Why studying the Western canon matters more than ever - ABC Religion & Ethics

[Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju]

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/zlatko-skrbis-why-studying-the-western-canon-matters/105954610 

[Moses Ebe Ochonu]

The Western canon should of course be studied, but not as a self-referential body of knowledge but in complementary and contrapuntal relationship to other canons and while acknowledging its debts to values and knowledges developed and evolved in non-Western contexts.

On Wed, Nov 5, 2025 at 10:43 AM Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju <toyin....@gmail.com> wrote:

https://www.abc.net.au/religion/zlatko-skrbis-why-studying-the-western-canon-matters/105954610 

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Edited

A beautiful ideal.

If I may modify it-

"The Western canon should of course be studied, but not as a [ purely ] self-referential body of knowledge but [ also ]  in complementary and contrapuntal relationship to other canons and while acknowledging its debts to values and knowledges developed and evolved in non-Western contexts"

- Moses Ochonu

Can a curriculum of comparative canons be developed along such lines?

I am suggesting the modifications in order to accomodate the large spans of discourse in which the Western cognitive tradition may be seen as largely self referential, even if intersections with other cultures occur at previous and succeeding spans of the tradition's history.

Are a  lot of canons-Asian, oral African, Western  etc  not significantly self referential at points of their development even though that is not so throughout their history?

Thanks

Toyin

On Wed, 5 Nov 2025, 20:55 Oluwatoyin Adepoju, <ovadep...@gmail.com> wrote:

A beautiful ideal.

If I may modify it-

"The Western canon should of course be studied, but not as a [ purely ] self-referential body of knowledge but [ also]  in complementary and contrapuntal relationship to other canons and while acknowledging its debts to values and knowledges developed and evolved in non-Western contexts"

- Moses Ochonu

Can a curriculum of comparative canons be developed along such lines?

I am suggesting the modifications in order to accomodate the large spans of discourse in which the Western cognitive tradition is largely self referential, even if intersections with other cultures could have occured at previous levels of the discursive chain.

Are a  lot of canons-Asian, oral African, Western  etc  not significantly self referential at points of their development even though that self referentiality is  not absolute throughout their history?

Thanks

Toyin

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[Gloria Emeagwali]

Definitely a quotable quote.

Gloria 

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[Dr. Oohay]

Don’t you think that your adding the  “complementary” element tends to weaken your otherwise compelling response? Perhaps, substituting the term “SUPPLEMENTARY” can strengthen your point (since in general we cannot identify any canon or group of canons as a complete entity).

Oohay

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

A beautiful ideal.

If I may modify it-

"The Western canon should of course be studied, but not as a [ purely ] self-referential body of knowledge but [ also]  in complementary and contrapuntal relationship to other canons and while acknowledging its debts to values and knowledges developed and evolved in non-Western contexts"

- Moses Ochonu

Can a curriculum of comparative canons be developed along such lines?

I am suggesting the modifications in order to accomodate the large spans of discourse in which the Western cognitive tradition is largely self referential, even if intersections with other cultures could have occured at previous levels of the discursive chain.

Are a  lot of canons-Asian, oral African, Western  etc  not significantly self referential at points of their development even though that self referentiality is  not absolute throughout their history?

Thanks

Toyin

On Wed, 5 Nov 2025, 20:22 Moses Ebe Ochonu, <meoc...@gmail.com> wrote:

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

between complementary and supplementary

does ''complementary'' not do the job more forcefully than ''supplementary''? i would have thought ''supplementary'' means ''to improve by adding to'' but does not suggest that the supplement is necessary to the unity of what is being supplemented.

i understand ''complementary'' as having a similar meaning of ''making more complete by adding to something existing''.

they look to me to mean practically the same thing, although consulting dictionaries would be helpful for clarification, but ''complementary'' seems to me to have the more forceful connotation.

the frames defining african scholarship

abiola irele makes a point in ''the african scholar'' that the globally dominant western academy is so structured that scholars centred in knowledge systems emerging from the western academy and focused on aspects of knowledge not directly related to the non-western world do not need to know anything about scholarship beyond those frames, but that a scholar centred on africa would not go far without a grounding in western thought.

   ironic demonstrations

 recent ironic demonstrations of that are toyin falola's decolonizing african knowledge: autoethnography and african epistemologies, grounded in a rigorous discussion of autoethnography in terms of its western centred scholarship, from where the sub-discipline emerges and akinwumi ogundiran's the yoruba: a new history, described by ogundiran as grounded in hermeneutics and archeology even as he develops a hermeneutics centred in classical yoruba thought but without explicitly pointing the reader's attention to the full scope of that hermeneutics-his unification of yoruba discourse, the proverb tradition, and the ideational and practical matrices of yoruba thought and practice.

falola, for his part, makes pointed references to cognitive orientations outside the western context even in his theoretical opening section in autoethnography but does not develop those references which could perhaps complement the western framework he was building upon.

he references his mentor iya lekuleja and his conviction that she strengthened  his memory through magic but i dont recall him exploring what magic means in that context and why he is convinced that it explains his powers of memory.

    developing and using africa inspired theory

could a stronger correlation not be made between autoethnography in the western understanding of that process and african discursive forms at the level of theory? can african conceptions of self consciousness and reflexivity such as ideas about the yoruba origin deity esu in relation to what obododimma oha describes as esuneutics play such a role?

could the eshu image not be complemented by such a figure as the fulani kaidara as described by ahmadou hampate ba?

yes, the disciplinary structures, theoretical constructs and scholarly procedures of learning available to an african scholar or a scholar working on africa are often western but other theoretical structures exist or could be constructed to complement, amplify or even at times replace the western origin structures. that is one inspiration that could be drawn from  falola's ''ritual archives'' centred on africa but which resonates beyond the african context.

beyond african and western cognitive systems and processes

beyond drawing on african and western thought and processes, what of other knowledge systems, such as from asia and south america? their own endogenous thought and their own struggle to dialogue with the western dominance in the world of knowledge on their own terms?

the force of the western publishing system in relation to other regional publishing systems

interestingly, an important place to go for these efforts are books and articles by western publishers along with work published in various regions.

the need for a comparative study of canons in their inwardness and outwardness

we need a comparative study of canons, at the intersection of self referentiality and external dialogue,  a rhythm of the centrifugal and centripetal, in a movement towards as expansive an understanding as possible of human cognitive achievement and of windows on the universe, in their uniqueness and complementarity.

thanks

toyin

 

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[Toyin Falola]

The missing issue in this conversation is about validation and reward systems.

Scholars seek validation for their works and thus appeal to hegemonic intellectual centers.

If you don’t bother about Western-derived index, you are free to do whatever you like. If you don’t use the Nobel Prize to judge the best literature and canon, the storyteller in your village can become the best.

If relevance to the nation is what you care about, an award by Cambridge is not what you seek.

Tf

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[Dr. Oohay]

Nothing “empirical” or time-bound (in your context) can be regarded as complete epistemologically; such complementarity would be regarded as a logocentric claim.  Apparently, a set theory rather than a theory of classes can better handle the “epistemological” at issue here — hence I suggested the term “supplementary”.

Oohay.

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

It would be great if those beautifully sounding ideas could be elaborated on.

Toyin

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

Beautifully said by Falola, but how how much of the story does it tell?

The argument comes down to ways of  navigating Western epistemic dominance.

The first approach is similar to what Achebe advocates in the different context of "The African Writer and the English Language", to "speak African using English" as his argument may be adapted, something African writers and other artists do very well.

Imagine a scholarly version of Things Fall Apart.

A text operating purely in terms of non- Western theory but accessible through geberally ubderstood forms of  logic.

Would the Western academy not acclaim that? 

In terms of reward systems I get the impression the Western academy in the West is very elastic.

Another approach is a hybrid one, combining Western and non-Western thought, which made Fritjof Capra's The Tao of Physics famous a work leading ultimately to his The Systems View of Life published by Cambridge UP.

The Western academy is rife with such conjunctions in the struggle to diversify the Western heritage through more sophisticated multicultural views.

The luxuriant growth of such fusions in such fields as environmental philosophy and  religion negates the idea of a monolithic Western thought in my view.

The fusion approach looks richer to me.

But on the other hand , perhaps non- Western communities could also do well tp provide their own reward systems which do not require knowledge of Western thought.

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[Toyin Falola]

The manuscript of Things Fall Apart was originally rejected, and early reviews were negative.

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[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

But that was decades ago.

But you are a veteran of the Western academy so your insight needs to be very carefully weighed 

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[Dr. Oohay]

Empirically speaking, every (“empirical”) context (western or eastern) has a context ad infinitum; no such context is contextless and as such complementarity never completes anything. Complementarity always hungers for supplementarity. Every culture tends to have both poison and medicine. A writer such as Okot p’Bitek exemplifies one fruitful way of Ugandanizing one (small) part of an Oinbo language. His Song of Lawino/Song of Ocol and his Song of Prisoner/Song of Malaya still endlessly vibrate in my ears. Generally, I see the issue of writing or speaking or thinking in terms of mereology (what in my own terminology I call “Mereotics”).

Oohay

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