(Re)Casting The Yorùbá World: Ifá, Ìyá, and The Signification of Difference

Abstract

In the previous chapter I focused on the writings of scholars who discuss different aspects of gender issues in Ifá, a Yorùbá knowledge and divination system. William Bascom and Wande Abimbola, the two main scholars that I interrogate extensively, did not set out consciously in their major works to make gender claims in the first instance. The gender statements they make are a by-product of their attempts to develop a comprehensive understanding of the Ifá world through the collection, analysis, and interpretation of all aspects of the system, including diviners, divination practice, and the content of Ifá and its place in Yorùbá culture and imagination. One could have explained their silence on gender as a sign of the nongendered quality of the Yorùbá ethos that they are attempting to elucidate. This line of thinking becomes untenable, however, because these Ifá scholars specifically mapped female exclusion, male dominance, and patriarchal values into the knowledge system by assuming a male-dominant lens from the get-go. They did not display any consciousness that they needed to account for male superiority and female deauthorization as they depicted cultural institutions and social practices.