Overview
- Provides the first cultural analysis of Yoruba hairstyle as a vehicle for political and religious expression in African communities
- Explores cosmetic appearance in gendered terms, focusing primarily on the male experience
- Based on the first hand experiences of an interdisciplinary scholar
Part of the book series: African Histories and Modernities (AHAM)
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Table of contents (7 chapters)
Keywords
About this book
This book offers an interpretation of Yoruba people’s affective responses to an adult Yoruba male with a ‘deviant’ hairstyle. The work, which views hairstyles as a form of symbolic communicative signal that encodes messages that are perceived and interpreted within a culture, provides an ontological and epistemological interpretation of Yoruba beliefs regarding dreadlocks with real-life illustrations of their treatment of an adult male with what they term irun were (insane person’s hairdo). Based on experiential observations as well as socio-cultural and linguistic analyses, the book explores the dynamism of Yoruba worldview regarding head-hair within contemporary belief systems and discusses some of the factors that assure its continuity. It concludes with a cross-cultural comparison of the perceptions of dreadlocks, especially between Nigerian Yoruba people an
d African American Yoruba practitioners.
Authors and Affiliations
About the author
Augustine Agwuele is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Texas State University, USA. He combines the conceptual rigors of theoretical linguistics with ethnographically grounded scholarship in socio-cultural anthropology to study peoples and cultures of Africa. At the core of his works is the quest to make sense of variabilities associated with the production of speech segments (phonetics) and to uncover the fulcrum of a people’s perception of, and response to, life persistent concerns (socio-cultural studies).
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: The Symbolism and Communicative Contents of Dreadlocks in Yorubaland
Authors: Augustine Agwuele
Series Title: African Histories and Modernities
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-30186-0
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan Cham
eBook Packages: History, History (R0)
Copyright Information: The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016
Hardcover ISBN: 978-3-319-30185-3Published: 22 August 2016
Softcover ISBN: 978-3-319-80743-0Published: 22 April 2018
eBook ISBN: 978-3-319-30186-0Published: 13 August 2016
Series ISSN: 2634-5773
Series E-ISSN: 2634-5781
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: IX, 210
Number of Illustrations: 1 illustrations in colour
Topics: History of Sub-Saharan Africa, Cultural History, African Culture, African Politics