Look Around

How a Yoruba person is located among relatives, in a physical compound and in a descent group, and why seniority rather than sex does most of the organizing work.

Seniority based on relative age and lineage entry constitutes the primary operational logic of social hierarchy, kinship terms, and interactive etiquette in Yoruba society.

Sourced Yorùbá proverbs about the household, the lineage, the father's house and the obligations that follow from being born into a particular family.

Thirty-eight Yorùbá proverbs in which kinship is argued through the body, blood as substance and as evidence, bone and marrow as the limit of what can be extracted, flesh and the breast, and resemblance as the proof of descent, each with the original, a literal gloss, a named translation, and the situation it is spoken in.

A very short aetiological tale in which the birds and the rats each disown a dead bat because he lacks their distinguishing feature, so he is left without relatives and without a funeral.

An analysis of how English kin categories distort indigenous Yorùbá social organization by replacing seniority and lineage membership with biological sex and nuclear family assumptions.