The Symbolism and Communicative Contents of Dreadlocks in Yorubaland

Download or read book The Symbolism and Communicative Contents of Dreadlocks in Yorubaland written by Augustine Agwuele and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-08-13 with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers an interpretation of Yoruba people’s affective responses to an adult Yoruba male with a ‘deviant’ hairstyle. The work, which views hairstyles as a form of symbolic communicative signal that encodes messages that are perceived and interpreted within a culture, provides an ontological and epistemological interpretation of Yoruba beliefs regarding dreadlocks with real-life illustrations of their treatment of an adult male with what they term irun were (insane person’s hairdo). Based on experiential observations as well as socio-cultural and linguistic analyses, the book explores the dynamism of Yoruba worldview regarding head-hair within contemporary belief systems and discusses some of the factors that assure its continuity. It concludes with a cross-cultural comparison of the perceptions of dreadlocks, especially between Nigerian Yoruba people an d African American Yoruba practitioners.