Mapping Yoruba Networks

Clarke Kamari Maxine Clarke

Description

Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of Oyotunji African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black nationalism, and the third the establishment of an ancient Yoruba Empire in the state of South Carolina. Located sixty-five miles southwest of Charleston, Oyotunji is a Yoruba revivalist community founded in 1970. Mapping Yoruba Networks is an innovative ethnography of Oyotunji and a theoretically sophisticated exploration of how Yoruba orisa 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 Oyotunji in vivid detail-the physical space, government, rituals, language, and marriage and kinship practices-and explores how ideas of what constitutes the Yoruba past are constructed. She highlights the connections between contemporary Yoruba 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 Oyotunji 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 Oyotunji 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 Yoruba-are the true claimants to the ancestral history of the Great Oyo Empire of the Yoruba people. Mapping Yoruba 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.

Sujets

• USA
• Carolina del Sur
• Ethnic religion
• South Carolina
• Biological anthropology
• États-Unis
• Caroline du Sud

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 12 juillet 2004
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822385417
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 2 Mo

Extrait

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Kamari Maxine Clarke

Duke University Press

Durham & London 

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©  Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Typeset in Galliard by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

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Contents

Note on Orthography ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xxix Introduction: From Village, to Nation, to Transnational Networks 

     .                    ‘‘On Far Away Shores, Home Is Not Far’’: Mapping Formations of Place, Race, and Nation  ‘‘White Man Say They Are African’’: Roots Tourism and the Industry of Race as Culture 

   .                         Micropower and y Hegemony in Yorùbá Transnational Revivalism  ‘‘Many Were Taken, but Some Were Sent’’: The Remembering and Forgetting of Yorùbá Group Membership  Ritual Change and the Changing Canon: Divinatory Legitimation of Yorùbá Ancestral Roots 

Recasting Gender: Family, Status, and Legal Institutionalism  Epilogue: Multisited Ethnographies in an Age of Globalization  Appendix  Notes  Glossary  Bibliography  Index 

Note on Orthography

ytúnjí Village and Santeria speech communities are not native Yorùbá speakers. The residents of ytúnjí Village use Yorùbá as a second language and as a mechanism for cultural reclamation. In using Yorùbá, however, ytúnjí Village residents tend to differently pronounce words—and in relation to the standards of native Yorùbá speakers they would be seen as mispronouncing and therefore misusing many Yorùbá words and phrases. As a result, each speech act that I incor- porated here was interpreted according to both pronunciation standards as well as differing social contexts. To reduce the ambiguities as well as to respect Yorùbá orthographic standards, the transliteration used here is based on modern Yorùbá orthographic conventions.

Yorùbá Orthographic Conventions

Yorùbá consonants are much like English consonants. However, some exceptions exist. The ‘‘p’’ is a double articulation sound [kp], called a voiceless labial-velar stop in phonetic terms; ‘‘gb’’ is its voiced counterpart. Both [kp] and [gb] are digraphs. [ṣ] is the same sound pronounced as ‘‘sh’’ in English. It has a phonetic value of [š]. The vowels ‘‘ẹ’’ and ‘‘ọ’’ are pronounced like the English vowels [e] and [o] inget andfall, respectively. Without the diacritical marks ‘‘e’’ and ‘‘o’’ resemble the initial vowel sound in the diphthongs [ei] and [ou] inmateanddrove, respectively.