Religious Studies News

The 1991 publication of Karen McCarthy Brown’s “Mama Lola: A Vodou Priestess in Brooklyn,” now in its third edition, was a watershed contribution to the field of religious studies and became a perennial favorite among assigned textbooks. Brown’s exemplary ethnographic treatment of the religious practices of a Haitian immigrant humanized the adepts of this much-maligned African diaspora religion, and made social science methodology accessible to religious studies, a field theretofore dominated by (and still largely defined by) textual studies. Brown’s feminist scholarship valued women’s accounts of their religious practices and life experiences as data for research, and provided a self-reflexive interpretation of the relationships she established with field subjects who became her own religious family. The panelists reflect upon the influence of Karen McCarthy Brown’s scholarship on their own research and teaching, and how her work marked, and helped to produce, the “ethnographic turn” in the study of religi