Toys and Idols

A tale of two action figures: in "The Sacred Arts of Vodou," a traveling exhibit that made the rounds in 1998, UCLA's Fowler Museum of Cultural History cobbled together an impressive range of costumes, ritual objects, paintings, flags, and videos in order to get across some of the power of Haiti's rich and popular religious tradition, whose gods bristle with all the foibles and lusts of Zeus' ancient crew. But unlike the Olympians, the Haitian pantheon is a living tradition,...