Mama Lola

1. Mama Lola • An ethnographic spiritual biography. • A spiritual biography = focuses on the life and religious practices of Mama Lola, a vodou priestess living in Brooklyn, NY. • An ethnography = provides a full picture of the cultural context of Mama Lola’s life, both in the US, and in Haiti.

2. The Sprits • Speak eloquently through the priestess’s body. • Address the problems and suffering of ordinary human beings.

3. Oral History • Stories told about Mama Lola’s spiritual ancestors = one of the most important sources of Brown’s anthropological insights.

4. Anthropological interpretation seeks to make meaning out of the meaning-making of others.

5. “Who gets to speak and from what perspective?” = Answered • Hearing and giving room (in the ethnography) to the different voices present in fieldwork context. • Style of writing = central in new forms of anthropological representation. • New forms address issues of authorship + responsibility toward research participants, readers, and the profession.

6. Turn to the person sitting next to you and talk about = authorship in writing and in storytelling. • Express your thoughts on Brown’s solution to the dilemma: whose authorship is being represented in the book?

7. Mama Lola’s oral performances of family history • Not only entertainment. • An evocation aimed at a particular existential knot in family life. • Illustrate emotions, feelings, advice and tales of caution about what is important in life.

8. Brown undertook initiation in Haitian vudou practices: • Twofold shift: • Change in the status of her relationship with Alourdes = friendship developed. • Change in her role as a scholar = Brown questioned her role as a detached observer whose goal was to describe reality scientifically.

9. Gains and risks involved in this shift: • Gains = depth of understanding. • Risks = losing distinction between the meaning of vodou for Haitian practitioners and for the ethnographer.

10. Academy has overemphasized those things that separate individuals and cultures from one another.

11. Alourdes makes connections all the time • As a form of cultural and social survival in Brooklyn. • As a way of enacting a Haitian ethos that works on the assumption of connection. • Alourdes is not afraid of incorporating elements from other cultures into her own worldview. • Haitian tradition emphasizes the importance of extended family relations.

12. Routine Culture Mixing

13. Interpretive Anthropology • Study how people themselves create meaning and interpret objects and events in their lives.

14. Mama Lola • This ethnographic study in particular is an interpretation within one cultural tradition (North America), of the interpretations of Haitians, who follow a very different cultural aesthetic.

15. Vodou Religion • People in Haiti don’t live out their religion in an unreflective, formulaic way. • They struggle with it. • Religion is deeply embedded in peoples’ everyday lives.

16. Please turn to your neighbour and discuss the meaning of food in the context of Vodou.