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Hail Orisha!: A Phenomenology of a West African Religion in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Studies of Religion in Africa)

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Peter McKenzie has sifted through the field notes, diaries, and other archival materials of tourists, adventurers, missionaries, military officials, and others to paint a picture of Orisha worship as it was practiced in Yoruba speaking territories in the mid-nineteenth century. It is very interesting that by comparison it seems that the rituals of veneration of the Orishas on THIS side of the Atlantic in modern times bear more in common with the Orisha worship of the past than the practices in modern day Nigeria. It is as if a snapshot of Orisha worship was taken by the people who would be torn from their homes and enslaved in the "new world" and that it has remained faithful to their socio-religious heritage and, in contrast, the forces of missionary Christianity and Islamic proselytization in Nigeria have birthed a very different form of veneration in the cradle of its own origin.