The Yoruba

A New History

Akinwumi Ogundiran author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Indiana University Press

Published:3rd Nov '20

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

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The Yoruba cover

The Yoruba: A New History  is the first transdisciplinary study of the two-thousand-year journey of the Yoruba people, from their origins in a small corner of the Niger-Benue Confluence in present-day Nigeria to becoming one of the most populous cultural groups on the African continent. 

Weaving together archaeology with linguistics, environmental science with oral traditions, and material culture with mythology, Ogundiran examines the local, regional, and even global dimensions of Yoruba history. The Yoruba: A New History  offers an intriguing cultural, political, economic, intellectual, and social history from ca. 300 BC to 1840. It accounts for the events, peoples, and practices, as well as the theories of knowledge, ways of being, and social valuations that shaped the Yoruba experience at different junctures of time. The result is a new framework for understanding the Yoruba past and present.

The Yorùbá: A New History by Akinwumi Ogundiran is an excellent compendium of Yorùbá studies focused on the period from 300 BC to AD 1840. The result is a "new history" of the Yorùbá born from systematic methods of research, inference, and interpretation that fit together knowledge from oral history, archaeology, and linguistic anthropology. The author's creative blend of methods, theories, models, and approaches establishes the concept of the book as a new cultural history of the Yorùbá.

-- O. Lasisi * African Archaeological Review *

The Yoruba: A New History is daring in scope and ambition and takes to task canonical stories of Yorùbá history. It is engaging and crosses datasets, making the case for a study of the deeper past that goes beyond the information oered by recent historical texts and the often-sober archaeological data. In this, Akin Ogundiran has written a book to be warmly welcomed by archaeologists.

-- Anne Haour * AZANIA: ARCHAEOLOGICAL RESEARCH IN AFRI

  • Winner of Vinson Sutlive Prize for Historical Anthropology 2021 (United States)

ISBN: 9780253051486

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 1139g

562 pages