Pierre Fatumbi Verger : From Detached Look to Knowledge through Initiation

A maverick photographer who travelled the world in search of otherness, over time Verger became a prominent ethnographer, botanist and historian. He devoted fifty years of research to the black cultures of Brazil and Africa and to the transatlantic world of the Orisha and Vodun deities. Living in the field, initiated into diverse religious societies, he was reborn under the name of Fatumbi. A go-between of the Yoruba diaspora, Verger practiced an anti-colonial ethnology avant la lettre. This book is an anthropological essay, but also a cross-cultural portrait and the story of an extraordinary life. It provides a detailed analysis of the artistic and scientific work of Pierre Fatumbi Verger (1902-1996).