Epistemic Roots, Universal Routes and Ontological Roofs of African Ritual Archives: Disciplinary Formations in African Thought 1
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Epistemic Roots, Universal Routes and Ontological Roofs
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African Ritual Archives
Disciplinary Formations in African Thought
Engaging the Toyin Falola Reader
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Abstract
An exploration of the significance of developing theory from endogenous African expressive forms as articulated by Toyin Falola in his essay "Ritual Archives".
Introduction
Why Write an Essay on an Essay?
One may compose an essay on another essay, and possibly an even longer one than the essay being studied, long as that one is, when one is confronted with one of those things one has to say something about after encountering them.
“Ritual Archives”, the climatic conclusion of the account in The Toyin Falola Reader ( Austin: Pan African University, 2018), of the efforts of Africa and its Americas diaspora to achieve political, economic, intellectual and cultural individuality, is a deeply intriguing, ideationally, structurally and stylistically powerful and inspiring work, rich with ideas and arresting verbal and visual images.
His focus is Africa and its diaspora, but his thought resonates with implications far beyond Africa, into contexts of struggle for plurality of vision outside and even within the West, the global dominance of whose central theoretical constructs inspires Falola’s essay.
“Ritual Archives”, oscillates between the analytical and the poetic, the ruminative and the architectonic, expressive styles pouring out a wealth of ideas, which, even though adequately integrated, are not always adequately elaborated on.
This essay responds to the resonance of those ideas, further illuminating their intrinsic semantic values and demonstrating my perception of the intersections of the concerns they express with issues beyond the African referent of “Ritual Archives”.
This response is organised in five parts, representing my understanding of the five major thematic strategies through which the central idea is laid out and expanded.
The first section, “Developing Classical African Expressions as Sources of Locally and Universally Valid Theory” explores Falola’s advocacy for an expanded cultivation of theory from Africa created and Africa inspired expressive forms. “Epistemic and Metaphysical Integrity in Ifa”, the second part, examines his argument for a re-centring of studies in classical African thought within the epistemic and metaphysical frames of those bodies of knowledge, using the Yoruba origin Ifa system of knowledge, spiritual development and divination as an example, an illustration I analyse through my own understanding of the cognitive and metaphysical framework of Ifa.
The third unit, “Falola’s Image Theory and Praxis, Image as Archive, Image as Initiator”, demonstrates Falola’s dramatization of the cognitive possibilities of works of art as inspirers of theory, exemplified by a figurine of the Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology orisa, the deity Esu. This is the most poetic and one of the most imaginatively, ideationally evocative and yet tantalisingly inadequately elaborated sections of “Ritual Archives”, evoking continuities between Yoruba philosophy, Orisa cosmology and various bodies of knowledge across art and image theory and history, without expanding on the ideas or building them into a structure adequately responsive to the promise of the ideas projected, a foundation I contribute to developing by elucidating my understanding of the significance of the ideas and their consonance with related conceptions and issues from Asian, Western and African cultures.
I also demonstrate how this section may contribute to clarification of the nature of Yoruba philosophy understood as a body of ideas on the scope of human intelligibility and the relationship between that philosophy and Orisa cosmology, an expansive view of the cosmos developed in relation to the philosophy. This is a heuristic rather than an attempt at a definitive distinction and is derived from the relationship between my practical and theoretical investigation of Yoruba epistemology and Falola’s exploration, in “Ritual Archives”, of a particularly strategic aspect of Orisa cosmology represented by Esu.
The distinction I advance between Yoruba philosophy and Orisa cosmology and the effort to map their interrelations is useful in categorising and critically analysing various postulates that constitute classical Yoruba thought. This mapping of convergence and divergence contributes to working out the continuum in Yoruba thought between a critical and experiential configuration and a belief system.
The fourth section, “The Institutional Imperative”, discusses Falola’s careful working out of the institutional implications of the approach he advocates of developing locally and universally illuminating theory out of endogenous African cultural forms.
The fifth part, “Imagistic Resonance”, presents Falola’s effort to make the Toyin Falola Reader into a ritual archive, illustrating his vision for African art as an inspirer of theory, by spacing powerful black and white pictures of forms of this art, mainly sculptural but also forms of clothing, largely Yoruba but also including examples from other African cultures, throughout the book.
Except for the set of images in the appendix, these artistic works are not identified, nor does the identification of those in the appendix go beyond naming them, exclusions perhaps motivated by the need to avoid expanding an already unusually big book of about 1,032 pages of central text.
I reproduce and identify a number of these artistic forms and briefly elaborate on their aesthetic force and ideational power, clarifying the theoretical formations in which they are embedded and exploring the insights they could contribute to theory beyond their originating cultures.
“Ritual Archives” is particularly important for me because it elucidates views strategic to my own cognitive explorations and way of life but which I have not been able to articulate with the ideational comprehensiveness and analytical penetration Falola brings to the subject of developing theory from endogenous African cultural expressions, exemplified by Ifa and art, two of my favourite subjects.
Part 1
Developing Classical African Expressions as Sources of Locally and Universally Valid Theory
In “Ritual Archives” Falola is agonising over and passionately projecting a corrective to what he rightly describes as the paucity of strategies of scholarly investigation developed from classical African cosmologies and their correlative visual, verbal and performative arts and sciences.
He examines how scholarly activism has enabled, among other Africa centred configurations of knowledge, the study of classical African history and historiography, African literature and African philosophy within the globally dominant Western academic system, as well as contribute to the study and creation of new kinds of these Africa focused creative structures. He then proceeds to argue in “Pluriversalism” and “Ritual Archives”, the concluding essays in the book, in a climatic section titled “Epistemologies and Ontologies”, that the struggle to adequately acknowledge the potency of Africa centred forms of knowledge must go beyond their study and even their creation to include the development of theories of local and universally illuminating power from these cognitive forms.
He argues for African art in general, and its cosmological images in particular, as capable of inspiring theories that could have value for both their originating cultures and for the world at large. He pursues this argument through a description of the problem in relation to its solution, discussing that solution through general elaboration and specific examples of what he describes as “ritual archives”, the cultural complexes, embracing and extending beyond conventionally accessible forms of being, created by engagement with the cosmos in its most expansive understanding by humanity, integrating the wonder and veneration represented by ritual and the critical thought enabling the order and continuity demonstrated by the organisation of knowledge that constitutes an archive.
Falola’s general summations of the concept of ritual archives is lyrically compelling:
… the metaphorical and mystical sense of “archive”… that dimension of archive that is never (fully) collected but retains power and agency in invisible ways.
By ritual archives, I mean the conglomeration of words as well as texts, ideas, symbols, shrines, images, performances, and indeed objects that document as well as speak to those religious experiences and practices that allow us to understand the African world through various bodies of philosophies, literatures, languages, histories and much more.
By implication, ritual archives are huge, unbounded in scale and scope, storing tremendous amounts of data on both natural and supernatural agents, ancestors, gods, good and bad witches, life, death, festivals, and the interactions between the spiritual realms and earth-based human beings.
To a large extent, ritual archives constitute and shape knowledge about the visible and invisible world (or what I refer to as the “non-world”), coupled with forces that breathe and are breathless, as well as secular and non-secular, with destinies, and within cities, kingships, medicine, environment, sciences and technologies.
Above all, they contain shelves on sacrifices and shrines, names, places, incantations, invocations, and the entire cosmos of all the deities and their living subjects among human and nonhuman species.
… the epistemological and ideological significance of these archives [constitutes] a body of knowledge on a wide range of issues, including but not limited to cultural cognition, ideas and idea formation, semiotics, and education.
Space does not permit the elaboration of the depth and breadth of the archives or the density of each genre with its own hydra-headed fragments and hundreds of individual constructions and presentations.
Falola illustrates these ritual archives through descriptions drawn from his native Yoruba cosmology. Central to his exemplifications are the multi-disciplinary scope, spanning the arts and mathematics, of Ifa and the figure of the deity Esu, who may be described as an embodiment of the contraries that define existence and their unificatory potential in relation to the dynamism of being, a dramatization of tension and aspiration for resolution evoked by the understanding of Esu as both trickster and privileged mediator of ase, a cosmic force that enables being and becoming, existence and change, individuality of being and connection between diverse forms of existence.
Theory as Cognitive Imperative
Why is Falola emphasising the need to develop theories inspired by these classical African cultural forms?
He may be seen as doing so because the ultimate bastion of the epistemic robustness of a tradition of enquiry, its vigour in terms of approaches to understanding the universe, is in its theories, the ideational lenses, the bodies of ideas on the nature of knowledge, and how it may be perceived, that underlie the cognitive activity of that tradition.
Theories are lenses through which phenomena are perceived. They are coherent ideational structures through which aspects of existence are interpreted. They are descriptions of the manner in which particular forms of being are understood, explanations of why they are seen that way as well as the logic of how these constituents of existence cohere to constitute an intelligible universe as perceived from the standpoint of a discipline, or, more broadly, from the vantage point of the epistemic universe constituted by a particular scholarly tradition embracing a totality of disciplines. Theories therefore represent the foundations of critical study of any phenomenon and of how phenomena cohere to constitute the cosmos.
This explanation of theory is based on the idea that all understanding is made possible by the relationships between the perceiving subject, particularly their cognitive faculties at play in particular perceptual contexts, the process of reaching understanding and the character of what is understood. This description adapts a triadic configuration derived from the Srividya and Trika schools of Indian thought, although the basic idea resonates across Western and Asian philosophies and what I know so far about African ideations.
Theories demonstrate a process of understanding in terms of how they configure what is understood. This process demonstrates particular ideas about why the person undergoing the process of understanding is able to gain such understanding in the first place.
How do you know what you know? Why do you describe what you know the way you do? Why do you give the value you do to what you know and how may others assess the validity of your views?
Those are the central questions of the philosophical discipline of epistemology and the ultimate orientation of theory.
To adapt the summation of the article on theology in the Encyclopaedia Britannica 1971 on theology as a reflection on the rationale, structure and implications of religious faith, that the only alternative to theology is bad theology, the only alternative to theory is uncritical theory, an unacknowledged and unexamined body of assumptions shaping how people think.
Roots or Foundations, Roofs and Routes of Knowledge
Theories are the roots of scholarship. The roots are the theories, the trunk and branches the particular phenomena explored, although this image is to some degree simplistic, since the relationship between theory and what is theorised about could be quite intimate.
The house of learning making up a scholarly tradition is constituted by many rooms or disciplines. These rooms, however, are built on a foundation representing conceptions of how knowledge may be developed and assessed, an epistemology, as well as a general view of the nature of the cosmos arising from this view of the nature of the intelligible, a cosmology.
Each room, in turn, is covered by a ceiling representing the world as seen from the view of a particular discipline. All the rooms are in turn enclosed by a larger ceiling that projects how the universe may be perceived from the combination of the rooms that make up that house.
The nature of the house is shaped by the character of its foundations, by the structure and contents of the rooms, the construction of their individual, smaller roofs and of the larger roof covering the entire house. The characteristics of these forms are fashioned through a combination of chance and choice enabled by the convergence of accidental history and deliberate historical structuring through informed decisions by various actors, circumstances not identical within various traditions of enquiry within the same cultures and between different cultures.
Thus, the Western esoteric tradition overlaps with but is different from the mainstream Western tradition of learning. Classical African and classical Western thought are different from each other and both differ from classical Asian thought, though all human forms of enquiry share significant convergences arising from the biological and environmental similarities that define the human race, as well as on account of historical intersections, routes of development between these pathways of enquiry.
Roots or foundations, roofs and routes of knowledge, adapting Toyin Falola’s development of this motif in the Reader as summing up the complex unity of African experience, and which I elaborate on in “Roots, Routes and Roofs: Images of Dynamic Unity at the Convergence of Personal and Cosmic History”, correlative with Michel Foucault’s conception of the episteme and Thomas Kuhn’s theory of paradigms, may be seen as paradigmatic or illustrative of the strategic significance of theory at the foundations and roofs of cognitive disciplines and the perceptions they enable of the world from within the complex of knowledge built within their compass. Theories are thus strategic within the overarching perspective on existence constituted by the superordinate scholarly tradition to which they belong, traditions created through shared epistemic and metaphysical conceptions developed through inter-referentiality, thinkers building on and referencing the work of other thinkers in developing a cognitive network within and between disciplines.
Combating Hegemonies of Theory
Why must the dominant lenses, the overriding perceptual structures, the roots and roofs of knowledge, almost the only ideational systems for studying phenomena across the world, be imported from only one part of the globe, the West-Europe and its North American diaspora? That is the question Falola, along with other activists over the decades in the struggle for epistemic decolonization, are asking. Political and economic decolonization from the West has been achieved up to a point. It is also vital to pursue to its full conclusion epistemic decolonisation, developing independence of cognitive frames, of ways of knowing, cultivating self-government of the mind, building original ways of exploring the cosmos and of interpreting what is discovered.
Falola decries the epistemic marginalisation of the cultural forms of classical African civilizations as these creative constructions may constitute strategies of scholarly knowledge, means of developing understanding within and beyond their own cultural contexts, rather than remaining only subjects of investigation, recipients of exploratory attention from other epistemic configurations rather than drivers of investigation from within their own epistemic nuclei.
He is particularly challenged by the need to develop theories of the nature of reality inspired by classical African cosmologies and their myriad projections because he holds that not only could such constructions yield new insights about the possibilities of existence, they would liberate Africans from living as one sided consumers of theories generated by the West.
He urges freedom from the orientation of Western scholarship towards treating as universal the locality of its knowledge grounded in study of what is native to its own environment, while other natalities, other nativistic contexts, remain localised. Thus an uncritical universalism is developed. In place of that, he advocates a critical universalism, a measured appreciation of the degree to which a body of knowledge, necessarily derived from an environment, can illuminate both that environment and other phenomena outside of its own context, a reflexive universalism he names “pluriversalism”, to suggest the creation of plural, multiple, co-existing centres of universal value.
“Ritual Archives” reminds me of Wole Soyinka’s great essay collection, Myth, Literature and the African World. Along with Falola’s “Pluriversalism” also in the Reader, “Ritual Archives” may be seen as taking forward the broad outlines of the project articulated by Soyinka, a project progressively actualised over the years before and since the first publications of the Soyinka essays and their collection in book form, by artists, and to some degree, scholars, inspired by classical African cultures. What Falola is doing in “Ritual Archives” is taking forward the urging of Soyinka for engagement with the spiritual and ideational power of classical African cultures as exemplified by his native Yoruba civilisation.
Falola is advocating, not only for such an engagement, a possibility already richly realized across a broad spectrum of creative endeavour, but even more specifically, for the development of theories inspired by these cosmological systems and their expressive forms. Like Soyinka, his examples are drawn from the classical cosmology of the Yoruba civilisation common to them both, their style of writing suggesting an identification with this cosmology and its creative expressions, an identification beyond the purely imaginative, evoking these inventive structures as constituting aspects of the core of the meaning of existence for these scholars.
Whatever the quality of insight the theories developed in Western contexts deliver, should the modulations of perception enabled by their construction in distinctive conditions not be factored into evaluations of their significance and how they are adopted? Rather than depending on theory from one cultural source, should each cultural setting not create its own theories, and, keeping in mind the manner in which each social context shapes cognitive creation, use these theories in interpreting both its own context and contexts beyond itself, giving room for local influences in its own theory construction as well as commonalities within differences shared by human beings?
Falola is focusing, therefore, not so much on the study of African subjects, but on the development of ways of exploration, modes of cognition, styles of thought, from within Africa centred creations and the projection of these cognitive matrices beyond their originating contexts, thus enabling the interpretation of other phenomena beyond the cultural roots that give birth to these theories, thereby expanding the universe of ways of knowing and perhaps even of organising and applying knowledge available to humanity.
Thereby, African or African inspired cognitive spaces would also export ways of creating knowledge instead of being focused only on importation of such engines of mental creation into their own creative spaces. Other geographies of knowledge would then have the opportunity of importing African cognitive engines, theories significantly inspired by cognitive pathways native to Africans’ journeys of understanding. Thus a global cross-current of creative strategies would be developed in relation to Africa.
Such a picture goes beyond the current situation in which Africa’s cognitive network is shaped principally by ideas on how to develop knowledge imported from Western scholarship, even when the subject of study is African. As Falola elaborates on in the Reader, a lot of progress has been made, for example, in integrating African oral methods of recording history into the study of African history, a strategy Jan Vansina, among other scholars, is notable in working out. Falola is arguing, not only for the expansion of this adoption of ways of knowing endogenous to Africa in the study of various disciplines, but for the application of such epistemic systems, adopted in their native forms or reworked as may be necessary, in the study of a range of phenomena within and beyond the African context, thus expanding the capacity of illumination enabled by African or African inspired systems of knowledge.
The essay, like his ideationally scintillating and passionately profound “Pluriversalism” represents for me the shock of encountering ideas I have long lived by but have not been able to express in the comprehensive summativeness that Falola dramatizes in these writings.
“Ritual Archives” also powerfully foregrounds a situation beyond the geographical and social contexts which Falola concentrates on in the piece. Falola’s inspiration and focus is Africa, but his ideas are relevant beyond Africa, being vital for the very Western civilisation whose scholarship has been the creators of the marginalisation of African expressive forms he agonises over, as well as for Asian, South American and Aboriginal Australian cultures, among other cognitive worlds marginalized in the epistemic and metaphysical frames through which knowledge is reached in the Western academy in its global dominance.
I get the impression that Falola’s challenge resonates most penetratingly in relation to what may be described as a particular epistemic frame privileged in Western culture and upheld in its global dominance, which may be descried as a cognitive mentality centred in privileging the ratiocinative and the logocentric, linear thought and its expression in language, rather than a related centralising of the power of the senses, for example, as sources of authoritative knowledge.
As has been pointed out, though, by Kwame Bediako in his essay on African theology in David Fordes’ edited The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology in the Twentieth Century, being the 1997, second edition, different from the third 2005 edition, The Modern Theologians: An Introduction to Christian Theology Since 1918, where Bedaiko’s essay on African theology is replaced by that by Tinyiko Sam Maluleke, even the West has suffered a similar suppression in terms of its pre-Christian heritage, which enthusiasts are struggling to recover and revalidate.
Western esotericism has itself been supplanted by what may be seen as an Enlightenment derived emphasis on the ratiocinative and secular, leaving the older culture marginalised in the marketplace of scholarly knowledge, marginalisation evident wherever the West has planted its dominant cognitive culture, often through colonisation.
The damage is less in places like India, on account of its rich culture of classical texts, among other factors, but to what degree do these classical cognitive systems shape the official culture of learning even in that subcontinent? In what way is the dominant academic culture of India different from that evident in New York and London? Is the emulation of the global metropolises represented by the West not the organisational norm and general aspiration world-wide?
Falola advocates the increased recognition of the vitality of classical African religious systems, their ritual structures and the material forms associated with them as primary knowledge generators. He expounds forcefully on these ritual archives as evidence of ways of knowing vital to investigate in order to grasp the full scope of the cognitive possibilities humanity has been able to develop. He analyses compellingly the epistemic subjugation created by colonialism in Africa in the marginalisation of African and particularly classical Nigerian religious cosmologies and their ritual archives.
Why the emphasis on religion and its expressions, in a world dominated by the secular power of science, scientific culture being one of the greatest limitations of Africa?
Falola states:
In varied ways, a countless number of sages, priests, devotees and practitioners created oral and visual libraries, which are linked to ritual complexes and secular palaces. Subsequently, cultural knowledge has extended from the deep past to our present day. It is through their knowledge that histories and traditions were constituted, while identities were formed, and philosophy as we know it emerged.
…
In the process, the traditions in ritual archives provide some templates for the future; the contents of the archives become the philosophy, literature, and history; their interpretations become manifested in our present as part of our engagement with heritage and modernity.
While Falola might have been referring purely or primarily to Africa, he is also summing up what I understand as the current stage of scholarship on the roots of Western philosophy and science. Religion and its related ideas and practices constitute humanity’s oldest and most deeply rooted modes of making meaning of the cosmos and thus constitute the historical and ultimate ideational foundations of a good degree of human activity, particularly its cognitive creations.
Hence, the roots of Western philosophy are described as being in Greece and the first exploration in that tradition of the nature of being, the fact of existence, a central subject in philosophy, is described as carried out by the Greek thinker Parmenides in the context of a discussion with a goddess.
The first great scientist in Western thought was Aristotle and all his investigations, spanning several disciplines across what later became known as the humanities, social sciences and sciences, are driving towards a goal he sets out in the Metaphysics, an effort to grasp the underlying principles of phenomena and thereby reach into the mind of the ultimate creative intelligence, as described by Jonathan Lear in Aristotle: The Desire to Understand, an aspiration also resonant in 20th-21st century scientist Stephen Hawking’s summation of the ultimate goal of physics in his A Brief History of Time.
This aspiration also reaches back to the dawn of modern science in the representative text of the17th century Scientific Revolution, Isaac Newton’s Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy, the concluding section of which caps his development of the theory of gravity and the laws of motion in which he worked out relationships between particular phenomena and universal principles. In that conclusion, Newton paints a majestic picture of the being of God in relation to his own enquiries into space and time across terrestrial and celestial scales, that divine image being a primary inspiration of his quest, having spent as much, if not even more time, on religious and occult investigations as on scientific study.
Recognising the complex multidisciplinarity of his thought as embracing in mutual fecundation disciplines now understood as epistemologically distinctive, contemporary Newton scholarship elaborates on the links between his science and his Christian and occult explorations. Richard Westfall’s Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton and his superb distillation of his research in the 1992 Encyclopaedia Britannica are definitive examples of this scholarship, while Rob Illfe’s Newton : A Very Short Introduction, sums up the field up till the digitisation of Newton’s work in the occult, quasi-scientific discipline of alchemy.
If Falola is summing up an idea already well known in the histories of Western philosophy and of science, what is its place in an essay on epistemic decolonisation in African inspired thought? The struggle to validate the contemporary and future creative possibilities of classical African thought remains live. The varied richness at the base of Western thought is not well known, and thus, the rationality of modern Western thought can be juxtaposed against what is described as the problematic rationality of classical African thought.
Scholars like Falola and Abiola Irele, for example, as in Irele’s “The African Scholar”, reframe African thought by pointing out the varied possibilities of its classical heritage, urging it be developed in terms of multiple but ultimately interrelated epistemic and disciplinary possibilities as the West has developed its own cognitive legacy.
Falola sums up this vision:
Finally, the tail end of my assertions will suggest transformational strategies in according a critical place for ritual archives … to formulate evaluation mechanisms to authenticate indigenous knowledge and those who communicate them using data-driven and emic standards. At all levels of the educational system, indigenous ways of knowing, along with the knowledge and researchers of those accumulated knowledges must be fully blended with the Western academy.
How is this blending to be achieved? By grafting the hitherto marginalized classical African cognitions onto the dominant Western system?
No.
Falola is projecting something more radical, a rethinking of the classical African corpus from within its own epistemic and ontological foundations. The reflexive process he advocates would work out these systems’ distinctive understandings of the nature and process of perception and of the nature of being thus perceived as well as how these insights can be relevant to the present. This task is described in a passage rich in ideational grace and power, compelling in its rhetorical rhythm, its force of commitment and its visionary concreteness :
Ritual archives tell us that we must review and question our externally derived approaches and the limitations of the methodologies we deploy. Western-derived disciplines (such as Religious Studies, History, and Philosophy as subjects of the Humanities) have carefully fragmented ritual archives, but it is time for all those disciplines to combine to provide an understanding of the centers of indigenous epistemologies, to unify their ontologies, and convert them to theories that will be treated as universal.
The visionary character of this passage emerges from its imaginative projection into the centres of possibility of cognitive systems whose nature is inadequately understood, like a glimpse of the majesty of the sky at night, the constellations ablaze as distant points of light within dark depths suggesting the compelling mystery of the largely unknown cosmos, that image a celestial analogue to Falola’s evocation of strategies of knowledge which the writer is certain would achieve greater robustness if their various units are creatively conjoined.
The rhetorical music of the lines comes from the writer’s movement from pointing out a challenge of scholarship, describing its origins and concluding in presenting a solution to the problem represented by the challenge. This ideational progression is made memorable by diction chosen for precision and semantic range, set like gemstones within carefully woven syntactic structures. The concreteness of the passage is demonstrated in its identification of the disciplinary contexts and procedures to be employed in achieving the goal the text advocates.