CULTURAL INTERACTION AND YORÙBÁ TRADITIONAL EPISTEME

Abstract

Culture defines the peculiarities of a people. It consists of a people's total way of life as embedded and expressed in their worldview, political organizations, social interactions, religious beliefs and practices. This explains the reason for the claim that culture is complex. It is therefore dynamic in nature. The dynamics of culture reveal that it is not static; it changes as human development and interactions occur. Human interactions across different cultures are the basis for cultural interaction. Evidently, cultural interactions affect the totality of a people's way of life. This is also the case in Yorùbá culture. Descriptive method will be used to describe how Ifa divination has enhance the symbolic role among the Yoruba. A historical analysis revealed that various sectors such as epistemic activities, religion, political organizations and so on in the Yorùbá modern society have been gravelly affected by cultural interaction. This is identified as the effect of uncritical openness and delusion of priding imported models of human cultural orientations as superior to what is indigenous. It is argued that such tendency has resulted in a structural disconnect between Yorùbá traditional and modern episteme, and consequently renders any meaningful advancement difficult. It is therefore imperative that Yorùbá episteme as it is been construed, be reconstructed and given a place of importance. This will necessarily include the consciousness of the fact that the epistemological basis of Yorùbá tradition as embedded in Ifa Corpus is the guiding principle of every sector of Yorùbá tradition. This will be a panacea for the plethora of issues that confront the contemporary Yorùbá.