Vodún: Secrecy and the Search for Divine Power (Contemporary Ethnography) - Hardcover

Landry, Timothy R.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0812250745 ISBN 13: 9780812250749

Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018

Synopsis

Tourists to Ouidah, a city on the coast of the Republic of Bénin, in West Africa, typically visit a few well-known sites of significance to the Vodún religion—the Python Temple, where Dangbé, the python spirit, is worshipped, and King Kpasse's sacred forest, which is the seat of the Vodún deity known as Lokò. However, other, less familiar places, such as the palace of the so-called supreme chief of Vodún in Bénin, are also rising in popularity as tourists become increasingly adventurous and as more Vodún priests and temples make themselves available to foreigners in the hopes of earning extra money.

Timothy R. Landry examines the connections between local Vodún priests and spiritual seekers who travel to Bénin—some for the snapshot, others for full-fledged initiation into the religion. He argues that the ways in which the Vodún priests and tourists negotiate the transfer of confidential, sacred knowledge create its value. The more secrecy that surrounds Vodún ritual practice and material culture, the more authentic, coveted, and, consequently, expensive that knowledge becomes. Landry writes as anthropologist and initiate, having participated in hundreds of Vodún ceremonies, rituals, and festivals.

Examining the role of money, the incarnation of deities, the limits of adaptation for the transnational community, and the belief in spirits, sorcery, and witchcraft, Vodún ponders the ethical implications of producing and consuming culture by local and international agents. Highlighting the ways in which racialization, power, and the legacy of colonialism affect the procurement and transmission of secret knowledge in West Africa and beyond, Landry demonstrates how, paradoxically, secrecy is critically important to Vodún's global expansion.

About this title

About the Author:

Timothy R. Landry teaches anthropology and religious studies at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

Review:

"A sensitive, nuanced account that captures the joys and struggles of ethnographic inquiry, Vodún reads as both a personal narrative of apprenticeship in Beninois Vodún ritual and a thick description of informants' discourses, life histories, and religious worldviews."—Douglas J. Falen, Agnes Scott College

"In Vodún, Tim Landry skillfully weaves narrative and analysis to craft an engaging and powerful book on the play of traditional religious practice in our transnational world. In this superb work Landry not only refines our comprehension of contemporary Vodún but also underscores the centrality of secrecy in religious practices. Based upon a long and complicated apprenticeship among Vodún practitioners in Benin, Landry's path breaking work is a model for doing the anthropology of religion in the twenty-first century."—Paul Stoller, 2013 Anders Retzius Gold Medal Laureate in Anthropology

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0812250745
• ISBN 13: 9780812250749
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 216