Lola

Description

By Karen McCarthy Brown

An intimate portrait of Haitian Vodou as it is actually practised, built around Mama Lola, a Vodou priestess in Brooklyn, and her family.

Brown alternates conventional ethnography with narrative chapters, and places herself in the account rather than pretending to observe from nowhere. The book is a study of women’s religious practice, of family, and of what a religion does for people living through displacement.

First published 1991