Allow me to help you with links to others using these concepts-
2. Knowledge network in the sense of a structure of ideas and cognitions developed by people
A. Every Idea is a Network
--
Adepoju:
Oxford Dictionary: Network
Network:
Noun
1.An arrangement of intersecting or vertical lines
2. A group or system of interconnected people or things.
Verb: connect with others to exchange information.
You asked me not to highlight my own interpretation, but stick to the dictionary definition, so you must reciprocate by not qualifying, extending, your overwrought , figurative definition of ' network' to justify predetermined goals as you have done below.
When Falola named a particular fellow as brand manager of Falola Network, it cannot be in the sense in which you are stretching the definition and that person's name is not Toyin Adepoju. That naming is meaningful only in the sense of the dictionary meaning which is normal usage.
Are you applying for a job that is already taken?
OAA
Sent from my Galaxy
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>Date: 28/03/2021 09:20 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - African Epistemic Metaphors :FromtheMask to the Baobab : Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension ofKnowledge 1
can you justify your claim about the conventional use of the word ''network"?
that would require recourse to english dictionaries not limiting yourself to your own views.
a network is a structure of interconnected points. it can be abstract or concrete.
its concrete form in this context is demonstrated by the people generating knowledge and the interpersonal and material processes through which they do this.
the abstract expression is demonstrated by the knowledge thereby developed.
one such cognitive network is demonstrated by the publications of toyin falola which may be organized in terms of various structures of interrelated points of focus, subjects or themes.
one such structure is constituted by the exploration of the historical development of phenomena and the demonstration of their qualities in the course of this developmental process.
this understanding of such a structure emerging from falola's work is derived from falola's originating discipline of history as a centre for exploring humanity's experience within its spatio-temporal context and by the refraction of history through what may be described as Oriki Theory of Discourse as developed by olabiyi yai and rowland abiodun.
one may adapt their ideas to the study of the expressions and development of the nature of phenomena, the development of those identities across time, that being one way of describing their understanding of the yoruba concept of oriki.
more specifically, such a structure in the falola context could be seen as constituted by his studies of the work of individuals, the study of communities, from such towns as ibadan to africans in africa and the diaspora, the study of disciplines, such as the humanities, and the study of specific cultural forms, such as the orisa or deities originating from yorubaland.
this complex constitutes a structure of investigation, a body of knowledge, a knowledge network unified by various factors, the most obvious being that it is generated by one person and a broader interpretive correlation being that they constitute varied explorations of the being and becoming of phenomena, their natures in their synchronic and diachronic states, at various points in time and through their development.
that's one way of identifying and analyzing a knowledge network
thanks
toyin
--On Sat, 27 Mar 2021 at 12:31, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
--
It seems obvious you are not using the word 'network' the way it is ordinarily used. The network may lead to a knowledge configuration, but it cannot be that knowledge configuration.
The existence of that knowledge configuration has to be identified and analysed why it is a knowledge configuration. You cant force it, if it cannot be identified.
OAA
Sent from my Galaxy
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>Date: 27/03/2021 10:50 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <usaafricadialogue@googlegroups.com>Subject: Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - African Epistemic Metaphors : FromtheMask to the Baobab : Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge 1
Both.
The Toyin Falola Network is both a system of research and publication and a knowledge configuration.
The research and publication system generates a knowledge configuration.
The knowledge configuration is the structure of ideas and perspectives created through that research and publication system .
toyin
--On Sat, 27 Mar 2021 at 04:57, OLAYINKA AGBETUYI <yagbetuyi@hotmail.com> wrote:
--
Is Toyin Falola Network a configuration of knowledge or a mode of organisation?
In what sense can Toyin Falola Network be a configuration of knowledge?
OAA
Sent from my Galaxy
-------- Original message --------From: Oluwatoyin Adepoju <ovdepoju@gmail.com>Date: 27/03/2021 02:45 (GMT+00:00)To: usaafricadialogue <USAAfricaDialogue@googlegroups.com>, Yoruba Affairs <yorubaaffairs@googlegroups.com>Subject: USA Africa Dialogue Series - African Epistemic Metaphors : From theMask to the Baobab : Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge 1
--African Epistemic Metaphors
from the Mask to the Baobab
Toyin Falola and the Mystical Dimension of Knowledge
1
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Abstract
This essay is an exploration of images of knowledge from classical African thought, juxtaposed with discussions of the work of scholar and writer Toyin Falola, correlating these with other bodies of knowledge, in relation to the mystical quest for intimate relationship with ultimate reality.
IntroductionClassical African images of knowledge are amongst the most imaginatively exciting one can find. They are not widely known, perhaps even among Africans, for various reasons. Even when they are known, their scope of significance is inadequately appreciated.
Toyin Falola's work is fascinating for its insights and multi-disciplinary range across a vast network of publications. It is also striking for its multi-expressive variety, across the expository and argumentative culture central to scholarship, the imaginative lyricism of poetry and the vividness of storytelling, storytelling being an expressive form unifying his autobiographical and historical writings. Also central to Falola's work is his exploration of the contemporary significance of classical African knowledge systems.
This essay is part of my own effort to better understand this dynamic, ceaselessly growing configuration of knowledge that is the Falola Network, sharing this appreciation with others in a way that goes beyond the academic circles, particularly in African Studies, where Falola's work is securely established.
The themes of African epistemic images, images of learning processes, and Falola scholarship, are unified in this essay through my fascination with mysticism, the human quest for union with or transformative insight to ultimate reality, the summation of all possibilities, as it may be described, a summation known by the varied names of "God," "Allah," "Braman," "Nyame," "cosmic mind," among other designations for the varied conceptions of an ultimate reality.This piece is a development from an earlier essay "Toyin Falola : A Dancing Mask and his Footprints," published in Nigerian news media. It expands the implications of the Igbo proverb of watching a dancing mask made famous by the quintessential literary explorer of classical Igbo thought and society, Chinua Achebe.
Entry into African Epistemic Images
The appreciation of the range and significance of African images of knowledge and the mutual illumination they generate between each other is enabled by multi-disciplinary exposure, across the visual and verbal arts, spirituality, philosophy, anthropology and other disciplines.
The better known strands of modern African philosophy, in keeping with their central inspiration by the linear logic that characterizes much Western philosophy, might not be adequately sensitive to this imagistic centre of classical African thought.
With such exceptions as Abiola Irele, Wole Soyinka, Mazisi Kunene and Ayi Kwei Armah, the literary scholars whose work is often closer to these images and who are central to making them known through their writings, may have other interests in them besides depth of engagement with their ideational significance as strategies of knowing relevant beyond the texts and other cultural forms where they occur.
Studies in African art history and theory, however, as in the work of Rowland Abiodun and Mary Nooter Roberts, are very sensitive to the visual evocation of ideas represented by these epistemic images.
Anthropologists have played a very significant role in these investigations. The magnificent work of anthropologist Marcele Griaule, enhanced by its qualification through subsequent research, his co-traveller Germaine Dieterlen and her collaborator, writer and scholar Ahamdou Hampate Ba, must be acknowledged as among my fundamental inspirations in this quest.
This essay is an effort to effort to organize what has been the outcome of random encounters rather than systematic research. This could lead to more focused textual and possibly interpersonal and material investigations.
The Dancing Mask
"You cannot stand in one spot to watch a dancing mask," states an Igbo proverb quoted by the novelist Chinua Achebe. You need to see the mask from various vantage points in order to better appreciate its dynamism, its combination of visual power and dazzling motion.
As with the mask, so with life. Its scope cannot be adequately appreciated from one perspective, from any one body of ideas and insights. The ever-unfolding totality of approaches to understanding reality represent human efforts to grasp the ultimately ungraspable.
The Falola Dynamic
Even then, the quest is central to what makes us human. The hunger to know as much as possible about this universe we find ourselves in, a pursuit taking the seeker into various disciplines, diverse bodies of knowledge. One such seeker I deeply admire is Toyin Falola, the "dancing mask" of many sides, whose multifaceted genius needs multiple perspectives to appreciate.
Through a consistently unfolding series of books and essays he writes, co-writes, edits or co-edits and through various book series he has instituted with different publishers, through interviews with figures from different aspects of life, there steadily unfolds a kaleidoscopic window of the African continental and African Diasporic experience, as seen by various eyes, spoken by varied voices.
Falola's academic education is in history. From the grand narrative about the scope of the human journey that is history, he enters into various tributaries of the mighty ocean, seeking, in the rivers, creeks and other waterways that feed into the tumultuous sea, the varied motivations and engagements with reality that define human existence. He is particularly interested in those who still people the continent from which humanity branched out across the world, Africa, as well as in the journeys of Africans across the ocean into the Americas.
Patterns of Knowing
Can studying Falola's work assist me in my fascination with patterns, patterns in terrestrial nature, patterns shaping the cosmos and patterns of interpretation of the significance of those material realities and of the human mind exploring those concrete forms?
The Calabash of Time and Infinity
I am haunted by the hunger for keys to the meaning of existence as dramatized in its unfolding possibilities. "Olo-du-mare," "the owner-olo- of-odu," odu, the calabash of existence from which each moment is born, is Shloma Rosenberg's interpretation, at his site Mystic Curio, of the meaning of the name "Olodumare," the identification of the supreme creator as understood in Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology.
I am intrigued by that calabash, its sphericality suggesting infinity, its concavity the depth of existence, as the complex of related calabash images in classical African thought, from Igbo to Zulu philosophy, may be described, resonating with Indian Tantric thought.[1]
Falola is an explorer of this calabash, an investigator of the sea of time and the multiple rivers emerging from and feeding into it.
The Dancer of the Mask
Dancer of the mask, what story are you telling us? Are you unfolding a vision of the African journey, in particular, and the human journey, in general, a perspective on its significance? Or are you simply a seeker yourself, a traveller seeking answers, sharing his travels across landscapes of possibility?
I am not developing a central idea, he says of the essays in his The Humanities in Africa,[2] but "an elaborate and systematic network of ideas on a given subject," he concludes in his introduction to that volume.
What may one learn from Abdul Karim Bangura's Falolaism: The Epistemologies and Methodologies of Africana Knowledge, 2019, and its predecessor, his Toyin Falola and African Epistemologies, 2015, Bangura's investigations of questions similar to those I am asking?
Diverse Ways of Knowing
History is a story told by different people, in different ways, seeing and describing the same thing, the same objectively verifiable happenings, from their own perspectives. What kind of story or stories are told by the collection of works emerging from the publishing network generated by Toyin Falola or by others, such as Olajumoke Yacob-Haliso, Adeshina Afolayan and Samuel Oloruntoba, whose originating platforms as knowledge curators, organizers of knowledge as book editors and writers, beginning as co-writers and co-editors with Falola and expanding into organizing their own edited book series, complementing their sole authored texts exploring various aspects of the African experience?
May these questions take us into seeking knowledge from all possibilities, as promoted by Falola in his ideas on pluriversalism and as exemplified by his own practice?[3]
Mirrors of Infinity: The Yoruba Orisa
Would this be akin to Akinwumi Ogundiran's description of the constellation of deities constituting Yoruba origin Orisa cosmology as mirrors reflecting everyday social lives from multiple angles, reflections expanding with the dynamism of everyday life as they recede into infinity, taking " deep learning, knowledge, and expertise to observe, read, and interpret these reflections," light reflected from mirrors into other mirrors, integrating impressions as they reach the eyes, carrying messages to the mind learning to interpret them, this process of learning constituting ways of knowing and organising knowledge?[4]
The Orisa represent windows for viewing the universe from different angles while Olodumare is the totality of these perspectives, states Ulli Beier,[5] viewpoints integrated and transcended, one could state, in that which is Axiom Paradoxon, Origin and Consequence, The Unlimitable, The Incomprehensible, as Suzanne Wenger describes Olodumare.[6]
The Ungraspable Baobab
"Wisdom is like a baobab tree, a single person's hand cannot embrace it" is an Akan proverb which Falola uses in highlighting the value of "seeking a [critical ] constellation of knowledges."[7]
The proverb suggests a sensitivity to the ultimate inadequacies of all cognitive processes and the incompleteness of all knowledge systems. This understanding motivates the integration of diverse epistemologies, different ways of knowing, as developed within and across various cultures, in order to maximise human cognitive potential.
Using this framework, I developed Baobab Epistemology and Mysticism,[8] a quest for ultimate knowledge through the critical integration of diverse cognitive strategies, inspired and challenged by the correlative allure and impossibility of ultimacy of knowing, aspirations evoked by the size and ecosystemic associations of the baobab as it harbors and nourishes various creatures even as it is beyond the physical grasp of those creatures.
Between the Small and the Large
I love such ideas because they imply that I, located at a particular spatio-temporal coordinate on a relatively small planet orbiting what is known as a dwarf star in relation to other, massive stars, though the Earth is but a dot beside it, am trying to reach beyond the circumscriptions of my material existence into the cosmos where I exist as a creature of negligible visibility amidst vast temporal and spatial coordinates ( A formulation inspired by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the conclusion of his A Critique of Practical Reason).
The African Imperative
Even sweeter, I am doing it using ideas developed by my fellow Africans, who need greater representation in the world of abstract thought, the universe of knowledge alive with people seeking to go beyond the needs of the moment and the demands of biology, questions stimulated by what Stephan Korner refers to as the "metaphysical moment,'' periods of acute sensitivity in which what matters most to the person is the sense of existence as a whole, of existence in contrast to non-existence, fundamental sensitivities different from the details of life that often engross people in the challenges and enjoyment of living.[9]
[1] As evident in Obianuju Umeji, "Igbo Art Corpus: Women's Contribution," Nigerian Heritage, 2,1993, 87-98, 96; Mazisi Kunene, Anthem of the Decades, 1981, xxiii; Daniel Odier, Tantric Quest, 1997, 164-5.
[2] 2016, xi
[3] "Pluriversalism," The Toyin Falola Reader.
[4] The Yoruba: A New History, ( 2021, 129).
[5] In The Return of the Gods : The Sacred Art of Susanne Wenger.
[6] In her response to Courlander's Tales of Yoruba Gods and Heroes (Research in African Literatures, 1976, Vol. 7, No. 1, 74-76, 75).
[7] "Power is Knowledge: Discussions in Intellectual Liberation," 2020, awaiting publication.
[9] In Kant (1977, 13).
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