Gelede: Art and female power among the Yoruba

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Book

Title:	Gelede: Art and female power among the Yoruba
Authors:	Drewal, Henry John Drewal, Margaret Thompson
Year:	1983
Pages:	306
Language:	English
Series:	Traditional arts of Africa
City of publisher:	Bloomington
Publisher:	Indiana University Press
ISBN:	0253325692
Geographic terms:	Benin Nigeria
Subjects:	Yoruba masquerades women
Abstract:	Gèlèdé masquerades are lavish spectacles of carved wooden headpieces, cloth costumes, dances, songs, and drumming found principally among western Yoruba peoples in Nigeria and Benin. According to tradition they began in the latter part of the 18th century, spreading rapidly, and as a consequence of the slave trade also to the dispersed Yoruba of Sierra Leone, Cuba, and Brazil. Carefully conceived and executed, they represent a highly visible, artistic expression of a pan-Yoruba belief: that women, primarily elderly women, possess certain extraordinary power equal to or greater than that of the gods and ancestors. This profusely illustrated book views the whole performance as a text of which art objects are but one element; it examines the art form of Gèlèdé both independently and collectively.