Read an Excerpt
MAPPING YORÙBÁ NETWORKS
POWER AND AGENCY IN THE MAKING OF TRANSNATIONAL COMMUNITIES
By Kamari Maxine Clarke Duke University Press
Copyright © 2004 Duke University Press
All right reserved. ISBN: 978-0-8223-3330-2
Chapter One
"On Far Away Shores, Home Is Not Far": Mapping Formations of Place, Race, and Nation
With the power of religious ritual, Oyotúnjí Village awakens at night. Ritual initiations and rhythmic drumming echo in the endless hours of the night as residents remake their ancestral homeland outside of the territory of Africa. If Africanness is defined as doing, rather than simply being, then òrìsà practitioners in South Carolina use ritual to produce a deterritorialized community in a U.S. landscape through which they become "African," in their terms. This making of Oyotúnjí Village as a legitimate site of Yorùbá traditionalism involves the recasting of time and space as a mechanism in which ancestral belonging is framed.
White candles along the community's private road lead participants toward the syncopated sounds of drums and the smell of frankincense. In the mystic aura of the moonlight, Yorùbá practitioners walk in and out of the palace courtyard, transposing themselves from African Americans to Yorùbá voodoo practitioners in sync with the mysteries of the occult fromancient times. The transformative celebrations begin with possessed dancers taken by the power of trance. Bare-breasted men and women with white cloths draped around their lower bodies invoke the ancestors through prayer, transforming ancestral death into life, into their ancestors living through them. Members chant songs announcing that, on these "far away shores, home is not far," for in the darkness of the moment lies the possibility of transformation. Although they are physically in the United States, they believe that they embody their ancestors in Africa. As such, the homeland is within them, allowing them to claim African ancestry regardless of their territorial affiliation. Prominently displaying reminders of slave captivity in sculptures that feature life-size broad-nosed, proud African ancestors, they study, worship, and wear the íleke (beads) of their initiation into Yorùbá òrìsà rituals, believing that it is to ancient Yorùbáland, and not to America, that their souls will return when they die. Ultimately, the practitioners' willingness to believe is the fundamental condition for this reclassification of Americanness into Africanness. The value of spirituality as the basis for Oyotúnjí political and social life lies neither in the institution nor in the practice of religion itself. It lies in the belief that Yorùbá ancestral forces live within them, and it is through ritual that they communicate with them. The links between southwestern Nigeria and life in the Americas is played out through invocations to transnational ancestors who were forcibly enslaved.
The day after, at the start of a standard workday, residents, many of whom live in polygamous family compounds, propitiate the gods and ask for blessings of good health, money, peace, and guidance. Announcing ritual completion and success, they spread rancid blood and remains of old animal feathers from earlier sacrifices throughout public shrines, unabashedly decorating ritual objects. During midmorning, the usual cacophony of men hammering, old engines, and tree droppings falling onto zinc roofs blends with the sound of people conversing, mixing both Yorùbá and English words in every sentence. The daily speech practices of Oyotúnjí villagers suggest that language is an ideological site for the reclamation of African ancestry. Mothers call out for their children, "Àgò Yétúndé, Adémíwá, Yétúndééééé, WOLÉ, come for lunch!" And children respond in Yorùbá, "Òoooo!" These sights and sounds may indeed transport the listener to a place seemingly far away, into an attainable reality: Africa in America.
The blended smells of livestock feed, fresh paint, and southern fried chicken refresh the community with the comforting banality of everyday life. In the heat of the day, while men in workgroups artfully decorate two-story buildings in the palace courtyard and children sit in classrooms learning African-centered humanities, sciences, and social sciences, clients pulling up in cars into the parking lot to seek spiritual guidance or healing are stopped by a young man on guard at the gate.
To announce regular clients, new visitors in tour buses, or simply local service repairmen, one of the boys beats the drum rhythmically, spelling out their message: Àlejò m bo wá, Àlejò m bo wá, Àlejò m bo (Visitors are here, visitors are here, visitors are here).
Welcome to Oyotúnjí. You are now leaving the United States of America and about to enter the Yorùbá Kingdom of Oyotúnjí African Village.
This sign, posted outside the front gates to Oyotúnjí, introduces a community that resembles the popular U.S. image of a quintessentially African village somewhere on a faraway shore, whose articulations of subjectivity lie in the enactment of the imaginary. For many visitors, its artistic presentation, coupled with the mementos of ritual, evoke nostalgic desires to see and experience ancient African village life. Named after the once powerful West African Oyo Empire of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries, Oyotúnjí is a black nationalist community of African American religious converts to Yorùbá practices who have reclaimed West Africa as their ancestral homeland. Most Oyotúnjí practitioners trace their origins to the descendants of the men and women taken from West African communities and exported to the Americas as slaves. As a result of the belief that they have a right to control the African territory that was their homeland prior to European colonization, residents of Oyotúnjí Village have reclassified their community as an African kingdom outside of the territoriality of the Nigerian postcolonial state.
In describing the power of indexical linkage to African homelands, I borrow the terms "index" and "referentiality" from linguistic anthropology: terms that are referential refer to things; terms that are indexical refer to truth-value. Such derivatives connect things to concepts; thus, the spatiotemporal distance between the sign of Africa and the thing referenced by the sign, such as brown or black skin, flags, or African clothes, is integral to the sign system, which enables the production of a conceptual linkage between race and African ancestral descent. Oyotúnjí was born out of complex controversies over the slavery that brought Africans to the Americas and the contestations between African American converts and Afro-Cuban practitioners over the legitimacy of their adaptations of West African practices. Thus, three national flags in the Oyotúnjí palace courtyard represent black American emancipation from slavery, black nationalism, and the establishment of an ancient Yorùbá empire in South Carolina.
The central theme of redemption from slavery is a direct reaction to the history of and continued hierarchies produced by U.S. racism. The flags, the meanings of the brown skin of the residents, and the aesthetics of African sign systems link conceptual relationships between people and sociohistorical meanings; however, this does not happen arbitrarily. The production of African aesthetic sensibilities is deeply connected to the establishment and strength of institutions that, through routinized practices, propel those meanings. Here, two institutions, that of religious ritual and legal regulations, are central to the entrenchment of linkages among race, citizenship, and hierarchies of scale that constitute historical patterns of exclusion and belonging. Yet, contemporary approaches to the convergences between religion and formal regulations of social law have been one of the most misunderstood areas of modern social life in the West. In an attempt to focus on religion as an object of study, scholars of religion have not only brought into being religion as a distinct conceptual element of social life, but they have also inscribed onto non-Western societies particular ontological categories ordered in particular domains that have not been reflective of their cosmology. Similarly, law has become an object of study, rendering secondary the processes of classifying the categories that have come to be scrutinized in legal analysis. By recognizing the ways that both religious and legal regimes co-constitute each other, we see how those regimes that developed alongside other institutions of knowledge contributed to the production of binaries that distinguish the secular from the nonsecular. It is important to note, therefore, that the similarities in these two forms of knowledge derived from religious and legal mechanisms relate to common requirements of solemn responsibility, training, and, most important, expected loyalty to principles of an originary founding moment as the basis of their authority.
In the case of religious worship, the founding moment of Yorùbá revivalists in the United States is both Olódùmarè's creation of the world and the eventual development of Yorùbá civilization in Oyo , which are further legitimated by Ife-centered origin narratives and Oyo narratives of greatness (see chapter 3). In relation to legal codes, the principles of constitutional doctrine, on which legal rules are based, are represented as having their origins in the founding of the Nigerian nation as a legitimating moment of statehood. These two originary moments figure critically in the institutional production of Yorùbá life. Òrìsà practices/rules became absorbed into legal codes in Cuba and Protestant reform movements in Nigeria. Oyotúnjí revivalism, therefore, is an attempt to employ the power of origins with the return to premodern/prenational òrìsà orthodoxies. However, in an attempt to reclaim these traditions, particular sources of institutional organization had to be established. History making as a domain of knowledge framed the basis for legitimating which origins and customs were to be followed. The second realm, religious ritual, which shaped the domain of ritual rules and developed alongside a society of priests, was established to interpret sources of divinatory interpretation. The third realm comprised the juridical political institutions that were established to secure "traditional" Yorùbá rules. The Ògbóni society was established to develop ex-post and ex-anti laws for the formation of coherent standards and methods for both forming and regulating transnational òrìsà communities.
In an attempt to rethink traditional regions, in this chapter I examine the production of social meaning in the context of historically constituted forms of transnational social order. The black Atlantic region that I am describing does not fit neatly into the area studies model preset by the establishment of nation-states and the formalization of international organizations. Instead, it is shaped by the racialization of black difference in the Americas and the history of captivity of bodies from one region to another. Recognition of the black Atlantic as a viable area of study involves the recognition of the ways that subjectivity is inscribed both through origins discourses and through the regulation of new forms of belonging. Taking seriously the conflation of the two involves taking seriously the deterritorialization of subjectivity in historically inscribed forms, thus the need for rethinking the borders for the "area" so central to anthropological studies. As we will see in this chapter, the borders are more ideological and institutional than they are geographic.
The Village Network
Founded in 1970 and by the late 1970s boasting a residential population of 191 residents, Oyotúnjí Village represents the home of black people in the United States whose ancestors were enslaved, sold to traders, and transported to the Americas. The development of religious revivalist movements as part of a counterculture is not new and often reflects people's attempts to respond to particular unfair historical conditions they are attempting to correct. In this case, over a period of three hundred years, the United States became home to millions of black Africans sold into slavery. The community's claims to African ancestry are signified through its aesthetic organization, for it indexically references Africa as its homeland.
Lying outside of the geographic boundaries of African nation-states, it is a small community built to accommodate up to twenty-five housing compounds with a potential capacity of over five hundred people. It is organized into three main sectors: areas for religious ritual and organizations, for political governance, and for a small-scale market economy within which religion and politics are played out.
The degree to which Oyotúnjí has been incorporated into the political economy of the state of South Carolina can be mapped by the interplay between the historical formation of scales of human value and the politics of plantation slavery, the consequences of which are operative in the village and its networks. Ultimately, its force is in its network of national and international economic and political linkages. In the mid-1980s, the population of the community plummeted from two hundred to seventy, but this led to an expanding constituency of thousands of urban affiliates with growing loyalties to the community. During this period, as increasing numbers of practitioners left for better opportunities in urban America, the community laid the seeds for the spread of new institutional forms of urban Yorùbá communities within a larger network of practitioners.
The decline in the number of residents and simultaneous growth of a national following produced the need to develop institutional infrastructures to standardize rules and norms of Yorùbá revivalism in the United States. Thus, through the creation of Oyotúnjí rural and urban nodes of connection, a larger deterritorialized network throughout the United States was constituted under the rubric of Yorùbá revivalism. Because of this added level of deterritorialized networking between Oyotúnjí Village and its satellite communities in urban centers, it became more important than ever for practitioners to claim belonging to a network of shared Yorùbá revivalists that linked them with Oyo practitioners in Nigeria and like-minded and similarly descended practitioners throughout the Americas. Today, Oyotúnjí is connected to networks of hundreds of thousands of affiliated practitioners and millions of òrìsà voodoo and Santería practitioners in the Americas. Compared with past numbers, fewer revivalists than ever resided in Oyotúnjí in the 1990s. Thus, it is the circulation of the institutional network and movement of people related to Oyotúnjí and not just the local community (with fewer than one hundred practitioners) that constitutes the basis for this study.
Yorùbá revivalism in the United States was shaped by the historical formations of meanings of racial belonging that have their roots in a racial aesthetics of practice. These aesthetics have taken the form of particular speech, dress, naming, ritual, and routinized practices that produced normative forms of Yorùbá expression and drove practices that, in the late twentieth century, took shape through the production of literary texts, books, and computer technologies. Ultimately, with the development of a plantation, slavery machinery, racial hierarchies of value, and the historical regulation of òrìsà ritual, the change in òrìsà practices and the production of different forms of institutions of òrìsà knowledge developed over time as a racially inscribed practice. These tenets of practice in Oyotúnjí and its related networks were reconstituted in the 1980s and 1990s through the spread of new religious forms. With these new circulations of knowledge, the movement, estimated by scholars of Yorùbá revivalism to exceed ten thousand adherents spanning major urban and rural centers throughout the United States, reconstituted itself in culturally racial terms.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from MAPPING YORÙBÁ NETWORKS by Kamari Maxine Clarke Copyright © 2004 by Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
