City of 201 Gods: Ile-Ife in Time, Space, and the Imagination

Jacob K. Olupona is a scholar of African religions with roots in the Yoruba tradition himself, and this University of California Press book is his academic study of Ile Ife as the sacred center of Yoruba cosmology, covering its festivals such as Olojo and Odun Ifa, its priesthood, and its role in Yoruba religious imagination. Its strength is the combination of scholarly method with genuine standing within the tradition being studied, giving Olupona access to ritual context and interpretive nuance an outside ethnographer might not fully capture, while still holding the material to academic standards of evidence. Its limit is that Ile Ife's own religious life, like any living tradition, continues to change, so a claim about current practice specifically, rather than the historical and cosmological material the book primarily documents, may need a more recent or locally sourced account alongside it.