Abstract
Indisputably, gender has been a fundamental organizing principle in Western societies.1 Intrinsic to the conceptualization of gender is a dichotomy in which male and female, man and woman, are constantly and binarily ranked, both in relationship to and against each other. It has been well documented that the categories of male and female in Western social practice are not free of hierarchical associations and binary oppositions in which the male implies privilege and the female subordination. It is a duality based on a perception of human sexual dimorphism inherent in the definition of gender. Yorùbá society, like many other societies worldwide, has been analyzed with Western concepts of gender on the assumption that gender is a timeless and universal category. But as Serge Tcherkézoff admonishes, “An analysis that starts from a male/female pairing simply produces further dichotomies.”2 It is not surprising, then, that researchers always find gender when they look for it.
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Notes
Old Öyó refers to Öyó-ile (Oyó “home”), the original space that was settled. There are many other Öyó that were occupied at different historical time periods before the establishment of New Öyó in 1837. The distinction I wish to draw, however, is between New Öyó, which was established in the nineteenth century, and all the previous Öyó. Öyó was many places, spatially speaking, but my allusion is to one culture and its continuities, despite a lot of movement. This chapter, then, is concerned with the period before die monumental changes of the nineteenth century. According to Robert Smith, “The Oyo of the alafin are three: Oyo-ile, Qyo-oro, …and lastly New Oyo. Although only these three bear the name ‘Oyo,’ tradition recounts that, since their dispersion from Ile-Ife …, the Oyo people have settled in sixteen different places” (“Alafin in Exile: A Study of the Ìgbòho Period in Oyo History,” Journal of African History 1 (1965): 57–77).
Samuel Johnson, The History of the Yorubas (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1921)
J. A. Atanda, The New Oyo Empire: Indirect Rule and Change in Western Nigeria, 1894–1934 (Bristol, England: Longman, 1973)
Robert S. Smith, Kingdoms of the Yoruba (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1969)
Robin Law, The Oyo Empire c. 1600–c. 1836 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)
Toyin Falola, ed., Yoruba Historiography (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991)
Peter Morton-Williams, “An Outline of the Cosmology and Cult Organization of the Oyo Yoruba,” Africa 34, no. 3 (1964): 243–61.
Serge Tcherkézoff, “The Illusion of Dualism in Samoa,” in Gender Anthropology, ed. Teresa del Valle (New York: Routledge, 1989), 55.
Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women,” in Toward an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975).
Judith Lorber, Paradoxes of Gender (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994).
Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 1952).
Marilyn Frye, The Politics of Reality (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1983), 165.
See, for example, Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990)
Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York: Routledge, 1990).
Nancy Chodorow, Femininities, Masculinities, Sexualities: Freud and Beyond (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 1994).
For a discussion of sexual dimorphism and the need to integrate biological and social constructs, see Alice Rossi, “Gender and Parenthood,” American Sociological Review 49, no. 1 (1984): 73–90.
The title of a recent book is especially appropriate in this regard; see Elizabeth Grosz, Volatile Bodies: Toward a Corporeal Feminism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).
Diana Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism and the Nature of Difference (New York: Routledge, 1989), xi.
Suzanne J. Kessler and Wendy McKenna, Gender: An Ethnomethodological Approach (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1978).
Wande Abimbola, Ifa: An Exposition of Ifa Literary Corpus (Ìbádán: Oxford University Press, 1976), 131–32.
Rowland Abiodun, “Verbal and Visual Metaphors: Mythical Allusions in Yoruba Ritualistic Art of Ori” Word and Image 3, no. 3 (1987): 257
Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature (London: James Currey, 1981).
Ifi Amadiume, Male Daughters, Female Husbands: Gender and Sex in an African Society (London: Zed Books, 1987)
N. A. Fadipe, The Sociology of the Yoruba (Ìbádán: Ìbádán University Press, 1970), 129.
Candance West and Don Zimmerman, “Doing Gender,” in The Construction of Gender, ed. Judith Lorber and Susan A. Farrell (Newbury Park, Calif.: Sage, 1991).
William Bascom, The Yoruba of Southwestern Nigeria (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1969), 54.
J. S. Eades, The Yoruba Today (London: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 53.
Hugh Clapperton, Journal of2nd Expedition into the Interior of Africa (Philadelphia: Carey, Lea, and Carey, 1829), 1–59.
T. J. Bowen, Central Africa (Charleston: Southern Baptist Publication Society, 1857), 218.
For a discussion of Yorùbá urbanism, see the following: E. Krapf-Askari, Yoruba Towns and Cities: An Inquiry into the Nature of Urban Social Phenomena (Oxford: Clarendon, 1969)
Akin Mabogunje Urbanization in Nigeria (London: University of London Press, 1968).
For example, Peter C. Lloyd, “The Yoruba Lineage,” Africa 25, no. 3 (1995): 235–51.
Compare Karen Sacks, Sisters and Wives: The Past and Future of Sexual Equality (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1982).
See Michelle Rosaldo and Louise Lamphere, eds., Women, Culture, and Society (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1974), 19–20.
Sandra T Barnes, “Women, Property and Power,” in Beyond the Second Sex: New Directions in the Anthropology of Gender, ed. Peggy Reeves Sanday and Ruth Gallagher Goodenough (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990).
Jacob K. Olupona, African Traditional Religions in Contemporary Society (New York: Paragon House, 1991).
Bolanle Awe, Nigerian Women in Historical Perspective (Lagos, Nigeria: Sankore, 1992), 58
Niara Sudarkasa, Where Women Work: A Study of Yoruba Women in the Market Place and at Home, Museum of Anthropology, Anthropological Papers 53 (Arm Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1973), 100.
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Oyěwùmí, O. (2005). (Re)constituting the Cosmology and Sociocultural Institutions of Òyó-Yorùbá. In: Oyěwùmí, O. (eds) African Gender Studies A Reader. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-09009-6_6
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