Spirit Service

"Perhaps no religion has been more maligned and misrepresented than Vodu, Vodún, Vaudou, or Voodoo.  Spirit Service engages the top scholars of Vodún in the world to capture the diversity and vitality of this quintessential African religion in a single volume, while at the same time offering a timely and vigorous counternarrative and testament to the Black religious imagination in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas. Indeed, Spirit Service is a tour de force in scale and scope, examining themes as important as they are riveting—art, performance, ritual, healing, resistance, funerary rights. Each treatment captures a complexity of the whole that is Vodún—highlighting the profound ways in which this religion has continued to adapt, rebuild, and reclaim all that is African religion. A must-read for students of African studies, history, religious studies, anthropology, and performance studies."—Nwando Achebe, Jack and Margaret Sweet Endowed Professor of History, Michigan State University

"The religious systems known as Vodu, Vodún, Vaudou, Voodoo, Gorovodu, and more have never been so thoroughly explored, interpreted, interrogated, and esteemed as by the writers of this lavish collection. The fourteen chapters in this volume provide extraordinarily diverse descriptions and narratives that allow readers to understand in abundant detail how Vodún (etc.) is not a single religion, but rather a vast global proliferation of sacred beliefs and practices that are in many ways related to one another, yet significantly different from place to place and through different historical periods. Readers will appreciate not only the diversity of forms and intentions of spirit service, but also that of the writers' relationships to their subjects, their closeness to the rituals or their more scientific distance, their identification (or not) with the community they study, their attention to performance, passion, aesthetics, rapture; and finally to political issues, class and race, state intervention, colonialism and its violence. This collection is an excellent and necessary addition to anthropology, history, and religious studies courses on Haiti, Voodoo in the U.S., African cultures, world religions, religious ritual and performance, art, and more."—Judy Rosenthal, Professor Anthropology Emeritus, University of Michigan, Flint

"An impressive overview of Beninese Vodún and Haitian Vodou, this volume explores their various manifestations on both sides of the Atlantic. The essays in this anthology examine Vodún and Vodou's common history, their integration in their respective communities, their encounter with Christianity and Islam, and their remarkable adaptability to various social and economic changes. The Middle Passage and chattel slavery, and of late the migration of Vodún and Vodou to many parts of the world has transformed their sacred traditions to produce a multiverse of symbolic forms and has altered their beliefs and ritual practices. The authors examine the current forms of Vodún and Vodou as well as their continuity and discontinuity with their past. Vital for historians of religion, anthropologists, sociologists, and political scientists, this book is likely to be an authoritative collection of essays and an important resource for scholarly research for years to come."—Leslie G. Desmangles, Professor Religious Studies Emeritus, Trinity College