According to Paul Touloute, human beings since their creation have always wanted to investigate the unseen world. These desires led to many religious and philosophical tendencies that account for many religions throughout the world. One of those religions, Vodou, commonly spelled Voodoo, evolved in Haiti as the predominant religion of the people incorporating traditions imported by enslaved Africans. In an attempt to investigate Vodou beliefs and for a better understanding of the religion, Karen McCarthy Brown immerses herself into the life of Alourdes Macena and their extended Vodou family kinship. Karen participates not only in the home-spun ritualistic ceremonies which is essential to pleasing various spirits, but also undergoes ritual marriages to the spirits Ogou and Danbala, and completes the initiation process one must undergo in order to become a manbo. The key goal of doing an ethnographic fieldwork is to go beyond what “actors’ say they do” (being the ideal) to “what actors actually do” (the real). Within the story of Mama Lola, the author Karen McCarthy Brown explores the spiritual tradition of Vodou through extensive research and participation-observation, which is a great way to go from the ideal to real absences. Karen Brown learns how Vodou operates, who the spirits are and what it takes to appease them, and of most importance, she learns about how Vodou is a religion of and for the people.
Karen McCarthy Brown meets Alourdes during the summer of 1978, while Karen was working on a survey project for the Brooklyn Museum. Karen at first begins interacting with Mama Lola essentially on the basis of Karen Brown being the observer and Mama Lola as the subject. The two quickly become friends as Karen eventually comes a...
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...ctivity. It is the means of identifying the in-group.” Alourdes then says, “You eat with people, you always have food. You eat by yourself, you don’t have nothing (Brown 43).” Within the Haitian community, food is often represented as someone’s happiness and well-being. If one day, Alourdes said that she was not going to eat for a whole day, which meant that she was most likely depressed or upset.
“The contents of Vodou rituals – from private healing consultations to public dances and possessions-performances- are composed from the lives of the particular people performing them. When I began to bring my own life to the system for healing, I began to understand more of what it meant for Haitians to do that (Brown, 134).”
Bibliography
Brown, K. M. (1991). Mama Lola: A codou Priestess in Brooklyn. Los Angeles: University of California Press.
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Karenga, Malauna. Introduction to Black Studies. Los Angeles: University of Sankore Press Third Edition, 2002.
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