The Symbolism and Communicative Contents of Dreadlocks in Yorubaland

Augustine Agwuele

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9783319301853
• eBook ISBN: 9783319301860
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African History
• Index: History

This book offers an interpretation of Yoruba people's affective responses to an adult Yoruba male with a 'deviant' hairstyle. The work, which views hairstyles as a form of symbolic communicative signal that encodes messages that are perceived and interpreted within a culture, provides an ontological and epistemological interpretation of Yoruba beliefs regarding dreadlocks with real-life illustrations of their treatment of an adult male with what they term irun were (insane person's hairdo). Based on experiential observations as well as socio-cultural and linguistic analyses, the book explores the dynamism of Yoruba worldview regarding head-hair within contemporary belief systems and discusses some of the factors that assure its continuity. It concludes with a cross-cultural comparison of the perceptions of dreadlocks, especially between Nigerian Yoruba people an

d African American Yoruba practitioners.

© The Author(s) 2016

Augustine AgwueleThe Symbolism and Communicative Contents of Dreadlocks in YorubalandAfrican Histories and Modernities10.1007/978-3-319-30186-0_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Augustine Agwuele¹

(1)

Texas State University, San Marcos, USA

End Abstract

This book explains and describes popular actions and thoughts of Yoruba people. When dealing with human behavior, making abstract generalizations about the motivation for action, as done within laboratory-based studies, evinces certain limitations. As a result, anthropological studies proffer interpretations of cultures on the basis of the uniqueness of their symbolism, their actions, the contextual meanings of events, and social relations. This approach to understanding a people’s views and thoughts, not in the abstract, but in relation to habitual interactions within their settings, often derives from an experiential and ethnographic perspective. On this basis, and using emic and etic perspectives, this work provides an ontological and epistemological explanation for the way that Yoruba people are observed to treat other Yoruba—males in particular—with hairstyles that they consider to be deviant. As an explanation of data obtained from an experiential fieldwork, there are by default personal meanings and attributions to the variously collected moments of interaction that generated the different rich points that this work accepts as data.

Postmodernists do not shy away from the injection of self into the study of cultures and of humans in interactions; neither do they wish away individual position in relation to their subject matter. This book provides epistemological interpretation for the Yoruba perception of a Yoruba male with hair that has been styled as cornrows or dreadlocks. It locates the basis of their visual perception of people in the cosmology of Yoruba people. The veracity of any proposition, with respect to the epistemology advanced by Francis Bacon, is a function of the data provided in support of it. On this basis, information obtained from real-life situations, especially events, responses, and activities that occur frequently, even if trivial, circumstantial, and anecdotal, is accorded significance. When such observations are pervasive, prevalent, and cut across stratum of the population, then according it such significance is obviously not misplaced. With roots in experience gleaned from interactions with owners of the culture, this work describes these observations, links them to the formative history of the people, and suggests a relationship between ideas, beliefs, values, and action. Thus, notions that produce actions produce culture. The source of the knowledge that guides Yoruba people is traceable to their cosmology; this not only defines their worldview (that belief of a people about the origins of the universe and their place in it), it informs their earthly pursuits, it guides their organization of their society—in both senses, political as well as social—and it delineates their cultural observances. The integrative that is contained within this cosmology establishes the milieu out of which resulted the Yoruba nation, the primacy of Ori-inu (inner-head) as the most prized possession of this nation, and the individual’s earthly sojourn, starting from the spiritual realm. The physical manifestation of inner-head, the Ori-ode (head) contagiously and analogously links with its essence; as such, the grooming of the physical head implicates the care and nurture of the spiritual head. This work, relying on actual deeds, shows—following Haraway—that this knowledge is not passive and merely abstract; rather, it is always an engaged material practice and never a disembodied set of ideas. Knowledge is embedded in projects; knowledge is always for some things and not others, and knowers are always formed by their projects, which shape what they can know. ¹ The consciousness or source of this knowledge, similar to the knowledge of a language, may be elusive; however, being in possession of this knowledge places one in a ‘certain state’ that ultimately generates culturally appropriate responses cloaked with specific frames of reference.

Furthermore, this book offers a parsimonious clarification of the complex interactions that yield knowledge of that which informs, among Yoruba people, the specific feelings that dreadlocks induce among them and the specific actions that they take in response to someone with this hairstyle, as a consequence of these feelings, which are themselves predicated upon the cultural knowledge that Yoruba people share. It does so under the view that the explication of the symbolism of the hair of the head and how it assumes its significations within Yoruba culture requires a clarification of the coreferentiality of the physical and the spiritual within the context of the Yoruba world, spiritual and historical, whence the hair ideology that informs politics of hair. It also requires a description of the various male hairstyles from the diachronic to the synchronic context, together with a description of the religious and social underpinnings of these variously attested hairstyles. The different disciplinary excursions make it possible to trace, to its roots, the trope that informs the Yoruba politics of perceiving hairstyles, their adoptions, their retention, and their modification in response to cultural change.

Concisely stated, this book brings together the results of ten years of experiential data collection, observation, and reflection as a cornrows- and dreadlocks-wearing Yoruba male. The purpose of this data collection, and, indeed this book, is to make sense of Yoruba attitudes toward male hairstyles by untangling the meaning attached to hair in Yoruba society ² and the existence of a precursor, a worldview, which informs the social fact of perception ³ among Yoruba people. This interpretative work provides meaning to the collected data. It does so by providing structure to the fragments of Yoruba everyday interaction with dreadlocks, and by the following techniques.

1. (1)
   This work makes use of the author’s personal hairstyle as a site from which to explore the issues surrounding the ontological ⁴ (as has been done by many scholars ⁵ ) and epistemological underpinnings of actions induced by apprehension of hairstyles from an axiological perspective.
2. (2)
   It makes use of sociocultural phenomena such as language, belief system, class, and popular culture to situate hairstyle as a site of the manifestation of cultural production and identity politics ⁶ and the maintenance of prized symbolic value.
3. (3)
   It examines the collusion of socially learned ⁷ Yoruba responses to, and perceptions of, male hairstyles, with features of modernism and globalization in addition to the concept of power within the Yoruba worldview.
4. (4)
   It codifies personal experiences from interactions with Yoruba people across three continents relative to others and provides cross-cultural comparisons of attitudes, expectations, and feelings toward particular male hairstyles (dreadlocks and cornrows).

This work does not offer a taxonomy of hairstyles worn by Yoruba people, it is not a study of Yoruba religion, and it is not a history of the people or any other subject that readers may consider valuable or would have wished to be the focus of its discussion. Rather, this work is particularly focused on explaining why Yoruba people hold particular notions about non-normative, deviant hairstyles and treat Yoruba males with such hairstyles the way they do. To accomplish this task, the book documents real-life, everyday encounters; from there, it traces the Yoruba philosophy to the formation of the nation and to cultural foundations, which inform this specific culture’s perception. It is only in the context of this excursion that the various appeals to other disciplines become necessary. These include appeals to history, to religious studies, to the handful of social institutions referenced, to power dynamics, to language, and to psychology. While the quest to understand just one leitmotif rests on these interdisciplinary pillars, this work should be understood only within its true context—the study of Yoruba reactions to an adult Yoruba male wearing a hairstyle considered to be deviant. The analyses that are involved in this work mainly consist in deciphering the roots of the signification of hair—indicated by the provided data—through the lens of the cohesive message encoded within the philosophical underpinnings of the various social institutions in which these occurrences take place. Since the aforementioned worldview colors a people’s perception and influences their responses to situations, it becomes necessary to understand their worldview in order to explain their responses to hairstyles they consider deviant. The documentation, description, and explication of the Yoruba worldview with respect to how it informs their perception of reality and effects their responses—to deviant hairstyles, in particular—are therefore the focus of this work. There are seven chapters in the book.

Chapter 2 argues for the theoretical import and adequacy of the “trivial” as means of studying the habits of a people. In our daily interactions, we find subtle manifestations of our innermost beliefs. These beliefs and associated habitual practices are so internalized they seem natural and inevitable. Invariably, they are generated by a cultural identity. This chapter argues for the viability of what people actually say and do, which, for explicative purposes, are termed “trivial.” It defines the specific use of the term trivial and gives examples, including anecdotal or circumstantial evidence as a valuable basis for conjecture in a scholarly work, especially when looking at shared practices.

Chapter 3 details the Yoruba world and their environment, including economic activities and subsistence strategies. The discussion assumes that the contemporary Yoruba worldview, with its particular understanding of reality and approach to life, results from the circumstances of their creation as a people, and their formation as a nation. It notes that the milieu surrounding the origin of the worldview was marked by insecurity and inequality that together created a habitus. To the extent that the punishing and toilsome economic, social, and political situation that was foundational to this formation has persisted and intensified, so also those solutions will persist, as they are instituted in response to this particular stressor. These solutions or responses, into which everyone is socialized, continue as means of societal organization, interpersonal relations, and views of the self relative to Others. The context, provided by the description of the Yoruba world, allows a semiotic approach, such as that which was privileged by Geertz, ⁸ which sees humans as beings suspended in the webs of significance that they have spun.

The interpretation of this web of significance requires the explanation of the worldview of Yoruba people, and this is the focus of Chap. 4. In their worldview are located the various crucial roles that hair plays for ancient and modern Yoruba people. It illustrates, based on thick description, ⁹ the various traditional male Yoruba hairstyles and the reasons for their existence. Since hair grooming is an invaluable part of normality for the society, this chapter shows from a diachronic perspective how the Yoruba view of uncultivated hair as a sign of madness evolved out of their cosmology. The discussion focuses on describing, in historical perspective, hairstyles that are worn for particular religious, political, and professional purposes, the traditional institution of dreadlocks (Dada), and the social use of hairstyles to adorn and express the self.

Chapter 5 discusses the Yoruba cosmology and its assumed orderliness. It shows the beliefs of Yoruba people about Ori and the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Trivial Behaviors as Valuable Data
• 3. The Yoruba Universe
• 4. Diachronic Study of Yoruba Hairstyles
• 5. The Underpinning of the Yoruba View of Hairstyle
• 6. Dynamics of Culture and Visual Profiling
• 7. Conclusion
• Backmatter