Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition

Abstract

Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition. By Yvonne P. Chireau. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. ix + 222, acknowledgments, photographs, illustrations, notes, index. $34.95 cloth) A professor of religion, Yvonne P. Chireau has focused her research for Black Magic on the religious life of the African American community, using a strong historical component. Yet folklorists and anthropologists will not be disappointed in the book, as its author has relied in large part upon texts produced by researchers in these fields. In its own right, however, the historical perspective shows that African American religiosity cannot be explained by methodologies ordinarily applied to studies of religion. In particular, the author shows that religious activity for African Americans has historically encompassed both "orthodox" church experiences and liminal experiences in non-institutional contexts. She argues that the academic distinction between magic and religion is of little use in an analysis of the lived religious experience of African Americans, and offers instead an experience-centered historical approach that bridges the worlds of religious ritual and magical practice-"Conjure," or "Rootworking" (in this book the author capitalizes the names of all Afro-diasporic religions and practices)-that shows why, in the case of the black community, the older dichotomy not only fails to explain a worldview of which both religion and magic were expressions, but fails also to see that when it came to African American spirituality, magic and religion were parts of a single complex. Other scholars who have studied African American spirituality have either largely failed to address, or have discounted the connection between, African American magical practice and African American Christianity. Chireau seeks to provide a corrective in chapters such as the provocatively titled "Our Religion and Superstition Was All Mixed Up': Conjure, Christianity, and African American Supernatural Traditions," which addresses this issue in detail and with thoughtfulness. Ambiguity of distinction between official religion and popular magic is at the heart of her contention that these two approaches to spiritual life among African Americans may not be separated. Appropriately, then, the historical interaction (and at times the difficulty in distinguishing) between Conjurer and minister is examined in the first chapters. Chireau's claim is that any attempt by observers to construct such historical distinctions is both artificial and unfaithful to actual understandings within the black community, not merely about these two figures-preacher and Conjurer-but about the very nature of Spirit. She tracks the careers of several Conjurers, showing how they moved, at times seamlessly, between the role of Conjurer and the role of minister, and showing that such individuals and their roles were often viewed within the community of worshipers as equal competitors for spiritual authority. …