Mapping Yorùbá Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities

Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of ÒyÓtÚnjÍ African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black nationalism, and the third the establishment of an ancient YorÙbÁ Empire in the state of South Carolina. Located sixty-five miles southwest of Charleston, ÒyÓtÚnjÍ is a YorÙbÁ revivalist community founded in 1970. Mapping YorÙbÁ Networks is an innovative ethnography of ÒyÓtÚnjÍ and a theoretically sophisticated exploration of how YorÙbÁ ÒrÌsÀ voodoo religious practices are reworked as expressions of transnational racial politics. Drawing on several years of multisited fieldwork in the United States and Nigeria, Kamari Maxine Clarke describes ÒyÓtÚnjÍ in vivid detail-the physical space, government, rituals, language, and marriage and kinship practices-and explores how ideas of what constitutes the YorÙbÁ past are constructed. She highlights the connections between contemporary YorÙbÁ transatlantic religious networks and the post-1970s institutionalization of roots heritage in American social life.Examining how the development of a deterritorialized network of black cultural nationalists became aligned with a lucrative late-twentieth-century roots heritage market, Clarke explores the dynamics of ÒyÓtÚnjÍ Village’s religious and tourist economy. She discusses how the community generates income through the sale of prophetic divinatory consultations, African market souvenirs-such as cloth, books, candles, and carvings-and fees for community-based tours and dining services. Clarke accompanied ÒyÓtÚnjÍ villagers to Nigeria, and she describes how these heritage travelers often returned home feeling that despite the separation of their ancestors from Africa as a result of transatlantic slavery, they-more than the Nigerian YorÙbÁ-are the true claimants to the ancestral history of the Great ÒyÓ Empire of the YorÙbÁ people. Mapping YorÙbÁ Networks is a unique look at the political economy of homeland identification and the transnational construction and legitimization of ideas such as authenticity, ancestry, blackness, and tradition.

Table of Contents:
Note on Orthography ix Preface xi Acknowledgments xxix Introduction: From Village, to Nation, to Transnational Networks 1 PART ONE. VERTICAL FORMATIONS OF INSTITUTIONS 1 “On Far Away Shores, Home Is Not Far”: Mapping Formations of Place, Race, and Nation 51 2 “White Man Say They Are African”: Roots Tourism and the Industry of Race as Culture 107 PART TWO. THE MAKING OF TRANSNATIONAL NETWORKS 3 Micropower and Oyo Hegemony in Yoruba Transnational Revivalism 157 4 “Many Were Taken, but Some Were Sent”: The Remembering and Forgetting of Yoruba Group Membership 201 5 Ritual Change and the Changing Canon: Divinatory Legitimation of Yoruba Ancestral Roots 231 6 Recasting Gender: Family, Status, and Legal Institutionalism 257 Epilogue: Multisited Ethnographies in an Age of Globalization 279 Appendix 289 Notes 295 Glossary 317 Bibliography 323 Index 341

About the Author :
Kamari Maxine Clarke is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Yale University.

Review :
Three flags fly in the palace courtyard of oyotunji African Village. One represents black American emancipation from slavery, one black nationalism, and the third the establishment of an ancient Yoruba Empire in the state of South Carolina. Located sixty- "In her pioneering analysis of the formation of a new religious nationalist movement, Kamari Maxine Clarke shows in fascinating detail how the oyotunji community refashioned Yoruba religion to suit its notion of racial identity."--Jacob Olupona, editor of African Spirituality: Forms, Meanings, and Expressions "In this highly original analysis, Kamari Maxine Clarke shows how the apparent stability of 'tradition' at different moments in time has been the product of processes of innovation made both necessary and possible during particular phases of economic limitation and religious and political oppression in the long historical stream of 'black transatlantic' cultural production."--Brackette F. Williams, author of Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle " ... an impressive account of Oyotunji and the role of religious practices and memory of the past in creating a transnational community. Clarke has succeeded in creating a narrative in which the cultural politics of blackness has merged with the notion of citizenship and the quest to resolve the dilemma of globalisation and its cultural implications."--Jrnl of Contemporary Religion, October 2006