Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Kamari Maxine Clarke is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University.

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"In this highly original analysis, Kamari Maxine Clarke shows how the apparent stability of 'tradition' at different moments in time has been the product of processes of innovation made both necessary and possible during particular phases of economic limitation and religious and political oppression in the long historical stream of 'black transatlantic' cultural production."--Brackette F. Williams, author of "Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle"

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MAPPING YORB NETWORKS

Duke University Press

Contents

Note on Orthography.....................................................................................................ixPreface.................................................................................................................xiAcknowledgments.........................................................................................................xxixIntroduction: From Village, to Nation, to Transnational Networks........................................................11 "On Far Away Shores, Home Is Not Far": Mapping Formations of Place, Race, and Nation.................................512 "White Man Say They Are African": Roots Tourism and the Industry of Race as Culture..................................1073 Micropower and y Hegemony in Yorb Transnational Revivalism.........................................................1574 "Many Were Taken, but Some Were Sent": The Remembering and Forgetting of Yorb Group Membership.....................2015 Ritual Change and the Changing Canon: Divinatory Legitimation of Yorb Ancestral Roots..............................2316 Recasting Gender: Family, Status, and Legal Institutionalism.........................................................257Epilogue: Multisited Ethnographies in an Age of Globalization...........................................................279Appendix................................................................................................................289Notes...................................................................................................................295Glossary................................................................................................................317Bibliography............................................................................................................323Index...................................................................................................................341

Chapter One

With the power of religious ritual, Oyotnj 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 rs 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 Oyotnj Village as a legitimate site of Yorb 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, Yorb practitioners walk in and out of the palace courtyard, transposing themselves from African Americans to Yorb voodoo practitioners in sync with the mysteries of the occult from ancient 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 leke (beads) of their initiation into Yorb rs rituals, believing that it is to ancient Yorbland, 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 Oyotnj political and social life lies neither in the institution nor in the practice of religion itself. It lies in the belief that Yorb 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 Yorb and English words in every sentence. The daily speech practices of Oyotnj villagers suggest that language is an ideological site for the reclamation of African ancestry. Mothers call out for their children, "g Ytnd, Admw, Ytnd, WOL, come for lunch!" And children respond in Yorb, "oooo!" 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: lej m bo w, lej m bo w, lej m bo (Visitors are here, visitors are here, visitors are here).

Welcome to Oyotnj. You are now leaving the United States of America and about to enter the Yorb Kingdom of Oyotnj African Village.

This sign, posted outside the front gates to Oyotnj, 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, Oyotnj is a black nationalist community of African American religious converts to Yorb practices who have reclaimed West Africa as their ancestral homeland. Most Oyotnj practitioners trace their origins to the descendants of the men and women taken from West African communities and exported to the Americas as...