Transnational Yoruba Revivalism and the Diasporic Politics of Heritage

KAMARI MAXINE CLARKE Yale University Transnational Yoruba revivalism and the diasporic politics of heritage ABSTRACT f an anthropological study of a “village,” however rendered, can pro- This article explores the making of social vide a statement about the world writ small, what message can the membership in U.S.-based deterritorialized contexts world at large offer to a small community constructed on the his- and interrogate the ways that black-Atlantic torical abyss of the triangular slave trade? Oyotunji African Village is diasporic imaginaries are intertwined to produce a Yoruba community in South Carolina created by black Americans transnational notions of linkage. In charting a Iwho, although born in the United States, have set the goal of reclaiming the genealogy of a transnational orisa movement that orisa-voodoo spiritual practices of Nigeria as their own.1 Although the site came of age in a moment of black-nationalist typifies the very small rural community that the sociological literature often protest, I pose questions about how such a study refers to as an “intentional community,” in the sense of providing a sepa- should be understood in relation to ethnographies of rate domestic arena both within and outside of a nation-state, it is neither global networks. I argue that, despite their a local village with regional community ties nor a homogenized population seemingly thin representations of broad forms of reducible to a single location. linkage, transnational orisa networks produce In this article, I discuss the significance of Oyotunji Village as a site within culturally portable practices that articulate networks of Yoruba revivalism throughout the United States and as a man- important transformations: They shape institutions ifestation of contemporary global mobilizations of orisa spiritualism. The through which new forms of religious knowledge are village becomes both a lens through which to examine the localization of producing significant breaks with older forms. meaning produced and distributed remotely and is deployed by agents in [ethnographies of global networks, African diasporic the transformation of cultural and religious forms that circulate within in- movements, black Atlantic, racial politics, Yoruba terconnected, global networks spanning the rural and urban, regional and orisa practices] national, and international and transnational. The ethnographic field becomes, in this case, a dynamic terrain of changing religious practices re- fracted through complex time–space configurations. A mapping of black- Atlantic networks through the case study of orisa production provides an analytic framework for rethinking the political economy of diasporic formations and the linkages (or breakages) between sub-Saharan African and U.S. communities. The African American orisa practitioners in Oyotunji African Village tend to believe that spiritual ancestral connections, symbolized through racial blackness and shared oppression (e.g., African colonialism and black American enslavement), link them with Yoruba people across the wa- ters. This genealogy of transnational linkage highlights an impetus to create “African” communities in the New World even as the very process of formation and articulation necessarily creates new forms of exclusions. AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Vol. 34, No. 4, pp. 721–734, ISSN 0094-0496, online ISSN 1548-1425. C 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the University of California Press’s Rights and Permissions website, http://www.ucpressjournals.com/reprintInfo.asp. DOI: 10.1525/ae.2007.34.4.721. American Ethnologist Volume 34 Number 4 November 2007 These formations call for an understanding of the ways that resignify their meanings in new social arenas. Both highlight transnational networks of alliance and innovation are be- the always unfinished articulations of practices that shape ing deployed—both in relation to and in the absence of social space making in particular ways and that produce new the state apparatus—to reconfigure commonsense mean- lines of inclusion and exclusion. ings of place, practice, and membership. Such formations The data for this study were gathered over a ten-year call for a shift in articulating conceptions of “diaspora”—a period (1991 to 2001) in multisited fieldwork contexts: orisa shift that will productively critique the central fetishization religious communities in New York City; Oyo and Abeokuta, of African culture by various re-Africanization movements Nigeria; Oyotunji Village; and various cities throughout the and, in so doing, account for the economic globalization of United States that form sites within the Oyotunji Village net- African heritage in the Americas in complex time–space re- work of connection. I do not locate any one of these sites configurations. “African” cultural production is taking place as marginal, and I do not view Oyotunji Village, a demo- through the political economy of cultural-heritage markets, graphically small community, in isolation. Rather, I treat the in which new reclamation movements are being developed village community as a focal point in an ongoing, multilo- to denationalize practices from their perceived sources and cal story about the cultural production of religious forms ex- to legitimate them in some of the most unexpected places. changed through deterritorialized institutions of global cap- My inquiry here builds on these insights to demonstrate italism (Clarke 2004). Ultimately, I explore the challenges to how various institutions of African diasporic orisa practices ethnography raised in studying people and spaces linked to take shape, converge, and become rearticulated in often other, remote spaces—some of which are only symbolically haphazard ways—through what Anna Tsing (2005) refers to related and others of which directly impact daily material as “friction”—and, in so doing, create networks of transna- forms of innovation and contestation. My intervention is an tional linkages with nodes of practitioners throughout the attempt to demonstrate how anthropologists might chart Americas, acting within and in relation to orisa’s African ori- field sites through the controversies and contestations that gins. However, I show that the development of these net- bind people across time and space. works has less to do with contemporary West African origins Tounderstand new cartographies of linkage in the mak- than with the spread of capitalism globally with its partic- ing of transnational and diasporic formations, we must map ular post–Cold War formations in various U.S. global cities. the ways that networks operate as contingencies, as forms Tounderstand the reclassification of meanings of orisa prac- of linkage that take shape not just through friction but also tices outside of African homelands, scholars need to engage the absence of encounter—through particular preexisting the realities of simultaneous continuities and discontinu- formations—institutional and historical, arbitrary, or un- ities that explains the nature of such forms of global change embodied. It is important not to simply presume linkage and the related politics of creating the conditions for what through physical interpersonal encounters but to acknowl- can be seen as cultural legitimacy. In so doing, we can un- edge it as also arising through the ways that people ac- derstandhowglobalreligioussocialmovementsare,through tively separate themselves from others and in that process the production of deterritorialized practices in New World reconceptualize their relations to new spaces through re- contexts, seen by their adherents as “authentic.” As I demon- Africanized heritage movements that emphasize difference. strate, particular forms of cultural variation are connected to Here, I refer to the ways people produce, deconstruct, and the perceived legitimacy of the “originary” condition or set of engage in complex social continuities in their lived worlds— relations. Through the formation of a “poor” African village the way that, through discontinuities and distance, cartogra- in the richest country in the world, perceived continuities phies of linkage are produced. Such approaches to under- (shared African ancestry as lived through blackness, spa- standing relationships have not been central to the core of tial aesthetics, and traditional organizing practices) are used the anthropological discipline. Thus, recasting networks of to legitimatize discontinuities and to obfuscate politicoeco- connection through the spatial articulations of distinction nomic configurations that splice class, race, and geographic provides a framework for critically reassessing the ways that belonging into new forms of inequality, complicating claims westudytransnationalandmorecircumscribedgeographies of collective heritage. Framing social change within such si- as they relate to human relatedness. multaneous relations of continuities and discontinuities in- Anna Tsing’s Friction (2005) represents one such volves locating two spheres of interaction, which anchor my reassessment but locates the space of linkage in the argument. encounter—in the rubbing up together of difference and The first interactive sphere highlights the ways that in- sameness. In the present case study, I map conflicts around dividuals code and reproduce meanings in everyday life. It the circulation and enactment of religious products and encompasses practices that borrow from

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