Andrew Apter

Discourse and its Disclosures: Yoruba Women and the Sanctity of Abuse

Today Evans-Pritchards essay is history and its relevance remains more a matter of intellectual genealogy than of contemporary research. It is now becoming de rigeur to locate verbal art and performance within socio-political relations of textual production exploring the poetic and strategic values dynamic ambiguities and complex historicities of what Barber and de Moraes Farias (1989) call discourse and its disguises. The effect has been to destabilise conventional distinctions between oral texts and social contexts precisely because oral literatures produce such instabilities--by remapping social categories refashioning social identities and by invoking rival histories and memories to shape and reorient social action. But if discourse masks and disguises by cloaking protest and criticism in poetry and praise it also reveals and discloses giving active voice to hidden passions and secrets that are otherwise repressed. It is this latter aspect of ritual discourse--one first theorised by Evans-Pritchard--which this article will explore in songs performed during the Oroyeye festival of Ayede Ekiti in north-eastern Yorubaland. Following recent developments in the interpretation of African oral texts (Barber 1991a; Barber and de Moraes Farias 1989; Irvine 1993 1996) I will locate these songs within a variety of shifting contexts ranging from the specific social project of the festival itself--which is to ostracise thieves and stigmatise evildoers--to the sexual socio-political and historical sub-texts which when voiced account for its deeper meanings and ritual power. (excerpt)

Yoruba Ethnogenesis from Within

It is an anthropological truism that ethnic identity is “other”-oriented, such that who we are rests on who we are not . Within this vein, the development of Yoruba identity in the late nineteenth century is attributed to Fulani perspectives on their Oyo neighbors, Christian missionaries and the politics of conversion, as well as Yoruba descendants in diaspora reconnecting with their West African homeland. In this essay, my aim is to both complement and destabilize these externalist perspectives by focusing on Yoruba concepts of “home” and “house” ( ile ), relating residence, genealogy and regional identities to their reconstituted ritual frameworks in Cuba and Brazil. Following Barbers analysis of Yoruba praise-poetry ( oriki ) and Verrans work on Yoruba quantification, I reexamine the semantics of the category ile in the emergence of Lucumi and Nago houses in order to explain their sociopolitical impact and illuminate transpositions of racial “cleansing” and ritual purity in Candomble and Santeria. More broadly, the essay shows how culturally specific or “internal” epistemological orientations play an important if neglected role in shaping Atlantic ethnicities and their historical trajectories.

Beyond Négritude: Black cultural citizenship and the Arab question in FESTAC 77

When Nigeria hosted the Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC 77) to celebrate the cultural foundations of the ‘Black and African World’, it was fashioned after Senghors festival mondial des arts nègres (FESMAN 66) held in Dakar 11 years earlier. What began as an alliance between festival co-patrons, however, soon developed into a divisive debate over the meanings and horizons of black cultural citizenship. At issue were competing Afrocentric frameworks that clashed over the North African or ‘Arab’ question. Should North Africans fully participate, as Lt-Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo maintained, or should they merely observe as second-class citizens, as Leopold Sédar Senghor resolutely insisted? If Nigerias expansive and inclusive vision of blackness was motivated and underwritten by its enormous oil wealth, Senghor refused to compromise his position, precipitating a face-off that ultimately lowered Senegals prestige. To understand why North Africa became the focus of these competing definitions of blackness, we turn to the 1969 Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers, where Négritude was disclaimed as counter-revolutionary. Placed within a genealogy of postcolonial Afrocentric festivals, the struggle over North Africa in FESTAC 77 shows that the political stakes of black cultural citizenship were neither trivial nor ephemeral, but emerged within a transnational field of symbolic capital accumulation.

THE BLOOD OF MOTHERS: WOMEN, MONEY, AND MARKETS IN YORUBA-ATLANTIC PERSPECTIVE

The question which I pursue in this essay concerns the impact of West African constructions of womanhood and female agency on the plantation societies of the Americas. The character of this influence is complex and variable, stronger in some areas than in others according to changing economic, demographic, and sociopolitical conditions on the ground, not to mention the different slave routes, ports of embarkation, and modes of collecting captives for the dreaded Middle Passage across the Atlantic. The criteria for assessing this impact are also complex, ranging from what historian Philip Curtin calls “the numbers game”—determining ethnic populations that were transshipped, in what gender proportions, and to which destinations—to mechanisms of cultural transmission and creolization, what for anthropologists Sydney Mintz and Richard Price is nothing less than the birth of African American culture. To date, the emphasis on African baseline cultures has shifted from the specific “tribal origins” that anthropologist Melville Herskovits originally invoked in the 1930s and 1940s toward general processes of creolization and ethnogenesis originating in the slave ships and further developing within the new social frameworks of the plantation complex. This change in focus from “roots” to “routes” is also marked by a more active understanding of African cultural influences, seen less as survivals and retentions resisting assimilation and more as cultural extensions and inventions, mediating the very processes of creolization and mobilizing resistance against the slaveholding class. I will not review these key positions within African Diaspora and Black Atlantic Studies, save only to highlight the growing focus on women and gender in plantation societies, and the West African constructions of womanhood that were variably reworked in the Americas. Since the 1985 landmark publication of Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman?, women have moved from periphery to center in historical studies of Atlantic slavery—not merely “added” as part of the story, but changing our understanding of its core contradictions. My goal is to deepen this focus on gender by developing a West African model of womanhood and agency and applying it to social relations of production and reproduction across a range of plantation societies. In so doing, I hope to get “beneath” the European gender ideologies that inform so much of the relevant

Ethnographic X-files and Holbraad's double-bind: Reflections on an ontological turn of events

The ontological turn asks difficult questions and pushes conceptual boundaries both forward and against the grain, challenging our standard epistemological orientations. That it replaces epistemological with ontological concerns is a position I oppose in the following reflections, inspired by Martin Holbraad’s “double-bind,” one which frames a predicament that not only resonates with my own ethnographic experience but also represents something of an occupational hazard (our X-files) for many of us working on spirit-worlds. In an alternative solution to Holbraad’s double-bind, based on Moore’s paradox and my own exposure to Shango’s wrath in Nigeria, I propose a radical decoupling of Knowledge and Belief to obviate the ontological proliferation of worlds.

M.G. Smith on the Isle of Lesbos: Kinship and sexuality in Carriacou

AbstractIn Kinship and Community in Carriacou (1962), M.G. Smith documents what he calls “abnormal” sexual relations between women in female-headed households on the island. These lesbian madivines represent statistically significant “deviations” from normative patterns of kinship and residence in domestic groups, and are associated with the shapeshifting witchcraft of sukuyan and lougarou. Linking Smith’s ethnography of “mating patterns” to transactional pathways of reproductive value—blood, money, witchcraft and sexuality—I rework his ideological explanation of Carriacou lesbianism (as a “mechanism” for preserving female marital fidelity) into a feminist model of female empowerment with comparative potentialities throughout the Caribbean.