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.

From the University of Amherst archives at http://www.amherst.edu/library/archives/exhibitions/beier/ulli-georgina.html

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

Wenger's Oshun Forest Cosmogeography as a Nexus of Mediation between Inter-Cultural Forms,Modes of Being and Forms of Knowledge

Opon Ifa Mandala/Cosmogram and Wenger/Oshun Forest Cosmogeography

Wenger’s understanding of the forest can be understood as emerging in relation to navigation between a confluence of factors. The first of these factors is represented by the relationship between the material space of the forest and her understanding of the various aspects of significance constituted by that space.

She navigates between the material reality of the forest’s space and her understanding of that space as also embodying forms of being which are neither animal, elemental or vegetative in their totality but which participate in or are to some degree constituted by these material forms.

The other set of factors in relation to which she shapes her understanding of the forest is represented by the communities of thought whose ideas influence her conception of the metaphysical significance of the geography of the forest.

The interpretive communities whose hermeneutic paradigms she draws upon,are, principally, the Yoruba Orisha tradition,which is directly related to the forest since the forest is in Yorubaland in South-West Nigeria,and, Jungian psychology, which provides her with a means of interpreting cultural confluence across time and space. Secondarily, Taoism, which influences her understanding of the ideational possibilities of physical space, both natural and humanly constructed, and, Tibetan Buddhism, the influence of which seems to be suggested in her conjunction of expansive abstract thought which attempts to unite mind and cosmos in its terrestrial and cosmic aspects with a concrete visualisation of complex ideas evident in both her writing and her art.

In Wenger's experience in relation to the Oshun Forest the opportunities provided by the vagaries of chance are transformed into hermeneutic pathways through which the artist becomes a conduit for mediation between material and cultural forms represented by the forest and the interpretive communities whose thought worlds inspire her in her immersive relationship with the elemental space of the forest and which she draws upon to conceptualise the outcomes emerging from that encounter.

LANDSCAPE AS COSMOGRAPHIC FORM IN WENGER'S CONFIGURATION OF THE OSHUN FOREST

From time immemorial, human beings have sought pristine natural spaces as places to seek or encounter something beyond the mundane realities that shape daily life.

In the forest regions of the world, the forest is often perceived as the abode of supernatural wonder into which people go to be initiated into spiritual mysteries, awakening them to the hidden metaphysical meaning of life.

The Oshun Forest in Oshogbo, Nigeria has been interpreted by the Austrian/Nigerian artist and philosopher Susanne Wenger, for whom the forest has become a spiritual home, in terms that develop into an expansive metaphysical vision the general understanding of forests as demonstrating sacred spaces.

Living in Oshogbo since 1950, she has come to understand the forest as embodying the spiritual beings who animate the world as understood in the Orisha tradition developed by the Yoruba of South-West Nigeria, where Oshogbo is located. Within this vision, the devotee who explores this forest make contact with the spiritual beings who constitute the metaphysical dynamism and spiritual essences of the world. The spiritual forces embodied by the forest represent a microcosm of the macrocosmic structure of the universe.

Wenger’s conception of the forest as a template of the metaphysical structure and dynamism of the cosmos could be understood as a development of Classical Yoruba thought as described by Irele, in its conceiving of the forest as constituting a theatre of experience within which the adventures of the hunter are evocative of the challenges faced by the human being in navigating the symbiotic formation of spiritual and material existence that constitutes life on earth.

The complexity of the forest’s ecosystem is constituted not only by the interrelationships of the flora and fauna that compose and inhabit it but also by the reflection of that physical complexity in a network of relationships between the material and spiritual aspects of its elemental and animal life. This interrelational network makes the forest into an example of one way of interpreting Aquinas’s conception of connaturality in terms of a symbiotic conception of reality, within which the material, the psychological and the spiritual are mutually constitutive of the nature of being.