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Black Magic: Religion and the African-American Conjuring Tradition. By Yvonne P. Chireau. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2003.222 pp. Illus. £22.95 (hbk). ISBN 0-520-20987-7
Magic and religion are closely interwoven in African-American cultural traditions. Although magical practices and ideas were certainly not identical with black American religious beliefs and institutions, they operated as counterparts to each other. Both have engaged with spiritual issues and with the sense of forces and powers beyond people's immediate, empirical realities. Particularly in local vernacular cultures, magical spiritual traditions such as Conjure, Hoodoo, and root working have coexisted with Christianity as part of a general moral and conceptual framework. Within this framework, the somewhat arbitrary categories of religion and magic have included cultural forms and practices that are remarkable historically for their complementarity rather than their opposition or incompatibility.
This is how Yvonne Chireau approaches the phenomenon of conjuring. She considers the prevalence of supernatural traditions in African-American experience and their eclectic sources, beginning with slavery and racial subjugation, and then moving to the indigenous religions of the western and central regions of sub-Saharan Africa from which black slaves were taken. She clearly resists any notion of an unbroken, essentialised African lineage, seeing such traditions as a variable intermixing of older cosmologies and newer spiritual conceptions. The newer elements in these traditions derived mainly from white society and were largely of immigrant European origin....