caa a22 4500 388036524 CHVBK 20180307125006.0 cr unu---uuuuu 161130e199801 xx s 000 0 eng 10.2307/1161148 doi S0001972000047008 pii (NATIONALLICENCE)cambridge-10.2307/1161148 Apter Andrew Discourse and its disclosures: Yoruba women and the sanctity of abuse [Elektronische Daten] [Andrew Apter] If ritual songs of obscenity and abuse have become a familiar topic in Africanist ethnography since Evans-Pritchard's first discussion of their ‘canalising' functions in 1929, few studies have paid sufficient attention to the socio-political and discursive contexts of the song texts themselves. The present article moves in that direction by relocating abusive songs of the Oroyeye festival in an Ekiti Yoruba town within the local forms of history and knowledge that motivate their interpretation and performative power. After reviewing the cult's historical interventions in local political affairs, the article examines the repressed historical memory of a displaced ruling dynasty and its associated line of civil chiefs as invoked by the song texts in two festival contexts. In the first—the Àjàkadì wrestling match—which occurs at night, male age mates from different ‘sides' of the town fight to stand their ground and topple their opponents while young women praise the winners and abuse the losers with sexual obscenities. In the second festival context, during the day, the elder ‘grandmothers' of Oroyeye target malefactors and scoundrels by highlighting their misdeeds against a discursive background of homage and praise. In this fashion the female custodians of a displaced ruling line bring repressed sexual and political sub-texts to bear on male power competition, lineage fission, and antisocial behaviour. More generally, they mobilise the fertility and witchcraft of all Yoruba women to disclose hidden crimes and speak out with impunity. Copyright © International African Institute 1998 Africa Cambridge University Press 68/1(1998-01), 68-97 0001-9720 68:1<68 1998 68 AFR https://doi.org/10.2307/1161148 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI 1 research-article jats NATIONALLICENCE 856 40 https://doi.org/10.2307/1161148 text/html Onlinezugriff via DOI NATIONALLICENCE 100 1- Apter Andrew NATIONALLICENCE 773 0- Africa Cambridge University Press 68/1(1998-01), 68-97 0001-9720 68:1<68 1998 68 AFR CC0 http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0 nationallicence SWISSBIB 077183746 BK010053 XK010053 XK010000 NATIONALLICENCE NATIONALLICENCE NL-cambridge