As a new resident of Togo in 1985, Judy Rosenthal witnessed her
first Gorovodu trance ritual. Over the next eleven years, she
studied this voodoo in West Africa's Ewe populations of coastal
Ghana, Togo, and Benin, an area once called the Slave Coast. The
result is Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo, an
ethnography of spirit possession that focuses on law and morality
in "medecine Vodu" orders. Gorovodu is not a doctrinal set, but
rather a lingusitic, moral, and spiritual community, with both real
and imagined aspects.
In medecine Vodu possession, the deities evoked are spirits of
"bought people" from the savanna regions, slaves who worked for
southern coastal lineages, often marrying into Ewe families.
Drumming and dancing rituals, replete with voluptuous trances and
gender reversals, bring these "foreign" spirits back into Ewe
communities to protect worshippers, heal the sick and troubled,
arbitrate disputes, and enjoy themselves as they did before they
died. (Rosenthal employs Bakhtin's theory of carnival to interpret
the openly festive element of Gorovodu.) The changeable nature of
the religion echoes the lack of boundaries of the Gorovodu family
and the residents' belief that communal and individual identity are
fluid rather than fixed. Numerous name changes early in this
century indicated a strategy for resisting colonial control.
Writing from a background of anthropology, Rosenthal carefully
monitors her own role as narrator in the book, aware of the
cultural distance between her and the Africans she is writing
about. She intends this ethnography to mirror the "texts" of voodoo
itself, a body of signifiers and meanings with which the reader
must interact in order to make sense of it.
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