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AFH 5905: Religion, State and Society in Atlantic Africa

Course Description:
Students will be introduced to the historical and anthropological scholarship on the role of religion and religious encounters in the contestation for power in Atlantic Africa (from Senegambia to South Africa) during the past 500 years. The class will focus on the intersections of religion as an organic/dynamic institution of beliefs, worldviews, knowledge and ritualized practices on one hand and the construction of hegemony, authority, legitimacy, governance, new identities and societies, resistance and rebellion on the other hand, especially in the era of Atlantic slavery and the aftermath European colonial rule.

The course is oriented towards historical processes and the birth of societies/ideas rather than  specific personality or event(s). Emphasis will be on innovations of religious beliefs as critical sites for building knowledge and ideology; and the deployment of religion in social action in Africa. Students will be asked to be attentive to the dynamism of religion as a product of and an agent of historical processes, and to the indivisibility of religion and beliefs as an integral part of everyday experience. The liturgy and doctrines of specific religions are not our concern in this class. They may be relevant but only in the context of understanding historically constituted social actions.

The themes we shall address include: how religion conditioned the choices of political entrepreneurs in their construction of power, legitimacy, and authority; how competing political agents manipulated belief systems to create ideology, legitimacy, authority, etc.; how the Atlantic political economy shaped belief systems and the knowledge base, and in the process created new worldviews in Atlantic African societies; the role of religion and beliefs in African responses to the Atlantic economic systems; and how religion mediated the encounters between European colonial agents and African subjects in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Broadly, the course will address issues of meaning, intellectual traditions, and culture in historical writing; and will identify the historicity of African traditions.

ACADEMIC PROFILE
I teach classes in the history, archaeology, and culture of Africa, and in comparative world civilizations. My research and teaching interests are interdisciplinary, intersecting the traditional boundaries of history, archaeology, and anthropology. Convinced that the historical experience of Africa is accessible from diverse sources, my pursuit of interdisciplinary approach to cultural historical analysis makes me aware of the many theatres in which history has been and is being produced, (re)enacted, and lived.

I have conducted research in Nigeria (West Africa), Ethiopia (East Africa), and the United States. I have collaborated (Ethiopia and U.S.A.) and  initiated (Nigeria) projects on different aspects of African cultural history stretching as far back as 100 A.D. in the case of Aksumite Civilization in Ethiopia, 1200 A.D. for Yoruba Civilization in West Africa, and as recent as early 19th century in the case of urban African-American communities in Boston (USA).

The cultural history of Yoruba-Edo region in Nigeria has been the main focus of my research since 1990. The major theme of the research is the articulation of local historical experience in regional and global contexts. I am interested in how historical communities, peoples, and cultural ecumenes responded to, manipulated, and became part of regional and global historical processes (e.g, the Atlantic economy). I am also interested in how the cultural institutions and daily lives of African societies have been transformed as a result of these global/regional encounters. Within the framework of global/regional/local intersections, my archaeological-historical research has been drawn to topics such as migrations, inter-group relations, ethnogenesis, political formation, material culture, and development of cultural institutions.

I am currently working on a project that focuses on the impact of the Atlantic commerce on social and cultural transformations in the Bight of Benin (West Africa). The project is titled "Cultural Translations of the Atlantic Experience in the Bight of Benin." The outline of an aspect of the research agenda is recently published in International Journal of African Historical Studies (see publications below). Methodologically, the project seeks to integrate political economic analysis with cultural theories, and the data for the study will be drawn from oral and written textual sources, social memory and public rituals, and archaeology. The ultimate goal of the project is to provide insights into the sociocultural transformations that took place in the Bight of Benin between 1500 and 1900 as a result of the integration of the region into the Atlantic economic system. My current research has been made possible with grants from Florida International University's Provost/ FIU Foundation Research Award, Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research, National Endowment for the Humanities, and The University of Missouri-Columbia Research Reactor Center/National Science Foundation.
 

Selected Publications

Books

Archaeology and History in Ilare District (Central Yorubaland, Nigeria), 1200-1900.
                                                Cambridge Monograph in African Archaeology No. 55 ( London: Archaeopress, 2002). Paper: £34.00
 

Precolonial Nigeria: Essays in Honor of Toyin Falola. Africa World Press, Trenton, NJ (2005). Paper: $39.95; Cloth: $119.95
 
 

Archaeology of Atlantic Africa and the African Diaspora. Indiana University Press (2007). Cloth: $59.95
 

Selected Articles and Book Chapters
"Four Millennia of Cultural History in Nigeria (ca. 2000 B.C. – A.D. 1900): Archaeological Perspectives," Journal of World Prehistory 19, 2 (June 2005).

"Chronology, Material Culture, and Pathways to the Cultural History of Yoruba-Edo Region, 500 B.C. - A.D. 1800," Sources and Methods in African History: Spoken, Written, and Unearthed, Toyin Falola and Christian Jennings, eds. (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2003)

"Of Small Things Remembered: Beads, Cowries, and Cultural Translations of the Atlantic Experience in Yorubaland," International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2-3 (2002): 427-457.

"Archaeology, Historiographic Traditions, and Institutional Discourse," Toyin Falola (ed.), Nigeria in the Twentieth Century (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2002).

"Filling A Gap in the Ife-Benin Interaction Field (13th-16th centuries AD): Excavations in Iloyi Settlement, Ijesaland," African Archaeological Review 19, 1 (2002): 27-60.

"Ceramic Spheres and Regional Networks in the Yoruba-Edo Region, Nigeria, 13th-19th Centuries A.C.," Journal of Field Archaeology, Vol.28, No. 1-2 (2001): 27-42.

"Factional Competition, Sociopolitical Development, and Settlement Cycling in Ilare District (ca. 1200-1900): Oral Traditions of Historical Experience in a Yoruba Community," History in Africa 28 (2001): 20-40.

Selected Conference Papers and Invited Lectures
"Investigating Oyo Imperialism in Central Yorubaland: The Archaeology of Ede-Ile, ca. 1600-1800," Society for American Archaeology (SAA) 71st Annual Meeting, San Juan, Puerto Rico, Apr. 26-30, 2006.

"Migrating Subjects, Frontier Process, and Cultural Transformations in Yorubaland, Seventeenth Century," Africa Conference on Movements, Migrations, and Displacements in Africa, University of Texas at Austin, March 24-26, 2006.

"Osun Yeye O: Gender/Power/History and Cultural Biography of a Yoruba Goddess," A Public Lecture organized by Nigerian Field Society and Institute of African Studies, University of Ibadan (Nigeria), August 3rd, 2004.

"Osun, Yemoja, and Olokun: Gender, Commerce, and the Making of Atlantic Goddesses."
Conference on Gendering the Diaspora: Women, Culture and Historical Change in the Caribbean and the Nigerian Hinterland. Held at Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire, November 22-24, 2002.

"An Archaeological Tale of Two Houses: Domestic Architecture and Social Formation in Yorubaland, ca. 1550-1750,"
16th Biennial Conference of Society of Africanist Association (SAfA), University of Arizona, Tucson (AZ), May 2002.

"Between the Ideology of Ethnogenesis and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism: Looking Back, and Questioning the Making of the Yoruba." Conference on Nigeria in the Twentieth Century, Austin (TX), March 2002.

Career Award
Recipient of The 2006 University of Texas Africanist Award for Research Excellence

University Teaching Experience
A. Florida International University
B. Boston University
C. University of Benin, Benin-City, Nigeria
D. Bendel (Edo) State University, Ekpoma, Nigeria
 

Previous Classes:
Graduate Reading Seminar:
AFH 5905: State and Society in Atlantic Africa, 1441-1850
AFA 5002: African New World Studies Theory and Methods
AFH 5935: Atlantic Slavery and Middle Passage

Graduate Research Seminar:
Orality and Social Memory [AFH 6915]
AFH 6915: Commodity and Culture in Atlantic Africa

Undergrad/Graduate Courses:
Migrations and Movement in Early Africa [AFH 4100/5935]
Religion, State, and Society [AFH 4100/5935]
Regional Interactions and World Systems in Africa [AFH 4100/5935]
Popular Culture in Modern Africa [AFH 4200/5935]
Kingdoms and Societies of Atlantic Africa [AFH 4100/5935]
Africa: Colonialism and Its Aftermath [AFH 4200/5935]
Ancient Egypt [AFH 4100/5935]
Revolutions in Atlantic Africa [HIS 4935: Senior Seminar]
AFH 4100: Atlantic Slavery and Middle Passage

Lower Division Survey:
WOH 2001 (02): World Civilization
 

Modified 01/08/08