Moral judgement is shaped by culture and by gender, and Claudine Michel makes that case through Haitian Vodou and through Karen McCarthy Brown's portrait of the Brooklyn manbo Alourdes, known as Mama Lola. Western ethical theory seeks rules with universal reach; Vodou supplies contextual ones anchored in family, community and obligation to the spirits. Michel works through episodes from Brown's fieldwork: the rebuke of a young man who greeted his elder carelessly, the prohibition on laying money on a bed, the instruction to light a candle for Dambala whenever the hot warrior Ogou is called. Each carries a lesson about hierarchy, reciprocity and equilibrium. Women hold genuine authority here because the priestess's task is to orchestrate ritual until participants find their own balance, a leadership measured by skill as a technician of the sacred. Michel also surveys the religion's political history, its parallel judicial societies, and the Western caricature that has dogged it.