Reciting IFA: Identity, Difference and Heterogeneity K. Noel Amherd

This book generates a critical Ifa poetics and analysis that emphasizes Ifa as a philosophical heritage that privileges heterogeneity of discourses, texts, and worlds. The book foregrounds and elucidates the practices and explications of Ifa thinkers (individual babalawo and their personal elaborations and explanations) and achieves this by its detailed transcription, translation, and analysis of an actual divination that took place in Ijebu Remo, Nigeria. Therefore, the book urges returning Ifa to its actual sites of recitation and contextualization in situ where the performances are bound up in specific locations, their pasts, the participants (both human and non-), diverging interests, and the differences of style and language that reside in every performance. Many works display and/or refer to Ifa poems in order to appeal to Ifa s authority thereby supporting their arguments and theoretical considerations on other subjects but overlook the performer, the uniqueness of his recitation, and the context of its performance. What is missing is a critical theory for the justification of such use. This book fills this gap by linking apparently transcendent Ifa texts to the real people who recite them within the horizon of still living heritages. A fundamental question for African Philosophy, asked by thinkers such as Wiredu, Towa, Serequeberhan, and others, has been: how can a modern philosophical discourse arise that is rooted in the continuum of cultural heritages? Discourse in oral cultures must be seen as simultaneous with performance so that the orature recitation by a specialist is in fact the intellectual elaboration by an individual thinker in an indigenous mode of heritage. Это и многое другое вы найдете в книге Reciting IFA: Identity, Difference and Heterogeneity (K. Noel Amherd)