ANTHROPOLOGY, ARTS AND CULTURE: AN INDIGENIZATION PROJECT

Abstract

Anthropology is the study of people, past and present, with a focus on understanding the human condition both culturally and biologically. The discipline compares present and past forms of government or legal and religious belief systems, social structures, such as family dynamics. Culture consists of an inheritance system, variant ideas, skills, and so forth that are transmitted by (usually) more experienced to less experienced individuals. The passage of the custodians of a vast cultural knowledge base leaves the populace with little knowledge of the people's arts and culture. The distress is that the upcoming generation that will be handed over to the community does not have sufficient knowledge of the arts and culture of their land. This is due partly to cultural atrophy facilitated by cultural imperialism. In the African setting and the Akpulu Clan in particular, this problem is further compounded by the menace of migrations occasioned by urbanization and people’s quest for greener pastures outside their natural settings. That movement has been an alienation of the incoming generations, and they continuously lose grip of their evolutionary pool, origin, and its culture, arts, norms, values, and mores, which are strengthened by the community kinship system. Our focus in this paper is to draw attention to our core anthropological derivatives with emphasis on the rapid erosion and extinction of our core cultural heritage, arts, and culture that give meaning to our existence as a cultural entity. It also has the goal of documenting the available remnants of the Akpulu Clan arts and culture expressed in her folk traditions, language/symbols, artifacts, value and belief systems, idioms, riddles, and jokes. That is an effort at indigenization of the indigenous, on Akpulu cultural derivatives, as different from the general Igbo cultural practices. The meanings of the various Akpulu indigenous language arts are provided, with their literary meanings in brackets. The methodological approach is both qualitative and quantitative, enriched with data from a structured questionnaire organized in Google Forms for opinion polls from the Akpulu Clan Whatsapp platform that operates within the clan, in-depth interviews, and participant observation.