Title: Mapping Yorùbá networks : power and agency in the making of transnational communities /
Authors: Clarke, Kamari Maxine, 1966-
Publisher: Duke University Press,
Year: 2004
Subjects: Yoruba (African people) South Carolina Oyotunji African Village Migrations.; Yoruba (African people) South Carolina Oyotunji African Village Ethnic identity.; Yoruba (African people) South Carolina Oyotunji African Village Rites and ceremonies.; African Americans South Carolina Oyotunji African Village Ethnic identity.; African Americans South Carolina Oyotunji African Village Rites and ceremonies.; Culture and tourism South Carolina Oyotunji African Village.; African Americans Race identity South Carolina Oyotunji African Village.; Oyotunji African Village (S.C.) History.; Oyotunji African Village (S.C.) Social life and customs.
Abstract: Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of Oyotunji African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black nationalism, and the other 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 multi-sited 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.^
Contents: 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 Ọ̀yọ́ 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.