The Symbolism and Communicative Contents of Dreadlocks in Yorubaland

This book offers an interpretation of Yoruba people’s affectiveresponses to an adult Yoruba male with a ‘deviant’ hairstyle. The work, whichviews hairstyles as a form of symbolic communicative signal that encodesmessages that are perceived and interpreted within a culture, provides anontological and epistemological interpretation of Yoruba beliefs regardingdreadlocks with real-life illustrations of their treatment of an adult malewith what they term irun were (insane person’s hairdo). Based onexperiential observations as well as socio-cultural and linguistic analyses,the book explores the dynamism of Yoruba worldview regarding head-hair withincontemporary belief systems and discusses some of the factors that assure itscontinuity. It concludes with a cross-cultural comparison of the perceptions ofdreadlocks, especially between Nigerian Yoruba people and African AmericanYoruba practitioners.

Augustine Agwuele is an AssociateProfessor of Anthropology at Texas State University, USA. He combines theconceptual rigors of theoretical linguistics with ethnographically groundedscholarship in socio-cultural anthropology to study peoples and cultures ofAfrica. At the core of his works is the quest to make sense of variabilitiesassociated with the production of speech segments (phonetics) and to uncoverthe fulcrum of a people’s perception of, and response to, life persistentconcerns (socio-cultural studies).?