A Midland Book
2 primary works
Book 565
Gelede masquerades, practiced by the Yoruba in homage to the extraordinary power of female forces in the cosmos, are lavish artistic performances involving carved wooden headdresses, cloth costumes, dances, songs, and drumming. The authors of this richly conceived study analyse song texts, music, and dance as well as oral traditions and personal histories to interpret Gelede as a symbolic representation of the Yoruba world view. Abundantly illustrated with black-and-white and color illustrations, mostly field photographs, Gelede offers an integrated perspective on the social and cultural functions of art.
Book 684
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.
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.