Oduduwa's Chain

Locations of Culture in the Yoruba-Atlantic

Andrew Apter

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780226506555
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Yoruba culture has been a part of the Americas for centuries, brought from Africa during the transatlantic slave trade and maintained in various forms ever since. In Oduduwa's Chain, Andrew Apter explores a wide range of fascinating historical and ethnographic examples and offers a provocative rethinking of African heritage in Black Atlantic Studies.
 
Focusing on Yoruba history and culture in Nigeria, Apter applies a generative model of cultural revision that allows him to identify formative Yoruba influences without resorting to the idea that culture and tradition are fixed. For example, Apter shows how the association of African gods with Catholic saints can be seen as a strategy of empowerment, explores historical locations of Yoruba gender ideologies and their variations in the Atlantic world, and much more. He concludes with a rousing call for a return to Africa in studies of the Black Atlantic, resurrecting a critical notion of culture that allows us to transcend Western inventions of African while taking them into account.

Index

ààfin (palace[s], Standard Yoruba), 132

abà (farm huts), 73

abortion, 112, 117; midwives assist in, 113; punishment for, 114. See also child/children; midwives; women

abúlé (farm shack), 73–74

adé Olókun (beaded crown), 79

Ado-Ekiti, 125

àdúgbò (quarters), 1, 29, 41, 70, 71, 73, 74, 75, 81, 82; in Ekiti region, 125; as towns, 125

afọbajẹ (kingmakers), 83, 87

Africa/African: and black Americas, 18; as imprecise designation, 26, 28–29; studies, 39, 159n1. See also blacks; Negro(es); racism

“African Harpies,” stereotype of enslaved women traders, 119. See also women

Africanism/Africanity, 18; as acculturative process (Herskovits), 25–29; Herskovits’s continuum of New World and, 20, 21, 21t, 22–23; in New World, 23–24, 32, 110, 117–18, 119–20, 166n35 (see also secrecy); and Vodou, 34. See also Africanization; religion(s)

Africanization: of Christianity in New World, 35, 45; redone, as purification, 148. See also Africanism/Africanity; diaspora, African; Nagô-Candomblé lines; whites

agbo ilé (compounds), 42, 73, 124. See also house/home

aguinaldos (economic tribute, in Cuba), 138

ahistoricism, 154

Ajayi, Jacob Ade, 2

àj

(witch, malign female double), 100, 163–64n3

aj

l

Shango priests, 70. See also Shango

ajiaco (folkloric soup), 4

àkòró crown, 70

Aku cult, 85–86. See also cult(s); orisha

Aláf

n (baál

of Ilafon), 87; àwòrò of, serve as kingmakers for, 87

Allada (Arada), 36, 46

Alu (Yagba kingdom), 134

Americas. See New World

anachronism, 154–55

analogy: of cool to right and hot to left (deities), 36, 46–47; European/civilization and African/barbarianism, 63; fancy/savage and European/African, 138; of hot/cool blood and equilibrium/disequilibrium, 162n27; sexuality/witchcraft and fertility/motherhood, 110; spears/kola nut and death/life, 138; of transformation in Petro, 47–48; of water/Rada and fire/Petwo, 60–61. See also deities; orisha; Petwo (Pet...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Introduction
• ONE / Herskovits’s Heritage
• TWO / Creolization and Connaissance
• THREE / Notes from Ekitiland
• FOUR / The Blood of Mothers
• FIVE / Ethnogenesis from Within
• Afterword: Beyond the Mirror of Narcissus
• Notes
• References
• Index