What Gender is Motherhood?

Changing Yorùbá Ideals of Power, Procreation, and Identity in the Age of Modernity

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137521255
• Print ISBN:
  9781137538772
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology

In this book, Oy?wùmí extends her path-breaking thesis that in Yorùbá society, construction of gender is a colonial development since the culture exhibited no gender divisions in its original form. Taking seriously indigenous modes and categories of knowledge, she applies her finding of a non-gendered ontology to the social institutions of Ifá, motherhood, marriage, family and naming practices. Oy?wùmí insists that contemporary assertions of male dominance must be understood, in part, as the work of local intellectuals who took marching orders from Euro/American mentors and colleagues. In exposing the depth of the coloniality of power, Oy?wùmí challenges us to look at the worlds we inhabit, anew.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• A Note on Orthography
• Introduction: Exhuming Subjugated Knowledge and Liberating Marginalized Epistemes
• 1. Divining Knowledge: The Man Question in Ifá
• 2. (Re)Casting the Yorùbá World: Ifá, Ìyá, and the Signification of Difference
• 3. Matripotency: Ìyá in Philosophical Concepts and Sociopolitical Institutions
• 4. Writing and Gendering the Past: Akọ̀wé and the Endogenous Production of History
• 5. The Gender Dictaters: Making Gender Attributions in Religion and Culture
• 6. Toward a Genealogy of Gender, Gendered Names, and Naming Practices
• 7. The Poetry of Weeping Brides: The Role and Impact of Marriage Residence in the Making of Praise Names
• 8. Changing Names: The Roles of Christianity and Islam in Making Yorùbá Names Kosher for the Modern World
• Conclusion: Motherhood in the Quest for Social Transformation
• Notes
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index