“Uneasy Lies the Head”: Politics, Economics, and the Continuity of Belief among Yoruba of Nigeria

Abstract

Traditionally a considerable gap has existed between social anthropologists, on the one hand, and political scientists and historians, on the other, in their analysis of events. Archetypically, social anthropologists have concentrated upon enduring social structure and have tended to steer clear of more recent events in the society under study; yet this suggests that the anthropologist is avoiding the question of how the social structure that he enshrines in the ethnographic present is derived. ‘Social structure’ is a composite of the anthropologist's own observation of native behaviour and native exegesis, the latter in turn being the result of a dialectic between their (the indigenous people's) present perception of events and their idea (or image) of what their society has traditionally been and perhaps ought to be. This is particularly so in those societies that, in Lévi-Strauss' words (1966a:233–4) seek “by the institutions they give themselves, to annul the possible effects of historical factors upon their equilibrium and continuity in a quasi-automatic fashion,” that is, in those societies in which “their image of themselves is an essential part of their reality.”

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