KOSANBA is a scholarly association dedicated to the study of Haitian Vodou.
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Founding
The organization was founded in 1997 at the Center for Black Studies Research of the University of California, Santa Barbara, then under the directorship of Claudine Michel.
Thirteen scholars met for a colloquium on Haitian Vodou titled The Spirit and The Reality: Vodou and Haiti on April 25-26, 1997. At the end of the conference, they decided to institutionalize their efforts through a new association under the name The Congress of Santa Barbara. Using the Haitian Creole name for congress (kóngre) with the San- and Ba- of Santa Barbara, the abbreviation KOSANBA was born.
Ongoing activities
According to their declaration, KOSANBA "proposes to have an impact on Haitian cultural politics as well as on other measures and policies that affect the Republic of Haiti ... It is the belief of the Congress that Vodou plays and shall continue to play a major role in the grand scheme of Haitian development and in the socio-economic, political, and cultural arenas. Development, when real and successful, always comes from the modernization of ancestral traditions, anchored in the rich cultural expressions of a nation."
KOSANBA meets every two years. Their colloquium on July 13-17, 2009 was held in Mirebalais, Haiti to coincide with the Saut-d'Eau pilgrimage. After the 2010 earthquake, KOSANBA did not meet until 2013. Their tenth colloquium was held October 10-20 of that year at Harvard University. The eleventh colloquium took place in Montréal from October 21-25, 2015.
The current president of the association is Patrick Bellegarde-Smith, Professor Emeritus of Africology at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.