Counter-Ontologies of Extraction: Vodou Plural Selfhood, Degrowth, and Post-Extractivist Futures

What kind of subject can inhabit a post-extractivist world? Degrowth scholarship critiques growth not merely as economic policy but as a structuring ontology, yet it rarely articulates the alternative subjectivity its vision requires. This paper argues that Haitian Vodou's multi-soul philosophy and modular personhood (Strongman 2008, 2019; Daniels 2021) offers a practicable, politically actionable model of non-sovereign selfhood that directly challenges the liberal-productivist subject underwriting extractive regimes. Taking Clayton Crockett's "renewable materialism" (2022) as a point of departure, I show that ontological reframings of energy remain inadequate without confronting growth as an organizing metaphysics (Kallis 2018; Martinez-Alier et al. 2010). Vodou's ritually enacted counter-ontology, forged inside plantation extraction and the Haitian Revolution, provides what abstract philosophical frameworks cannot: a living tradition of collective, non-possessive personhood already practicing what degrowth theorizes. These are the "emergent lifeworlds" (Berlant 2020) materializing beyond extractivism.