Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn / Edition 3

by Karen McCarthy Brown, Claudine Michel

Overview

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 35 year 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 Claudine Michel's account of working with Mama Lola after the Haitian earthquake. 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.

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520268104
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/05/2011
Series:	Comparative Studies in Religion and Society , #4
Edition description:	Third Edition, With a New Foreword by Claudine Michel
Pages:	488
Sales rank:	432,083
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 8.90(h) x 1.20(d)

About the Author

Karen McCarthy Brown (1942-2015) was Professor Emerita of the Sociology and Anthropology of Religion at the Graduate and Theological Schools of Drew University. Claudine Michel is Professor Emeritus of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Table of Contents

Foreword to the 2010 Edition
Preface to the 2001 Edition
Preface to the First Edition

Introduction
1. Joseph Binbin Mauvant
2. Azaka
3. Raise that Woman's Petticoat
4. Ogou
5. The Baka Made from Jealousy
6. Kouzinn
7. Dreams and Promises
8. Ezili
9. Sojeme, Sojeme
10. Danbala
11. Plenty Confidence
12. Gede
Afterword

Glossary of Haitian Creole Terms
Bibliography
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Brown's ethnographic short stories vividly capture the complicated personal history that is summed up in Mama Lola's full name and they also dramatize the larger social processes at work in Haiti's recent history . . . Mama Lola provides an engaging, detailed, and sympathetic account of the world of Haitian Vodou. Brown has used a variety of interesting, and even daring, techniques to make that world come alive."

Journal of the American Academy of Religion

""This volume is superb: a poignant account of a Haitian migrant to New York and how she appropriates and reworks her family knowledge of healing and ritual. . . . Gently informed by her own life and by women's anthropology, Brown offers a sympathetic and vivid portrait of the lives of a group of women."

Political and Social Science

"Brown has written a life story that is full of feeling."

|Los Angeles Times

"No other work about Vodou . . . can teach the uninitiated so fully what it means to know: how unassuming, contingent and matter-of-fact real konesans (understanding) must be."

Women's Review of Books

I know of no other work about Vodou that can teach the uninitiated so fully what it means to know: how unassuming, contingent and matter-of-fact real konesans :understanding) must be.

Joan Dayan

This volume is superb: a poignant account of a Haitian migrant to New York and how she appropriates and reworks her family knowledge of healing and ritual... Gently informed by her own life and by women's anthropology, Brown offers a sympathetic and vivid portrait of the lives of a group of women.

Roland Littlewood

Novelistic chapters, beautifully written, are alternated with a narrative of the present, including descriptions of the members of the Vodou pantheon and how Alourdes serves themÉ. She has written a life story that is full of feeling.

Constance Casey

Brown's ethnographic short stories vividly capture the complicated personal history that is summed up in Mama Lola's full name and they also dramatize the larger social processes at work in Haiti's recent history... Mama Lola provides an engaging, detailed, and sympathetic account of the world of Haitian Vodou. Brown has used a variety of interesting, and even daring, techniques to make that world come alive.

Eugene V. Gallagher

Brown befriends a Haitian vodou priestess who practices in her Brooklyn, N.Y., home. Photos. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly