Yoruba People

Lillian Trager is professor of anthropology at the University of Wisconsin-Parkside.

Of all the different sub-genres of oral prose fiction among the Yoruba of Nigeria, the trickster tale is the most popular, especially among the nonruling stratum of society. Sekoni describes and explains literally what makes the trickster tale a trickster tale. The focus is to establish the phenomenology of the trickster tale discourse from a sociosemiotic perspective. More specifically, Sekoni attempts to investigate the sociological and narratological conditions that govern the formation, transformation, and persistence of the trickster tale primarily among the Yoruba masses and secondarily among contemporary Yoruba authors writing in English.

Covering five centuries--from the rise of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church in the 15th century and the early Portuguese missionaries right through to the Church and its key role in Africa today--this major new volume is the first complete history of the Christian Church in Africa. Written by a leading authority on Church history who has spent many years in Africa, it looks at all aspects of Christianity in Africa, including its relationship to traditional values and customs, politics, and the comparable rise of Islam in Africa during the period. It is the latest volume in the highly successful Oxford History of the Christian Church series.

Twenty-eight scholars, many of them well known in the sociology of religion, examine a variety of faith traditions and sociological topics that illustrate the connection between religion and society in many different countries at the dawn of the 21st century. The faith traditions include Judaism, Roman Catholicism, evangelical and mainstream Protestantism, Islam, Hinduism, Yoruba religion, Chinese religion, and several new religious movements, including a UFO cult in Quebec.

An interdisciplinary study of market women from all parts of Africa shows how, from historical times to the present, African women have used the economic power they have derived from market activities and commercial enterprises to improve their social and political status in a man's world. They used their wealth in pre-colonial times to obtain titles and even chieftainship. Because of their involvement in trade, many women acquired considerable property, especially real estate. The authors stress the positive aspect of women's economic activities, but also point out the prevalent sexual division of labor in Africa as a limiting factor. They illustrate the concomitant struggle between men and women over certain market items traditionally associated with one or the other sex. They analyze the cultural, social, and economic barriers that restrict female involvement in some economic activities. Nevertheless, the overwhelming conclusion by all of the writers, who are Africans and Americans, is that women play a major role in the economic sector of all the regions of the continent.

Drawing examples from a wide range of African cultures, this ground-breaking book expands the continuing discourse on the aesthetic and cultural significance of cloth, body and dress in Africa and moves beyond contextual analysis to consider the broader application of cloth and dress to art forms in other media. In blending the concerns of Art History and Anthropology, the authors focus on the art patronage systems that stimulate production, consumption, commodification and cultural meaning, and emphasize the overriding importance of cloth to aesthetic and cultural expression in African societies. Through this approach they reveal complex processes that involve a series of actors, including textile artists, commissioning-patrons and consumer-patrons, all of whom shape cloth and dress traditions. These individuals not only influence production, but are a key to understanding the cultural meaning of cloth and dress and, by extension, the body in Africa.

The musics of Africa play a particularly important role in expressing and forming identities. This book brings together African and Nordic scholars from both musicology and other disciplines in an attempt to analyse various aspects of the complex playing with volatile identities in music in Africa today. Taken together the papers put new light on the assumed or real dichotomies between countryside and city, collective and individual, tradition and modernity, authentic and alien. The papers are based on contributions for a conference organized by the research project "Cultural Images in and of Africa" of the Nordic Africa Institute together with the Sibelius Museum/Department of Musicology and the Centre for Continuing Education at Åbo Akademi University in Åbo (Turku), Finland in October 2000. The book includes a keynote speech by Christopher Waterman (UCLA), and an introduction by Annemette Kirkegaard, Copenhagen University. Southern, West and East Africa are represented in the studies, which cover a great variety of musics.