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CHAPTER 6 Heritage as Remembrance History, Photography, and Styles of Imagination The first time I heard the religious dimension of the Osun Osogbo festival explicitly disavowed was during the closing ceremony of the 2001 festival. Ataoja Iyiola Matanmi III was standing in the VIP pavilion in the Osun grove to deliver his public address. After having welcomed the numerous dignitaries attending, he briefly outlined the importance of the event and took the occasion to make the case that the festival was not primarily about worshiping “idols” but about the act of remembering and honoring tradition. Initially puzzled by the demonstrative rejection of the religious dimension of the festival, I was told that the reference to remembrance is a standard formula invoked each year. And indeed, in the years that followed, I heard the same denial of the religious element again and again. Clearly, it was a cultural formula that seemed to contradict the obvious facts. After all, hadn’t the World Heritage Committee explicitly praised the religious vitality of the Osun grove and festival? How then to explain the disavowal? How does this denial of religious meaning comport with the belief that I posited earlier in the transcendental reality of Osun and the reauthentification of the Osun grove as a celebration of the vitality of postcolonial Yoruba religion? What looks like a paradox actually conforms to a well-established characteristic split in Yoruba culture. In his study on Yoruba politics and religious change, David Laitin (1986: 109ff) devotes a whole chapter to the “competing cleavages” between “the ancestral city and religion.” As he notes, “ancestral city identity is subjectively felt to be primordial while religious identity is not” (ibid: 146). This phenomenon has been subject to different interpretations. For Laitin, the reasons are linked to the ways in which Yoruba identity was formed. In his view, it was the colonial backing of the educated Yoruba elite that led to the relative primacy of political and cultural agendas prioritizing leadership and group identity over belief systems. While Laitin’s argument thus focuses on remnants of colonial politics, Margaret Thompson Drewal (1992: 162f) stresses the role of the religious openness and diversity embedded in Yoruba culture. For her, the high degree of flexibility and fluidity 120 OSOGBO AND THE ART OF HERITAGE intrinsic to Yoruba religious belief and practice unleashes centrifugal forces that are detrimental to political organization. Insisting on the ancestral connection counters and restrains these forces sufficiently to permit the formation of political identity. Recently, Jacob Olupona (2001) has put forward a third proposition. In an attempt to reconcile religion and politics, he introduced Robert Bellah’s discussion of “civil religion” to characterize the public appeal of the Osun festival in terms of the way it constitutes and maintains a common/civic identity. In this chapter we shall consider the primacy of ancestral over religious identity from a visual perspective. As discussed in the preceding chapter, the Yoruba concept of spectacle (ìran) is linked to memory (ìrántí) and image (àwòrán). So, it is not surprising that the palace’s insistence on the priority of remembrance over religion correlates with its interest in the use of photography and film for the display and documentation of heritage and communal identity. The practice has a long tradition. As I have explained elsewhere (Probst 2007), the increasing interest in issues of heritage in nineteenthcentury Europe went hand in hand with the development of photography . As part of the same discourse on loss and absence, photography functioned to “substitute” or “refill” the absence of the past by producing or, in the sense of Roland Barthes (1981: 87), by “certifying” presence. In fact, in 1853, only two decades after the invention of photography, the French government began to document its patrimony by photographing its architecture (Boyer 2005). In 1897, the National Photographic Record Society was founded in England with the purpose of documenting disappearing English customs (Jäger 2005). Along the same lines, photographic societies in North America undertook to document the vanishing cultures of American Indians (Fleming & Luskey 1986; Dippie 1992). Depicted as survivors of a lost age, their subjects gave witness to the tragic condition of belatedness. In other words, photography was not only a means of honoring or securing heritage; as “objects of melancholy” as Susan Sontag (1977) has aptly put it, photographs actually helped to create heritage. I shall investigate how photography helped to create heritage in Osogbo and in so doing how it contributed to the primacy of...

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