Orisha Journeys: the Role of Travel in the Birth of Yorùbá-Atlantic Religions
Peter F. Cohen

Archives de sciences sociales des religions117 | janvier - mars 2002
Les religions afro-américaines : genèse etdéveloppement dans la modernité

Electronic versionURL: http://journals.openedition.org/assr/2474 

DOI: 10.4000/assr.2474ISSN: 1777-5825PublisherÉditions de l’EHESSPrin


EXCERPT 

1830 the «Yorùbá» did not exist. Or put less dramatically, the peoples no
known by that name considered themselves neither a political nor a cultural unity;
but identified with the city-states into which the region was organized. Yet by
1895, a British-educated Christian Yorùbá intellectual could confidently state: “It is
beyond doubt that the Egbas, Ketus, Oyos, with their subdivisions etc., are of one
stock; their manners and customs agree; what is held sacred in one town is held
sacred by all of them without exception” 4.

The concept of a single “Yorùbá” people and its baptism with the Hausa term
for the inhabitants of Òyó was largely the work of liberated captives and their 
children returning from Sierra Leone, particularly as Protestant missionaries. 

The terms by which the descendants of Yorùbá-speakers are known today in the New World –
“Nagô” in Brazil, “Nago” in Haiti and Jamaica, “Lucumí” in Cuba, “Akú” in Sierra
Leone, and “Yorùbá” in Trinidad – emerged as meaningful categories in the con-
text of enslavement and exile 5. The “Yorùbá” can in this sense be seen as a product
of displacement and dispersion. 6

The emergence of Orisha religious traditions in several distinct localities
around the Atlantic basin is correlated with similar and interrelated historical 
processes involving people from a particular region of Africa. Enough work has now
been done on the local level to justify an attempt at synthesizing of the various 
histories and an exploration of their similarities and differences, as well as of their
 historical interrelationships.

Such a synthetic approach has precedents. Verger’s (1968) monumental history
of the «flux and reflux» between Bahia and the Bight of Benin, presented under the
sponsorship of Braudel, was the first study to give a sense of the richness and
complexity of cultural interaction between the “Old” and “New” sides of what
Thompson (1968) would term the “Black Atlantic World”. Thornton’s (1992)
definition of an “Afro-Atlantic” region along Braudelian lines identifies an emergent
“Afro-Atlantic culture”. Matory’s more specific formulation of a «Yorùbá-Atlantic
complex» emphasizes the dialogue between the historically “coeval” Yoruba