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Vigilant Things - On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and The Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R1,492
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Vigilant Things - On Thieves, Yoruba Anti-Aesthetics, and The Strange Fates of Ordinary Objects in Nigeria (Hardcover)
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Winner of the 2012 Melville J. Herskovits award (African Studies
Association) Throughout southwestern Nigeria, Yoruba men and women
create objects called aale to protect their properties-farms,
gardens, market goods, firewood-from the ravages of thieves. Aale
are objects of such unassuming appearance that a non-Yoruba viewer
might not register their important presence in the Yoruba visual
landscape: a dried seedpod tied with palm fronds to the trunk of a
fruit tree, a burnt corncob suspended on a wire, an old shoe tied
with a rag to a worn-out broom and broken comb, a ripe red pepper
pierced with a single broom straw and set atop a pile of eggs.
Consequently, aale have rarely been discussed in print, and then
only as peripheral elements in studies devoted to other issues. Yet
aale are in no way peripheral to Yoruba culture or aesthetics. In
Vigilant Things, David T. Doris argues that aale are keys to
understanding how images function in Yoruba social and cultural
life. The humble, often degraded objects that comprise aale reveal
as eloquently as any canonical artwork the channels of power that
underlie the surfaces of the visible. Aale are warnings, intended
to trigger the work of conscience. Aale objects symbolically
threaten suffering as the consequence of transgression-the
suffering of disease, loss, barrenness, paralysis, accident,
madness, fruitless labor, or death-and as such are often the
useless residues of things that were once positively valued: empty
snail shells, shards of pottery, fragments of rusted iron, and the
like. If these objects share "suffering" and "uselessness" as
constitutive elements, it is because they already have been made to
suffer and become useless. Aale offer would-be thieves an
opportunity to recognize themselves in advance of their actions and
to avoid the thievery that would make the "useless" people.
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