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7. The Collective in Conflict, or, the Play of Personalities
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7. I The Collective in Conflict, or, the Play of Personalities "Acting like E~u complements Agt;mQ."1 This popular expression highlights the trickster..like behavior participants shift into when experiencing Ag~mQ-another masked performance with a very dif.. ferent style and flavor from Egungun. Announced publicly in the news media, annual Ag~mQ festivals attracted thousands of people from all walks of life-the wealthy, the poor; locals and out..of..towners; young and old. Spectators were treated to plays of competing interests-trickster personalities like Iya Sango's times more than sixteen, all converging in the same performance. Rather than one long social drama in Turner's sense, Ag~mQ ritual performances consisted of a multiplicity of minidramas. The action surged back and forth between poles of joking and fighting, so that to get involved in Ag~mQ was indeed to become a trickster. The polarity is reflected in Ag~mQ titles. Thus Ija, the title of one priest living in ImQsan, means "Fight," while Serefusi, the one living in Igbil~, means "Playful..Beyond..Measure."2 Ag~mQ performances included formal segments of drumming and dancing as well as informal intrusions into ritual time and space at the whims of individual participants. Once again, improvisation was the mode of production. In keeping with the trickster deity's personality, participant/observers had to be quick and agile, fickle and flexible, ready to joke one moment and fight the next. Ag~mQ demanded it of those who wanted to "see," or truly experience, the ethos of the performance.3 Everybody got caught up and pulled along in the performative flow of events. IDEOLOGICAL CONFLICT The Agemo priests are traditionally the intellectuals of Ijebuland and they are usually found contemplating the principles of life and death and the inscru.. table force which controls them. They appear to be close to the source of cosmic power or energy but they cannot tap it at wilL They tend to feel acutely the paradox of their position, namely, the gulf between their conviction that this is a world that should thrive on co..operation and the negation of this very 114 Yoruba Ritual principle in their own organization. In their village isolation, the Agemo priests spend much of their time meditating on this paradox. Oyin Ogunba (1985:294) In the festivals I attended, there was no existential communitas expressed among Ag~m9 participants except as factionalism. If ritual hinges on the ex.. change of symbols of commonality (Schwartz 1978:429), then it seems ironic that conflict and controversy were endemic, that the style of the exchange should be rough and tumble in character. But, as Schwartz points out, common.. ality makes communication about difference possible. There was almost no tradition upon which all Ag~m9 priests agreed. There are, everybody said, sixteen titled Ag~m9 priests; in reality there were more. The stories presented to explain this discrepancy were as numerous as those that explain the history of the Ag~m9 institution itself. And although the priests could describe in enormous detail how Ag~m9 ritual should be performed, it never happened just that way. The king of Ij~buland, the Awujal~, has not played his formal ritual role for nearly twenty years because of his conversion to Islam, but Ag~m9, priests and others never failed to include him in their descriptions of festival events. The office was in a sense present symbolically even in the absence of the king. Or rather, he was pres.. ent in spite of himself. What each priest tended to narrate was his personal role in Ag~m9 performance; all others by comparison became secondary so that what I ended up with were as many different versions of the practice as there were official participants. At a fundamental level, Ag~m9 practice fomented conflict. Thus Ag~mQ priests were known traditionally for their abilities to curse, which they hurled against each other as well as against women. As the son of one Ag~mQ priest said of his father's relationship with another priest who lives in close proximity, "they are close friends, but at festival time they become enemies." The notion of ritual as journey persists. More specifically, Ag~m9 involved pilgrimage and the relationship between a center and its periphery. Ag~mQ priests encircle the capital at Ij~bu..Ode, living in outlying communities that are anywhere from six to fifteen miles away (Map 2) (Ogunba 1965:178). Most of the myths that serve...