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Nova Religio 112 Copyright © 2024 Association for the Academic Study of New Religions, Inc. encounter the lwa as fellow participants alongside humans in Vodou's ceremonial life, and like the worshippers with whom they interact, they have individual preferences for particular fashions and their own sexual identities. In addition, Vodou en Vogue is unusual among scholarly texts because of the degree to which its author and her experiences are a key primary source. Unlike typical scholarship, which tends to appear as argument based on ostensibly objective data collected by dispassionate scholars, Nwokocha's text blends the traditional scholarship of a participant–observer with elements of memoir. One could be forgiven for assuming that an ethnographical text dedicated in large part to the ways sartorial expression shapes interpersonal and human–divine relationships in Vodou ritual would be weighed down with jargon. With the exception of short portions of the work that define and contextualize terms like spiritual vogue and seek to apply Judith Casselberry's taxonomy (2017) regarding labors of faith to the negotiatory work required for the successful operation of Manbo Maude's Vodou temples, Nwokocha's work is anything but difficult to follow. While Vodou en Vogue's semiformal approach to its subject sometimes allows readers to lose track of its key themes, its emphasis on the personal stories of informants and the author makes it easy to follow, regardless of one's scholarly background or lack thereof. Moreover, tales like those of Nwokocha shopping for fabric with Manbo Maude, finding herself strapped for cash during her first ethnographic trip to Haiti, and learning in a rather uncomfortable way that her assumptions about Black solidarity were faulty, are some of the most insightful portions of the book. In sum, Vodou en Vogue is not what the average scholar would expect to find in examination of the interactions of material culture and community in an African diasporic religion. Indeed, when I initially read the subtitle, I expected to encounter something akin to a Haitian and American application of the arguments of Suzanne Preston Blier's African Vodun: Art, Psychology, and Power (1996), which examines the ways in which Benin Vodun practitioners physically make their deities. What I found was more reminiscent of Karen McCarthy Brown's Mama Lola (1991). Vodou en Vogue is an engaging study of how one Haitian American manbo navigates her faith and followers through fashion. Jeffrey E. Anderson, University of Louisiana–Monroe The Politics of Sacred Places: A View from Israel–Palestine. By Nimrod Luz. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023. 223 pages. 115. 00 hardcover; ebook available. Nimrod Luz, the author of this fascinating book, is a Jewish Israeli academic who situates himself at the theoretical crossroads of the disciplines of geography, anthropology, and religious studies in order to NR-27-4Text. indd 112 NR-27-4Text. indd 112 5/9/24 3: 33 PM 5/9/24 3: 33 PM Reviews Copyright © 2024 Association for the Academic Study of New Religions, Inc. 113 assess the ways in which sacred space impinges on the perspectives of Muslims, Christians and Jews living in Israel. He attempts, in his own words, to "present balanced, highly informed, and theoretically sound research on the politics of the sacred" (16). A relationship of trust with Muslim and Christian communities in Israel was not easy for him to achieve. In the course of his research, he was referred to as "a Zionist, an orientalist. . . and even a suspected collaborator or informer of Israeli security forces" (17). He shares with us his extensive fieldwork in a number of rural and urban settings in order to present the often- highly- conflictual political and social implications of the attempted (re) establishment of sacred spaces by Israeli non- Jewish communities. In rural Galilee, Luz presents the Maqam Abu al- Hijja, the traditional tomb of a Kurdish Muslim warrior in the army of Saladin (twelfth century). He then analyzes a Galilean Christian shrine at the birthplace of Saint Mariam Bawardy (1846–1878, canonized 2015). In his narrative, he carefully draws our attention to the interconnections between the spatial and the political. He also offers an analysis as to why both these shrines remain local and obscure, in the. . .
Ira Robinson (Wed,) studied this question.