Judy Rosenthal is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of Michigan--Flint.
Review
"I was enthralled by this book and that, I believe, is not something that often happens to a reader of
ethnography. There is a marvelous simplicity and honesty in this very sophisticated text that could only have come
from prolonged fieldwork and the loving care of the people among whom Rosenthal dwelt-not to mention the magic
of the spirits themselves."
--Michael Taussig, Columbia University
University of Chicago Press Web Site, October, 2000
Summary
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.
