Mapping Yoruba Networks: Power and Agency in the Making of Transnational Communities

Mapping Yoruba Networks, by the anthropologist Kamari Maxine Clarke, is an ethnography of Oyotunji African Village built on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in both the United States and Nigeria. Clarke lived at Oyotunji and traveled with residents she calls heritage travelers on their own pilgrimage journeys to Nigeria, using that direct participant observation to examine how the village constructs and legitimizes its own account of an authentic Yoruba past. Its authority rests on sustained anthropological fieldwork across two countries and Duke University Press's standard scholarly peer review. Its limit is that it is one anthropologist's interpretive account of a single community's self-understanding, useful for describing how Oyotunji sees itself and its history rather than as an independent verification of every historical claim its residents make.