Gendered Agendas: The Secrets Scholars Keep about Yorùbá-Atlantic Religion
Abstract
Whereas scholars have often described the material interests served by any given social
group's selective narration of history, this article catches scholars in the act of
selectively narrating Yorùbá-Atlantic cultural history in the service of their own
faraway activist projects. Anthropologist Ruth Landes' re-casting of the Afro-Brazilian
Candomblá religion as an instance of primitive matriarchy not only encouraged feminists
abroad but also led Brazilian nationalist power-brokers to marginalise the male, and
often reputedly homosexual, priests who give the lie to Landes's interpretation. In
the service of a longdistance Yorùbá nationalist agenda, sociologist Oyeronke Oyewumi
has declared traditional Yorùbá society ‘genderless’, and found, among both North
American feminist scholars and Yorùbá male scholars, allies in concealing the copious
evidence of gender and gender inequality in Yorùbá cultural history. What these historical
constructions lack in truth value they make up for in their power to mobilise new
communities and alliances around the defence of a shared secret. The article addresses
how politically tendentious scholarship on gender has inspired new social hierarchies
and boundaries through the truths that some high-profile scholars have chosen to silence.
Type
Journal articlePermalink
https://hdl.handle.net/10161/7033Published Version (Please cite this version)
10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00314.xPublication Info
Matory, JL (2003). Gendered Agendas: The Secrets Scholars Keep about Yorùbá-Atlantic Religion. Gender & History, 15(3). pp. 409-439. 10.1111/j.0953-5233.2003.00314.x. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/10161/7033.This is constructed from limited available data and may be imprecise. To cite this
article, please review & use the official citation provided by the journal.
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Show full item recordScholars@Duke
J. Lorand Matory
Lawrence Richardson Distinguished Professor of Cultural Anthropology
Specialties
Anthropology & History, Africa, African Diaspora, Transnationalism, Social Theory
Research Summary
Anthropology of religion, of ethnicity, of education and of social theory; history
and theory of anthropology; African and African-inspired religions around the Atlantic
perimeter; ethnic diversity in the African-descended population of the US; tertiary
education as a culture; gender, religion and politics; transnationalis

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