Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn Updated and Expanded Edition (Comparative Studies in Religion and Society)

by Karen McCarthy Brown

Paperback, 2001

Status

Available

Call number

299.675092

Collection

Publication

University of California Press (2001), Edition: Updated, 440 pages

Description

Vodou is among the most misunderstood and maligned of the world's religions. Mama Lola shatters the stereotypes by offering an intimate portrait of Vodou in everyday life. Drawing on a decade-long friendship with Mama Lola, a Vodou priestess, Karen McCarthy Brown tells tales spanning five generations of Vodou healers in Mama Lola's family, beginning with an African ancestor and ending with Mama Lola's daughter Maggie, a recent initiate and the designated heir to her Brooklyn-based healing practice. Out of these stories, in which dream and vision flavor everyday experience and the Vodou spirits guide decision making, Vodou emerges as a religion focused on healing brought about by mending broken relationships between the living, the dead, and the Vodou spirits. Mama Lola is also an important experiment in feminist ethnographic writing designed to address current questions in the field. Brown begins with the assumption that ethnography is not so much a science as a social art form rooted in human relationships, and as such it is open to moral and aesthetic questions as well as to those more routinely addressed to it. Weaving several of her own voices--analytic, descriptive, and personal--with the voices of her subjects in alternate chapters of straightforward ethnography and ethnographic fiction, Brown presents herself as a character in Mama Lola's world and allows the reader to evaluate her interactions there. Mama Lola's story thus rises from a chorus of equally authoritative voices. Deeply exploring the role of women in religious practices and the related themes of family and of religion and social change, Brown provides a rich context in which to understand the authority that urban Haitian women exercise in the home and in the Vodou temple. A broad range of general readers and scholars will find insights and new understandings in this startlingly original work.… (more)

User reviews

LibraryThing member Crowyhead
A fantastic study of a Vodou priestess who operates out of her house in Brooklyn. Brown is highly respectful of the Vodou religious tradition, and as her study of Mama Lola progresses, she herself becomes deeply intwined in Mama Lola's life and the lives of her fellow worshippers.
LibraryThing member candycaines
Very informative on probably the most misunderstood religion on the planet. The author gives cultural and historical context to the religion. However, the book veers back and forth between academic study and intimate portrait. If you're looking for one you'll be disappointed by the other. It is
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still worth a read if your interested in vodoun, though.
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Awards

Language

Original language

English

Physical description

440 p.; 9 inches

ISBN

0520224752 / 9780520224759

Local notes

MJW

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