STRANGE REALMS OF KNOWLEDGE


Where do I start from in my account of my bold, but as it now turns out, possibly misguided quest?

I will begin from my explorations of something I had long suspected as a scholar of that continent. I had long suspected that what other peoples, particularly those from Europe, understood as a primitive absence of the skill of writing, an illiterate cultural landscape, was in fact a complex cultural topography in which various options for exploring and communicating knowledge had been developed, some of these options being cognitive strategies which had been forgotten by or were never cultivated by others. In most languages which had created alphabets, linguistic signs were primarily a way of directly or indirectly suggesting ideas which were limited to the basic significations, the basic field of reference of the words in the language. But in these other cultures, most of which had not developed alphabets, people seemed to have developed systems in which both the direct and indirect expressiveness of symbolism were deliberately conjoined in the same form in such a manner that the symbols acted as building blocks in suggesting ideas which were much more expansive in scope. The relationships between the associative values of the symbols in the system evoke a conception of the metaphysical structure and dynamism of the cosmos.

One of the most striking examples of this is the Ifa system, developed in the former Yoruba states of West Africa, in what is now Nigeria. The Adinkra symbolism developed by the Ashante of West Africa, for example, although not demonstrating the architectonic scope of Ifa, reflects a quality shared by certain other African systems of communication, such as Ifa, in that visual symbols are correlated with linguistic symbols in the form of proverbs and stories to encapsulate a broad range of ideas, ideas demonstrating both social and metaphysical significance. The visual symbol, therefore, becomes a primer for the expressive universe it contains.

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