Anthropology Essay

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Dr. Yeager Reece
AN 112
17 February 2014
Critical Analysis #1 For this paper I chose Karen McCarthy Brown’s “Introduction”. In this section of the book, she describes what it was like learning the background of Vodou and how one lady lives her life around it. She wanted to take this experience into her own hands to get the true story behind it and not just base her information on the stereotypes that we all her throughout our lives. Brown does most of her research in Haiti and also some in New York to get a sense of diversity within two different countries. When I started reading this I thought that the author was meaning voodoo like putting a spell on someone, making a doll that resembles someone that you can manipulate or prick with a pin, I was thinking of the word Vodou in a completely different manner. I did not know that when she said Vodou that it is a type of religion that Haitian’s believe in. Vodou, a traditional Afro-Haitian religion, is a worldview encompassing philosophy, medicine, justice, and religion. Its fundamental principle is that everything is spirit. This religion is a fusion of a number of religious traditions, of which Catholicism is one influence. Haitian culture and religion was inspired by virtually all of Africa. In her introduction she said, “It can be argued that Haitians are more religious than people from many of the other former slave colonies and also that Haitian Vodou is closer to its African roots than more other forms of New World African religion.” She brings up slave colonies because that is another origin of where Vodou came from. It comes from “the social chaos and agony of Haiti’s eighteenth century slave plantations blended several distinct African religions with French colonial Catholicism”, as Brown has mentioned. As she continues with her research she learns so much more about the culture and how stereotypes

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