Introduction

4It would seem that the performers associate the notion of reappropriation with the threat of destruction of a popular culture that needs to be preserved and revitalized from the fragments of collective memory. But paradoxically, in order to “recreate”, “recover”, “give value” or “reinvent” it, practices observed elsewhere, notably in West Africa and other territories in the Caribbean basin are being borrowed in different ways. The principle behind it is that these different territories have preserved a more vivid memory of a common cultural origin. For example, the bendémaré was reinvented by mixing local references, such as the Manman Dlo mermaid, with global ones, through a series of references to the “transnational religion of the orishas” (Argyriadis and Capone 2011). For example, due to a semantic shift, the bendémaré no longer represents liberation from a binding spell, but the start (“unmooring”) of the year, in line with contemporary practices occurring on January 1 in certain regions of Brazil, in which participants dressed in white make offerings to Iemanja, goddess of the sea.

6This article presents some of my research organized as follows: first, I consider how the emic notion of reappropriation might be akin to a reappraisal of certain popular practices that serve as strategies for resisting alienation; second, I investigate to what extent this reappropriation then involves processes of (re)invention based on elements borrowed from other territories. As we can see here, “appropriation appears at both ends of the creativity chain” (Martin 2014), in this case, it is both the cause and the instrument of ritual innovation.

From cultural appropriation to reappropriation

Safeguarding popular practices

7The first gwoup-a-po, Akiyo, was created at the end of the 1970s in the context of the institutionalization of Guadeloupe’s carnival. In 1975, this led to the creation of the Groupement pour le développement du carnaval et des fêtes (GDCF), which began to oversee all carnival activities (interview with Louis Collomb, July 2020), and in 2008 became l’Office du carnaval de la Guadeloupe (Guadeloupe Carnival Organization, OCG) on the initiative of the Guadeloupe Region, primarily with the objective of developing tourism. In reaction to the process of institutionalization of the carnival, there appeared at this time a division of the groups into two main categories, in addition to other categories that could be called intermediate. On one hand, snare-drum groups belonging to the “official” carnival. They mainly use “snare drums” taken from drum sets and are inspired by Rio’s New Carnival or Trinidad’s pretty mas (Gugolati 2018). They design elaborate decorations and highly choreographed parades that they present in competitions organized by regional institutions. On the other hand, gwoup-a-po use recycled materials for their outfits and wooden barrels covered with animal skins inspired by gwoka culture for their instruments, hence the name “skin groups”. They identify mostly with groups of resistance against French cultural centralization and the commercialization of carnival. These are the only groups that do not parade in the official carnival. The position of these groups echoes the reorganization of the political struggle in Guadeloupe after the events of May 1967 (Sainton and Gama 1985), when nationalist-leaning trade union movements took over cultural events.

8In this spirit of resistance, these groups are mostly seeking to preserve and revitalize popular carnival practices associated with the old gwoup-a-mas or “mask groups”, which are becoming extinct due to reorganization of the official carnival. These gwoup-a-mas seem to be considered the heirs of solidarity structures exclusively for slaves during the pre-abolitionist period (nations and then societies), and then reserved for “Blacks” after abolition (corporations, associations and mutual societies) (Lanoir L’Étang 2009). Their common purpose was to supervise the slave festivals and later Black participation in various festivities, including carnival. The gwoup-a-mas that still remained in the 1970s were small groups of a few dozen men from the working-class area around the port, who would leave their neighborhood on Sundays, completely masked and unrecognizable, to roam the streets of the city, where they would perform skits or dance for a few coins (Mulot 2003, Nabajoth in Roselé Chim and Raboteur 2012). Because these gwoup-a-mas were on the verge of extinction, the gwoup-a-po decided to preserve a number of their features, such as some of the wooden instruments that they reduced in size to match the dimesion of the new groups and the increasing speed of the déboulés, the name given to the fast march that characterizes them. They also reproduce some of the rhythms as remembered by the founders and some of the outfits and artifacts such as whips, previously mainly used in skits depicting bèf chapé (“escaped oxen”).

9The mas culture was thus redefined in a way comparable to that of gwoka music to which it is closely linked, since both types of music are inseparable and the social environments they come from converge and represent an endangered agricultural working-class culture they want to preserve. Gwoka later entered a process of patrimonialization by being gradually valued by the dominant social classes, notably with gwoka modèn theorized by the musician Gérard Lockel. But initially, gwoka was also redefined as a central element, along with palé-kréyol, of the working-class pride that developed in the 1970s, notably through the trade union Union des travailleurs agricoles (UTA). Ary Gordien writes of gwoka that it “embodies the idealization of peasant community values against French cultural assimilation, tertiarization of the economy and urbanization gradually imposed following the departmentalization of 1946” (Gordien 2018).

10The desire to preserve disappearing popular practices has been extended by the gwoup-a-po to the carnival. Although both valorization processes have not always been promoted by the same individuals, they have occurred more or less simultaneously. Thus, the symbol of the popular carnival is now Mas as practiced by the ancient gwoup-a-mas. The social category associated with these endangered working-class practices is most often the vyé nèg, to use the words of my informants:

Mas was something people did spontaneously, and not just anyone did mas. It was the vyé-nèg a mas, vyé-nèg a wonm (“old nigger with a mask, old nigger with rum”). […] Mas was not something for the bourgeoisie, it was only for the vyé-nèg, the vyé-nèg on the street, the vyé-nèg of Bas-du-Bourg [port district of Basse-Terre], people who worked in the countryside, people who were on the roads, people who didn’t socialize as you had to at the time… These people weren’t part of the normal circuit, and so they did mas. (interview with Amédée Labigny, June 2020)

11The founders of the gwoup-a-po, who have the same working-class background, grew up in the low-status neighbourhoods of Basse-Terre or Pointe-à-Pitre, where they were immersed in this culture: “I was brought up among the people who did mas” (interview with Fred Demetrius, founding member of Voukoum, May 2021). They decided to preserve these disappearing practices, the “kannaval a nèg a mas” (“carnival of masked negroes”) in opposition to the development of “kannaval a saten” (“satin carnival”) or “kannaval a lajen” (“money carnival”) (interview with Amédée Labigny, June 2020). To preserve these practices, they want to relearn them and pass them on to younger generations, in other words, “reappropriate” them.

Patrimonialization and appropriation

13As a result, Mas has spread outside gwoup-a-po through various cultural events, mainly in mainland France, the Caribbean basin and Africa, according to Voukoum members. For example, two “pilgrimages” were organized to Gorée Island in 2002 and again in 2018. The second one was filmed in a documentary that emphasizes the idea of reappropriation, as indicated by its title, “Voukoum, back to our roots” (“Voukoum, retour aux sources”, Kalil Sarkis, 2021). In the documentary, a performance was staged in front of the House of Slaves and its “Door of No Return” showing instead the possibility of a transgenerational return. In other contexts, only the artefacts –tents, musical instruments, whips and other objects involved in ritual performances– are exhibited, possibly with photos and videos of Mas in action, and with explanatory discourses. In Paris, for example, an exhibition was held at the Musée national des arts et traditions populaires in 1998, at La Villette in 2010 and at the Musée Dapper in 2011. In Guadeloupe also, a “Mofwazé - Métamorphose” exhibition was organized in 2021 in the gardens of the island’s main concert venue, l’Artchipel, and a dekatman exhibition was held at the Mémorial ACTe in 2023. While official paths to patrimonialization are based on the central condition that “the social and economic value of this transmission of knowledge is relevant for minority groups and for mainstream social groups within a State” (Unesco), these processes seem to require a certain form of appropriation by groups that did not initially claim them, or even despised them, as was the case for gwoka.

14However, these forms of patrimonialization are far from being unanimously criticized by those involved, who do not necessarily consider them as forms of cultural appropriation, but more often as factors that restore (new) value to popular practices that had previously been marginalized. In fact, they seem to have largely contributed to complexifying Mas and the narratives of struggle, resistance and ancestrality associated with it. More than that, these patrimonialization spaces now serve as genuine reservoirs of ritual inspiration. For example, the exhibition Mascarades et carnavals, held at the Musée Dapper in Paris in 2011 and 2012, associated mask parades in sub-Saharan Africa with West Indian carnivals based on certain “visual proximities” (Falgayrettes-Leveau 2011: 7). This approach is likely to have had an impact on the discursive creations developed for certain mas outfits, such as Mas a Lous. Bovine horns and banana leaves, already used by some gwoup-a-mas, gave the gwoup-a-po inspiration for a new mas outfit that Akiyo descriptively calls “Fèy a bannan, tèt maré, konn a bèf” [“Banana leaves, covered head, ox horns”], and which Voukoum later adopted as “Mas a Lous” [“Mask of the Bear”]. After the exhibition, Voukoum presented this mas outfit more clearly as a sacred Mas of African origin. It is also possible that the performers rediscovered Césaire’s text, which compares West Indian masks adorned with bovid horns with an African initiation mask found in Casamance, probably the ejumba mask. The exhibition may also have had an impact on some visual creations: for example, the two “white mas”, Boukliyé and Lèspri Virjilan, a bovid pelvis on the face and a goat skull on the genitals, seem to have changed after the exhibition to become more similar visually to an African imaginary.

15What role do State institutions, notably museums and research laboratories, paradoxically play in the reinvention of Mas? Stéphanie Mulot’s article published in 2003 may have contributed to a certain extent to the adoption of complementary discourses on mas outfits, by emphasizing the European origins of some carnival practices in Guadeloupe. Thus, Mas a Kongo are no longer described by the performers solely in reference to the skin color of those who were deported to the island, but also to festivities in the south of France in which bodies were covered in wine lees (Fabre and Camberoque 1977). These external discourses on Mas allow gwoup-a-po members to develop their practices and the narratives that surround them. Group members mention each interpretation, and if it does not seem contradictory with their perception of “tradition”, they include it in their own narratives and thus increase the significance of their practices. For example, when talking about the use of whips, the performers mention both the symbol of slave domination and the reference to possible medieval fertility rites. The result is a constant back-and-forth between the discourses of the performers and those of the observers, and Mas draws from this dialogue to introduce increasingly complex and ritualized practices.

17Yet what emerges in my fieldwork is above all a recognition of the processes of reinvention from which Guadeloupean culture has emerged, in a context in which even nationalist movements have reoriented their defense of Guadeloupean culture to make room for ideas of métissage (Camal 2019: 145). One of Voukoum’s founding members explains:

For us, in Voukoum, we’re talking about “reinventing”. “Reinventing” what is ours, what is sacred for us, based on our own experience today. That’s what we can do. We can’t return to something sacred that we haven’t maintained… […] We’re making a mixture and maybe it’s taking us to something sacred, but it’s something sacred that looks like us today. It can’t be something that was sacred at the origin. (interview with Amédée Labigny, June 2020)

18So how does this “mixture” come about? How do you “reinvent” a Guadeloupean spirituality via Mas?

Between appropriation and borrowing

The poetics of loss: fragmented memory

19It should be noted that Mas has developed by popular appropriation of a dominant epistemological tradition in Caribbean anthropology, which André Mary calls the “dialectic of African continuity and discontinuity” (Mary 2000), and which, at least since the work of Herskovits (1937), but before him in Cuba with Ortiz (1916) or in Haiti with Trouillot (1885), consists in classifying the cultures of Caribbean territories according to their degree of Africanness. Within this framework, a certain scientific consensus places the French West Indies on the side of “negro communities” rather than “African communities” (Bastide 1973), since they seem to be home to cultures largely disorganized by the slave system and almost entirely drowned in processes of creolization (Bonniol 2013). This concept is mostly used in the French West Indies today in reference to Glissant’s thinking, based on the following definition:

If we posit métissage as, generally speaking, the meeting and synthesis of two differences, creolization seems to be a limitless métissage, its elements diffracted and its consequences unforeseeable. (Glissant 1990: 46)

20Jean-Luc Bonniol thus proposes to redefine the concept of creolization in the context of the French colonial West Indies as the reconciliation of “the diversity of original sources” and as the “construction of a cultural edifice partly shared by the various components of society, that gradually developed from these diverse contributions” (Bonniol 2013: 263). The term is also used as the optimistic version of the “impossible identity” theories (Affergan 1983) born of the absence of a “cultural hinterland” (Glissant 1981). This epistemological categorization, according to which the French West Indies are more creolized than other Caribbean societies, and thus their African heritage more diluted, has led in Guadeloupe to the “poetics of loss” (Pavy 2021).

21Yet this idea of a loss of African memory in the French West Indies seems to have developed historically because of specific political objectives in the post-colonial period. While French researchers in the first half of the 20th century were conducting surveys of the archaic superstitions that the process of assimilation enforced by the Departmentalization Act (1946) was supposed to gradually erase from Guadeloupe and Martinique (see, for example, Delawarde 1939), a methodological and theoretical turn had already been taken in the neighboring islands, with, for example, genuine ethnographic research on Haitian voodoo in the 1920s, defined for the first time as a religion from a Durkheimian perspective (Price-Mars 1928). In Cuba also, practices that were initially considered only from a criminological angle as belonging to the category of witchcraft had already been redefined as religions with the aim of building a national culture by recognizing and giving value to practices now claimed to constitute the country’s non-European identity (see notably Argyriadis, Gobin, Laëthier, Núñez González and Byron 2020). Half a century late, the first folklorists and later anthropologists to take an interest in Guadeloupe and Martinique (Revert 1951, Leiris 1955) finally focused their attention on the disappearance of cultures of African origin, which they deplored from a scientific perspective, while insisting on the rare traces left by these cultures, particularly in religious terms. These authors then focused on a specific form of cultural and religious reservoir: the carnival, where “African survivals” were first identified, in Cuba for example (Bachiller y Morales 1887). Links were found between carnival practices and mutual aid societies structured around the African “nations” of origin.

22Césaire who was part of a dense trans-Caribbean political, scientific, artistic and literary network and whom Leiris sometimes cites as an informant, confirmed this intuition in 1973. Despite the widespread loss of memory of ancestral cultures, West Indian carnivals may have preserved the diffuse remembrance of forgotten African rites imbued in the fabric of their masks. The popular dissemination of this theory probably led the founders of some gwoup-a-po to take the following approach. From a theoretical point of view, they have been redefining some carnival practices as relics of African religions. From a practical point of view, they have been working to reactivate the “spiritual” dimension of these practices, and in particular mas outfits, whose capacity to transform the bodies and minds of those who wear them has not entirely lost its effectiveness, even though their meaning has been forgotten and mastery of their use is limited:

Some mas like the Mas a Lous are, on their own, loaded with spirituality. Ignoring it or denying it won’t change a thing; the mas is spiritual. And even in total ignorance, to repeat them is to invoke them. We invoke energies when we wear them, energies that we need to know more about. (interview in French with an Akiyo musician)

23As we can see, the notion of reappropriation has two dimensions, one epistemological and the other religious. In both cases, there is a dialectical relationship between anthropological research and ritual innovation, as has been demonstrated in other regions of the Caribbean (Capone 1999, Palmié 2002), but it has come later in the French West Indies due to the “poetics of loss”, i.e., the perception of an irreversible loss of memory associated with the French islands.

The Mas ritual, we don’t have all of it, because… we’ve lost a lot of its content… I don’t mean lost. I always say we’ve misplaced it in our heads… it’s misplaced somewhere in our minds. […] So we’ve lost part of the ritual, but we still have what we call the trance, the part that when you fall into the mas trance, you are really metamorphosed [mofwazé], at a certain point you lose the personality you have as a man or woman, you change, you move into another sphere. We still have that. But… the whole ritual part, the whole ceremony part, the whole dimension of falling into a trance, falling into this thing comes naturally, we don’t have the key for when to trigger it, when… We do it naturally and we’ve effectively lost the meaning in the ritual sense, in the sense of what is practiced in Africa: exorcism, healing… We don’t have that sense. We don’t have it, we’ve lost it. We’ve lost it somewhere. We’ve forgotten it in our heads. (Interview with Amédée Labigny, June 2020)

24Although phenomena of reinvention to fill memory gaps can be observed throughout the Caribbean (see, for example, Argyriadis 2009), this loss is nonetheless presented by Mas performers as specific to Guadeloupe. Haiti, on the other hand, seems to represent the living African heritage and a model of memorial continuity. So, for example, when a member of the group claims that “all the populations that came out of Africa have a mystical side”, he immediately adds:

It’s less than in Haiti, for example, because everything was done to Europeanize us: the goal was to make us forget the past. But there are still some small parts left. (interview with Jimmy Vignerol, current President of Voukoum, April 2020)

25Therefore, when the gwoup-a-po seek to reactivate the sacred aspects in some of their local practices with the aim of recovering the memory of their African ancestralities, the process for doing so could be associated with the category of borrowing. What they consider a “reappropriation”, defining themselves at the same time as the legitimate heirs to a certain cultural heritage, seems to involve certain specific forms of “appropriation”.

Appropriating or reappropriating

26The “cultural memory” (Assman 2010) of the Mas performers is nourished by the identification of supposed centers of authenticity and the possibility of regaining sovereign possession of them by drawing inspiration from other territories. The process begins with the identification of sensory similarities between elements of the Guadeloupean carnival and elements associated with the neighboring islands or with West Africa. For example, some participants identified in mizik a mas (Mas music) inter-Caribbean rhythmic sequences that share the capacity to induce a state of “trance”. The musician Rudy Benjamin, co-founder of the gwoup-a-po Le Point, isolated a rhythmic sequence in Senjan that he claims to have identified in other Caribbean ritual music, notably in the Lucumi religion in Cuba, and he called it “plena”. It occurs during the call to the Ochosi orisha and, according to him, fulfils a similar function in Mas where it gives the participants of déboulés unusual physical abilities.

What we play in the street is ceremonial music. I found it out later! Because I went to Cuba and met the ancestor of my music. In santería, there’s a master drummer who brings you in and out, with rhythms and songs. […] We […] march, but marching is the effect [of trance] on us. Otherwise, it’s the same thing, there are sounds that open doors. […] It’s no coincidence that we drag everyone along like this! Mas-la ka chayé’w (‘the Mas carries you away’). (interview in French with Rudy Benjamin, June 2020)

27After identifying sensory similarities, group members then went on to a more intentional search for exogenous information, based on the certainty of a common origin. The observation of similarities led to the conviction that their own practices were incomplete and their meaning forgotten. The detour via neighboring territories was supposed to help them repair this damaged memory by appropriating the knowledge needed to reappropriate the practices.

28This search for information started with the study of the biographical trajectories of gwoup-a-po founders, who often share an ethnographic culture as well as ritual initiation experiences with neighboring islands. A. Labigny (Voukoum), for example, regularly travels to Haiti, where he makes video recordings of the rituals he witnesses, and he shares them within Voukoum. R. Benjamin states: “I had to be initiated to voodoo and to santería to understand the journey” (interview, June 2020) and then pass on some of that knowledge. Another example is F. Dunkan (Anbouta’y), who studied anthropology and then was a member of the international brigades in Cuba in the 1980s, where he says he “learned the ritual”. These different researchers nevertheless remain independent from ritual kinship networks and do not seek to introduce them in their homeland. Their purpose is not to import non-Guadeloupean religions, but rather to draw inspiration from some of their ritual sequences and bring added significance to traditional practices considered insignificant. For example, Fritz Dunkan explains the following, showing that he is not in the lineage of any religion but rather that he seeks to reinvent an original Guadeloupean spirituality imbedded in the carnival:

For Mas, we’d do our ritual and that’s when we’d say which mas you should put on. […] The Mas headquarters was the house of my mother, my grand-mother, my great-grand-mother. Before the house was built, it was a chapel, then they put the chapel in the house. […] We gathered all the powers that were in this house to do Mas. (interview with Fritz Dunkan, July 2020)

29In the introduction, we already mentioned the example of the bendémaré, which is held on the margin of the carnival, and is only performed by a few groups and only once before the opening of the carnival season. In fact, all Mas practices of the gwoup-a-po can be described by means of this borrowing process. Mas is the transformation ritual performed by gwoup-a-po members two days a week on average during the entire carnival season, i.e., for six to eight weeks between the first Sunday in January and Ash Wednesday. Group members gather, usually in their headquarters, to strip themselves of their social identity and transform or “mofwazé” into Mas, to use the expression mostly used by Voukoum, which traditionally refers to the nocturnal metamorphosis of a sorcerer:

A mas only becomes real when inhabited by a human. But the individual who enters the mas loses his identity, becomes possessed by the spirit of the Mas, he is mofwazé. (interview with Amédée Labigny, in French in this extract, August 2020)

30However, most of the Mas performers remain recognizable. So, from the observers’ point of view, there is no “skin change” that would really be comparable to the traditional imaginary of the mofwazé.

31The intent of the Mas ritual is actually less to hide an identity than to reveal another, usually invisible, entity. These entities are not only made visible by Mas practices, but they also “enter the bodies” of the participants who, without completely losing their identity, identify in part with the spirit they represent. The text invoking Mèt-Mas which is recited during certain Voukoum dekatman “show-ceremonies” where they invoke the “spirit of Mas”, practiced by the group since the 1990s, reflects this ambiguity by referring to the Legba lwa:

You who have traveled from Africa, We invoke you, You who are the Spirit of Mas, Enter our bodies, Transform us into Mas, Atibon-Legba open the gate for us, To allow Mas to enter.

32The dekatman also includes various behavioral references to possession cults on neighboring islands. For example, Mas performers are guided on stage by a female figure who uses an incense burner to regulate their behavior in a staging that seems to reflect the notion of religious initiation (Berliner and Sarró 2007). With this behavior, the dekatman scene mirrors the terreiros of Candomblé, in which the mãe de santo plays the role of regulator of possession trances, just like the madrina in the bembe of Cuba’s lucumí religion. Between mofwazé and possession, a semantic bridge is thus created between an external transformation with no change in subjectivity and a transformation of subjectivity despite an identifiable appearance. An exogenous reference takes on the name of an indigenous practice, which is thereby updated and revitalized, and also takes on a new behavioral expression.

33This borrowing is not considered by the performers as forms of cultural appropriation for two reasons. First, they assume that there is a horizontal relationship between Guadeloupe and the territories borrowed from, and they place the French department on the geographical side of the historically dominated Caribbean rather than on the institutional side of dominant France. Second, they assume that all these territories have a common origin and that borrowing is simply a return to their roots, thus contributing to a reconstruction of memory. A certain “aesthetic of symbolic exchange” (Martin 2014: 49) is emerging, in which the appropriation relationship is experienced as egalitarian and even more, that it contributes to “proclaiming the humanity of the oppressed” (op. cit.: 52), which runs counter to the polemical concept of cultural appropriation as it is used today. To use the categories of Bruce Ziff and Pratima Rao, who place the question of power relations at the heart of the concept of cultural appropriation, appropriation here seems to be, from the point of view of the groups that practice it and represent themselves as subordinate, a practice of resistance (Ziff and Rao 1997: 5), that is, an act of opposition to colonial domination (Martin 2014: 61).

A tale of resistance

34These borrowings then appear to serve as cultural tools for the political reappropriation of the territory’s postcolonial destiny. According to this principle and in light of practices observed elsewhere, the gwoup-a-po seek to adapt them to the local context, thus reinventing “fragments of ritual systems” (Price 1964: 97) observed in twentieth-century Guadeloupe. While these practices are undoubtedly the result of an “original métissage” (Amselle 2001) from which all forms of cultural practice necessarily derive, what they have in common is to be often associated in post-abolitionist Guadeloupe with the term “nèg”. However, the use of this term in my fieldwork at the time when I carried out my research no longer seemed to refer directly to what some observers may have considered Afrocentrism in the 1990s (Mulot 2003). The term first refers to a colonial categorization in which it is a synonym for slave. After abolition, it is still being used to refer to people who might be considered descendants of slaves, but more in social than racial terms, and notably in reference to agricultural laborers who were still employed in relatively unchanged work structures. The word nèg thus came to represent Guadeloupe's working poor, then the culture associated with them, and finally the political positioning that consists in claiming this heritage regardless of the racialized or non-racialized identification of the person making the claim. Currently, the fact that people considered “white”, meaning most often that they come from mainland France or are identified as possessing a certain economic capital, may take an interest in this popular Guadeloupean culture sometimes summarized by the term “nèg”, is generally not considered as cultural appropriation as long as these people join existing groups and accept their rules. While I often questioned my legitimacy in using this term in the first person, notably when singing certain songs (e.g., “Nou sé nèg”), I was often told that if I chose to be part of a group like Voukoum, I was supposed to take ownership of the lyrics:

You don’t understand, awa, nèg it’s not a skin color, it’s a philosophy. It’s not that you can sing, it’s that you have to sing. (informal interview with a Voukoum musician, December 2020)

Among the people, slaves, or Africans who arrived here and were enslaved, some had been initiated. In these initiations, automatically when you’ve had it once, it’s by descent. […] So, initially, the slave used the carnival period to practice what had always remained in his mind about these rituals [of initiation]; but he wasn’t celebrating carnival: it was a pretence, it was a way to deceive the master, as Haitians have always done, pretending that they were honoring Catholic saints while practicing their voodoo. It’s a way of pretending that we’re doing what the master told us when in fact we’re doing the opposite. That’s why Mas itself has nothing to do with carnival. It was used at carnival time to make people believe something. (Interview with Amédée Labigny, June 2020)

36The emphasis on biological filiation shows that my informant’s model for describing the origin of Mas is Haitian voodoo, more than other ritual systems such as Cuba’s Lukumi religion, which is only based on ritual kinship. But the key aspect of this discourse is the imaginary of an intrinsic tension found in Mas, which is the expression of a compromise between two contradictory wills: the masters’ will and the slaves’ will, whereby the first is forcing the last to find strategic detours to express itself. For Mas performers, what matters the most is the idea of a strategy of resistance to the constraints of colonial society. This narrative echoes the anthropological category of myth, broadly defined as a foundational or exemplary narrative that is ritually enacted. Thus, it serves to change the representations associated with marginalized practices by way of an origin narrative. By that means, the marginal and depreciated “vyé nèg” culture becomes both a learned African culture and a Creole culture of resistance. Therefore, if the different mouvman kiltirel are involved in a dynamic process of borrowing that can be partly associated with the concept of creolization, they develop at the same time a discourse of reappropriation that allows them to grant added value to certain practices and negotiate the symbolic status of the social groups that perform them.

Conclusion

37Despite their use of the concept of “reappropriation”, Mas performers seem to be aware that they are borrowing practices from others and that the outcome is new. But their concern is not scientific as would be the objective of faithfully reconstructing the historical past, but rather political in the broadest sense: their purpose is to have an impact on the present in order to negotiate margins of power for certain social groups by drawing from “political uses of the past” (Hartog and Revel 2001). This is an example of the “shift from the traditional patrimoniality regime” (Bortolotto in Csergo, Hottin and Schmit 2020: 227), that has occurred in recent years, toward the goal of “safeguarding practices and knowledge considered not only necessary in the present but also valuable for the future” (ibid.). In the case of Mas, the preservation of disappearing practices, which also involves processes of reinvention, represents “a way of acting on the present, and […] on a future perceived as increasingly threatening, against which the safeguarding of heritage is proposed as an antidote and a protection” (op. cit.: 228). It is therefore important to distinguish between a form of “grassroots” patrimonialization and another, more official form of patrimonialization approved by regional, national and international institutions. The patrimonialization process led by the Mas performers themselves allows different groups to negotiate their place in post-colonial Guadeloupean society by means of transversal forms of ritual innovation and memory construction, which can be observed in different forms throughout the Caribbean.