I see now, more clearly than I did during 12 years of labor on it, that my book Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn is the product of unconventional methods of anthropological research and writing. Published by the University of California Press last year, the book weaves stories of Mama Lola’s ancestors together with ethnographic narratives that are woven, in turn, from my own scholarly and personal voices and from several of Mama Lola’s voices, including those of six Vodou spirits who routinely possess her.
I did not set out to do experimental fieldwork, nor, when I was writing, did I see myself as jumping into the middle of a postmodernist debate on ethnography. Yet now that the book is done and I can afford the luxury of sticking my head up and surveying the wider terrain, I see that I did flout some of the conventions of anthropological fieldwork. I also have become involved, willy-nilly, in the current spirited debate about what we anthropologists -- mostly white Euro-Americans -- are doing when we write about those whom scholars sometimes call “the Other.”
Contemporary critics argue that the greater social power of the researcher overwhelms the subject and that ethnographic texts are, by default, little more than fictions, revealing more about the culture and the preoccupations of the writer than about those of the people being studied. Mama Lola enters this debate in two ways: First, by deliberate attention to the power issues between Mama Lola and me, and second, by an implicit claim that more extended, intimate, and committed contact between researcher and subject can undercut the colonial mindset of much anthropological writing.
I met Alourdes (the name that I usually use to address Moma Lola) in the summer of 1978. She was then in her mid-40’s and had immigrated from Haiti in 1963. I was 10 years younger and the great-granddaughter of European immigrants. On the surface, we were very different. By the time I reached my mid-20’s, I had my first college teaching job; at the same age, Alourdes was living in the squalor of Port-au-Prince, raising two children on her own, and, when there was no other way to feed them, resorting to prostitution. Yet, ironically, when we met, we shared a sense of upward mobility. A member of the first college-educated generation in my family, I had recently received my Ph.D. and had taken a position on the faculty of Drew University. Alourdes by that time owned her home and was firmly ensconced as the head of a lively, three-generational household.
She also was working full-time as a Vodou priestess, a vocation requiring the combined skills of priest, social worker, herbalist, and psychotherapist. Three generations of healers in her family had preceded her, but she was the first family member to muster the financial resources needed to pay for the elaborate initiation rituals that make the role official.
When we were introduced, I was living in a loft in SoHo, an artists’ district in lower Manhattan. Alourdes’s home, where she also held regular Vodou ceremonies and consulted daily with individual clients, was a small row house in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn. The social distance between us was great, but the geographic distance small. Her house and the Vodou world she inhabited were a mere 20 minutes by car from my front door.
Something clicked between Alourdes and me, although I cannot say that we liked or trusted one another right away. Perhaps it was just that each of us sensed in the other someone who could extend and challenge our world. She seemed a formidable person, strong and moody. One moment she was electric, filled with charm; the next, dour and withdrawn. I, no doubt, appeared overly polite and overly white.
For a while, we engaged in a formal little dance. I stopped by her house to visit frequently and brought her small gifts; she usually offered me coffee and took the time to sit and talk with me. Sometimes she invited me to ceremonies. I was utterly fascinated by her charismatic priestcraft and by the intimate and familial style of ritualizing that was so different from what I had seen during the years I worked on Vodou in large, urban temples in Haiti. Despite my fascination, I mostly hovered on the edge of the crowd at Alourdes’s “birthday parties” for the spirits. Sometimes when she went into a trance, the Vodou spirit “riding” her would seek me out to give advice or blessing. Later I found out that one or two regulars at these events objected to my white presence and suggested that I was a spy from the immigration office. Alourdes reportedly answered that no one could tell her how to choose her friends.
After a few months, I offered to help Alourdes with ritual preparations. I ran errands, helped to cook the ritual meal, and lent a hand constructing the altar that is the focal point of each Vodou ceremony. Our friendship grew through intimacies shared in the midst of routine work as well as through stronger bonds forged in the midst of life crises. Her son got in trouble with the law, and she turned to me for help; I went through a divorce and felt grateful for her support, which often took the form of offers of ritual healing. Soon a friendship developed that blurred and confused our previous roles of academic researcher and representative Vodou priestess. These days she calls me her “daughter,” and, when I am not able to spend holidays with my biological family, I am more likely to celebrate them at her house than anywhere else.
As our friendship grew, participating in her religion felt like a natural step. I did not tumble into it in reaction to a life crisis; I chose to participate in Vodou for a mix of professional and personal reasons that I will never untangle. The single clear feeling was a powerful need to understand what Vodou was about, what it had to offer those who turned to it in times of trouble. My own attitude was very much like Alourdes’s when she offered to let me kouche (literally, lie down or sleep) -- in other words, to participate in healing ceremonies that also function as rites of initiation into Vodou. “Try it,” she said. “See if it work for you.”
And it did work. Vodou gave me a rich, unblinkingly honest view of life that has been one of several resources that I have drawn on in the last decade or so to sort out life’s problems. Participating in rituals and deciding to offer myself as a candidate for healing have given me valuable insights into how Vodou works, insights that strengthened my book considerably.
Yet my academic colleagues have raised questions. Have I lost my objectivity? Has my friendship with Alourdes biased my account of her family history, her daily life, and her spirituality? Has my participation in Vodou colored the way in which I present the religion? The answer to all these questions is a qualified Yes, although that doesn’t disturb me as much as some of my colleagues wish that it did.
The analogy commonly drawn between anthropology and the natural sciences has ceased to be helpful to me. While I still care about factuality and freedom from bias, those standards are no longer the most demanding ones for my work. Over the years I have come to understand anthropological fieldwork as something closer to a social art form than a social science. It involves a particular type of human relationship, yet one that is subject to all the complexities and ambiguities of any other kind of human interaction. This conception of fieldwork does not mean that no standards are applicable; they simply are different from the traditional ones. Truth telling and justice, for example, seem to be more fitting criteria than the canons of scientific research.
In relation to Mama Lola, truth telling not only required enough care and persistence to get the facts straight, but also enough self-awareness and self-disclosure to allow readers to see my point of view (another term for bias) and make their own judgments about it. Because I believe that a writer’s perspective is more than a collection of facts that can be listed in an introduction and then forgotten, I chose to present myself as a character in the story, interacting with Alourdes. The challenge was to do this enough to reveal the way in which I relate to her without turning the book into a story about me.
A standard of truthfulness also demanded that I tell as complete a story as possible, including all the complexities, without boring or confusing readers. In other words, telling the truth required me to perform an intellectual-aesthetic balancing act in which the order and clarity of abstraction were placed in tension with the dense tangle of lived experience.
Justice, which like truth telling can never be fully achieved, was an even more challenging criterion of scholarship in this case. I felt compelled to do justice to Alourdes and to her world in my writing. Both moral and aesthetic judgments came into play, for example, in choosing the telling detail or the revelatory incident designed to capture definitive aspects of her life.
Justice as a goal in my relationship with Alourdes has meant, among other things, that I could not exploit her, misrepresent my intentions, or turn away from her once I had what I needed. Financial obligations, like those of time and energy, could not be limited to what was necessary to grease the flow of information for the book. A true friendship is not over just because a writing project is done. So she will share the profits from the book with me, and, when she cannot meet a mortgage payment or raise the money for a trip to Haiti, I expect to continue to contribute.
It has not always been easy for me to negotiate the responsibilities that I have accepted as a result of Alourdes’s gift of friendship, but I would not have it any other way. Despite her limited reading and writing skills, Alourdes helped to keep me truthful and just while writing Mama Lola. When I was tempted to soft-pedal information that I feared might embarrass her (for example, her prostitution), she pushed me: “You got to put that in the book. Because that’s the truth. Right? Woman got to do all kinda thing. Right? I do that to feed my children. I’m not ashame.” The nature of anthropological fieldwork changes in situations of cultural mixing where the subject has her own vision of the project and her own views on the standards to which it should be held accountable.
I could not have written Mama Lola if Alourdes had not challenged me, trusted me, and become my friend. Through our friendship, we have served scholarship’s end of deepened understanding, in this case by showing Vodou at work in the intimate details of one person’s life. We both hope that our risk taking will help to counter the distorted image of this ancient religion.
Karen McCarthy Brown is professor of the sociology and anthropology of religion in the Graduate and Theological Schools of Drew University.