Anthropologist and mambo Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique dies

Rachel Beauvoir-Dominique died on this day at 52. She was the daughter of Max Beauvoir, the Ati of Haitian Vodou, and she was a mambo herself. Trained at Tufts and Oxford, she spent the 1990s collecting oral histories in the communities around Bois Caiman, and her fieldwork is a main reason scholars stopped treating that ceremony as a legend. With her husband Didier Dominique she wrote Savalou E and built Vodou exhibitions in Chicago and Ottawa. She defended the religion of our ancestors as scholarship, not folklore.