AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF A VODU SHRINE IN SOUTHREN TOGO: OF SPIRIT, SLAVE, AND SEA - CHRISTIAN VANNIER & ERIC MONTGOMERY

Honesty in advertising. This book is certainly what it says it is, an ethnography of a shrine in southern Togo. As you might have gathered, I’m currently living in Togo so this book is of particular interest to me. Actually, in just a day after writing this I’m going to travel to Ouidah, a city in Benin, which serves as the spiritual headquarters of Vodun/Vodu, the religion discussed in this book. Actually, to get even more precise, there are dozens of types of Vodun/Vodu (as well as spellings of said name) and this book focuses on Gorovodu, and a particular shrine outside of Lome. Where I live is 100% Muslim so I don’t actually encounter this relgious expression in my day-to-day life but I’ve been fascinated by African Traditional Religions for some time. As an ethnography this thing is pretty good. I does a good job laying out the interplay of religion and the lives of the people they are observing and it does a good job not weighing itself down in theory-speak. Though, they do reference Bakhtin and the carnivalesque which, as far as I can tell from my experience reading ethnographies, is basically mandatory. Anthropologists love talking about the carnivalesque. I have my typical complaints about ethnographies, sometimes they seem to extrapolate too far from seeing one single thing, how integrated and knowledgeable can they be spending only a year or two in these communities, how well do they actually speak Ewe and thus understand what is being said to them, etc. The book also features a long section about the history and current political situation in Togo (and the ruling family’s alleged ties to Vodu) which I personally found quite interesting and am going to ask around about here. There are better books about Vodun as a whole, DIVINE HORSEMAN (tho, this is about it’s iteration in Haiti) comes to mind, but as an overview, this was quite engaging and good. The reportage on various ceremonies was compelling. The parts about how the legacy of slavery plays into the current religious practices were very compelling. Basically, the Ewe were both the victims and co-perpetrators of this genocide and largely stole slaves from up north (where I live now) so they have ceremonies to appease these spirits who are, quite obviously, pissed about what happened to them. It was interesting to learn that these ceremonies take on a sort of quasi-Islamic vibe since the North is considered to be largely Muslim and Islam is respected as a source of spiritual power, even if the Ewe don’t practice it themselves. It’s quite a strange dynamic. I’ll have to see how much of this I recognize when I’m in Ouidah in a few days. 256 Aya