Book Review

Possession, Ecstasy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo is a fascinating account of the cosmology and practice of two Vodu possession cults, Gorovodu and Mama Tchamba, whose members reside in coastal Togo, Ghana, and the Bight of Benin. Both religious orders practice "ecstatic spirit possession, out of which come law and a moral code," but also "an interpretation of life on the Bight of Benin (once called the Slave Coast), fueled by histories of north-south relationships and memories of slavery" (1). Rosenthal's ethnography reveals the meanings of personhood, gender, and slavery in two communities about whom western scholars had previously known very little. In addition, she provides an erudite and perceptive account of the ways in which ritual serves "structure and anti-structure" (223). Building upon past research on trance and possession by anthropologists and psychologists and occasionally referencing cultural studies and literary texts, Rosenthal embarks on a journey to understand and to portray vividly the ecstatic condition as an experience of mimesis and "the Real," a state in which the possessed can neither "represent" nor "speak in normal voice" (3, 4).	1
In the Ewe village of "Dogbeda," Togo, daily life is a struggle to provide families with food and cash, to keep healthy, to please one's neighbors, to attend to the needs of the gods, to live by moral and ethical codes, and to evolve as a person. Arguing that the Ewe concept of personhood is particularly "modern" or even "post-modern" in its "consciousness of its own fragmentation" (31), Rosenthal demonstrates that a person is a complex work in progress, a product of the interplay of human endeavor and spiritual activity. Each life history is unique, "grasped through its participation in other lives, communities, histories, Vodu components, reincarnation souls, and Afa signs (divination life-texts)" (2). Moreover "gender" is similarly complex and fluid: " . . . gender is not of a piece with genes in most Vodu life but is a movable festival of signs, whereby wives can be men, goddesses can be husbandly, and anybody can dance with anybody" (11).	2
Rosenthal's comprehensive description of the Gorovodu and Mama Tchamba pantheon is impressive. As in Haitian Vodun, the pantheon is very extensive and each deity commands a litany of services and sacrifices. From these gods come some of the "law" to which Vodu followers adhere. In addition, "law" emanates from Afa divination, a geomantic system comprised of 256 major and 240 minor signs to guide everyday activities, health and mental well-being, and significant life decisions and events. Afa includes songs, legends, incantations, and plants and animals associated totemically with different signs and carrying dietary restrictions. The knowledge that comes from participating in divination is power—power over choices and over life—but knowledge also brings interdictions (186). Thus Vodu and Afa followers choose "law" when they adhere to prescribed regimes for proper living. The gift for living according to law is the ecstasy that comes with possession by the appreciative gods.	3
Rosenthal's theoretical play with the symbolic binary oppositions that are central to Ewe culture and social structure—male and female, husband and wife, north and south, divinity and worshiper, and slave and master—gives the work thematic consistency. She shows how each term in any set eventually collapses into the other. For example, it is not only Ewe persons who are always "becoming" even as they "become undone": ritual itself presumes transformation into "the other." As Rosenthal explains, possession ceremonies are:	4
. . . paths for becoming Foreign Others—for turning into what one (and one's group) is most radically not—and that this radical becoming, or overcoming of difference, is ecstatic, practiced because of its marvelous nature. . . . In Gorovodu there is no beginning or end to anything. Instead, there is redistribution of power, identity, and the bits and pieces of matter that go with (sometimes compose, represent or symbolize) various nexuses of being. (30, 47)
In other words, while earlier anthropologists held that rituals were mechanisms for sustaining community order and controlling social life, Rosenthal argues instead that Vodu both creates and destroys structure, at times promoting ambiguity and rapture, rather than order and restraint.
In addition to elucidating the meanings of personhood, gender, and ritual, two chapters of the book provide insights into Ewe slavery, a system that lacked the concept of "master" in relation to "slave" and never treated slaves as "property." Instead, "bought people," like family members, were under the authority of the head of the household. Oftentimes slaves or their descendants married into the families for whom they worked. Today, members of the Mama Tchamba order are in debt to these former slaves. In yet another ritual of reversal, former slaves are now divinities and the descendants of their owners are willing hosts.	5
Rosenthal's understanding of "law" is pluralistic, like that of the Ewe people themselves. According to her glossary, the Ewe words for law are se, ese, or Se. The terms refer to "law of any kind, including Vodu law, Afa law, regional customary law, official state law; Se is capitalized as destiny or deity" (265). However, Rosenthal is primarily interested in "law" expressed in Vodu and in divination and less so with "law" that is the subject and object of juridical practice. She acknowledges that she does not "fully address the relationship of Gorovodu to state power and political struggle " (33), although her foray into the history of these religious groups suggests that earlier Vodu cults sometimes resisted particular colonial authorities and arrangements. Nevertheless, how law functions of and for the state, and as another system of power, domination, and resistance, remains largely unexplored. Moreover, similarities and differences that occur within and between different dispute resolution forums, presided over by Vodu priests, village chiefs, and government officials, receive only slight attention. This lack of a systematic account of the dynamics between village, Vodu, and state forms of social control is a limitation of the book for students of law and society research. Rosenthal also leaves unresolved a contradiction that implicates the need to attend to the state. On the one hand, she claims that the Ewe "have never organized states" and "continually flow across Ghanaian and Togolese and Beninese borders as though state lines did not exist." On the other, she notes that other Ewe people are trying to "build democratic state institutions in Togo" (nn. 10, 260) and that the "political police" (15) forced Rosenthal to flee the country!	6
Finally, Rosenthal's complicated introduction, which assumes some familiarity with theoretical work in cultural anthropology, and her very brief introduction to Togo, which does not give readers a sense of place in the same way that they come to appreciate a sense of person, may give some historians reason to pause before assigning the book for classroom use. Still, Possession, Ecstacy, and Law in Ewe Voodoo achieves its goal of bringing elegantly to light the worldview and ritual practices of fascinating people. It makes compelling reading for students in anthropology, comparative religion, gender, African studies, and the sociology of slavery.	7
Mindie Lazarus-Black University of Illinois at Chicago

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