Ase: Verbalizing and Visualizing Creative Power Through Art

Abstract

An important aspect of verbal and visual arts in ritual contexts in Africa is the way they affect their audience, initiate and noninitiate alike. Often achieved through a careful choice and arrangement of a range of sculptures, objects, colors, sounds, phrases, and incantations, these artistic devices, whether they exist as assemblages or simply by themselves in sacred settings, confront the researcher in the field with an enormously complex religioaesthetic experience. This scenario does not lend itself easily to straightforward ethnographic description, translation and analysis, especially if we rely solely on terminologies and/or theoretical constructs derived from the traditionally relevant academic disciplines of art history, psychology, philosophy and anthropology as defined and practised in the West. The methodological challenges arising from this situation create, however, an opportunity to explore afresh African conceptual systems and oratory for new and contextually relevant theoretical alternatives. This exercise is most likely to advance the study of art in general, as it promises to add the badly-needed dimension of 'soul' to a still essentially formalist, self-referential and Western-modernist approach to African art and aesthetics. Drawing mainly on my fieldwork and findings in Yorubaland, this essay will address the subject of ase, an enigmatic affective phenomenon in Yoruba art and culture, and elaborate on its critical role as a creative and effective power in the verbal and visual arts. An attempt will also be made to shed some light on the compelling aesthetic presence which invariably results from the logical combination of artistic components purposefully selected and designed to convey and accentuate the ise in a thing or subject. The concept of ase has intrigued many scholars of Yoruba culture in Africa and the New World. The word, ase, is generally translated