[WikiEN-l] Eskimos and Voodoo

Tue Nov 26 20:01:50 UTC 2002

Tucci wrote:

>I stumbled across the talk page at Vodun a week ago
>or so, and some IP asked if it was the same thing as
>Voodoo and if so, if the article should be moved there
>because Voodoo is the more commonly used term.  That
>led me to the following conclusion:
>
>I'd like to propose a minor modification to the
>current naming conventions that I think will make a
>lot of the different sides happy.  If experts in a
>field nearly universally use a different term than the
>general population, the expert term should be used to
>name the article.  The only two I can think of that
>this would apply to is Vodun and Inuit instead of
>Voodoo and Eskimo.  Asking my seven reasonably
>educated co-workers, six out of the seven have no idea
>what Vodun is (though they've heard of Voodoo) and one
>thought it was the capital of "one of them southeast
>Asian countries" (for those keeping score, seven out
>of eight paramedics are unfamiliar with the word, with
>myself the only exception).  Four out of the seven
>were familiar with the word "Inuit" but said they
>probably wouldn't think to use it.  Three claim to
>have never heard it before, though all seven knew what
>an Eskimo was.  Because experts in the field of
>religion and anthropology use "Vodun" and "Inuit" to
>the complete exclusion of "Voodoo" and "Eskimo"
>(except maybe to explain that they're the same thing
>at the beginning of an essay or paper or whatever), I
>think the Wikipedia would seem a bit... well, dumb,
>having an article about Eskimos when everybody
>involved with the people in question refer to them as
>Inuit.  
>
The terms Eskimo and Inuk are not equivalent.  Properly used the term 
Eskimo is a broader one of whom the Inuit are a subset. The term Inuit 
does not apply to those people who are in the more western, Siberian 
part of the range.  People in the eastern part of the range consider the 
use of "Eskimo" as politically incorrect, and if they had their way 
would probably also insist on changing the name of the Edmonton football 
team.  The best approach would be to move the material to two separate 
articles that reflect the different usages.

Polls of a small local groups about what terms they know does not strike 
me as a sound basis for deciding what name(s) we should use.

I am very much less certain about usage of voodoo/vodun.  I've always 
considered that vodun was the Dahomean language word for God and that 
voodoo was derived from that.  You are probably right to put everything 
under "vodun".