Mapping Yorùbá Networks

Mapping Yorùbá Networks

Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities

  • Autor: Clarke, Kamari Maxine
  • Editor: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822333302
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822385417
  • Lloc de publicació:  Durham , United States
  • Any de publicació digital: 2004
  • Mes: Juliol
  • Pàgines: 384
  • DDC: 305.896/333
  • Idioma: Anglés
Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of Òyótúnjí African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black nationalism, and the third the establishment of an ancient Yorùbá Empire in the state of South Carolina. Located sixty-five miles southwest of Charleston, Òyótúnjí is a Yorùbá revivalist community founded in 1970. Mapping Yorùbá Networks is an innovative ethnography of Òyótúnjí and a theoretically sophisticated exploration of how Yorùbá òrìsà voodoo religious practices are reworked as expressions of transnational racial politics. Drawing on several years of multisited fieldwork in the United States and Nigeria, Kamari Maxine Clarke describes Òyótúnjí in vivid detail—the physical space, government, rituals, language, and marriage and kinship practices—and explores how ideas of what constitutes the Yorùbá past are constructed. She highlights the connections between contemporary Yorùbá transatlantic religious networks and the post-1970s institutionalization of roots heritage in American social life.

Examining how the development of a deterritorialized network of black cultural nationalists became aligned with a lucrative late-twentieth-century roots heritage market, Clarke explores the dynamics of Òyótúnjí Village’s religious and tourist economy. She discusses how the community generates income through the sale of prophetic divinatory consultations, African market souvenirs—such as cloth, books, candles, and carvings—and fees for community-based tours and dining services. Clarke accompanied Òyótúnjí villagers to Nigeria, and she describes how these heritage travelers often returned home feeling that despite the separation of their ancestors from Africa as a result of transatlantic slavery, they—more than the Nigerian Yorùbá—are the true claimants to the ancestral history of the Great Òyó Empire of the Yorùbá people. Mapping Yorùbá Networks is a unique look at the political economy of homeland identification and the transnational construction and legitimization of ideas such as authenticity, ancestry, blackness, and tradition.

  • Contents
  • Note on Orthography
  • Preface
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction: From Village, to Nation, toTransnational Networks
  • Part One. vertical formations of institutions
    • 1 ‘‘On Far Away Shores, Home Is Not Far’’: Mapping Formations of Place, Race, and Nation
    • 2 ‘‘White Man Say They Are African’’: Roots Tourism and the Industry of Race as Culture
  • Part Two. the making of transnational networks
    • 3 Micropower and Oyo Hegemony in Yorùbá Transnational Revivalism
    • 4 ‘‘ManyWere Taken, but SomeWere Sent’’: The Remembering and Forgetting of Yorùbá Group Membership
    • 5 Ritual Change and the Changing Canon: Divinatory Legitimation of Yorùbá Ancestral Roots
    • 6 Recasting Gender: Family, Status, and Legal Institutionalism
  • Epilogue: Multisited Ethnographies in an Age of Globalization
  • Appendix
  • Notes
  • Glossary
  • Bibliography
  • Index