In Voodoo: An African American Religion, Jeffrey Anderson attempts to collect and catalog the spirits, rituals, and practitioners of Voodoo in the Mississippi River Valley to serve two main arguments. First is that Voodoo, as practiced in this region, is an African American faith connected to other religions in the African diaspora like Haitian Vodou and those of West African nations like Benin. Anderson concedes that the Voodoo practitioners who are the book's subjects were “drawn from all segments of society,” but he contends that Voodoo is an African American tradition because, by the nineteenth century, white participants were “always described as being in the minority” (p. 6). Second, and most controversially, Anderson posits that after the mid-twentieth century, the religion of Voodoo ceased to exist as a living tradition. The broader faith—with its gods, ancestors, and other spirits—“flourished throughout the nineteenth century,” but “faded” during the early twentieth (p. 2).Much of Anderson's argument begins with philology, parsing the different variations of the words used to refer to the phenomena, practitioners, and spirits at the center of his study. Unlike many of his predecessors, Anderson starts by settling on the term Voodoo, as opposed to variants like Vaudou, used for traditions in West Africa, and Vodou, used for those in Haiti. Surprisingly, he also argues that “hoodoo”—a term that previous scholarship has used to denote magical practices distinct from religious worship—“came closer to describing the historical faith” he characterizes, because hoodoo speaks to both religious and magical practices (p. 4). Furthermore, Anderson asserts that Voodoo includes but is not limited to magic.Anderson's focus is just as geographically specific. He characterizes Voodoo as having developed in and around New Orleans in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. He claims that only in the Mississippi River Valley did these practices “preserve a name, a priesthood, and a complex system of communal rituals decades beyond emancipation” (p. 5). Anderson defines the Vodun practiced in West Africa's Bight of Benin as an ancestor of his American subject, along with forebears among the religions of Senegambia and West Central Africa. He posits that many of the elements that interacted to create Voodoo originated in these regions. He then uses the presence of Native Americans, French and Spanish colonials, Americans from the early United States, and Haitian émigrés in Louisiana as evidence that their religions and cultures also helped to form the building blocks of Voodoo.Anderson supports his assertions about African origins through comparisons of the deities mentioned by observers and practitioners in Louisiana to those throughout the African diaspora. The charts he has created to connect and categorize these spirits are probably the most useful example of diagramming in the field since Leslie Desmangles published Faces of the Gods (University of North Carolina Press, 1992). Anderson also makes distinctive use of interviews with contemporary practitioners of diasporic religions. He compares their impressions of these names and spirits and includes those musings with his own reading of characters listed in diverse sources that range from novels and newspapers of the 1800s to ethnographic interviews from the interwar period.Voodoo: An African American Religion is most compelling when Anderson details the similarities between ritual practitioners of the early twentieth century. While a number of monographs have previously mentioned New Orleans workers like Oscar Felix and Lala Hopkins, ironically, having black-and-white photos of them in Anderson's book may be the first time this kind of study has included images of these very colorful practitioners. The author admits that the boldest argument of the book—that Voodoo in this region died in the twentieth century—“depends less on evidence of continued existence than upon interpretation” (p. 8). Anderson does not dispute that there are still adherents of Voodoo in the Mississippi River Valley. But he contends that this contemporary faith “is best understood as a belief system that draws primarily from Haitian Vodou with a sizeable admixture of various other forms of African diasporic religion in an effort to reconstruct a lost faith” (p. 159). His position that Voodoo as practiced in twenty-first-century New Orleans is a blend of entrepreneurship and Haitian Vodou, rather than the descendant of a living tradition from the period preceding the 1940s, is most convincing when he marshals statements by contemporary priestesses in the city about their own initiations in Haiti rather than in New Orleans.Anderson is substantially less convincing when he dismisses the origins of priestesses born in New Orleans or references to “folk Voodoo” (p. 158) that they practiced even before Haitian initiations, which might detract from his central claim. Anderson's conclusions might also be more convincing if he delineated criteria for ranking the credibility of his sources. He seemingly grants as much weight to references pulled from George Washington Cable's nineteenth-century novels as he does to Federal Writers’ Project interviews done with flesh-and-blood practitioners in the 1930s.Despite any shortcomings, Voodoo: An African American Religion will undoubtedly persist as an important text in the field. The systematic and ordered comparisons between American, African, and Haitian rituals, spirits, and practitioners is extraordinarily illustrative, if not dispositive, of Anderson's argument. Similarly, the cataloging of the Louisiana-based priests and priestesses and the author's validation of them and their work and professionalism make this book's contribution to the historiography invaluable. As a bonus, the Appendix of chants, songs, and prayers stands as a charming and accessible reference that adds to the appeal and likely longevity of the text. For all of these reasons, Anderson's work is a significant contribution to the study of African diasporic religions.
Kodi A. Roberts (Thu,) studied this question.