Conjure in African American Society.

Conjure in African American Society. By Jeffrey E. Anderson. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Pp. xvi, 230. $39.95, ISBN 0-8071-3092-3.)

Conjure in African American Society brings attention to the world of black American magic, a topic that Jeffrey E. Anderson argues has been neglected by historians and other academics. Drawing largely from secondary sources, Anderson examines the significance of the African American supernatural practices that are known variously as hoodoo, voodoo, mojo, and tricking in order to rectify scholarly neglect and to "return hoodoo to most Americans' conception of black society" (p. 23). Marginalized by intellectuals and elites, conjure is unfamiliar to many white Americans despite its persistence as a powerful force in black life and culture.

According to Anderson, conjure falls somewhere between religion and folk belief. It is not a religion, strictly speaking, for it lacks the developed theology of most syncretic faiths, focusing instead on practical objectives. These objectives--including physical healing and empowerment, sexual coercion, aggression, and self-defense--cast conjure as a medium of social relations for African American practitioners from its earliest appearance in colonial America to the present day, when it has profited from contact with such disparate forces as New Age spirituality and religious commercialism. Although it later became ubiquitous in scope, Anderson notes that conjure practices originated in two quite distinctive cultural zones in the South: areas settled by Anglo-Europeans along the Atlantic coast and the Latin cultural areas of the French and Spanish colonial settlements. Ethnic factors, demographic variations, and religious influences helped to shape conjure and to provide the distinctive flavors by which African-based magic became known. Although conjure's foundation stands firmly upon indigenous African sources, the building blocks of the tradition are both European and Native American.

Although acknowledging some earlier works, Anderson fails to offer much original information in this study. The book, which contains a lengthy literature review, illustrations, and an appended note on sources and methodology, bears the signs of a hastily revised dissertation. Anderson offers no sustained historicizing of conjure on the ground, as it were, so as to delve deeper into his fine ethnographic sources or to situate the traditions in a narrative of local change and social transformation. The author's unfortunate conflation of New Orleans's voodoo and black American hoodoo does not do justice to the important divergences that occurred in the independent development of these traditions. Also missing is a theoretical analysis of conjure in any given moment. Anderson suggests that conjure is more than just magic, for over the course of its sojourn in America, it has served multiple purposes. Whether it has been viewed as ideology, pathology, folklore, commodity, or racial trope, there is good reason to believe that conjure's persistence and vitality can be attributed to its effacement of the unstable boundaries between religion, intellectual orientation, and popular belief. Without proper attention to questions of meaning and historical context, however, Conjure in African American Society does not make these traditions truly familiar to unfamiliar readers and thereby falls short of its stated goal.

YVONNE P. CHIREAU

Swarthmore College