Falola To Speak On Yoruba Physical, Spiritual Worlds

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Toyin Falola

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Jan 4, 2022, 10:57:09 AM1/4/22
to dialogue, Yoruba Affairs

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Jan 4, 2022, 11:46:56 AM1/4/22
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Wow

On Tue, Jan 4, 2022, 16:57 Toyin Falola <toyin...@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

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Oluwatoyin Adepoju

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Jan 4, 2022, 11:53:17 AM1/4/22
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Very attractive. Will it be a series of lectures or one lecture, since only one date was given?

Very promising addition to Falola on Eshu in Eshu: Yoruba God, Power and Imaginative Frontiers and "Ritual Archives" and more general philosophical reflections in In Praise of Greatness.

Will Falola illumine Yoruba cosmology by distilling it's essence as he understands it, as Soyinka does poetically  in Credo of Being and Nothingness/Seven Signposts and in poetic prose in Myth, Literature and the African World?

Will he describe the Yoruba cosmos in terms of imagistic summation from other contexts  as Akinwumi Ogundiran does with the image of infinitely reflecting mirrors  in The Yoruba:A New History?

Will he employ concepts only as Abiodun, Drewal, Pemberton and Wardwell do, focusing on the relationship between ase, life force, ori, the self, oju inu, inward, penetrating perception,  in the first chapter of Yoruba:Nine Centuries of African Thought and Art?

In short, how will he nagivate between the imagistic and mythic forms in terms of which this cosmology is often expressed, the ideas dranatised by these mythic images, the more abstract conceptions in terms of which the cosmology is often expressed and the idea of a personal orientation to this thought world, taking it beyond a readily replicable summary of well known ideas to a distinctive engagement with the known, presenting it from fresh vitalisations?

Having read part of the thorough  exposition of Eshu in Eshu:Yoruba God and the more imaginatively identificatory relation to Eshu in terms of personal identification in "Ritual Archives" as well as the assumption of the persona of an Egungun, an ancestor from the Beyond in In Praise of Greatness, in consonance with Falola's other episodic but striking reflections on the cycle of life and ultimate transition, I'm hopeful of something memorable at that lecture, it's title reminding me of the intersection of dimensions through the motif of a crossroads of converging lines, a motif central to Yoruba, Benin and Voodoo cosmologies.

Thanks

Toyin

Toyin Falola

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Jan 4, 2022, 12:11:16 PM1/4/22
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You can be there. I will focus on

 

Orun—what no one has been able to translate, called “heaven” in English, or in Ajayi Crowther’s attempt, the “sky”. I will argue that it is “origin”

Igba: time—that the measurement, in Anglo time, is misleading. Suppose you say the snail is slow, I ask the question, where does the snail tells you it is going?

Cosmos in linkage with being

 

Body parts and their cosmological meanings. Oju, if you say eyes, tell us little as there is

Oju inu

Oju ona

Oju rere

Oju buruku

Oju ole

Oju asewo

Oju odoko, etc

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