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Sex and the Empire that is no More: Gender and the Politics of Metaphor in Oyo Yoruba Religion.
... Outra questão ainda: se estudiosos euro-brasileiros são a fonte desta idéia (como argumentam os desconstrucionistas), de onde vem o valor extremado colocado na "pureza" cultural, e por vezes, racial, da nação nagô no Brasil? A nação afro-brasileira identifi cada com os yorubá ocorre em um Brasil do século XX dominado pela valorização pública da hibridez racial e cultural, e declara sua descendência da religião da África Ocidental que, por todas as evidências disponíveis, manifesta também uma valorização de mistura e hibridização cultural (ver Matory, 1994). Nenhuma das narrativas destes estudiosos convencionalmente dadas como explicações para a origem do Candomblé -tanto a de uma memória de uma antiga religião africana ou a de uma invenção burguesa euro-brasileira -parece direcionar-se no sentido da valorização da pureza racial e cultural do Candomblé dos anos 20 e 30. ...
... Conseguiu isto através de seu monopólio ao acesso a cavalos de guerra do norte e através da rede de delegadas -"esposas" e também delegados -"esposos" (iyawo e ilari) do rei. Isto incluiu, sobretudo, os médiuns, ou "cavalos" (elegun, ou esin) do deus Xangó (Matory, 1994). Estes reinos que os oyos vieram a dominar vieram também, em vários níveis, a falar dialetos muito similares ao oyo e a praticar celebrações religiosas profundamente vinculadas ao ritual e à mitologia oyo. ...
... Pro některé to zahrnuje možnost milovat více lidí současně. Například slavný výzkum o polygamii mezi Yoruba v Nigérii ukázal, že polygamní vztahy jsou vnímány jako stabilizující a posilující rodinné a společenské struktury (Matory, 2005). Na druhé straně, v západních kulturách, kde je monogamie často normou, výzkum ukazuje vyšší míru nevěry a tajných vztahů mimo oficiální partnerské vztahy. ...
... While early work on performative speech in Africa relied heavily on Austin, later work has taken it for granted that anthropologists are familiar with his framework, and used it without needing to justify its use explicitly. For example, in his study of Yoruba rituals, cultural anthropologist James Lorand Matory (2005) examines metaphor, punning, and metonymy as performatives in ritual utterances and sacred songs. He argues that their primary function is to persuade and make experience palpable. ...
Judith Butler’s theory of performativity has been highly influential in anthropological studies, particularly of gender and sexuality. Drawing on J. L. Austin’s concept of language as action, Butler’s theory challenges identity categories and emphasizes the role of language and other semiotic resources in constructing, reproducing, and resisting social identities and power relations. While much research has focused on applying Butler’s theory to studies of gender and sexuality in the West, there is a growing interest in its application to diverse cultural settings, including African societies. The use of Butler’s theory of performativity in anthropology to understand how language and other semiotic resources are used to perform specific social actions in African contexts goes beyond gender and sexuality to encompass various areas such as research, statehood, nationhood and nationalism, kinship, religious identity and piety, respectability and social hierarchy, race and ethnicity, morality and dignity, everyday interactions, aging, and citizenship. Examining these aspects of performativity reveals the complex interplay between language and social action in shaping cultural practices and beliefs in Africa and beyond. The translation of Butler’s theory in Africa-focused anthropology emphasizes the importance of examining cultural practices and beliefs within specific sociocultural contexts rather than imposing external frameworks or preconceptions. It highlights the diverse and dynamic nature of African societies’ cultural practices and beliefs, offering a valuable theoretical framework for understanding them and contributing to a nuanced understanding of the construction of social practices and beliefs in African societies and beyond.
... (Gleason, 2006:12). Também, como cita Lody, "por excelência é Iansã uma quebra de padrões, modelos sociais, morais e outros" (Lody, 2006:120 (Lawal, 2008;Matory, 1994 (Mattoso, 1988 (Lawal, 1996:15 (Oyěwùmí, 2016:29). ...
Peças compostas de três partes (nave, berloques e correntes), as pencas de balangandãs faziam parte da indumentária de mulheres negras escravizadas e livres do período colonial e imperial. Esses objetos já tiveram seus elementos lidos por abordagens realizadas em diferentes pesquisas acadêmicas. Entretanto, parte significativa dessas investigações tratou de modo superficial ou mesmo equivocado algumas questões fundamentais para seu entendimento, principalmente no que tange às tentativas de relacionar seus elementos visuais às culturas africanas e afro-brasileiras. A falta de subsídios históricos, artísticos e teóricos para aprofundamento nas questões de africanidade que tangenciam as análises das pencas se dá, muito provavelmente, pela quase inexistência de um campo estruturado de estudos das artes africanas e afro-brasileiras nos cursos de Artes Visuais e de História da Arte das universidades brasileiras. Com o intento de preencher essa lacuna, o presente artigo propõe análises que realoquem as pencas ao meio epistemológico e às tradições artísticas das quais elas são desdobramento.
... On 19 October 1916, the Onjo (the King), Olori (the Queen) and Daudu (the Prince), the native court judge, all symbolizing the British Native Authority, tax extortion in Okeho were killed, while the native court was set on fire. Lugard ordered troops under the command of Captain Ross and Captain Waters to march on Ibadan, Lagos, Iseyin and Okeho, where they suppressed the revolt and executed its six ringleaders, including the traditional ruler, Aseyin of Iseyin, publicly (Atanda 1973a;Matory 2005). This violent response is consistent with Lugard's assertion that such events 'must be dealt with by the exhibition of such a degree of force as may be necessary to compel obedience to the law' (1918,249). ...
In this article, we explore employment policies and practices in Colonial Nigeria, during a period of planned development, from the late 19th to early 20th century. We consider the relationship between colonial government, commerce and development of a labour force against the working experiences and growing aspirations of many colonised locals. Our study draws on Michel Foucault's work on governmentality. We draw on an archive that comprises British government and colonial administrative reports, complimented by a range of official and unofficial documents of the period. There was a coexistence of colonial governmentality through waged labour (a non-traditional practice in precolonial Nigeria), sovereign power through localised rule by traditional leaders and slave labour) and forced labour (introduced by the British). In the Lagos area in particular there was concentration of commercial, administrative and waged employment, with Lagos also the main hub for the organisation of labour and the seeds of resistance to unfair working conditions and colonization among workers dissatisfied in particular with wage and taxation levels. We also use the Foucaudian approach of the deep archive, which captures the interplay between governmental policy and its outcomes, and accounts of the lived experience, as our method of evaluating our research archive.
... Claro que muito tem ainda de ser investigado sobre as migrações dos deuses, da cosmologia Iorubá e de suas metáforas do continente Africano para cá, e de cá -a América meridional e a caribenha -para a região do golfo de Guiné. Trabalhos mais recentes, discutindo premissas de Herskovits e Bastide, apontam sobretudo para a exportação da religião afro-brasileira (aqui como um corpo mais ou menos organizado de crenças e ritos), religião esta como originária da Bahia, ainda que construída com uma série de elementos e referências Africanas, onde a idéia de pureza, articulada a uma suposta pureza racial negra em voga na África colonial inglesa do século XVIII e XIX, vai revestir as religiões afro-brasileiras da prerrogativa de "originária da África", o que passa a ser essencial à construção uma identidade étnica de uma elite negra no Brasil (Matory, 1988, 1993. ...
I approach few authors (Darwin, Mantegazza, Herskovits, Willems and Bastide) as key-anthropologists in taking the Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul as an ethnographic field. Presenting original texts from these early anthropologists, I analyze the main features of what came to be identified as a cultural area. The issue of cultural difference in contrast with a alleged homogeneous national culture is the central point that organizes and identifies the South as an anthropological construct.
... However, the limited female representation provided by and facilitated through women's wings was ended by the military takeover in 1966. During Nigeria's Second Republic (1979-83), their role was mostly ornamental, and their political relevance was probably 20 Matory (1994) discusses the appropriation of female powers by men in the historical context of ritual in the Oyo town Igboho. 21 The E . ...
This article examines the role of women in the politics of the Oodua People's Congress (OPC), a militant ethno-nationalist movement of the Yoruba people in south-west Nigeria. Women's inclusion in the organizational structure and their typical roles within the OPC, the article suggests, expand the political agency of women but at the same time ensure that their contributions are contained within the OPC's overall politics. Women play important roles within the OPC, primarily by enabling and supporting the vigilante activities of male OPC members. In the provision of this support, women overwhelmingly draw on the knowledge and powers associated with typically female life experiences. As a result, women's interests are represented within the overall agenda of the OPC, but on the basis of complementary rather than egalitarian gender roles.
Brazilian Black Feminists Lélia Gonzales, Beatriz Nascimento and Djamila Ribeiro constructed theories that reference historical processes of liberation among Afro-Brazilian communities, the two most prominent sites being the former maroon societies— quilombos —, and the Candomblé terreiros —communities of Afro-Brazilian religious worship. In this article I propose a genealogy of Black Feminism that places Candomblé priestesses as foremothers to the contemporary political and intellectual movement through the concept of embodied territoriality. Ethnographic and historical engagement with public representations of Candomblé shows that despite the rich history of Black women’s leadership, their politics are oriented more towards racial justice than gender oppression. Considering the ongoing tensions between an unmarked, but largely White ‘Feminism’, and the political commitments of Black Feminism as a path to liberation for all oppressed peoples, this work approaches historic Black women who did not frame themselves as ‘Feminists’, but who nevertheless are fundamental to the genealogy of contemporary Black Feminism. In conversation with US Black Feminism, the paper argues that following the relationships between generations of Black grandmothers and granddaughters from Africa to the Americas allows for continuity of Black feminist thought, history, and practice as it evolves through political and intellectual discourse.
O presente artigo tem por objetivo apresentar os argumentos de Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmíem sua obra A invenção das mulheres: construindo um sentido africano para os discursos ocidentais de gênero, (1997), para ser pensado a relação entre o corpo e a ética na cosmovisão e na cosmopercepção. Para demonstrar que a epistemologia ocidental engendra sobre si e os demais povos a universalidade da categoria gênero e os problemas sociais oriundos desta generificação, a epistemóloga iorubana escreve A invenção das mulheres com um caráter dialético, em que é demonstrada sua crítica ao passo que são descritos os costumes autóctones Iorubás, com objetivo de demonstrar que para tal povo o corpo não determinava papéis sociais antes da colonização. A partir de sua defesa de que o gênero é uma categoria criada socialmente, mas que esta não foi parte originária de todos os povos é que se inicia a escrita deste texto. Para apresentar a complexidade do pensamento oyewumiano, as categorias de cosmovisão e cosmopercepção foram retomadas, através do alinhavemento do que elucida a autora sobre a bio-lógica, raciocínio corporal, somatocentralidade e senioridade. Com a apresentação destes conceitos é que se conclui como cada cultura cunha seus liames éticos.
Previous scholarship on the Ààfin Ọ̀ yó ̣ mural art read it exclusively as an appendage of Ọ̀ yó ̣ history and politics, highlighting but with little compelling research on the Aláàfin's leadership qualities and aesthetics in the embedded animal metaphors. Therefore, this study seeks to provide a balanced outlook on Ààfin Ọ̀ yó ̣ mural art and especially to unearth distinct leadership qualities of the iconic Ọ̀ yó ̣ paramount ruler, encoded predominantly in his panegyrics from a visual semiotic perspective. The stylish Aláàfin Ladigbolu commissioned Salami Alabebe's design of (Ojú Abata Aremo), the wall of the central porch between 1915 to 1917 to replicate the grandeur of the Old Ọ̀ yó ̣ Empire in the New Ọ̀ yó ̣. Royal referents, mainly imageries of large wild animals like elephants, lions, leopards, and horses, foreground the Aláàfin's leadership qualities. Symbolic mammals like kob antelope, hare, monkey, and warthog expose the monarch's distinct personality as magnificent, clever, wise, and fearless. Symbolic birds like ostrich and cattle egrets reveal the physical and metaphysical forces behind the Aláàfin's leadership. Symbolic reptiles like tortoises, crabs, chameleons, lizards or geckos, crocodiles, and snakes (mamba and python) are mainly votive animals reiterating the Aláàfin's cycles of life, death, and reincarnation. Royal paraphernalia-like the sword and sheath, bow and arrow, royal umbrella, crown, royal trumpets or flute, scepter, horsetail and embroidery-provide a foray into Ọ̀ yó ̣'s strong affiliation with Oranmiyan of Ile-Ife. In addition, the embroidery reveals women's contribution to the domestic economy of the Ọ̀yọ́ Empire, especially as weavers. The human figures hint at royal servants' (Ilaris) personal and state responsibilities, especially as Sango's priests and royal envoys. Also, the signature norm of Ọ̀ yó ̣ Yoruba is the Omoluabi (compliant citizen) qualities like bravery, hard work, honesty, humility, positive conduct, and respect. The study concludes that Ààfin Ọ̀ yó ̣ mural paintings are communicative symbols grounded in Yoruba proverbs, culture, and religion to under-gird the centrality of the Aláàfin's dualistic roles as a spiritual and political
If the head is religion, the gut is magic. Taking up this provocation, this Element delves into the digestive system within transnational Afro-Diasporic religions such as Haitian Vodou, Brazilian Candomblé, and Cuban Lucumí (also called Santería). It draws from the ethnographic and archival record to probe the abdomen as a vital zone of sensory perception, amplified in countless divination verses, myths, rituals, and recipes for ethnomedical remedies. Provincializing the brain as only one locus of reason, it seeks to expand the notion of 'mind' and expose the anti-Blackness that still prevents Black Atlantic knowledges from being accepted as such. The Element examines gut feelings, knowledge, and beings in the belly; African precedents for the Afro-Diasporic gut-brain axis; post-sacrificial offerings in racist fantasy and everyday reality; and the strong stomachs and intestinal fortitude of religious ancestors. It concludes with a reflection on kinship and the spilling of guts in kitchenspaces.
This article argues that Espiritismo Cruzado practice is comprised of fluid dynamics that disrupt notions of discrete entities. The disruption of clear‐cut lines means that Espiritismo Cruzado is fertile ground for creative and generative ambiguity. This ambiguity disrupts the boundaries between forms of religiosity and different religious actors, and in doing so both disrupts and reinforces broader frameworks of race and gender. My examination of Espiritismo Cruzado , a Cuban religious tradition based on communication with spirits of the dead, demonstrates how the practice's ambiguity can emerge through instances of both convergence and fractures in relationships between spirits and practitioners. Convergences and conflicts emphasize concerns regarding beauty, race, and sexuality and how spirits and practitioners are implicated in the experiences of one another. Alongside these innovations, however, practice can often end up reifying overdetermined tropes of racialized and gendered figures in the wider popular Cuban imaginary. This article highlights how the mixedness that Espiritismo Cruzado offers is neither a straightforwardly liberatory politics of enablement nor exclusively one of constraint but rather a complicated nexus of the two.
Most efforts to promote gender equity in sub-Saharan Africa have been rooted in a Western heteronormative framework inherited from colonialism that aims at ‘balancing’ gender rather than deconstructing it. Dismantling this entrenched, though exogenous, binary is a daunting task, especially since, over time, it has become widely accepted as ‘authentically’ African, while the more radical initiatives of African trans* activists are seen as foreign. African trans* activism is theoretically sophisticated, deeply committed, and highly skilled, but its impact has been confined largely to an ‘Afropolitan’ elite. Based on interviews with leading trans* activists, this paper examines some of the key challenges to deconstructing the imported binary at grassroots levels. It looks at how linguistic and cultural particularities affect trans* activism in Africa and proposes new strategies, using lived cultures as a basis, that will be more appropriate and effective in a postcolonial context in which both indigenous and exogenous elements legitimately interact.
In her book Antigone's Claim: Kinship between Life and Death, Judith Butler reads the figure of Antigone, who exists as an impossible aberration of kinship, as a challenge to the very terms of livability that are established by the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought (Butler 2000). In this article I extend Butler's argument to reach beyond gender. I argue that African feminist scholarship shows that the kinship norms shaping the reigning symbolic rules of Western thought not only render certain gendered lives unlivable, but through the gendered working thereof also become key to the colonial process of the racial dehumanization of the colonized and the violent expansion of Eurocentric capitalism. I show how Oyèrónké Oyĕwùmí, in her work on the Yorùbá people of Nigeria, provides, in a way analogous to Antigone, a glimpse of an order structured by kinship formations that are remarkably different from, and thereby bring into crisis, the normative versions of kinship that are posited as timeless truths. Through a reimagining or reconstruction of precolonial Yorùbá kinship formations, Oyĕwùmí articulates a different scheme of intelligibility, which enables radically different ways of being human and existing in the world.
This article is about women's labour in nineteenth-century Abẹ́òkúta, in present-day south-west Nigeria. It is based on primary research which explores women's economic independence and its intricate connection to the indigenous institution of polygyny. By examining the institution from the perspective of Anglican Church Missionary Society evangelists, it also demonstrates how indigenous culture conflicted with the newly introduced Christian religion and its corresponding Victorian bourgeois ideals of the male breadwinner and the female homemaker. It investigates the extent to which missionaries understood women's work in the Yorùbá context, their representations of the practice, their attempts to halt female labour and their often unsuccessful efforts to extricate their congregations and their own families from these local practices. It argues that European Christian principles not only coloured missionary perceptions of women's labour, but influenced their opinions of the entire Yorùbá matrimonial arrangement.
The aim of this article is to analyse the manner in which W.K. Tamsanqa depicts aggression initiated by males against other males and in so doing, engendering same-gender abuse in “Ithemba liyaphilisa”. Tamsanqa identifies certain amaXhosa cultural practices as being socially oppressive in same-gender relations within families and society. In addition his presentation of the characters’ continuation of traditional gender ideology will be explored to highlight familial conflict. These familial conflicts, seen as horizontal violence, are exacerbated by tribal laws and customs which reinforce vertical violence.
Based on a decade of fieldwork in southeastern Ghana and analysis of secondary sources, this book aims to reconstruct the religious history of the Anlo-Ewe peoples from the 1850s. In particular, it focuses on a corpus of rituals collectively known as “Fofie,” which derived their legitimacy from engaging with the memory of the slave-holding past. The Anlo developed a sense of discomfort about their agency in slavery in the early twentieth century which they articulated through practices such as ancestor veneration, spirit possession, and by forging links with descendants of peoples they formerly enslaved. Conversion to Christianity, engagement with “modernity,” trans-Atlantic conversations with diasporan Africans, and citizenship of the postcolonial state coupled with structural changes within the religious system - which resulted in the decline in Fofie's popularity - gradually altered the moral emphases on legacies of slavery in the Anlo historical imagination as the twentieth century progressed.
Èrìn-Òṣun, Nigeria is renowned for being home to lineages of traditional drummers and masquerade dancers. Since the 1960s, Èrìn-Òṣun artists have collaborated with European and U.S. artists and scholars. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork from 1995 to 2005, this chapter analyzes Èrìn-Òṣun artists’ strategic collaborations with a prolific German culture broker, an ethnofusion band, drumming students, and Yorùbá business entrepreneurs. This chapter argues that viewing collaborations through the lens of status-shifting strategies reveals the interconnected aesthetic choices and material realities that constitute reinventions of Yorùbá culture.
Introduction: African Women, Gender, and Globalization This is a brand new century. It is an exciting new day. In order to stimulate the flows of new and different, critical, and timely intellectual ideas, I suggest that we look both to the past and future. From the past, we can consider the record of victories won, gains made, and challenges that continue to move us to action. In the future lies the possibility of making change through the inspirational force of ideas, the mobilizational impetus of action that points out the shortcomings of the past and present, and provides worthwhile alternatives. I have tremendous optimism for the future, but would like to point to the dangers of the unwarranted cosmopolitanism of African women scholars and activists. I bring up this issue first because numerous changes and developments are afoot in this new, global world. Neoliberalism reigns supreme. For feminist critics of neoliberalism, old gains have been eroded because the corporate elements of old feminist movements that generated inclusionary politics have been swept away, while there are no new supports for feminist struggles to advance the cause of marginalized women. Two observations occur to me at this point. First, I question the benefits of the politics of inclusion. Second, I concur with socialist feminists that the presumed benefits of globalization do not extend to African and other third world women. For African women, this is very serious business. While the politics of inclusion produced the heady idealism of a united front of all women against the marginalization and oppression of patriarchy, the promise of unity in the face of adversary never materialized because there was a hierarchy that privileged Western women, being the controllers or conduits of funding, the published scholars whose ideas were widely disseminated worldwide, the advisors that recommended and prescribed solutions to women in other regions of the world, the dominant voice at international conferences, workshops and negotiations to whose advantage the mobilization of bias worked, since they were able to set the agenda that women from other parts of the world respond to. The problem did not begin with this latest manifestation of globalization. It was also present in the pre-1985 period when the progressive forces in the development field talked excitedly about, and campaigned vigorously for the adoption of the New International Economic Order. The problem with the most recent incarnation of globalization is that it acts in a catalytic manner that intensifies old tensions, and produces new challenges. Although the neoliberal proponents of globalization argue that the phenomenon presents numerous possibilities of benefits to humanity, and although one can clearly see how advances in communications technology have made the world smaller, the advantages are not enjoyed equally by all people. While most have control over, and access to the latest technology, others do not have the means to purchase such technology. While technological advances have eased a lot of the tedium of modern life, they are responsible for a myriad of problems that affect the environment, and consequently, the health
Egungun is a Yoruba ancestral masquerade ritual that has been practiced for centuries. Shifting coalitions of individuals and factions have vied for social and political influence through this practice. In the nineteenth century, when western missionaries, explorers, and colonial officials first documented this phenomenon, any individual who could sponsor an Egungun performance was a force to be reckoned with in Yoruba society. To this day, Egungun masquerades are understood as vehicles through which individuals and groups can assert influence in their communities. Western scholars have portrayed Egungun as a hegemonic masculine performance space through which men assert their dominance over women. In privileging the writings of English missionaries, explorers, and colonial officials, we have tended to neglect the oral traditions and histories of specific Egungun masquerades in which women feature prominently. I argue that scholars have oversimplified and misrepresented the complex ways in which these performances are gendered as well as the ways in which they offer women opportunities to shape the identities of the places they inhabit.
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