jocelyn

The New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum’s gift shop was very under stocked. Due to the decrease in tourism since Katrina the museum has been have a hard time making ends meet. The gift shop is located in the front room (see map Item 9). There are gris-gris bags, candles, voodoo dolls, and some books on sale. Interestingly the books do not deal specifically with Voodoo but rather are instructive as to practices like candle lighting. There did not seem to be a major selling item but the voodoo dolls they sold while more elaborate were made by the same company/people as the voodoo dolls in some of the really touristy shops that sold Mardi Gras masks and beads.
I found it interesting that the gift shop had so little to offer considering that there were five different shops within a few blocks of the museum offering a huge number of different Voodoo objects. In many cases the objects in the stores were more completely labeled than those in the museum. The Voodoo shops seemed to me to have a much bigger issue with the regime of truth, appropriation, and reflexivity.