Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria conceive of rituals as journeys --
sometimes actual, sometimes virtual. Performed as a parade or a procession, a
pilgrimage, a masking display, or possession trance, the journey evokes the
reflexive, progressive, transformative experience of ritual participation. Yoruba
Ritual is an original and provocative study of these practices. Using a performance
paradigm, Margaret Thompson Drewal forges a new theoretical and methodological
approach to the study of ritual that is thoroughly grounded in close analysis of the
thoughts and actions of the participants. Challenging traditional notions of ritual
as rigid, stereotypic, and invariant, Drewal reveals ritual to be progressive,
transformative, generative, and reflexive and replete with simultaneity,
multifocality, contingency, indeterminacy, and
intertextuality.
Throughout the book prominence is given to the
intentionality of actors as knowledgeable agents who transform ritual itself through
play and improvisation. Integral to the narrative are interpolations about
performances and their meanings by Kolawole Ositola, a scholar of Yoruba oral
tradition, ritual practitioner, diviner, and master performer. Rich descriptions of
rituals relating to birth, death, reincarnation, divination, and constructions of
gender are rendered all the more vivid by a generous selection of field photos of
actual performances.
