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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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"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
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