Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Human Rights and Cultural Limitations, By Toyin Falola

A consideration of the socio-psychological dimension to culture and a focus on the individual and away from the meta political structures of class and superordination and subordination also seem to remain ever useful. A child of five whose thoughts and actions are yet to be consciously affected by politics bears culture that is specific to the child's locale of socialization relative to another local within the same geopolitical boundary and within the same structure of national inter-class relations.  

Culture as a deep level, a times subliminal, framework or model or what anthropologists/sociologists? term frames or narratives that we use to interpret our experiences and to respond to members of our locale in particular ways and to members of other locales in different ways still has a validity that repeated experiences of migrants, expatriates, and exiles continue to demonstrate. The profoundly different ways that people from different locales (even from the same country) relate to noise, to death, strangers, time, new stimuli, to pain and sorrow, blood, blood flow etc., all validate the continuing relevance of the "banal" view of culture. Some dimensions of culture cut across class. 

/F. Kolapo

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From: usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> on behalf of Dr BioDun J Ogundayo <akande1098@gmail.com>
Sent: Sunday, December 13, 2020 2:15 PM
To: dialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Human Rights and Cultural Limitations, By Toyin Falola

 

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Biko my brother, your citing or referencing Mandela et al's notions/theories of culture already has its limitations since these are mostly leftist, anticolonialist... Thus a very ideological definition from your side, of culture. Your iteration if culture thus comes with limitations, as valid it is. The social engineer that I perceive you to be, reminds me of Marx's political economy as a tool for reimagining society/culture...

Falola's definition seems, (and I am being presumptuous here, since I cannot read his mind) rooted in the recently departed Olabiyi Yai's semiotics of culture, this, located in the etymology of Yoruba àsà (culture), thus a broader definition that,  a priori, acknowledges that our people,  indeed all peoples, do have agency in shaping their social and lived reality, be they subjugated, or not. 

Falola's definition, or notions, of culture, will include indigenous technologies such as farming practices, manufacture and use of tools, religion,etc that predate and have even outlasted the worst forms of European and white supremacist hegemony. 

Just sayin'...

BioDun

On Sun, Dec 13, 2020, 12:05 'Biko Agozino' via USA Africa Dialogue Series <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com> wrote:

'To begin with, I clarified the concept of culture. It is a way of life that lays the groundwork and provides the frame of reference with which people approach and navigate their everyday lives and experiences.' - Toyin Falola

To say that culture is a way of life is to replicate the contested consensual definition advanced by colonial functionalist anthropologists. To say that it is a way of life is to suggest that the way people live is their chosen consensus way of life. Quite on the contrary, the way Africans live in a racist world, the way women live in patriarchal societies, and the way the colonized and the poor live in a world under imperialist domination cannot be said to be their ways of life. Rather, these are conditions imposed by law against which they struggle for liberation. Therefore, culture is the way of struggles for and against domination according to Du Bois, CLR James, Azikiwe, Nkrumah,  Fanon, Cabral, Rodney, Mandela, Ousmane, Soyinka, Achebe, Ngugi, Angela Davis, bell hooks, Amadiume, Nzegwu, Oyewumi, Bessie Head, Ruth First, Derrida, Gilroy, and Stuart Hall.

Biko

On Sunday, 13 December 2020, 11:20:01 GMT-5, Olusegun Olopade <bcmanager@toyinfalolanetwork.org> wrote:

Human Rights and Cultural Limitations, By Toyin Falola

 

Howdy?

Check this newly published article from Toyin Falola.

HUMAN RIGHTS AND CULTURAL LIMITATIONS

https://opinion.premiumtimesng.com/2020/12/13/human-rights-and-cultural-limitations-by-toyin-falola/

https://www.chronicle.gm/human-rights-and-cultural-limitations-a-reflection-on-2020-human-rights-day/

https://www.naijatimes.ng/human-rights-and-cultural-limitations/

Cheers!

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Toyin Falola Network
- Pan-African University Press
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