ABSTRACT
Ѐ̣rìn-Ọ̀ṣun, a developing town in Ọ̀ṣun State renowned for its traditional culture, is home to families of practicing bàtá and dùndún drummers and masquerade dancers. Since the 1960s, Ѐ̣rìn-Ọ̀ṣun artists have collaborated artistically and intellectually with European and American artists and scholars. This chapter illustrates the concept of strategic collaboration: the art of occupying and performing one's status position to facilitate a common project. In Yorùbá culture, one's position can shift from patron to client and back again, but the involved parties must be willing to acknowledge such shifts. When Westerners have collaborated with Ѐ̣rìn-Ọ̀ṣun artists, dynamics of status have often gone unspoken and have led to tense relationships and unfinished projects. Drawing upon three years of ethnographic fieldwork in the 1990s, this chapter documents and analyzes Ѐ̣rìn-Ọ̀ṣun artists' collaborations with an ethnofusion band, drumming students from Germany and Yorùbá business entrepreneurs. The culminating example illustrates how the desperation of Nigeria in the late 1990s fueled an era of creative and elaborate visa scams. Viewing collaborations through the lens of status-shifting strategies allows us to assess the motivations for aesthetic choices and material realities that constitute the reinventions of Yorùbá culture.
