Culture And Society In Yorubaland

In this ambitious work, David D. Laitin explores the politics of religious change among the Yoruba of Nigeria, then uses his findings to expand leading theories of ethnic and religious politics.

This collection of essays, written during the last couple of decades on Yoruba cultural heritage, brings together a wealth of material on Yoruba history, art, and institutions within a framework of writing on the phenomenon, history and sociology of tradition. The essays demonstrate a strong philosophical context, and new insights into the nature and behavior of the Yoruba tradition. A main theme is that there is no antithesis between tradition and modernity and that to examine how the Yoruba synthesize tradition and modernity is a useful way to understand how their society functions and changes. The author further brings perspectives to current concerns about why there is at present a resurgence of violent ethnic clashes. He reflects on the divisiveness of violent conflicts arising from tribalism and ethnic consciousness, illustrating how these need not be a threat to Nigerian unity, and considers roles of traditional authorities in modern political structures.

This study makes the point that foreigners who have come in contact with Africans, whether as missionary, teacher, colonial administrator, or trader have often underestimated the extent to which the African cultural ethos rules the African mind. Modernizing efforts in Africa are based on assumptions which seek rapid transformations into the ways of another cultural ethos. These efforts, which abound in religious, developmental and political practices, have often met with difficulties. An examination into the content, structure and symbolic notions of the African ethos should unearth those aspects which are in conflict with, and those which are in favour of modernizing tendencies. This orientation sheds light on the problems that inhibit stability and development in Africa.

A rich and accessible account of Yoruba history, society and culture from the pre-colonial period to the present.

This is a book on the social and cultural history of Yoruba people, a people in southwest Nigeria. As the first to provide a comprehensive treatment of Yoruba dress in historical perspective, this book is an important contribution to African history in general and the Yoruba cultural history in particular. The book illuminates the impact of Christianity, Islam, and British colonialism on the construction of Yoruba identity, and how dress was entangled in that construction. It also provides insightful discussions of the transformations in dress culture since independence and demonstrates the importance of dress as a site for contesting and articulating postcolonial Yoruba identity and class structure within the Nigerian national space. This book provides many insights into these issues and is thus an invaluable addition to Africana studies, anthropology, and history.

The Yoruba: A New History is the first transdisciplinary study of the two-thousand-year journey of the Yoruba people, from their origins in a small corner of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria to becoming one of the most populous cultural groups on the African continent. Weaving together archaeology with linguistics, environmental science with oral traditions, and material culture with mythology, Ogundiran examines the local, regional, and even global dimensions of Yoruba history. The Yoruba: A New History offers an intriguing cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and social history from ca. 300 BC to 1840. It accounts for the events, peoples, and practices, as well as the theories of knowledge, ways of being, and social valuations that shaped the Yoruba experience at different junctures of time. The result is a new framework for understanding the Yoruba past and present.

The author traces the misapplication of Western, body-oriented concepts of gender through the history of gender discourses in Yoruba studies. THE INVENTION OF WOMEN demonstrates that biology as a rationale for organizing the social world is a Western construction not applicable in Yoruban culture where social organization was determined by relative age.