Socio-Religious Analysis of the Drum of Ọbàtálá Festival
- Oluwasesan Victor AJAYI Ph.D.1 & Olusegun Adebolu OLADOSU Ph.D.2
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1Department of Music, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria. 2Department of Religious Studies, Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
This work identifies
Ọbàtálá festival as one of the several festivals among the various Yoruba
religious groups in the southwestern Nigeria, particularly among the Yorubas.
It has an iconic drum as a major instrument during the festival which is called
Igbìn. Research methods used in this study are therefore descriptive, varying
from interviews, observation, and also, personal experience. It discovers that
it is the reason why festival serves to be a social context in which Yoruba
religions are displayed. It reveals that Festival celebration is identified
with symbolic actions that portray worship tenet of the adherents in a
religious group are carried out through ritual, iconography and gesture that
symbolically actualize their collective sociocultural experiences. It is
therefore important to document that Igbìn drum exhibits the acts of spiritual
manifestation in ritual passages. It activates the spirits of deities in
festivals and thus motivates connection between them and the participants.
Keywords: Socio-Religious;
Socio-Cultural; Mythology; Culture; Divinity,
