FREE MAMA LOLA: A VODOU PRIESTESS IN BROOKLYN BY KAREN MCCARTHY BROWN PDF BookRags | 9781628505757 | | | | | Ethnography Review: Mama Lola (Brown ) | Mobian Anthropologist Very informative on probably the most misunderstood religion on the planet. The author gives cultural and historical context to the religion. However, the book veers back and forth between academic Karen McCarthy Brown. 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 decade-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 Mama Lola's daughter Maggie, a recent initiate and the designated heir to her Brooklyn-based healing practice. 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 Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown, and the Vodou spirits. Mama Lola is also an important experiment in feminist ethnographic writing designed to address current questions in the field. Brown begins with the assumption that ethnography is not so much a science as a social art form rooted in human relationships, and as such it is open to moral and aesthetic questions as well as to those more routinely addressed to it. Weaving several of her own voices--analytic, descriptive, and personal--with the voices of her Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown in alternate chapters of straightforward ethnography and ethnographic fiction, Brown presents herself as a character in Mama Lola's world and allows the reader to evaluate her interactions there. Mama Lola's story thus rises from a chorus of equally authoritative voices. 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. A broad range of general readers and scholars will find insights and new understandings in this startlingly original work. Raise That Womans Petticoat. Ogou 93 4 Ogou. Joseph Binbin Mauvant. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn - Karen McCarthy Brown - Google книги Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge cover. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Karen McCarthy Brown's classic book shatters stereotypes of Vodou by offering an intimate portrait of African-based religion in everyday life. She explores the importance of women's religious practices along with related themes of family and of social change. Weaving several of her own voices--analytic, descriptive, and personal--with the voices of her subjects in alternat Karen McCarthy Brown's classic book shatters stereotypes of Vodou by offering an intimate portrait of African-based religion in everyday life. Weaving several of her own voices--analytic, descriptive, and personal--with the voices of her subjects in alternate chapters of traditional ethnography and ethnographic fiction, Brown presents herself as a character in Mama Lola's world and allows the reader to evaluate her interactions there. Startlingly original, Brown's work endures as an important experiment in ethnography as a social art form rooted in human relationships. A new preface, epilogue, bibliography, and a collection of family photographs tell the story of the effect of the book's publication on Mama Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown life. Get A Copy. PaperbackUpdated and Expanded Editionpages. More Details Original Title. Other Editions 7. Friend Reviews. To see what your friends thought of this book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Mama Lolaplease sign up. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 3. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. The author was writing her PhD thesis on Voudou and over ten years grew close to Mama Lola, Alourdes, the mambo - priestess of her local Haitian community. It's a very well-rounded book, with as much about Mama Lola and her family and parishioners as about the lwa - the spirits and gods - rituals and ceremonies performed. It's an interesting religion concerned more with the here and now than creation and after-life. Some rituals sound like shaministic magic until you think them through. One favo The author was writing her PhD thesis on Voudou and over ten years grew Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown to Mama Lola, Alourdes, the mambo - priestess of her local Haitian community. One favoured 'treatment' is the aromatic bath of herbs and other materials, which sticks to the skin for up to three days. What brings back memories faster and more intensely than smell? You only have to have a whiff of something you haven't smelled in years for it to take you back to that moment. Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown is a psychological base to most of the curative rituals, it isn't just a 'placebo' effect. In Haiti, but not Brooklyn, the religion which has become syncretised with Catholicsm, serves a quite different purpose. Haitians have been ruled by greedy dictators and an unbelievably rich upper class that employs private 'armies' to protect their interests since the time of their freedom. Their only means of political protest is to be 'possessed' by a spirit, to be the 'horse' of that god, put on the accoutrements, top hat, dress, whatever, and take to the streets to say whatever they like. They are not responsible, it is the gods speaking. No one, not even the worst dictator, would dare to the stop them being as they too are adherents of the religion. There is a twist at the end of the book, a very, very annoying twist. Karen McCarthy Brown, this PhD anthropologist of religion, journeys to Haiti and becomes an initiate and then a mambo herself. As a priestess she feels unable to give away any of the 'inner' secrets of voudoo and there the book ends. Read inreviewed 26 May and the book lost none of his power during those intervening years. View 2 comments. Feb 22, Bill rated it it was amazing Shelves: comparative-religion. Walking between the worlds Karen McCarthy Brown has penned a masterpiece! Mama Lola, known to family and friends as Alourdes, is a Mambo, an initiated priestess of Voudou Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown earns a modest living by serving her immigrant countrymen in America as a traditional healer and by conducting Haitian Voudou rites in her Brooklyn home. InBrown, then a professor of religion at New Jersey's Drew University first encountered Mama Lola while doing an ethnographic survey of the local Haitian population. Intrigued by the priestess and her misunderstood and maligned tradition, Brown became at first a friend, then a member of Mama Lola's extended family and finally an enthusiastic participant in many of the rites that comprise the corpus of Voudoun devotional life. Mama Lola, her daughter Maggie, their children and their ancestors, and the 'Lwa' spirits who frequently 'possess' them are an engaging, wonderfully diverse crowd: deeply spiritual, profoundly thoughtful and often humorous characters marvelously skilled in surviving conditions of extreme deprivation and oppression and in adapting to the conditions of life or, afterlife in the strange world of urban America. By the time I had completed this delightful book, I felt myself deeply involved in Mama Lola's life and that of her extended family. Brown's writing is Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown and a pleasure to read. The author goes far out on a limb, leaving her observer role and social scientist expertise and becomes an initiate into the religion, wedding the 'etic' of academia to the 'emic' of an ecstatic, profoundly sensual, Earth-centered religiosity. The arrangement of the text adds to Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn by Karen McCarthy Brown readability, with odd chapters offering stories about Mama Lola's family and heritage and even chapters devoted to the pantheon of lwa spirits of the Voudou tradition. A glossary of Voudou terms has been added, which is indispensible to readers new to the subject. Students and scholars of Haiti, the African Diaspora and African religious traditions will enjoy and benefit from this work immensely. I recommend it as well to the general public for a most worthwhile reading adventure. Jul 21, Pamela rated it it was amazing. This is an extraordinary book. In this account, she is part anthropologist and part friend. Mama Lola comes off as an utterly real person: temperamental, sometimes unkind, but a woman of great gifts and insight. Her grown daughter too is "coming up" in the line of family mambos. Brown also does a good job of conveying what life is like for Haitian emigre This is an extraordinary book. Brown also does a good job of conveying what life is like for Haitian emigres still half connected to the country of their birth or their parents' birth and half absorbed into American society. The Vodou religion is widely misrepresented and misunderstood outside of Haiti and even inside itand this book, with its mix of anecdote, history, folk tale, travel narrative, and accounts of actual Vodou rituals the author underwent her own initiation but does not describe that here, as the details of that are considered sacred brought me far closer to understanding than any other that I've consulted.