Deidre Helen Crumbley. Spirit, Structure, and Flesh: Gender and Power in Yoruba African Instituted Churches. Africa and the Diaspora Series. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2008. xv + 180 pp. $50.00, cloth, ISBN 978-0-299-22910-8.
Reviewed by Derek Peterson
Published on H-Africa (May, 2010)
Commissioned by Brett L. Shadle (Virginia Tech)
In the forty years since John Peel's pioneering and also enable, women's participation in the study, Aladura: A Religious Movement among the Aladura churches. Yoruba (1968), the Aladura (the "Owners of Crumbley's particular focus is on three Prayer") have become much more than a "reli‐ churches: the Christ Apostolic Church (CAC), gious movement among the Yoruba." Between founded in the early 1920s by schoolteachers in 1992 and 2002, some seventy-fve thousand Nige‐ Ijebu and Ibadan; the Church of the Lord Aladura rians made their home in the United States, and (CLA), formed in 1925 by the prophet Josiah Aladura churches now have congregations in New Oyelowo Ositelu; and the Celestial Church of York, London, and elsewhere in Europe and Christ (CCC), inspired in the late 1940s by the heal‐ America. There is a vibrant Aladura presence on er Samuel Bilehou Joseph Oshofa. All three the Internet, and Aladura entrepreneurs are busi‐ churches, she shows, share a "certain unease-- ly composing their history, writing apologetics, sometimes subtle, sometimes glaring--with the fe‐ and participating in international conferences. In male body as a conduit of both divine power and Spirit, Structure, and Flesh, Deidre Helen Crumb‐ procreative potential" (p. 136). The CCC excludes ley ofers guidance for those who wish to under‐ women from the leadership of the church; se‐ stand the gender politics of the Aladura churches. questers women who are menstruating from the Her aim, she says, is to help prepare American congregation; and arranges church members in a churches for "productive intercultural ecumenical hierarchical fashion, with junior members sitting dialogue, by displacing ethnocentric misinforma‐ in the back of the church. The CAC is less particu‐ tion with pertinent ethnographic knowledge" (p. lar about the physical arrangement of its congre‐ 8). But this is not a handbook for church ofcials gation, but like the CCC, it excludes women from to read. It is a lively, sympathetic study that illu‐ ordination into the priesthood. The CLA, by con‐ minates the structures of power that constrain, trast, celebrates women's role in the church's lead‐ H-Net Reviews ership. Ositelu, the church's founder, declared life does keep this book anchored squarely within that the ordination of women was a "divine in‐ the precincts of the Aladura congregation, and junction," and female priests are today among the only rarely does Crumbley move outside the leaders of the church (p. 45). "Women count in the church walls. She is preoccupied with the rules day-to-day life of these Aladura churches," Crumb‐ that oblige menstruating women to separate ley concludes, even where they confront rules themselves from the body of the Aladura congre‐ that exclude them from full participation in the gation: the subject is discussed--among other church's life (p. 137). places--on pages 77 to 79, 95 to 96, 113 to 115, and Crumbley's book is by no means a dry institu‐ in the conclusion. Crumbley herself experienced tional history. Raised in a black "sanctifed" the "cost of having a female body": she was com‐ church in Philadelphia, Crumbley spent four pelled to absent herself from the compound of the years living and working in Ibadan, and during Church of the Lord (Aladura) while menstruating, that time she found common ground with her and to perform a "sanctifcation" upon returning Aladura friends. She was actively involved in the to the church's life. For the anthropologist Crumb‐ life of the three churches she studied: she ofered ley, the exclusion of menstruating women is a lectures at the CLA seminary, helped to draft a measuring stick by which to evaluate women's document on "The Status of Women" for the same power in the church. The "ritual use of space in church, and taught a congregation how to sing relation to the female body," she writes, "drama‐ "Joy, Joy, Joy, Joy, Down in My Heart." In turn, tizes the respective exclusion and inclusion of Aladura protocols shaped her research program. women within church structures and processes" Crumbley describes how, while worshipping at (p. 135). But in her focus on the churches' ritual one church, she was subject to correction by other life, Crumbley makes it hard to see the uses wom‐ attendees, who obliged her to sit with a straight en made of Aladura discourse. She catalogues the back, point her feet toward the altar, and use a rituals of Aladura congregations, keeps track of white coverlet while sleeping in the church. When women's menstrual periods, and maps their seat‐ she asked for permission to explain her research ing arrangements. But Crumbley only rarely al‐ questionnaire to a CCC congregation, the church's lows her Aladura friends and informants to authorities refused to give her opportunity to speak, and she spends little time reconstructing speak, explaining that women were not permitted the biographies of the female commoners in to address the church. As an author and as a feld Aladura congregations. We are left to wonder, researcher, Crumbley does not hide behind a therefore, about the ways in which their scrupu‐ screen. She writes as a partisan, an advocate, ea‐ lous command over Aladura practices empow‐ ger to advance Aladura women's interests. In a ered women in other spheres of their social lives. chapter on "Gender and Power," for example, How far did Aladura Christianity ofer its female Crumbley ofers advice to church authorities. advocates rhetorical and theological resources as "Were CAC women ordained," she writes, "they they sought to advance their interests in the mar‐ could efect change directly on policy-making ketplace, in political societies, or in their kin rela‐ committees," allowing the church to retain the tionships? What "gendered experiences" of being services of inspirational female evangelists (p. Aladura were constituted outside the church? 107). Crumbley's angle of vision is fxed on the church's institutions, on its rituals and bureaucracy, and on Crumbley's close relationship with her sub‐ its male and female leadership. She misses the op‐ ject of study gives this book its intimacy and ener‐ portunity to explore how Aladura women gener‐ gy. But her intimate involvement in the church's
2 H-Net Reviews ated social capital as they moved into other for his evangelistic vocation. During that time, he spheres of the social world. invented a holy script, coined a set of holy words, The point is not simply that Crumbley has and gave out prophecies that he recorded in his been too focused on churches. The point is that book. Ositelu--like Akinyele--was creating both a the narrow character of her research makes it im‐ vocabulary and a literature that his followers possible to glimpse the wider world in which could learn, drawing Yoruba devotees into a Aladura entrepreneurs took up a position. sphere of discourse that was defned neither by Throughout the book, Crumbley illuminates the age nor by wealth, but by a shared devotion to "dramatic and undeniable continuities" that link and command over a unitary set of texts. contemporary Aladura churches with a longer Crumbley says nothing about Aladura parti‐ Yoruba religious tradition, and the book begins by sans' creative cultural work. She keeps her analyt‐ quoting the manifesto of the Organization of ical eye frmly fxed on the rituals that happen in‐ African Independent Churches, which claims that side the walls of Aladura churches, and she fails Aladura and other African-initiated churches "try therefore to illuminate how Aladura churches to live Christianity with our own national cloth‐ drew from and expanded on currents of thought ing, in harmony with our own cultural heritage" and practice that Yoruba people more generally (pp. 20, 6). Crumbley accepts Aladura Christians' were inaugurating. Where else were Yoruba self-justifying theology on its own terms, and ig‐ women and men being drawn together, whether nores the innovative cultural and intellectual in competition or in harmonious cooperation? work in which Aladura partisans were involved. I. Aladura churches are not simply an extension on B. Akinyele, for example, appears in Crumbley's an already -established set of Yoruba values and book as one of the founders of the CAC: he estab‐ practices. As Peel has shown in Religious En‐ lished the frst CAC primary school at his farm in counter and the Making of the Yoruba (2000), and Ibadan in 1924, and as the frst president of the as Akinyele's work suggests, the Yoruba were co- CAC, he helped to build the church's "fedgling bu‐ created alongside Yoruba Christianity. What polit‐ reaucracy" (p. 65). But Akinyele was doing more ical work did Aladura Christians do as they imag‐ than building churches. In 1916, some years be‐ ined themselves to be Yoruba, and how far did fore the foundation of the CAC, he published Iwe their imagined community overlap with other Itan Ibadan, a creative work of historical re‐ Yoruba imaginaries? search.[1] On its pages, Akinyele drew together But these are questions for another study. modes of discourse that Yoruba people had hith‐ Deidre Crumbley has done us a service in ofering erto kept separate. The book presented, side by an insightful, deeply felt book on a subject that side, the praise epithets that female oriki poets matters, both for church people and for those commonly recited and the historical narratives who would seek to understand the lineaments of (itan) that were ordinarily told by men. In Iwe our cosmopolitan world. Itan Ibadan, Akinyele was drawing Yoruba read‐ Note ers together, breaking down the separate spheres of discourse in which men and women practiced [1]. Karin Barber, "I. B. Akinyele and Early history, and constituting an integrated public. The Yoruba Print Culture," in Recasting the Past: His‐ churches that Akinyele helped to found might tory Writing and Political Work in Modern Africa, productively be seen as a further expression of ed. Derek R. Peterson and Giacomo Macola that innovative culture-building project. The CLA's (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2009), 31-49. founder, Ositelu, is said to have flled six massive journals during the four years he spent preparing to which
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Citation: Derek Peterson. Review of Crumbley, Deidre Helen. Spirit, Structure, and Flesh: Gender and Power in Yoruba African Instituted Churches. H-Africa, H-Net Reviews. May, 2010.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=26119
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