From folk/sacred to ‘popular culture’ syncretism in Nigeria's Ubakala dance-plays

Abstract

Although popular culture remains an ill-defined, heterogeneous concept, sociological criteria generally include direct and spontaneous appeal to a mass audience in literate, industrialized, urbanized, class-divided, mass-media societies. These characteristics distinguish popular from “elite” and “folk” cultures, since expressive forms in all these categories may serve to define and mediate reality and to reflecc group values1. The roots of the popular culture concept are Western2, however, and when applied to Africa, these distinctions blur. A new definition is needed that will, along other things, reflect the role of popular culture in shaping the course of social life. Participant observation, film, interview, and historical research on Nigeria's Ubakala danceplays3 challenge the dichotomy between Western industrial societies and third world “folk” societies in addition to the notion that art forms merely reflect values.

Since no African society has remained untouched by capitalist penetration and cultural as well as political colonization, we would do better to speak of multidimensional modes of syncretistic response4 than in terms of arbitrary categories. Ubakala dance-plays define and reflect indigenous values, but their evolution in the context of colonial culture places them in the same expressive and conceptual universe as working-class and elite cultural forms in industrial societies. This analysis calls attention to the need for students of popular culture to consider its potential for more general social transformation.