Notes
- I would like to thank Allen F. Roberts, Monica Visoná, and David Cateforis for their comments on earlier drafts of this text. I would also like to acknowledge my great debt to the Okpebili of Ugep, Cornelius Ikpi Edet, for his considerable contribution to my understanding of Yakurr culture. Research for this study was conducted between June 1998 and January 2007. Funding was generously provided by University of Iowa Stanley (1998), Bodine (2001), and Seashore (2003) Fellowships, and by U.S. Department of Education Foreign Language Area Studies (1999) and Fulbright-Hays DDRS Fellowships (2001). All photographs are the author's.
- B. Ruby Rich, “Dissed and Disconnected,” Transition 62(1993): 35.
- Okwui Enwezor, “Redrawing the Boundaries: Towards a New African Art Discourse,” Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art 1(1994): 6.
- For a discussion of the concept of “dividual” identity, see Edward LiPuma, “Modernity and Forms of Personhood in Melanesia,” in Bodies and Persons: Comparative Perspectives from Africa and Melanesia, ed. Michael Lambek and Andrew Strathern (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 53–79.
- Salah Hassan, “The Modernist Experience in African Art: Visual Expressions of the Self and Cross-Cultural Aesthetics,” in Reading the Contemporary: African Art form Theory to Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor (Cambridge.: MIT Press, 1999), 219.
- Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 35.
- Ibid., 11.
- Ikem Stanley Okoye, “Identity/Knowledge,” Critical Interventions: Journal of African Art History and Visual Culture 1(July 2007): 6.
- Ibid.
- The terms “neo-traditional” and “contemporary traditional” respectively come from Hassan, “The Modernist Experience,” 219 and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, Contemporary African Art (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1999), 9.
- William Rubin, Primitivism in 20th Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1984).
- As an example, Atewa, one of the priest-chiefs in Ugep, is not allowed to sit in state with the other priest-chiefs during the Leboku festival, because generations ago the incumbent of the Atewa office initiated an adulterous affair with another chief's wife. Such instances, once inscribed into rites' protocols, become part of their permanent defining characteristics, but that does not mean that the overall form of rites is therefore rigidly fixed.
- For examples, see Christopher Steiner, African Art in Transit (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), for a discussion of the nature of the trade in African artworks; Polly Richards, “Masques Dogons in a Changing World,” African Arts 38, 4 (2005): 46–53, 93 for a discussion of the impact of tourists; and Bess Reed, “Spirits Incarnate: Cultural Revitalization in a Nigerian Masquerade Festival,” African Art 38, 1 (Spring 2005): 49–59, 94 for a study of “traditional” art's role in identity politics.
- Ulli Beier, Contemporary Art in Africa (New York: Praeger, 1968), 14. Ulli Beier, of course, was not alone. The same claim can be made about a dozen or so expatriate patrons and culture brokers; see Kasfir, Contemporary African Art, ch. 3.
- The overall argument I make in this essay owes much to Nelly Richard, who draws attention to African Diaspora artists' centuries-long expertise with bricolage, or assembling meaningful culture out of bits and pieces of remembered and newly introduced practices. In the late 1980s, Richard pointed out the degree to which Diaspora artists' strategies resembled those of postmodernism. She showed that the artists, despite their expertise, were denied serious consideration by the Western art world on the grounds that postmodernism is not interested in creating meaning. Nelly Richard, “Postmodernism and Periphery,” Third Text 2(1987/88): 5–12.
- Anthony King, ed. “Introduction: Spaces of Culture, Spaces of Knowledge,” in Culture, Globalization and the World-System: Contemporary Conditions for the Representation of Identity (Minneapolis: Minnesota Press, 1997), 8; Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1990). Most experts on African art agree that the world has been global for centuries. Okwui Enwezor, for example, pinpoints the years 1497–1498 as a watershed, when Vasco Da Gamma encircled Africa. Carol Becker, “A Conversation with Okwui Enwezor,” Art Journal 61, 2 (2002): 13.
- Terence Ranger, “The Invention of Tradition in Colonial Africa,” in The Invention of Tradition, eds. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger [1983], rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 212.
- Richard Schechner, Performance Theory (New York: Routledge, 1988): 172–173.
- Gabriel Hakims Ukpenetu, “Prospects for Leboku Festival,” The X-Ray 3, 19 (29 August 2003): 9.
- Eli Bentor observed that the division of the field into two areas of concentration is due precisely to art history's use either of anthropological methodology for indigenous art production or art historical methodology for studio-based art. Eli Bentor, “Challenges to Rural Festivals with the Return to Democratic Rule in Southwestern Nigeria,” African Arts 38, 4 (Winter 2005): 38–45, 93. For his arguement, S. J. Tambiah relies on, among others, Lévi-Strauss. S.J. Tambiah, “A Performative Approach to Ritual,” Proceedings of the British Royal Academy 65, 1 (1979): 118.
- Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics, eds. Charles Bally and Albert Reidlinger, trans. Wase Baskin (New York: Philosophical Library, 1959).
- Herbert M. Cole, “The Art of Festival in Ghana,” African Arts 8, 3 (Spring 1975): 12–23.
- Arjun Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy,” Public Culture 2(1990): 5.
- Roland Robertson writes of “a twofold process involving the interpenetration of the universalization of particularism and the particularization of universalism.” Roland Robertson, “Social Theory, Cultural Relativity and the Problem of Globality,” in King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-System, 73. According to Stuart Hall, the now universal interplay between the local and the global derives from the spread of capitalism. Capitalism inherently depends on, and seeks to draw into itself, foreignness. It resolves the contradiction in this scenario by celebrating difference without attributing any significance to it. Stuart Hall, “The Local and the Global: Globalization and Ethnicity,” in King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-System, 33.
- Hall, “The Local and the Global,” 26–27. Hall emphasizes that during the current phase of globalization, nations are “an untenable configuration to keep in place for very much longer.” It needs to be pointed out that Yakurr people think of themselves as a subjugated nation. Yakurr society partakes in the modern nation state of Nigeria only on occasion and only selectively. Ulf Hannerz points out that “The Nigerian state has not used its state apparatuses very insistently to impact a national culture.” Ulf Hannertz, “Scenarios for Peripheral Cultures,” in King (ed.), Culture, Globalization and the World-System, 117. Femi Shaka also asserts the Nigerian state lacks sovereignty, because people's loyalties are with their “traditional” governments. Femi Okiremuete Shaka, “The Colonial Legacy: History and Its Impact on the Development of Modern Culture in Nigeria,” Third Text 19, 3 (2005): 297.
- Terry Eagleton, “Nationalism, Irony and Commitment,” in Nationalism, Colonialism, and Literature, ed. Seamus Deane (Minnesota: Field Day Company with University of Minnesota Press, 1990), 26. Although I specifically focus on Yakurr culture's relationship to a globalizing world in this article, elsewhere I discuss oppositional politics in Yakurr culture in relationship to colonialism. Gitti Salami, “‘Saa, Saa’: The Instrumentality of ‘Indigenous’ Yakurr Culture to Nation Building in Postcolonial Nigeria,” forthcoming.
- The slave trade lasted well into the middle of the nineteenth century. P. Amaury Talbot, Historical Notes of The Peoples of Southern Nigeria, vol. 1 (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd., 1969), 195. Yakurr people's involvement in the slave trade primarily consisted of supplying the trade with foodstuffs. Daryll Forde, Yäko Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 1964). However, cultural memory of Aro raiders and middlemen is vivid. The Aros (of Arochukwu and Aro Ndizogwu) were dreaded, and interaction with Akunakuna middlemen from Agwagune led to various crises at the end of the nineteenth century. At the time, British intervention, which took the form of several expeditions, brought about loss of Yaurr sovereignty. Otu Abam Ubi, “The Cross River Expedition of 1898: The Loss of Yakurr Political Independence,” in History and Culture of the Upper Cross River, eds. S.O. Jaja, E.O. Erim, and B.W Andah (Enugu: Harris Publishers, 1990), 76–83.
- “His Highness Chief Michael E. Obeten (The Obool Lopoon of Ugep),” Umor Otutu: People's Magazine (n.d., circa 1984).
- Ubi Okoi, Interview with author. 4 August 1998.
- Tony Ita Etim, “Yakurr LG Crisis: Royal Fathers Want Officials Removed,” The Punch, 1 August 2001: 4.
- Tambiah, “A Performative Approach,” 120.
- James C. Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), xi.
- Susan Vogel, Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art (New York: Center for African Art, 1991), 32–55.
- Daryll Forde, Yäko Studies (London: Oxford University Press, 1964).
- Scott, Domination and the Arts of Resistance, 4.
- Olu Oguibe, “Art, Identity, Boundaries: Postmodernism and Contemporary African Art,” in Oguibe and Enwezor (eds.), Reading the Contemporary, 20. Various peoples in the Middle Cross River region amuse themselves by recounting acts of bravura of the past, during which they defied their immediate neighbors and stole their secrets. Gitti Salami, “Ordinarily Extraordinary: Yakurr Priest-Chiefs' Ritual Performances and the Leboku Festival” (Ph.D. diss., University of Iowa, 2005), 243–246. The claim made that “traditionally”-trained artists' strategies resemble those of studio-trained artists can also be reversed. Are studio-trained artists who employ self-exoticization to afford themselves an entry into the international art world simply doing what traditional artists taught them?
- Amanda Carlson, “Nsibiri, Gender and Literacy: The Art of the Bakor-Ejagham (Cross River State, Nigeria)” (Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 2003), 84–87.
- Robertson applies the term, which emerged as jargon in the context of Japanese business concerns, to illuminate the global-local problematic. Here, it references the particular local understanding of an increasingly homogenized global world. Roland Robertson, “Glocalizaton: Time-Space and Homogeneity-Heterogeneity,” in Global Modernities, eds. Mike Featherstone, Scott Lash, and Roland Robertson (Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications, 1995), 25–44.
- Schechner, 281.
- Timothy J. Reiss, Against Autonomy: Global Dialectics of Cultural Exchange (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), 10.
- Salah Hassan makes this desire for a shift in the art world's power structure explicit when he calls on African scholars, who according to him are in control of the discourse on contemporary African art, to also take the lead on the discourse on classical African art. Salah Hassan, “Commentary,” in The Nsukka Artists and Nigerian Contemporary Art, ed. Simon Ottenberg (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2002), 312.
- Cornelius Ikpe Edet, letter to the Author. 10 March 2005.
- Schechner uses this term to differentiate mimetic representation from ritual acts that effectively bring about change and are an integral part of living. Schechner, Performance Theory, 40. In Ugep, there are still a sufficient number of people, who practice local religion in earnest, to whom the proper execution of annual rites is of utmost importance. Most, but not all of them, are elderly. Many of them speak neither Pidgin nor standard English. The majority of the population attends Christian churches, but interpretation of scripture and the nature of the church services have come to resemble the indigenous culture so closely, that local beliefs are not incompatible with them. When in a pinch, people turn to local practice to alleviate their suffering. A growing number of Christians attend Pentecostal Churches. As born-again Christians they generally avoid contact with rites. A very small number of people who attend Pentecostal churches are actively seeking to eradicate all customs deriving from local spiritual practice.
- I do not count “Yakurr Day,” a day centered on Yakurr dances among these alterations, because it was not generated from within the culture. This event, which occurs a day after the main day of the festival and is held in a school yard, was imposed on the culture in 2005 by the state governor as part of his effort to promote tourism. Ubi Ujong Inah, Video transcript by author, Ugep, 29 December 2006.
- VIPs, such as the governor of the state or representatives from the federal government, are usually permitted to take seat on the palace grounds, but other visitors sit under canopies at a distance.
- Appadurai, “Disjuncture and Difference,” 5.
- To my knowledge, during the eighteen months I spent there, I was the only foreign national in the community.
- Although copies of Forde's text (op.cit.) were not readily available in Ugep, older, literate people appeared all to have read the book. Forde was frequently mentioned during interviews.
- At issue was a display in the museum (which I have not yet seen) and labeling of brass bangles as originating in Benin. Such bangles are worn by Yakurr women during the festival, but they are widely used, i.e. all the way from Benin to the foot of the Cameroon Mountains.
- I provide a chronological account of the Leboku rites in “Umor Revisited: A Diachronic Study of Sacrosanct Principles Embedded in the Yakurr Leboku Festival,” African Arts 41, 3 (Fall 2008): 54–73. The complex structure of the festival consists of twenty-five separate rites executed over two months.
- D. G. Coursey and Cecilia K. Coursey, “The New Yam Festivals of West Africa,” Anthropos 66, 3–4 (1971): 445–446.
- Md. 451.
- See Cole, “Art of Festival,” or Michelle Gilbert, “Aesthetic Strategies: The Politics of a Royal Ritual,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 64(1994), 99–125.
- Kathy Curnow, “The Art of Fasting: Benin's Ague Ceremony,” African Arts 30, 4 (Autumn 1997): 46.
- To date, I researched a total of twenty-four festivals in the Middle Cross River region; thirteen of them were documented in detail. A preliminary report of my findings is forthcoming.
- Herbert M. Cole and Chike C. Aniakor, Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos (Los Angeles: Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1984), 128.
- “Betwixt and between” refers to the notion of liminality. See Victor Turner, The Anthropology of Performance (New York: PAJ Publications, 1987), 25–26.
- Christopher Slogar, “Iconography and Continuity in West Africa: Calabar Terracottas and the Arts of the Cross River Region of Nigeria/Cameroon” (Ph.D. diss., University of Maryland, 2005), 27. There is at least one instance in the archaeological material in which a fertile woman is paired with an accomplished man. Ideas around personhood that involve productivity as evidenced by accumulation of money are ubiquitous in the archaeological record, where figurines are lavishly bedecked with skeuomorphic representations of various forms of currency.
- Ibor Esu Oden. Video transcript by author. Ugep, 27 August 2001.
- Emea O. Arua, “Yam Ceremonies and the Values of Ohafia Culture,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 51, 2 (1981): 695.
- Shaka, “Colonial Legacy,” 302–303.
- Forde, Yäko Studies.
- Ibid., 240–241.
- For a discussion of the ritual implications of crossroads, see Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit: African and Afro-American Art and Philosophy (New York: Vintage Books, 1983).
- Ibid.
- Margaret Thompson Drewal discusses performance and individual agency within a Yoruba context in Yoruba Ritual: Performers, Play, Agency (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). Gavin Brown provides considerable insight into the indeterminate nature of ritual, see “Theorizing Ritual as Performance: Explorations of Ritual Indeterminacy,” Journal of Ritual Studies 17, 1 (2003): 3–18.
- Cole, “Art of Festival,” 23.
- Cornelius Ikpi Edet, conversation with author, 3 August 1998.
- Ritual differs from other works of art only in that its intent is inviolable; while its forms portend to be divinely inspired and immutable, they clearly change to adapt to changing conditions. For ritual to achieve an aesthetic charge, since changes to its forms have to be minute and barely noticeable, it is the meaning assigned to the forms that has to be flexible. In Yakurr culture, the form of the Leboku festival rites, which originally had a religious function, are today reinscribed with meanings regarding contemporary identity issues.
- Daniel, E. Valentine, “The Individual in Terror,” in Embodiment and Experience: The Existential Ground of Culture and Self, ed. Thomas J. Csordas, [1994], rev. ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 229–247.
- Schechner, Future of Ritual, 230.
- Hall, “The Local and the Global,” 26–27.
- Such as 0100101110101101.com, Critical Art Ensemble, Otabenga Jones & Associates, Forcefield, Instant Coffee, and Temporary Services. See Holland Cotter, “The Collective Conscious,” New York Times, 5 March 2006 (sec 2): 1, 29. Collectives that emerged in the West during the twentieth century, unlike kinship-based groups, seem to me to consciously engage the West's preoccupation with individual agency.