Tuesday 2 October 2007

Transformations of Self and Landscape as Elements in Inter and Intracultural Transformations across Cultures





Wenger's Transformations of Self and Landscape as Elements in Inter and Intracultural Transformations across Cultures in Africa and the West

She could be understood as participating, not only in the birth of a new self through her experiences and her responses to them,but as participating in larger cultural transformations in the development of new forms in modern African and post-World War 2 European culture.

These forms are expressed in Africa in the search for new cultural forms in the aftermath of the havoc wreaked on endogenous African cultures by colonialism and their subjugation through their interpretation in terms of the evaluative criteria of Western high culture.

In Europe and North America these novel cultural forms are expressed in terms of new ways of conceiving relationships to metaphysical and ultimate meaning in contrast to the dominant paradigms that emerged after the Scientific Revolution in the seventeenth century and the later Industrial Age.These cultural and economic developments cemented the progressive loss of social prestige and power to shape human minds suffered by Christianity,the previously dominant religion of the West, since the schism represented by the Reformation.

Oshun Forest Cosmogeography as Transformative Nexus in Wenger's Biographical Itinerary

SUSANNE WENGER,ULLI AND GEORGINIA BEIER:CO-TRAVELLERS AT A NEXUS OF CULTURAL TRANSFORMATION










Oshun Forest Cosmogeography as a Transformative Nexus in Wenger's Biographical Itinerary:The Emergence of an Integrative Vocation as a Consummation of Professional and Personal Growth

She understands herself as mediating between both the material form represented by the forest, the cultural forms in relation to which she encounters the forest as a hermeneutic space, and the non-human, non-material forms embodied in nature, which, at various points, she describes as spirits, transcendent energy fields, gods, and by the name they are characterised in the tradition originated by the Yoruba, and in terms of which it is named, the Orisha, of the Orisha religious tradition.

Wenger's chance encounters with the Orisha priests as well as with the natural spaces and cultural forms that inspired her in Yorubaland emerged from an unanticipated trip to Nigeria initiated by her then boyfriend and eventually,husband, the German Ulli Beier,who was to become in Nigeria a catalytic force in the development of the early stages of modern African literary,visual and intellectual culture through his activities as a cultural connector and educational entrepreneur and scholar.

This chance trip by two carefree people,as Beier described the experience, proved providential for Wenger in relation to her own sensitivity to what she describes as archaic modes of interpreting the world.Her encounter with endogenous Yoruba culture constitutes a shaping of experience into hermenutic forms that have led to her development of a new self within the crucible of her encounter with the cultural and spatial forms that characterise those areas of Yorubaland where she has lived.

This self constitutes a sense of vocation centred in her sense of mediation between cultural forms, between natural forms represented by the forest and between these and the non-human forms which are embodied by the forest but can not be characterised purely in terms of a description of its material constitution.

Images:


Susanne Wenger in advanced old age,having lived in Yorubaland since 1950.Osogbo,where she has lived almost all that time,celebrated her 90th birthday in 2005.For birthday honours see http://www.rootsandrooted.org/susanne.htm

Image from couragefilms.at/pages/documentary/wenger/wenger-info

Susanne Wenger in meditation at the Oshun river.

1. From The Adunni Olorisha Trust at http://www.geocities.com/adunni1/sw.html
2. and A Life with the Gods in their Yoruba Homeland by Susanne Wenger and Gert Chesi

3. Ulli Beier and his second wife Georginia Beier,who also played a fundamental role in his cultural efforts in Nigeria. Ulli is in Nigerian attire.

4.Ulli Beier later on in life.
From: http://www.ralf-siedhoff.de/raiarts/chronik.html