Spiritual Merchants: Religion, Magic, and Commerce.

By Carolyn Morrow Long. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2001. Pp. xxx, 314. Paper, $19.00, ISBN 1-57233-110-0; cloth, $38.00, ISBN 1-57233-109-7.)

From colonial times to the present, African American spirituality has been attacked, stereotyped, and misunderstood. Africans who were brought to the New World practiced their ancestral faiths, even though the derivatives that emerged, such as Vodou, Santeria, conjure, and rootwork, were legally discouraged. The history of these practices and their merging in the New World amid changing interpretations, criminalization, and commodification are the subjects of Carolyn Morrow Long's Spiritual Merchants.

The spiritual products industry is the focus of the book's study of the origins, meaning, and practice of folk religion. In Long's view, "charms and spiritual products" are "artifacts within a cultural context" when understood on their own terms as "simply part of everyday life" (pp. xx-xxi). The roots of the religious faith Long describes emerged in the crucible of struggle. Although African slaves, European indentures, Native Americans, and other immigrants faced a hostile environment, they produced a unique spiritual legacy.

To untangle the origins of these peculiarly New World religious practices, Long did fieldwork across the country, visited over fifty outlets of the spiritual products industry, and conducted numerous interviews. She also used the work of Newbell Niles Puckett and Zora Neale Hurston, the Hampton Folklore Society, the Federal Writers' Project, and other sources. She makes great use of her material, particularly voluminous court records. Without blinking at the racial bias of the data, Long observes that rarely did the authorities reveal the names--or apparently even prosecute--those practitioners who were white, but the cases against blacks were countless, widely publicized, and replete with prison sentences. The case studies on latter-day spiritual workers are fascinating, especially as juxtaposed with Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau and other legendary root doctors. Long discusses the myths surrounding these figures and blends in cogent analysis of the overarching racism that continues to shroud them in mystery.

The book benefits from a clear understanding of the distinctions between different types of occult practice, and Long carefully distinguishes between regional fine points. She easily shifts her focus from graveyard rituals in the South Carolina Lowcountry to the New Orleans-influenced Gulf Coast, from the West Indian obeah in Harlem to the hundreds of botanicas in Los Angeles (p. 82). The book reads like a catalog in places (the appendix lists retailers by state, manufacturers, wholesalers, and websites), along with graphics and photographs, providing a welter of detail that might stagger some readers.

In the second half of the book Long analyzes what happened in the twentieth century when New Orleans Voodoo and conjuring in general went underground. By the 1930s "manufactured spiritual products" (p. 99), like modern-day cake mixes, had replaced the traditional ones made from scratch. The resulting charms, totems, powders, perfumes, washes, soaps, oils, sachets, incense, and the like are "a symbol of a symbol" because they carry no magical essence, but they bear "symbolic ingredients" and hence derive their power from faith (p. 104). Today these products are the backbone of a flourishing industry, and Long gives the history of dozens of these retailers.

While all the detail in Spiritual Merchants lends texture to this work, it also presents the familiar dilemma of how best to link the themes in a narrative that must deal with so many regional and chronological distinctions. Long addresses this in two ways. First, she repeatedly traces the multifaceted origins of each spiritual practice as far back as possible. Second, she presents an episodic view, one that moves from Africa to the colonial Caribbean, from contemporary Chicago and Memphis back to medieval Europe. This approach is perhaps her greatest accomplishment because it demonstrates how Vodou, conjure, and rootwork are such an integral part of the American experience. Throughout the twentieth century to the present day, "[p]eople came from all over," as one practitioner told Long, to purchase spiritual products. "They didn't just buy a little of this and that--they bought by the box" (p. 150).

EDITH AMBROSE

Xavier University of Louisiana