In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

1 Henry John Drewal and John Mason 14 Ogun and Body/Mind Potentiality: Yoruba SCarification and Painting Traditions in Africa and the Americas Erin Ogun ki se awada "Ogun's laugh is not a laughing matter" Ogun a sa'le fun orisa "Ogun clears land [and heads] for the gods" Ogun okoko yeri ogu "Ogun, the hoe that opens the earth to bury us" - Verger 1957:187, 188, 193 hroughout the lives of persons who liveaccording to Yoruba ways,Ogun "opens the road," helping them to actualize their iwa, their character, personality, and destiny. As patron of all who use iron, Ogun guides those who incise bodies, either with tattoo scarifications (kolo) serving principally aesthetic purposes (Drewal 1988, 1989), or those marks (gbere) whose inscriptions have primarily curative, protective, and empowering objectives.' Gbere include inoculations that deal with a variety of crisis situations , as well as those performed during initiations of orisa devotees. Initiation gbere, accompanied by head/body painting, attract and encourage divine forces to occupy the bodies of the devout, who then literally embody sacred presences and powers. Reflecting upon our own studies and experiences of Yoruba/Lukumi body arts, we offer some thoughts on how visible markings on bodies signal invisible transformations of persons. Part I The distinction between so-called "aesthetic" and "empowering" body arts is an arbitrary, basically Occi-centric one. From a Yoruba perspective, all cor- Ogun and Body/Mind Potentiality 333 poral transformations, whether obvious, subtle, unseen, temporary, or permanent , signal empowerment in a variety of ways.As Yoruba say, iwa l'ewa, "character /essence is beauty," and vice versa. Beauty (ewa) possesses power (ase), the power to move and change us in substantial ways. This holds for kolo (tatoo scarifications) and the symbols and sanctified pigments of spiritual forces painted on our bodies as much as the healing substances that soothe our skin or penetrate our bodies via inoculations. This view is due in large part to Yoruba concepts of the relationship between the body and the mind. As Morakinyo and Akiwowo (1981:26, 36) have noted, the Yoruba "concept of the person ... vis-a-vis body-mind relationship, is a unitary one. The body is the mind." In the West, some are beginning to examine and take seriously the bodily basis of experience and knowledge (see Johnson 1987; Drewal 1994)-something Yoruba have understood for some time in their holistic approach to human capacities and sources of well-being (Ademuwagun et al. 1979). The sensessight , hearing, smell, touch, and taste, as well as the sense of motion/movement /balance-create and respond to affective qualities in the "arts," which Yoruba define and understand as "evocative form." Logocentric approaches to the arts have limited our understandings of art on its own terms. As Drewal has argued elsewhere (1990:35), language-based approaches, such as semiotics, are just that: language-based, not sense-based. Art communicates and evokes by means of its own unique codes, and these await investigation. Recently, a vision-based approach has been outlined by the Yoruba artist and art critic Moyo Okediji (1992:119-23), which he imaginatively terms semioptics -an approach that recognizes the limitations of the linguistic basis of semiotics and seeks to uncover the ways in which the sense of sight shapes our perceptions and understandings of the world. Semioptics is an important step, but it needs to be part of a more comprehensive investigation of the bodily, multisensorial basis of understanding. Language, for example, is just one of the ways we experience and represent the world. But before language we began by perceiving, reasoning, theorizing, and understanding through all our senses, and these continually participate, though we may often be unconscious of them, in the ways we literally make sense of the world. Sensing (hearing, tasting, etc.) is thinking; sensing is theorizing . In the beginning, there was no word. Three examples may suggest how specific senses contribute to experiences and understandings of art in a Yoruba environment. Take the sense of hearing. In Yoruba society, the notion of "educability" is conveyed in the term iluti (ilu-eti, "possessing a well-trained ear"), the ability to hear well and learn (Abiodun 1983). Examining indigenous concepts of orality might provide insights into African understandings of "understanding." Such an exercise might be one way to respond to Mudimbe's challenge "to make African thought thinkable" (1988). A second example involves the sense of smell. At Abeokuta in 1978, I experienced a masker (Egungun) representing lineage ancestral warriors (fig...

Share