UC Berkeley UC Berkeley Electronic Theses and Dissertations Title Incorporating Divine Presence, Orchestrating Medical Worlds: Cultivating Corporeal Capacities of Therapeutic Power and Transcendence in Ifa Everyday Practice Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/45z5n187 Author Gardner, Amy Harriet Publication Date 2010 Peer reviewed|Thesis/dissertation eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Incorporating Divine Presence, Orchestrating Medical Worlds: Cultivating Corporeal Capacities of Therapeutic Power and Transcendence in Ifá Everyday Practice by Amy Harriet Gardner A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Joint Doctor of Philosophy with the University of California, San Francisco in Medical Anthropology in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Lawrence Cohen, Chair Professor Judith Justice Professor Sharon Kaufman Professor Nancy Scheper-Hughes Professor Ula Taylor Spring 2010 Incorporating Divine Presence, Orchestrating Medical Worlds: Cultivating Corporeal Capacities of Therapeutic Power and Transcendence in Ifá Everyday Practice © 2010 by Amy Harriet Gardner Abstract Incorporating Divine Presence, Orchestrating Medical Worlds: Cultivating Corporeal Capacities of Therapeutic Power and Transcendence in Ifá Everyday Practice by Amy Harriet Gardner Joint Doctor of Philosophy in Medical Anthropology with the University of California, San Francisco University of California, Berkeley Professor Laurence Cohen, Chair This dissertation focuses on the cultivation of specialized corporeal capacities of therapeutic power and transcendence among Ifá medical-ritual specialists in Yorùbá communities in contemporary Nigeria (and the resonance and implications of their practices within a global context). Rather than interrogate “medical (and/or religious) knowledge” as the object of inquiry, this project explores the power of the learning process –– as a practice of everyday living –– to cultivate, within student-apprentice and healer-sage alike, a distinctive (sonically and spiritually informed) somatic mode of being-in, perceiving, interpreting, and attending-to-the-world, and thus, to orchestrate Ifá’s distinctive medical and religious life-world. In so doing, this dissertation seeks to redress the historical stigmatization of African and Diasporic religions, subjectivities, and knowledges within the scholarly and popular imaginations and to contribute to recent scholarship on sensuous and sacred ways of knowing. An ethnography of embodiment, the senses, and practices of everyday living, this work is fundamentally informed, methodologically and theoretically, by a phenomenological approach and the author’s embodied experiences (as a professionally trained dancer; as a physician; and –– in her extensive training and continuous, on-going learning process –– as an Ifá healer- specialist). Focusing on the embodied and the sensorial as formative principles in, respectively, the mundane and specialized medical-devotional (Ifá) life-worlds of the Yorùbá, this project explores the ways in which the sonically-informed sensorium of Yorùbá society –– as articulated through common and specialized practices of everyday living –– cultivates (and naturalizes) particular ways of being-in, attending-to, and making-sense-of intersubjective experience and the phenomenally given world for the populace at large and for Ifá specialists, in particular. Specifically, this research claims that in the training and devotional development of Ifá apprentices and priests/esses, embodied techniques of everyday scholarly-devotional practice that cultivate a corporeal resonance with the earth are key. These distinctive embodied practices initially engender shifts and ruptures in the apprentice’s mundane habitus, while simultaneously facilitating the gradual incorporation of the priestly habitus with its associated sensibilities of “coolness,” permeability, and containment. These practices of everyday living also facilitate conscious, dispassionate communion with Divine Presence, and thus revelatory knowledge (the embodied certainty known as erí okòn). Gradually, with experience and practice, the healer- priest/ess is able to consciously direct aspects of Divine Presence-as-healing-force for the therapeutic benefit of others. Finally, after years of daily scholarly-devotional practice, these musical-embodied practices are refined and body forth a special –– sonic and incorporative –– somatic mode of being-in and attending-to-the-world particular to Ifá, known as “a stomach as 1 deep as a calabash” (inú t’ó jìnlè bi igbá), in which Divine Presence is incorporated, as co- presence, within the corporeality and being-in-the-world of the healer-sage. And this particular sonically-informed mode of being-in-the-world is characterized by corporeal capacities of phenomenologically potent therapeutic power and transcendence. Thus, this research proposes that Ifá practice is a techne of musical corporeality, wherein the healer-sage consciously and dispassionately orchestrates aspects of Divine Presence for the therapeutic, aesthetic, existential/transcendent enhancement of the individual, the priesthood, and the community. This dissertation also asserts the primacy of engagement in everyday scholarly-devotional practices, over time, in bodying forth wisdom, knowledge, and healing power among Ifá healers and sages; and therefore, claims that the historical privileging of “initiations” of “ritual” and/or ethnomedical specialists in anthropological and religious scholarship is both misplaced and misleading. In West Africa, Ifá specialists are trained for years before being recognized or accepted as qualified practitioners. And it is through the individual practitioner’s engagement in the formative practices of the learning process –– much more than in an overly mystified “initiatory moment(s)” –– that Ifá’s specialized life-world, orientations, and corporeal capacities of therapeutic power and transcendence are made real and palpable. In Ifá practice, the sensuous and affective body is the pregnant nexus from which, and through which, innovative knowledge, healing (regenerative therapeutics) and subjectivity continually emerge. Thus, in contrast to Bourdieu’s (1977) privileging of the conservative and congealing aspects of practice and habitus, Ifá practice highlights (and cultivates) the body’s inherent plasticity and malleability, and its capacity to incorporate –– literally to embody –– innovation, as sonically-informed sensibilities. This embodied agency has the potential to transform inter-subjective relations in/and the phenomenally given world. In particular, the phenomenological and therapeutic power of Ifá’s healing orchestrations dramatically highlight that, in addition to the technological instrumentality of biomedicine, there are other ways of constituting real and effective therapeutic power. And, given the shifts and flows of globalization as well as the emergence of complementary, alternative, and integrative medicine within biomedical institutions and practices, this has significant implications, theoretically and practically, for the challenges inherent in attending to the complexities of human suffering in the contemporary global moment. 2 To all those upon whose shoulders I stand Mo Dúpé Òrúnmìlà, Mo yín ború. Òrúnmìlà, Mo yín boyè. Òrúnmìlà, Mo yín bosíse-o. i Acknowledgements To the members of my dissertation advisory committee –– VèVè Clark, Lawrence Cohen, Judith Justice, Sharon Kaufman, Nancy Scheper-Hughes, and Ula Taylor –– I am extremely grateful for your generosity, diligence, and intellectual rigor; for your encouragement and support, academically and personally; and for serving as shining examples of academic mentorship as well as critically engaged and socially responsible scholarship. It has been an honor and a pleasure to work with you. Thank you. To my family –– to my parents, Marlyn and Bernard Gardner; and to my ex-husband Adékúnlé Elutilo and his extended family –– I thank you for your support and for the ways in which our relationships have informed, and enriched, my work and my being-in-the-world. To my Ifá family –– especially to Asèdá Àgbáyé, Awo Kékeré, Fágbémi Fásína, Fela Sowande, and Àdùnní Olórìsà –– words cannot adequately express my gratitude for your guidance and shepherding; for the profound substantive and ephemeral nourishment our relationship has afforded me; for your abiding Presence in (the organic unfoldment of) my life. Mo dúpé gan-an. To the following persons who have informed and enriched my life and this project, assisting me in various ways, over many years –– Roland Abiodun, Biodun Adediran, Clara Aisenstein, Akintunde Akinyemi, Kitty Allen, Dawn Arens, Fanny Arnovitz, Peshel Arnovitz, Linda Barnes, Gay Becker, Diane Bell, Roberto Belmar, Jasmine Berke, Priya Bhogaonker, Phyllis Bischoff, Nestor and Tamar Bittelman, Stanley Brandes, Alison Brooks, Mary Ann Burris, Stephanie Chatman, Connie Chiba, Kamari Clarke, John Coltrane, Beverly Davenport, Katherine Dunham, David Eaton, Marie Ekpere, Marion Ekpuk, Brad Erickson, Gaylon Ferguson, Marianne Ferme, Yvette Flores, Bill Foreman, Harriet Iris Gardner, Maurice and Bella Gardner, Ned Garrett, Kathryn Geurts, Gail P. Gordon, Karen Greene, R. Richard Grinker, Sonya Haggett, Barry Hallen, Geon Soo Han, India Harville, Teddy Holiday, Sarah Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, Yoko Kamitani, Eliana Korin, Cathy Kresik, Carol Kress,