Introduction: Exhuming Subjugated Knowledge and Liberating Marginalized Epistemes

Abstract

Some psychological, some linguistic, and some intellectual. But none have perhaps been less studied than how colonization subjugates knowledge and marginalizes local epistemes. This book aims to take endogenous categories and epistemologies seriously, focusing on the production of knowledge in the Yorùbá society of southwestern Nigeria and exploring the extent to which indigenous concepts, ideas, and language are taken into account in academic research. Paying close attention to language, endogenous discourses, and local knowledge systems, I hope to provide a new understanding of a number of important institutions and social practices such as Ifá, motherhood, marriage, and family. This study draws on data collected over a long period of time, starting with my dissertation research in Ibadan and Ogbomoso in the 1980s and continuing to the present. Significantly for this book, I also conducted interviews with diviners in Ogbomoso.