Yoruba Cloths with Regal Names

Boyer, Ruth M.

doi:10.2307/3335848

Cited by 4 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…Precolonial luxury consumption was tied to both royal and charismatic authority, and manifested in and communicated via such indigenous values and materialities as volume or bulk (Boyer 1983), sheen (Douny 2013), exclusivity and cosmopolitanism . This last value is especially important to underscore because, as remains the case today, luxury in Africa has often been imbricated with the new, foreign and 'exotic' , and thus with trade and exchange from near and far; from north, east and west; by sea and by land Prestholdt 2007).…”

Section: The Roots and Routes Of African Luxurymentioning

confidence: 99%

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African luxury: aesthetics and politics

Sykes¹

2021

Luxury

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Some might assume that the phrase ' African luxury' is an oxymoron, certainly not considering the notion that Africans are the consumers of said luxury. At the time of writing, entering the search keywords ' Africa' and 'luxury' into Google Scholar resulted not in scholarly work that engaged critically, or indeed otherwise, with how luxury consumer cultures play out in African settings, but rather in numerous articles that use the idea of 'luxury' as a rhetorical device to ask whether certain developmental needs are necessities or 'nice-to-haves' for Africans. For example, one question raised is whether the availability of adolescent psychiatry is a 'luxury' for African communities (Robertson et al. 2010), and it is also considered how, in certain Aids-stricken African contexts, it might be a 'luxury' to grieve for loved ones lost to the disease (Demmer 2007).While there is extensive scholarship examining various aspects of contemporary consumer cultures and identities in Africa, including those of elite actors and demographics (Dosekun 2020; Huigen 2017;Iqani 2015) and those centred on expensive goods -and indeed their symbolic destruction, in the case of the South African township culture, izikhotane (Howell and Vincent 2014) -'luxury' has been little considered as a distinct category thus far, moreover as distinct from 'conspicuous consumption' . Some attention to luxury can be found in work on other global south 1 locations -often, tellingly, more in relation to so-called 'new' middle classes than the 'elites' or 'super-elites' of concern in the global North (Brosius 2012;Fernandes 2006; Lange and Meier 2009;Southall 2016). There is, for example, work on luxury accommodation in gated communities in Bangalore, India (Upadhya 2009); on the growing popularity of luxury golf courses in China (Zhang et al. 2009); and on middle-class Thai consumers' savvy expenditure on affordable 'fast fashion' , complemented with 'substantial investments in expensive western branded goods -a Prada bag, a pair of Gucci sunglasses' , which gives them entry into elite consumer spaces, and which are often resold or traded at 'luxury goods exchanges' (Arvidsson and Niessen 2015: 9; Wattanasuwan 1999). At the same time, in both the larger and more established body of scholarship on luxury from business, marketing and management studies (Cavender and Kincade 2014;Dubois and Duquesne 1993; Kapferer and Bastien 2012; Truong et al. 2008), and in the emergent field of critical luxury studies concerned with the cultural and other politics of what is contemporarily deemed luxury (Armitage and Roberts 2016; Featherstone 2014), the focus is almost exclusively on the global North.African Luxury: Aesthetics and Politics emerges from, and begins to fill, these multi-faceted gaps. With original case studies spanning the continent, from Togo to the former Zaire to Angola, the book moves beyond predominant imaginaries of Africa as a place to be 'saved' or 'aided' , as well as more recent, teleological formulations of it as 'rising' , to foreground a...

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Section: The Roots and Routes Of African Luxurymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is also an imperative to spend money including, quite centrally, by way of hosting others and distributing gifts (e.g. Bascom 1951;Boyer 1983). The moral Yoruba subject: must spend money on his [sic] house and on his clothes so that he can be well dressed.…”

Section: The Roots and Routes Of African Luxurymentioning

confidence: 99%

African luxury: aesthetics and politics

Sykes¹

2021

Luxury

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The Cloth That Eats Money: Ṣeghoṣen as a Symbol of Prestige

Onibode,

Poynor

2023

African Arts

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A Nineteenth-century Shao Bridal Fabric Art as a Metaphor for Starting a Successful Marital Life Journey

Akinwumi

Oha

2009

Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archives Professionals

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The article explores the cultural and semiotic elements of aso a/aro, a Yo ruba bridal fabric that features interesting animal and domestic object motifs. Generally spectacular bridal aso alaro were stored away after the wedding event and they became treasures that many people beheld later in life particularly because of the design motifs. This paper demonstrates how the iconographic features of the focused bridal fabric could be defined and interpreted by means of verbal arts and in terms of Yo ruba cultural values , and attempts to establish that, although this type of cloth design/tradition has eclipsed in the context of modernity, its meanings are significant enough to engage intellectual attention as through which a society tried to articulate its understand ings of social and cultural experience .

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Yoruba Cloths with Regal Names

Cited by 4 publications

References 18 publications

African luxury: aesthetics and politics

African luxury: aesthetics and politics

The Cloth That Eats Money: Ṣeghoṣen as a Symbol of Prestige

A Nineteenth-century Shao Bridal Fabric Art as a Metaphor for Starting a Successful Marital Life Journey

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