Author: Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara
Publisher: Great Lakes Books
Published: 2005
Total Pages: 173
ISBN-13: 9780814328514
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The first art historical study of Yoruba-descended, African Brazilian religious art based on an author's long-term participation in and observation of private and public rituals. At a time when the art of the African diaspora has aroused much general interest for its multicultural dimensions, Mikelle Smith Omari-Tunkara contributes strikingly rich insights as a participant/observer in the African-based religions of Brazil. She focuses on the symbolism and function of ritual objects and costumes used in the Brazilian candomble (miniature "African" environments or temples) of the Bahia region, which combine Yoruba, Bantu/Angola, Caboclo, Roman Catholic, and/or Kardecist/Spiritist elements. An initiate herself with more than twenty years of study, the author is considered an insider, and has witnessed how practitioners manipulate the "sacred" to encode, in art and ritual, vital knowledge about meaning, values, epistemologies, and history. She demonstrates how this manipulation provides Brazilian descendents of slaves with a sense of agency -- with a link to their African heritage and a locus for resistance to the dominant Euro-Brazilian culture. Manipulating the Sacred will be of value to students of art history, religion, anthropology, African American studies, and Latin American studies, and to the growing English-speaking community of initiates of African-based religions.
Author: Rowland Abiodun
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-11-13
Total Pages: 415
ISBN-13: 1139992872
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Yoruba was one of the most important civilizations of sub-Saharan Africa. While the high quality and range of its artistic and material production have long been recognized, the art of the Yoruba has been judged primarily according to the standards and principles of Western aesthetics. In this book, which merges the methods of art history, archaeology, and anthropology, Rowland Abiodun offers new insights into Yoruba art and material culture by examining them within the context of the civilization's cultural norms and values and, above all, the Yoruba language. Abiodun draws on his fluency and prodigious knowledge of Yoruba culture and language to dramatically enrich our understanding of Yoruba civilization and its arts. The book includes a companion website with audio clips of the Yoruba language, helping the reader better grasp the integral connection between art and language in Yoruba culture.
Author: Suzanne Preston Blier
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2017-11-02
Total Pages: 793
ISBN-13: 1107729173
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →In this book, Suzanne Preston Blier examines the intersection of art, risk and creativity in early African arts from the Yoruba center of Ife and the striking ways that ancient Ife artworks inform society, politics, history and religion. Yoruba art offers a unique lens into one of Africa's most important and least understood early civilizations, one whose historic arts have long been of interest to local residents and Westerners alike because of their tour-de-force visual power and technical complexity. Among the complementary subjects explored are questions of art making, art viewing and aesthetics in the famed ancient Nigerian city-state, as well as the attendant risks and danger assumed by artists, patrons and viewers alike in certain forms of subject matter and modes of portrayal, including unique genres of body marking, portraiture, animal symbolism and regalia. This volume celebrates art, history and the shared passion and skill with which the remarkable artists of early Ife sought to define their past for generations of viewers.
Author: Henry John Drewal
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 1983
Total Pages: 356
ISBN-13: 9780253325693
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →..". an exceptionally rich source for all those interested in symbolic, religious or social studies." -- Tribus ..". an excellent book... fascinating to read." -- Research in African Literatures ..". a volume that establishes the standards by which future works on the masked festivals of the Yoruba and other Sub-Saharan African peoples will be judged." -- African Arts ..". the most sophisticated art historical analysis of a single African aesthetic tradition." -- Tribal Arts Review
Author: Robert Farris Thompson
Publisher:
Published: 1976
Total Pages: 254
ISBN-13:
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →Author: Akinwumi Ogundiran
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Published: 2020-11-03
Total Pages: 370
ISBN-13: 0253051525
DOWNLOAD EBOOK →The Yoruba: A New History is the first transdisciplinary study of the two-thousand-year journey of the Yoruba people, from their origins in a small corner of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria to becoming one of the most populous cultural groups on the African continent. Weaving together archaeology with linguistics, environmental science with oral traditions, and material culture with mythology, Ogundiran examines the local, regional, and even global dimensions of Yoruba history. The Yoruba: A New History offers an intriguing cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and social history from ca. 300 BC to 1840. It accounts for the events, peoples, and practices, as well as the theories of knowledge, ways of being, and social valuations that shaped the Yoruba experience at different junctures of time. The result is a new framework for understanding the Yoruba past and present.