A bold reconsideration of Hoodoo belief and practice
Katrina Hazzard-Donald explores African Americans' experience and practice of the herbal, healing folk belief tradition known as Hoodoo. She examines Hoodoo culture and history by tracing its emergence from African traditions to religious practices in the Americas. Working against conventional scholarship, Hazzard-Donald argues that Hoodoo emerged first in three distinct regions she calls "regional Hoodoo clusters" and that after the turn of the nineteenth century, Hoodoo took on a national rather than regional profile. The spread came about through the mechanism of the "African Religion Complex," eight distinct cultural characteristics familiar to all the African ethnic groups in the United States.
The first interdisciplinary examination to incorporate a full glossary of Hoodoo culture, Mojo Workin': The Old African American Hoodoo System lays out the movement of Hoodoo against a series of watershed changes in the American cultural landscape. Hazzard-Donald examines Hoodoo material culture, particularly the "High John the Conquer" root, which practitioners employ for a variety of spiritual uses. She also examines other facets of Hoodoo, including rituals of divination such as the "walking boy" and the "Ring Shout," a sacred dance of Hoodoo tradition that bears its corollaries today in the American Baptist churches. Throughout, Hazzard-Donald distinguishes between "Old tradition Black Belt Hoodoo" and commercially marketed forms that have been controlled, modified, and often fabricated by outsiders; this study focuses on the hidden system operating almost exclusively among African Americans in the Black spiritual underground.
| Cover Title Page Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Prescript 1. Traditional Religion in West Africa and in the New World: A Thematic Overview 2. Disruptive Intersection: Slavery and the African Background in the Making of Hoodoo 3. The Search for High John the Conquer 4. Crisis at the Crossroads: Sustaining and Transforming Hoodoo's Old Black Belt Tradition from 5. The Demise of Dr. Buzzard: Black Belt Hoodoo between the Two World Wars 6. Healin' da Sick, Raisin da Daid: Hoodoo as Health Care, Root Doctors, Midwives, Treaters 7. Black Belt Hoodoo in the Post–World War II Cultural Environment Postscript Notes Glossary Bibliography Index |"Mojo Workin' is a key contribution to the study of Hoodoo in America, with some energizing new ideas about its origins, early expression, and broader religious aspects."—Journal of American Folklore"Hazzard-Donald set out to demonstrate the need to include African American Hoodoo in the study of African American religion in the New World. The search she presents in her work clearly validates the belief that there is a strong connection between African American Hoodoo and African American religion. . . . The author provides a great deal of research and analysis that is sure to aid scholars, students, and enthusiasts."—Journal of Folklore Research
"Hazzard-Donald's formulation of Hoodoo's evolution represents a new chronology for its study and transformation over time. It's a valuable contribution to the growing number of volumes concerned with African-based traditional spiritual beliefs in the New World."—American Studies
|Katrina Hazzard-Donald is a professor of sociology at Rutgers University-Camden and the author of Jookin': The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African American Culture.