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Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System. By Katrina Hazzard-Donald. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012. Pp. 248, 10 black-and-white photographs, 3 charts, notes, glossary, bibliography, index.)
In the past few decades, scholars have traced the roots and branches of the African spiritual experience in the New World. Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion (Oxford University Press, 2004), for example, places the religious systems of Africa alongside the primarily Protestant Christianity of African Americans in the southern United States during antebellum slavery, while demonstrating the distinct spiritual traditions shared by both systems. Katrina Hazzard- Donald's Mojo Workin' expands upon Raboteau's work and explores a system that has received intermittent scholarly attention: Hoodoo. HazzardDonald's conception of Hoodoo marks it firmly as a religion (hence, its capitalization in her text and this review), albeit a religion that flared up as an integrated system only briefly during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and then quickly segmented into distinct vernacular praxes. She does link the African American practice of Hoodoo with its African forebears, primarily through a set of criteria that she calls the African Religion Complex, but she then devotes the majority of the text to a general-if sometimes unfocused- study of Hoodoo's evolution on American soil. She pays particular attention to expressive elements such as dance, water immersion, divination, and naturopathic medicine, and interprets belief through the lens of folklore, such as the hero tales of "High John the Conquer" (pp. 68-83). She provides special critique of modern "marketeered" Hoodoo, which she believes to be an appropriative and abusive dilution of a rich religion into "snake-oil" sales and "Gypsy palm reading" (p. 119). Hazzard-Donald takes great pains to chart the historical course of Hoodoo while simultaneously attempting to understand its recent modes and its potential future.
Mojo Workin' is loosely divided into seven chapters with themes mostly distinct from one another, but occasionally blurred and...