This dissertation examines contemporary permutations and manifestations of the most prominent spirits of the Afro-Haitian religion Vodou, the Gede. This family of spirits is predominantly male and they reside over all aspects of life's beginning and end, from ancestors and future progeny to sex and death. I argue that Gede is undergoing a mythopoeic transformation linked to fundamental shifts in population, production, and consumption at the end of the 20^th and beginning of the 21^st centuries. Gede reflects the impact of death on everyday life but also the related terms of social and physical regeneration. However, Gede is more than a manifestation of anomie or an example of theologic devolution. Rather Gede's popularity and ubiquity have grown as a direct result of population shifts to the city—and beyond to the diaspora—where he surrogates the presence and proximity of the ancestral dead of the rural familial compound. With the consolidation of so much of the population, and nearly all of the political and economic power, to urban centers, Gede has become not just the collective dead, but the national dead and the spirit of the people. Data has been culled from more than ten years of work in Haiti and engages myriad manifestations of Gede in secular and religious culture, including interviews with spiritual leaders and practitioners, field observations, performance analysis, song text, art and visual culture. Most of the data has been collected in Port-au-Prince, the largest city and capital, because this has been an era defined by intensive and rapid urbanization.

I begin the dissertation with the history of Gede as an object of study in 20^th century ethnographic literature. Chapters two and three consider the spatialization of the dead. In chapter two, I examine how the Gedes' annual festival has transformed from a rural, private, and familial celebration to a public and carnivalesque spectacle on the national stage of Port-au-Prince's mega-necropolis. This chapter also investigates the network of mystical laborers who operate within the cemetery. Chapter three considers the placeless and displaced dead who become vulnerable to the fate of commodified labor in the “occult economy” of zonbi (zombies). Chapters four and five analyze the economies of infection in relation to both the reproduction of signs and bodies. These chapters focus on local humor and the global semantics of AIDS.