The Good, the Bad, and the Beautiful: Discourse about Values in Yoruba Culture

5 The Beautiful

5 THE BEAUTIFUL AFRICAN “ART” AND YORUBA VALUES Use of the word “values” to describe normative beliefs in a culture is less fashionable these days. Perhaps it is because this term suggests the subjective and the relative, a ‘loose’ collection of qualities that are preferred on other than objective grounds, that it has been replaced by terminology that places a pronounced emphasis upon reasoning and evidence: “principles ,” “criteria,” “standards,” “prescriptive judgments,” and so forth. I have not chosen to resurrect the expression “value theory” because I find Yoruba discourse to be short on consistency or coherence. As should be evident from the preceding chapters, the epistemic criteria underlie and inform the ethical in an impressively systematic and coherent manner. I have chosen the term because it is a way to avoid the arbitrary division that has been introduced into English-language discourse by the use of the separate terms “ethics” (as arising from morality) and “aesthetics” (as arising from art) as if naming two different intellectual realms. For in the discussions with the onı́s .e .̀gùn, the transition from the “good” to the “beautiful” was as systematic and coherent as was the case with that between the epistemological and the moral. Any exegesis that has to do with the aesthetic in relation to an African culture must come to terms with the substantial corpus of publications that has arisen from the study and collection of African “art.” Yoruba Studies is no exception in this regard. Vastly more has been published on Yoruba “art” than on other aspects of the culture. And it is a further commonplace generalization that more studies have been published about Yoruba “art” than that of any other sub-Saharan African people. If this narrative did not already have a non-aesthetic starting point, arising from the previous discussion of epistemic and moral values, it would be 114 | THE GOOD, THE BAD, AND THE BEAUTIFUL prudent to begin this discussion by turning to such recognized authorities on Yoruba aesthetics as Rowland Abiodun (1990, 1994; Abiodun et al. 1994), Robert Plant Armstrong (1971),1 Babatunde Lawal (1974, 1996), and Robert Farris Thompson (1973, 1974). But in the present circumstances that need not be the case. The disproportionate importance that has been assigned to a Yoruba aesthetic as a result of the influence of African “art collection” does not fairly represent the bulk of ordinary discourse about values in that culture. Scholarly publications that attempt to site that aesthetic in a broader cultural context continue to analyze that context in terms of how it relates to whatever happen to be the specific “art” objects of particular interest. This is neither to underrate such work nor to say it is misled. But I do think the effect of the disproportionate number of such studies has been to skew the scholarly presentation and popular perception of Yoruba culture so that it becomes overly art-historically aesthetic in nature. In the past a disproportionate emphasis on the aesthetic in an African culture has led to a similar emphasis on the “poetic-symbolic” and the (emotionally) “expressive” as core elements to the African mentality. Speaking again as an analytic philosopher , I would suggest that developing the rational analysis of aesthetic values in Yoruba culture may prove to be an alternative possibility worth exploring. THE AESTHETIC OF THE PERSON In discussions with the onı́s .e .̀gùn the term most frequently mentioned that would appear to be relevant to an aesthetic was “e .wà,” which is normally translated into English as “beauty” (etm 199). But rather than being attributed to arts or crafts, its most common usage was emphatically with regard to persons, to human beings: (232) It [“e .wà”] has more than one type (orı́si). A person (ènı̀yàn) can be liked by others because of the color (àwo .̀ ) of his or her body. This concerns the beauty (e .wà) of the body (ara). When he or she wears cloth, the cloth will fit him as if it was sewn onto his or her body [perfectly]. In virtually every account of the term, however, e .wà or beauty as a physical attribute was rated superficial and unimportant by comparison with 1. Still significant as a seminal, if not topical, figure who wrote on African aesthetics principally with the Yoruba in mind. THE BEAUTIFUL | 115 good moral character (ı̀wà rere) as...