Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency

Reader's Road Map

Reader's Road Map Until now, Western interpreters as well as African analysts have been using categories and conceptual systems which depend on a Western epistemological order. I ... I Does this mean that African Weltan.. 5chauungen and African traditional systems of thought are unthinkable and cannot be made explicit within the framework of their own rationality? v. Y. Mudimbe (1988:x) How, and in what Perspective, objects appear to me depends upon me. Only because, at this moment, I am here, where I am, do they appear to me in the way in which they do. Should I change my perspective, the aspect of things would also change. Michael Theunissen (1986:28) Yoruba peoples of southwestern Nigeria conceive of rituals as journeys-some... times actual, sometimes virtual. In elaborate funeral rituals, the elders transfer the deceased's spirit to its othelWorldly domain, while in rituals performed after the birth of a child, a diviner strives to settle the newly arrived infant on earth. Ritual incantations tell of the journeys of ancient diviners, deities, and spiritu... ally powerful women as they came from heaven to earth. Diviners journey to the sacred grove of the deity Odu to perform initiations. In masking rituals, trained specialists bring spectacles of cloth, dance, and music into the world from their othelWorldly domain and send them away again to close the performance (H. Drewal and M. Drewal 1983:2-4). The deities, too, journey into the world, by mounting the heads of their priests, who go into states of possession trance and dance (M. Drewal 1986, 1988). Elaborated transitional stages mark the deity's arrival and withdrawal. Wherever Yoruba religion thrives-Brazil, Cuba, the United States-this practice has persisted. Cast in performance in a myriad of ways-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. Transformational, or generative, processes are embedded in African perfor... mance practices through acts of re...presentation, or repetition with critical differ... ence. Thus, ritual performance necessarily involves relations between the past and individual agents' interpretations, inscriptions, and revisions of that past in present theory and practice. Scholars have long recognized the transformational capacity of ritual (see Meyerhoff 1990). Ritual has been said both to transform human consciousness and to alter the social statuses of participants, such as in rites of passage. This is true for the Yoruba cases examined here. In addition to these two kinds of transformation, I argue that ritual practitioners as knowledge... able human agents transform ritual itself through play and improvisation. Stud... xiv Reader's Road Map ies that place emphasis on the transformation of consciousness and changes in social status tend to attribute agency to the ritual structure, as in Victor Turner's tripartite model of ritual process (1977a). From this point of view, the ritual is successful only if the participants fulfill or complete all the stages of the ritual structure (see Fernandez 1986:43). In this study, I have examined instead the power of human agents to transform ritual through performance. This extends the perspective ofW. Arens and Ivan Karp (1989). Rather than privileging ritual structure as if it were some a priori "thing," I stress the power of participants to transform ritual itself. In the temporal flow of situated human interactions, knowledgeable actors make choices and take action based on their assessments of the moment and in order to influence their circumstances. Virtually everything in one's environ.. ment and experience is potentially usable to this end. This does not mean, however, that everybody always exercises his or her options. But, as I hope to show, performers exercise their options frequently enough to undermine the dominant notion in scholarly discourse that ritual repetition is rigid, stereotypic, conventional, conservative, invariant, uniform, redundant, predictable, and structurally static (see, for example, Bloch 1974; Gell 1975:217-218; Moore 1975:41, 219; Peacock 1975:219; Goody 1977:30; Rappaport 1979:172, 175176 ,183,208; Ortner 1984:154; Tambiah 1985:131-166; and, more recently, Lincoln 1989). Using a performance paradigm, I attempt to make an African system of thought explicit from the vantage point of its practitioners' theories and embod.. ied practices. Terms such as ritual have traditionally defined the gaze of the anthropologist and the historian of religion more so than they have defined what their subjects of study actually do and think (de Certeau 1986:129). What I have written has a dialectical relationship with the literature...