other-than-human entities, the specific referents shift-
ing with context and regional dialect. Etymologically, djab
comes from the French diable, meaning “devil.” The pejora-
tive connotations attached to this derivation make it a com-
plicated term within the literature on Haitian cosmologies,
particularly for scholars who have worked to dispel the pop-
ular association of Vodou with black magic (Brown 1991),
although variations of the term, including its close relative,
démon, have appeared in many ethnographies of Haiti over
the years (Courlander 1960, 96; Davis 1988; Herskovits 2007;
Hurbon 1979, 49; Marcelin 2012, 254; Métraux 1972).5
On the northern coast of Haiti’s southwest peninsula,
the term djab is used to designate a variety of beings: the
more temperamental and demanding lwa, members of se-
cret societies (sanpwel and honorab), human-like entities
with unnatural appetites (including the aforementioned
blan of Boutilliers), and a class of beings with whom one can
negotiate “conditions” for specific interventions that often
require the exchange of human life.6 This last type of djab
includes entities that specialize in guiding kanntè through
the gauntlet of Coast Guard vessels.
In 2007, I sat down with Jeankel to hear about his voy-
age. He told me that as part of their preparations, he, along
with six members of his group, had sought out a ganga,
or ritual intermediary, who had a relationship with a djab
known to guide journeys of this kind. The ganga took them
to the djab’s cave, which he and Jeankel entered together,
crawling on their bellies and squeezing through narrow
crevices before reaching an inner chamber. There, Jeankel
engaged in the following exchange with the djab:
He said, “You’ve come to negotiate conditions for a
kanntè?” I said, “Yes.” He said, “I’m going to send you
on a kanntè, but I’m going with you.” I said, “You’re
going too? But have you been to Miami before?” And he

said, “Yes, many times.” I said, “How can a djab tell me
that he goes to Miami?” He said, “Me, I work in Miami.
That’s where I travel, that’s where I eat, that’s where I
drink, that’s where all my business is.” I said to him, “Do
you believe with all your heart that you can send me to
Miami?” He said, “Yes, and you don’t have to worry. I’ll
be going with you too.”
And so the negotiations began.
As the story continued, more details emerged. The
djab itself never took a visible form in the cave; Jeankel
could only hear its voice. Nonetheless, Jeankel haggled
with the spirit over the price of the guidance. During the
negotiations—a process known as fè kondisyon (setting
conditions)—the djab asked for the lives of two of Jeankel’s
fellow voyagers. He refused, offering instead to pay the djab
a larger, nonhuman fee.
Negotiations complete, Jeankel returned home, and
soon after, he and his fellow travelers embarked for South
Florida. As is customary, they cut across the Gulf of Gonâve
in their wooden sloop, casting off at night. As they set sail,
a small bird alighted on the gunwales, hopping about the
vessel and over the passengers. This, they all recognized,
was the djab. The following evening, they reached Môle
Saint-Nicolas, in Haiti’s northwest province. From there,
they cut across the Windward Passage to Cuba, but before
they reached Punta de Maisı́, the bird abandoned them, and
shortly thereafter, a surveillance plane passed overhead, fol-
lowed by a Coast Guard cutter. Jeankel and the others were
processed and screened, and all but seven of them were sent
back to Port-au-Prince. Those who were not repatriated
were sent to Guantánamo for further interviews to evaluate
their asylum claims.
When Jeankel returned home from the capital, the fam-
ily members of the seven passengers now at Guantánamo
refused to accept the repatriated voyagers’ explanation that
the others had been transferred to the base. Suspicious, they
accused Jeankel of foul play, insisting that he was complicit
in tossing the missing passengers into the sea as part of a
pact with the djab. With both the police and these family
members breathing down his neck, Jeankel returned with
the ganga intermediary to the cave where he had negotiated
conditions for the journey. The djab explained that it was he
who had accompanied them in the form of the bird, but that
he had been forced to leave them unprotected when one
of the passengers began to smoke marijuana, which intox-
icated him. The djab, however, promised to use his powers
to summon the seven back from Guantánamo, guarantee-
ing their arrival before police intervened or a mob exacted
revenge. Several days later, the seven arrived on the ferry
from Port-au-Prince, having been unable to reach the imag-
ined abundance of the tè beni, the “blessed land,” that lies
lòt bò dlo, “across the water.”
As Jeankel noted, the djab had told him, “I work in
Miami. That’s where I travel, that’s where I eat, that’s where
Cosmographies of mobility  American Ethnologist
I drink, that’s where all my business is.” This fits within an
image of these types of djab as maritime traders who dock
their freighters in coastal caves and ravines, physical fea-
tures common in this part of Haiti. These seafaring djab
are cosmopolitan in the sense that they travel back and
forth between key commercial centers in the United States,
various ports in Haiti, and their homes, evading the Coast
Guard by appearing as mist floating above the water, waves
crashing over a reef, or a downed tree drifting in the current.
They can also shield others with these powers, but at a cost.
The djab move across Caribbean and Floridian sea-
scapes with ease, unhindered by storms, undetected by
Coast Guard vessels, and unmolested by customs agents.
The political geographies they traverse create no barriers,
only opportunity. They profit from their ability to enter
spaces of market activity beyond the reach of most Haitians,
to buy low and sell high, unaffected by the impediments
of transaction costs and national boundaries. In short, they
are entrepreneurial, hypermobile, and embedded in a tan-
gle of creditor-debtor relations that make kanntè possible.
Some time after the Coast Guard launched its inter-
diction program in 1981, Haitians began seeing journeys
arranged without the assistance of djab as a waste of time
and money, doomed to end in repatriation. When organiz-
ers of professionalized smuggling ventures pitch their ser-
vices to potential migrants, they emphasize the efficacy of
the djab with whom they have contracted. I recall one such
organizer making his way across Grand’ Anse Department
in 2011 with boasts about the number of successful trips he
had arranged and the power of the djab that had made them
possible. He intended to sway potential migrants to com-
mit themselves and the smuggling fee for safe passage. In
direct-flight kanntè, djab have become indispensable.
Much like the movement within the blan of Boutilliers’s
networks, kanntè mobility is about consuming human
bodies. Yet both geographies structure consumption and
(im)mobility in strikingly different ways. The grotesquely
obese djab blan described above, for instance, stays in place
and so depends on networks of subordinate human actors
in the provinces to feed it.7 The kanntè djab, in contrast, cir-
culate across vast distances, light as sea spray and nimble
as birds, collecting their own debts (the payment of life in
the form of passengers tossed overboard or dying after the
voyage). With the blan, value is drawn toward an anchored,
terrestrial center, whereas with the kanntè djab, a far more
complicated array of decentered, scattered, and shifting
routes of circulating value emerge across land and sea.
Descriptive narratives like those depicting the blan and
the kanntè djab conjure images and attendant sensations
that condition the feel of not only the stories but also of
the land and seascapes that they bring into being. This
becomes possible within a wider universe of talk about
direct-flight kanntè, talk about sailing practice beyond
kanntè, and direct experience of seafaring itself. Haitians
475
American Ethnologist  Volume 46 Number 4 November 2019
discuss boat making, for instance, by focusing on the qual-
ities that make boats seaworthy. These may include the
“hardness” of the wood, the weight of the vessel (discussed
in terms of not selecting planks that are too “thick”), its
“smoothness,” its “straightness,” and its “strength,” all of
which combine to make the vessel kouri, or “run.” Haitian
sailors often express the sensation of “running” with ono-
matopoeic utterances like “pshhhh” or “eeeeeee” in ac-
counts of sea voyages, recalling the sensation of a vessel
gliding across the water. Narratives of the maritime mobil-
ity of djab, and of kanntè guided by djab, emerge within this
wider field of associations among valued qualities (for in-
stance, motion and speed), calling them to mind even when
they are not explicitly described in a given account.
The valorization of these qualities reflects a gendered
association of mobility with the accumulation of personal
wealth. My interlocutors talk of the need to be willing to
kouri (run), brase (shake), or demele (untangle) if one is to
survive and thrive under conditions of precarity in Haiti’s
katye popilè (poorer neighborhoods). In other words, most
Haitians need to hustle—perhaps the closest English equiv-
alent to a composite of these verbs—and they do so in gen-
dered ways, as Chelsey Kivland (forthcoming) has noted
with regard to her urban, male interlocutors’ aktivite (an
entrepreneurial mode of being active). The qualities that
emerge in tales of moving ships and circulating djab be-
come significant in relation to these wider associations of
motion and speed as desired qualities—that is, desired vis-
à-vis the achievement of certain ends, including survival or
prosperity—as well as their opposites.
The Boutilliers blan’s supply chains and the djab’s sea
routes stand as related but contrasting spatializations of hu-
man and other-than-human agencies. The blan’s Port-au-
Prince-bound supply chains posit centripetal circulation
that destroys peripheral, black bodies. The djab’s sea routes,
however, evince a centrifugal circulation that also devours
some Haitians from the provincial fringe but does so while
producing a set of transnational networks that shatter the
capital’s unidirectional pull. This divergence appears both
in these spatializations’ structure and in their vivid qualita-
tive dimensions, the one tied to sedentary corpulence and
the other to agility. At the same time, they are mutually im-
plicated in constituting a wider universe of possibilities and
impediments.
Cosmographies of (un)freedom
Villages, mountaintops, bays, passages, maritime routes,
currents, winds, humans, and other-than-human beings—
the Boutilliers blan and the kanntè djab among them—exist
in a particular, albeit mutable, configuration. This is not
the case for all Haitians, but it is for many aspiring and
former Haitian migrants who have navigated the wa-
ters of the northern Caribbean. For those engaged in or
476
knowledgeable about maritime migration techniques,
particularly in southwest Haiti, the spatiality of migration
is defined by the particular arrangement of topographic
features, forces, and entities that I have been tracing. The
production of this space also establishes the contours of
imaginable migratory mobility.
The heterogeneity of this ensemble of elements—
particularly the djab and weather-modifying magic—makes
it easy to recognize that it is a space with cosmographic
depth. The cosmos of cosmography is meant to highlight
elements of spaces more encompassing than the geos of
geography, with its connotations of crude materialism.
Cosmos also brings to mind something akin to Stanley
Tambiah’s (1985, 3) conceptualization of “cosmologies”
as orientations that describe “the universe . . . in terms
of space, time, matter, and motion” while “peopl[ing] it
with gods, humans, animals, spirits, demons, and the like.”
These cosmic elements of the spaces Haitian migrants and
smugglers face as they navigate northern Caribbean waters
shape the way they see its affordances and impediments
to mobility. How they evaluate what is possible for them as
mobile subjects cannot be disentangled from this depth.
This is not to say that Haitians are immersed in cos-
mographic space, whereas others, such as Coast Guard
captains, are not. Rather, the ontological and epistemo-
logical assumptions within security discourses tend to
erase their cosmographic framing in favor of realist, em-
piricist self-description. The djab and magic calabashes
of kanntè merely foreground these cosmographic di-
mensions for those less inclined to see them within the
legislative debates and border-policing regimes of liberal
democracies—juridico-political formations that conjure up
and rely on their own invisible forces in producing space.
Cosmographies, then, are not merely “magical” spaces.
Cosmographies are also not static. They are “practiced”
configurations in that they are brought to life by entities
in motion and by mutable narrations of this mobility
(de Certeau 1984, 117). This emphasis on practice as
process and making destabilizes such configurations as
ontologically fixed. The graphy morpheme in cosmogra-
phy, moreover, does not imply a fixed inscription—this
morpheme’s conventional meaning—but an assembling
of routes, forces, beings, built environments, and material
features of land and seascapes. These arrangements are
made and they change.
Because other-than-human beings both create these
spaces and exist as elements within them, cosmographies
are not simply material geographies. Nor does cosmology
effectively evoke their spatializing effects, because cosmol-
ogy as a concept often operates at a scale so totalizing
as to erase the particularities of a sensuous, assembled
space. The stories of blan abductions and of kanntè high-
light the lineaments of a recognizable, although historically
emergent, cosmographic vision of the northern Caribbean

that, for many Haitians, manifests itself in a shifting array
of currents, patrol vessels, djab, wind calabashes, and sailed
paths, all pieced together through decades of voyaging and
narrations of voyaging.
The kanntè journeys and blan-driven abductions do
not exhaust this cosmography but draw attention to its key
dynamics. In these and other accounts, Haitian towns and
US cities become significant as indexical icons—signs that
both draw attention to and resemble their objects—of cir-
culating value. This semiosis manifests in visible indicators
of wealth, such as the houses that people build in Haitian
villages with remittances their relatives send from overseas.
For instance, Rodrigue, whose two voyages appear in
the opening of this article, identified visible, physical trans-
formations in his hometown as motivating the more recent
of his kanntè. He explained that
everyone was in motion. They wanted to go because
those who had gone to “the other side” [the United
States] already in 1980, they used to tend their gardens
[when they were still in Haiti], producing a little bit of
manioc, a little bit of yam. They didn’t even have a real
place to sleep, just a little house they would rent for 30
or 40 Haitian dollars, and then they came back [from
the United States after a kanntè] and built houses [in
Haiti] for 200,000 US dollars, and I saw this, and I said,
“I’m going.”
While many fled Haiti because of political persecution
(O’Neill 1993), crossing over to lòt bò, the “other side,” al-
most always meant gaining access to sources of value that
were simply unavailable to artisanal fishers and farmers
in Haiti’s provinces. It also often meant redirecting circuits
of value that existed outside Haiti such that they linked
points of departure to an abundant, exterior space. Once
Rodrigue’s hometown started to display the wealth with
which it was now connected, he sought access to these
sources of capital as well.
Kanntè, as a form of valued mobility, also became a
mode of spatiotemporal extension for those left behind,
whether family members or entire communities. Take, for
example, the case of Claude, a fisher from a small coastal
town to the west of Jérémie, who recalled that, after the
first Aristide coup, he had started hearing that many kanntè
had been organized and that their passengers had even-
tually reached the United States after passing through
Guantánamo. He told me that he had “heard that a lot of
other places were ‘making’ djaspora,” djaspora being the
Creole term for a Haitian living abroad. He wanted the town
where he lived “to have djaspora as well.” To that end, he
organized a kanntè. It started smoothly, but after encoun-
tering rough seas, the captain was forced to turn back in
the full light of day, attracting the attention of the Haitian
army. Soldiers publicly tortured one of the organizers and
Cosmographies of mobility  American Ethnologist
destroyed other vessels along the beach as a warning to
those who would attempt further departures.
Claude shared his story with me at a meeting spot over-
looking the beach where the army had disabled the town’s
boats. As he spoke, a young man who had witnessed the
event amplified the point. If the town “had had a good
number of boats leave in kanntè in’91,” he said, “it would
have had a lot of djaspora.” Instead, he went on, “in this
province [our town] has fallen the furthest behind because
there aren’t any djaspora to come back and finance projects
or help the country.” There was no one to “invest” in the
area, he added, because the Haitian army had prevented the
boats from leaving. A kanntè, in other words, was a way of
expanding a group’s space-time—in this instance the over-
seas connections of a town—and a way of linking that group
to the circuits of value that seemed to bypass it. Claude and
those listening to his account felt that their town had failed
to extend itself through kanntè, having been locked in place
when the military destroyed the town’s boats.
In kanntè stories, the yearning for connection to an
outside world is coupled with a strong sense that Haiti has
been walled off by the US maritime interdiction program
and domestic measures to restrict departures by sea. This
is an effect that the US Coast Guard has intentionally
engineered by launching its highly visible patrols and by
denying nearly all asylum claims by Haitians interdicted
during the program’s first decade. During the postcoup
period of the early 1990s, for instance, the theatricality of
interdiction was in full force as cutters became frequently
visible from the coast. My interlocutors often referred to
this looming presence when discussing kanntè. Rodrigue,
for instance, recalled in his account of his second voyage—
again, described in the opening to this article—that before
he set off, he could see two cutters from shore, one “above”
and one “below” Cayemite. As of 2017, when I was con-
ducting research aboard a 270-foot cutter patrolling off
the northwest of Haiti, interdiction vessels assigned to the
Windward Passage would sail within full view of coastal
towns and cities to deter would-be migrants. The Coast
Guard would also record how many people witnessed its pa-
trols in order to assess the size of the audience of its policing
performances.
Even now, long after the intensified policing of the
coup period and outside the contemporary cutter traffic
zones of the northwest, there is a sense that Coast Guard
vessels are just beyond the horizon, plying the outer edge
of a boundary meant to shield the United States and encase
Haiti. Talk of this American panopticism often revolves
around the aparèj, or “devices,” that the Americans use to
police these waterways. These include not only the radar
components mounted atop cutter masts but also bagay nan
lespas, literally “things in space,” a reference to the powerful
surveillance satellites that people suspect of operating in
the offshore patrol regime.
477
American Ethnologist  Volume 46 Number 4 November 2019
A discussion of US surveillance technology and djab
was sparked in 2007 when a Haitian sail freighter arrived
at Hallandale Beach, Florida. Jeankel, whose own kanntè I
described earlier, had heard about the voyage over the ra-
dio and, assuming the vessel had been interdicted, began
discussing the “devices” that must have allowed the Coast
Guard to intercept it. When I told him I had read that the sail
freighter had actually arrived on the beach, making it possi-
ble for the passengers to undergo asylum processing in the
United States (Kahn 2019), he remarked that this particular
kanntè must then have “had a djab” and that it had been
anfòm (in good shape). The technologically enhanced sight
of American “devices” and patrols, in other words, made
contracts with the djab necessary, and it was the djab that
made the trip successful.
It is widely believed throughout Haiti that circuits
of value have bypassed the country and that, for poorer
Haitians at least, kanntè have been one of the few means
by which these circuits might be reached. This idea struc-
tures many Haitians’ sense of what routes and destinations
are accessible within this cosmography. It also maps out
spaces where value resides and where it is absent. As such,
kanntè narratives and practices produce a way of sensing
the world that is about both accessing zones of value and
being denied access to them. People who set out on the sea
attempt to become agents within the maritime sphere of
this wider geography of value. It is a way of escaping the in-
ternal pull toward a destructive politico-economic center,
whether in the form of literal abduction by the henchmen
of mysterious beings in the capital (the blan of Boutilliers)
or the forces of rural-to-urban migration that have swelled
the slums of Port-au-Prince for more than half a century.
Wooden sloops and dugout canoes are vehicles not
only of escape from such forces but also of value redirec-
tion. Through them, one may pierce the floating walls that
the United States has erected around Haiti with its fleet
of cutters, break free of internal dynamics that devour the
Haitian poor, and, eventually, refashion the routes connect-
ing Haitian families and communities—largely through re-
mittances (Dubois 2012)—with a wider world of market
flows.
Cosmographic physics
While migration routes have their liminal qualities (Chavez
1998; Malkki 1995), they are not merely threshold zones
between spaces that are more socioculturally significant.
Rather, they exist as relevant spaces in their own right,
although still situated within wider spatial arrangements.
The imprinting of kanntè and other maritime commerce
itineraries onto the public imagination in certain parts
of Haiti through repetitive, visible, and narrated oceanic
circulation stands in sharp contrast to long-standing tropes
of maritime emptiness and interstitiality, themselves part
478
of the mythology that has fed American prerogatives of
sea-based policing in the region. As these itineraries have
sprouted out of Haitian coastal towns, across passages and
straits, along Cuban and Bahamian coastlines, and into the
territorial seas of South Florida, they have bound together
a range of sites that are part of the cosmographies I have
been exploring.
In his discussion of the transatlantic slave trade,
Édouard Glissant (1997, 5) represented its sprawling com-
merce in human bodies and the goods they produced as
a fibril—a strand of connection, branching out at both
ends, but canalized in its crossing of sea space. In con-
trast, the Haitian cosmographies discussed herein might
be viewed as an overlay of multiple fibrils (see Figure 1),
twisted, stretched, and layered in time and across space.
The middle is not, however, an absence, a narrow chan-
nel, or merely a liminal becoming. These waterways have
emerged as spaces of activity, sociality, and ritual that are
themselves connected with wider networks to which the
branching ends of Glissant’s fibrils allude. They also contain
more than waves, wind, tides, and currents.
The cosmographic physics (the energies and forces) of
Haitian maritime migration has its sites of blockage as well
as its channels of circulation, its land-based fixtures as well
as its aquatic expanses. Just as the actualized routes of sea-
faring Haitians and their djab shape a sense of the possi-
ble within these expanses, so too do other waypoints and
adjacent methods, like the tent cities of Guantánamo and
the kanntè baz. These sites and techniques are part of this
wider cosmography, not isolable elements to be separated
out through purification. The multiplicity of Guantánamo
looms large in these stories—that is, not only its incarna-
tion as a space that could be remade as an entry point into
a wider American bureaucracy, but also its status as an end-
point, a holding site, and a trap that undid, for Rodrigue
and thousands of others, kanntè’s aspirational mobility and
value redirection.
The politics that emerged within the confines of
Guantánamo have swirled around the spatiotemporally
framed dimensions of this wider physics of mobility, itself
discernible within the hundreds of narratives of migration
voyages that repatriated asylum seekers have shared with
me in Haiti since 2005. For instance, the possibility of being
interned at Guantánamo defined one aspect of the base—
that is, the base as gravitational trap. This sense that the
base operated more often than not as a site of containment
blocking forward movement, however, gave way, at times,
to a vision of the base as a passageway to US soil. When
Haitians became frustrated with their confinement and
the feeling that their voyages had stalled indefinitely, many
would rise up in protest on the base’s McCalla airfield and
Camp Bulkeley. As put to me by one mariner, Amos, who
had attempted three kanntè baz in 1991, 1992, and 1994,
Guantánamo is “a military base, and we’re not supposed

Figure 1. This is a stylized depiction of Haitian migrant routes across the northern Caribbean. The image repurposes and multiplies Édouard Glissant’s
representation of the transoceanic commerce of the slave trade as a singular “fibril” that connects Africa to the Americas.
to be stuck there for long periods of time.” Therefore, he
elaborated, “if [the Haitians] saw that they’re wasting time
at the base,” they would “leve trouble” (“raise trouble” or
“protest”). This direct action, its music (drumming and
song), and its movements were meant to “heat” things up,
to turn stasis or blockage into value-generating mobility,
a technique characteristic not just of political demonstra-
tions but of Haitian ritual generally (Brown 1991).
Rodrigue described a similar hunger strike that he and
his fellow travelers launched when detained by the Cuban
government during his aborted 1980 kanntè. After a repre-
sentative from Havana asked why the group was refusing
food, they explained, in Rodrigue’s words, that
we left our fathers in poverty, our mothers in poverty.
They’re poor. We came in search of a better life, and
since we’ve come here, we’ve eaten well, but we don’t
have a way of sending this food back home. [ . . . ] We’ve
spent too much time sitting here. If you give us a place
to work, we’ll stay, but if you won’t allow us to work and
send money home, then send us on our way.
And so a voyage that began with the rush of rain and air
that followed the cracking of a wind calabash on the tran-
som of a kanntè vessel had stalled in a Cuban camp, an-
other site in a then shifting cosmography, only to be re-
animated by a refusal of the constraints that came with
this form of hospitality. Sitting in these sites of entrapment
and stasis was not lavi (life) for Amos and Rodrigue; “life”
was something that happened elsewhere, something that
happened when one could labor and activate the capac-
ity to redirect value homeward, something that required
Cosmographies of mobility  American Ethnologist
passage out of these dead ends within existing land and
seascapes. The pull and entanglements of such stalled sites
(analogues to the literal dead ends of Boutilliers)—as much
as the motion across sea routes—gave cosmographic shape
and substance to the spaces through which these aspira-
tional transnational subjects moved.
Conclusion: Cosmographic depth
For many Haitians, the northern Caribbean is not just a
material, instrumental medium for circulation but a space
with its own morally infused physics of mobility and con-
straint. Its cosmographic depth is generated by the range of
actors and forces that operate within it. As such, it is not un-
like many other spaces, even if such depth often goes un-
noticed elsewhere. This particular space of migration polic-
ing and voyaging comprises passages opened by merchant
djab, gateways paradoxically revealed by a foreign maritime
border brought close to shore, impediments of a police raid
avoided with a broken wind calabash, and hopes suffo-
cated in the monotonous stasis of a military base or the
deadly weight of the capital’s suburbs. Although unnamed
as some singular figuration within local discourse, these
assembled elements hang together within them, emergent
but not without a recognizable form.
Like other seascapes—for example, the Mediterranean
of Mazarese fishers described by Naor Ben-Yehoyada (2017)
or the Indian Ocean of Somali pirates elaborated by Jatin
Dua (2016)—this particular variant from the northern
Caribbean emerges not only in ports and coasts but also
on the water. Like any spatial configuration, it is made.
479
American Ethnologist  Volume 46 Number 4 November 2019
Here, this making consists of Haitians and others reading
the signifying qualities it embodies (e.g., its heavy and light
actors and sites) and sailing historically shifting routes. All
the while, these pathways become etched into the minds of
those who come to see and narrate them as ensembles of
passages and trajectories. This cosmography, and certainly
others like it, emerges from the ongoing interactions of its
economic exchanges, which extend beyond the human. To-
gether, these interpretations, effects, and repetitive engage-
ments produce a meaningful spatial configuration, not just
on land but at sea as well.
The path I have charted in tracing out these cosmo-
graphic spatializations lies somewhere between an anthro-
pology of occult economies and an ontological anthro-
pology. This article has been an experiment in walking a
line between the two without fully disavowing the former’s
modes of critique while avoiding the latter’s excesses—
particularly its tendency to forbid certain types of inquiry
(Viveiros de Castro 2015). The question is whether there ex-
ists a worthwhile anthropology of other-than-human be-
ings and forces that does not merely replicate the work
of occult economists or ontologists and that can be pur-
sued without repudiating either Marxist-inspired investiga-
tion or its neorelativist competitors. The answer, I think, is
yes. There are interesting topics besides the root causes of
particular occult idioms and the ontological status of spir-
its or wind calabashes. One is how cosmographic spaces
emerge out of instances of clandestine maritime cross-
ings, spirit bargains, magically redirected weather patterns,
and money transfers. Another is how such affordances and
impediments generate maritime worlds. Anthropologists
should be attuned to these types of questions at a moment
when they are increasingly examining the contested, secu-
ritized, liquid spaces that exist between the neat lines of
globe-spanning sovereign geographies.
Notes
Acknowledgments. Special thanks to participants in the anthro-
pology department colloquia at Harvard University, Dartmouth
College, Stanford University, and the University of California, Santa
Cruz. I am grateful for Naor Ben-Yehoyada’s critical reading of
the manuscript as well as insightful comments from Niko Besnier
and four anonymous AE reviewers. Pablo Morales’s excellent copy-
editing greatly improved the article. Jowel Laguerre and Jean-
Yves Merilus assisted with the translation of the abstract. This re-
search was funded by the National Science Foundation, the Robina
Foundation/Yale Law School, the University of Chicago, Harvard
University, and the University of California, Davis.
1. All personal names used in this article are pseudonyms. Un-
less otherwise noted, details regarding migration voyages and de-
tention at Guantánamo are based on fieldwork I have conducted in
Haiti since 2005.
2. Stories abound of sailors throwing migrants overboard as pay-
ment to djab. Nonetheless, most accounts suggest that djab collect
the debt themselves by causing a promised victim to grow ill or die
480
in an accident. Under the cover of such misfortunate deaths, the
djab take the nanm, or soul, of the deceased.
3. These are, of course, important discussions. What I am offer-
ing here is a path through what may appear to be the Scylla of
one position and the Charybdis of the other. My own skepticism
regarding the novelty of ontology and the tensions of witchcraft’s
modernity are best addressed elsewhere.
4. Qualisigns must be understood in relation to two other con-
ceptual terms—qualities and qualia (singular: quale). Qualia are
“sensuous qualities” that have materialized phenomenally as “in-
stances of abstract qualities” (Harkness 2015, 574). For example,
the heat that one experiences on one’s fingertips when lighting a
match is an instance of the abstract quality warmth. When this
quale comes to signify in conventionalized ways (e.g., the associ-
ation of warmth with secure domesticity), it operates as a qualisign
(Chumley and Harkness 2013, 6; Harkness 2015, 579).
5. Efforts to collapse all of Haitian ritual into the category of “sor-
cery” has had its consequences, from the violence of antisupersti-
tion campaigns in the past century (Ramsey 2011; Dubois 2012)
to the spurious arguments of development specialists pinning the
blame for Haitian “underdevelopment” on Vodou after the 2010
earthquake (Harrison 2010).
6. The lwa and other spirit-like entities in Haitian cosmology fall
on a spectrum that ranges from the nefarious to the benevolent.
Those classified as more dangerous or volatile sometimes trans-
form into calmer, familial spirits over time (Hurbon 1979; Larose
1977; Richman 2005). My interlocutors in Haiti drew a distinction,
however, between the kanntè djab and the lwa, making clear that
the former could not become the latter.
7. In multiple versions of the Ti Kalap story, the human-like blan
were explicitly described as djab, their anthropophagy suggesting
that they were, however, more than human, although in different
ways than the kanntè djab, who approximate spirits like the lwa
but remain distinct from them.
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Jeffrey S. Kahn
Department of Anthropology
University of California, Davis
328 Young Hall
One Shields Avenue
Davis, CA 95616
jskahn@ucdavis.edu
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