Long, Carolyn Morrow. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press,
2001. xxix + 314 pp. $19.00 (US). ISBN: 1-57233-110-0.
[1] Spiritual Merchants takes readers into the marketplace
of a predominantly African American popular culture where floor washes
bring luck, roots keep evil away, and powders assure a lover's fidelity.
Long, a retired Smithsonian preservation specialist and conservator,
combines artifact studies, field interviews, and archival research
to examine magical charms and the stores and manufacturers selling
them. Presenting chapters on African-based religions in the New World,
New Orleans Voodoo, hoodoo, and the commodification of "spiritual
products" in the twentieth century, Long introduces readers to
obscure subjects often neglected by academics and sensationalized
in mass media.
[2] In part I ("Historical Antecedents and Traditional Practices"),
Long examines the historical and cultural origins of spiritual products.
Following an overview of Yoruba, Fon, Kongo, and European religious
and folk traditions brought to the New World, she argues that "African
American charms are primarily of African origin with considerable
influence from European folk Christianity and popular magic"
(14-15). In other early chapters, Long compares African-based practices
in South American and Caribbean Catholic slave colonies to those in
the Anglo-Protestant American South. In an argument first made in
classic works like Albert Raboteau's Slave Religion and repeated
by Long, new religions like Cuban Santer’a and Haitian Vodou combined
African religious practices with Catholicism in Latin American colonies.
In North America, slave acculturation and plantation demographics
caused charms and "conjure" practices to become distanced
from their African religious origins. One exception to this was the
former French Catholic city of New Orleans, where a somewhat fragmented
form of Vodou existed into the mid-to-late nineteenth century and
has recently resurfaced. Long dedicates a chapter to "New Orleans
Voodoo," discussing its commercialization in the late 1800s and
its early twentieth century transition from religion to a form of
magical conjuration known as hoodoo.
[3] In the second part of the book ("Sold as a Curio Only: The
Evolution of the Spiritual Products Industry"), Long traces the
historical shift from individual hoodoo practitioners who prepared
homemade charms with specific ingredients to spiritual merchants who
sold mass-produced ones defined more by their names and the art on
their labels than by content. Other chapters offer descriptions of
hoodoo, Santer’a, and Yerber’a shops, interviews with store owners
and spiritual product manufacturers, and the cultural history of one
particular charm ingredient: John the Conqueror root. In the book's
most engaging chapter, "The Commodification of Traditional Charms,"
Long persuasively shows how "the trend toward the commodification
of traditional charms began around the turn of the twentieth century
and accelerated in the 1920s" (99). Early manufacturers of spiritual
products were sometimes companies that made toiletries and cleaning
supplies. Tapping into an African American occult market, these entrepreneurs
turned liquid soaps, bath crystals, and aerosols into charms. In the
world of mass-produced spiritual products, the magical properties
of certain ingredients and the importance of ritual in making a charm
disappeared. Lodestone sprays came without lodestone, black cat bones
were made of plastic, and uncrossing powder was scented talc. "By
a leap of faith and logic," Long writes, "the users of spiritual
products have transferred to these manufactured goods their belief
in the properties of traditional charms, rendered magical because
they are composed of symbolic ingredients and activated by symbolic
rituals. Spiritual products are thus a symbol of a symbol" (103-104).
[4] Spiritual Merchants has many positive features. Although
never explicitly stating her thesis, Long presents a persuasive historical
argument outlining how hoodoo charms became commercialized - and thus
altered - in the twentieth century. Her primary sources, like lay
anthropologist Harry Middleton Hyatt's five volume Hoodoo-Conjuration-Witchcraft-Rootwork,
letters to South Carolina hoodoo doctor D.W. Watson, and mid-nineteenth
century New Orleans newspaper articles on Voodoo, are particularly
engaging. She also does a good job identifying regional variations
in Southern hoodoo practice, and the chapter on John the Conqueror's
metamorphosis from "magical root to manufactured product"
provides a focused case study supporting her larger historical argument.
[5] Though it exhibits strengths, Spiritual Merchants needs
more explanation and clarification in places. In one early endnote,
for example, Long tells readers that she will not discuss New Age
merchants trading in European Occultism, but fails to say why. Long's
inclusion of Latin American-owned bot‡nicas and Mexican yerber’as,
her suggestion that the early spiritual merchant and author L.W. DeLaurence
got into the business by expanding his European occult book publishing
company to sell hoodoo paraphernalia, and her argument that charms
are a mixture of African religious traditions and European occult
practices make this omission somewhat peculiar. One wonders if Long's
decision not to compare the spiritual products and stores of New Age
occultists to those of Hispanic and African American practitioners
stems from a class and race-based assumption that the white middle
class doesn't have "folklore."
[6] Long provides a fascinating entry into the world of spiritual
products, but readers with training in religious studies, history,
cultural studies, and popular culture theory will find that Spiritual
Merchants often describes without analyzing and traces historical
change without contextualizing. Questions materialize like the spirits
once thought to reside in charms. How did the commodification of African
American hoodoo charms in the early twentieth century compare to the
commercialization of other artifacts of popular religious, ethnic,
and folk cultures during the same period? How did the birth of the
spiritual products industry, partly focused on health and well-being,
relate to the concurrent professionalization of medicine? And how
did the racialized, gendered, and orientalist images on charm labels
support or subvert popular beliefs and assumptions in the depression-era
United States? While Long doesn't broach these subjects, she has given
those who want to do so some useful material.
Sean McCloud
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Charlotte, North Carolina
spmcclou@email.uncc.edu
