Emily Mellen  0:08  
Welcome to Global Research Bytes. I’m Emily Mellen and I’m here with Olanrewaju Lasisi, a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Architectural History in the School of Architecture. Olanrewaju, you were recently awarded the CGII Global Programs of Distinction, or GPOD, grant for your collaborative project “Performing the Past: An Exploration of Yoruba Agemo Rituals as Multimodal Historical Documents.” Can you give us an overview of the project?

Olanrewaju Lasisi  0:33  
Absolutely. Thank you again, Emily, for having me here. And, well, this research itself looks at how about 16 towns around the Ijebu kingdom of southwestern Nigeria, how they march to the capital city for a particular ritual festival, which must be done every year. It's an annual walk that happens around the solstice, basically between June 21 and July 5. And in order to do this, our work is in different sections and segments. And by the way, it's not just me, we have four of us: the Ogunnaikes, Ayodeji and Oludamini, and Robin Garcia in the Global Studies program and myself in the School of Architecture. So, we all are working together in this particular project itself. So, basically, there are different segments. One is an ethnography, where we are interviewing all the priests of these towns around the Ijebu kingdom, these towns called the Agemo towns, and then after the interviews we are also conducting, doing this qualitative research, where we are distributing questionnaires for the local people in all of these 16 towns, also about 19,200 questionnaires, yes, distributed so far for that one. And then, the third aspect of it is the pedestrian survey, which requires doing aerial photography and videography of the ritual movement map of all of these priests from their own towns to the palace complex, as well as using GPS to record the tracks and the route in which they follow. And then the last segment is the archaeological excavations, which will take place within the palace complex, where all of these priests around the Ijebu kingdom, where they all gather, to culminate the festival itself. So, as you can see, it's a multimodal method already, through our ethnography, with the survey map, the archeological excavations, and then, lastly, using Open AIs, generated between technology, to simulate all of this data together and provide us with this kind of mobile application, where if you ask any question about the Ijebu Kingdom, about the Agemo festival, about the excavations, it will pop up generatively because of the AI we are incorporating into it.

Emily Mellen  2:51  
That's so rich, the breadth of disciplines that you've managed to build in there. And, as you said, your collaborators come from Religious Studies, Global Studies, and African American and African Studies. How do those different approaches influence the direction of the project?

Olanrewaju Lasisi  3:05  
Oh, yeah, that's a good question. Personally, I'm just an archaeologist who likes to dig, and then analyze what I've found, but then working with great scholars like Ogunnaike, Oludamini, who has done a lot of work on intersections of religion, you know, in West Africa, and, as you can see, our work touches somewhat not just on the architecture of ritual movement, but also on the ritual itself. And having someone like him on board helps us, you know, to expand into this, the breadth of religion itself, which is one of the cause of human economic, and kind of human concepts, basically, I would say, and then then we also have his brother Ayodeji Ogunnaike, who is also doing a lot of work on Orisha Iyanifa, which are those who hold knowledge systems in and among the Yoruba. So, having him on board also goes away from just thinking about a physical object that I'm interested in, but also what is underlying, you know, the symbolical aspects of the peoples and therefore, you know, you can understand it, thinking about it in terms of religion. And then we have Robin Garcia who has done a lot of work on cultural heritage in different parts of the world, actually, in California and Venezuela. So, having her on board and all of us thinking about these things in light of Digital Humanities together, because that's where we are all headed, you know? So, archaeology is coming in contact with ethnographers and religious scholars and cultural heritage managers coming together, as we all try to digitize, you know? So we are, it's not that we're just creating history. We're not just even performing the past, but we are preserving the present through digital AI and that's the onus of our work to digitize it using multimodal method. So, all of us are not just doing what we know how to do, but we're also embracing the frontiers of human understanding and knowledge systems, which itself is AI system.

Emily Mellen  4:59  
That's amazing and I think you were touching on something that I wanted to ask about, which is this cultural heritage aspect. There seems to be an important balance here between asserting and celebrating the cultural and historical heritage of the Ijebu-Yoruba people for an outside public, while also preserving and protecting some specific forms of knowledge to keep within the community. Can you talk a little bit about this aspect of the project?

Olanrewaju Lasisi  5:24  
Thank you so much for that. Let's think, generally, what is knowledge? Knowledge is what you don't know that you now know. So simple and easy to think about. But then, as scholars are we supposed to get all the knowledge system from the people and put it out there? You see? Now, in as much, and that's where I come in as an indigene myself, I've been given access to certain knowledge. And there are some that were held by the priests that wouldn't be given out to another person. But because I'm local, I'm indigenous to the Ijebu kingdom, I've been given access to some things. Now, in presenting my findings to the rest of the world, I can only present that which they want to let the world know. So, for example, if I, even within the Ijebu Kingdom itself, there are some things that women cannot see. So, if you're a woman, an Ijebu woman, you can see how much more we just placed on the internet, you see? So, there are levels and layers to knowledge that goes out. But our own work entirely is to enable the world to know about Ijebu traditions that have been there for over 1000 years, in which the people themselves do not have any worry about letting the world know about, for example, the map of the ritual movements. They kept on doing that every year. People all over the world can go there and follow them in the ritual movement map. That they want the world to know. That you can do with GIS. You see? So, it's easy, we could see what they're looking for. And we as scholars can come in, help them to amplify their voice. I think that's the word: we are trying to amplify the voice. And in amplifying the voices, we will also see that which they don't want the world to know. So, we help them to also make it sacred and sustain the sacredness. I think that's our role here. We are like middlemen between the past and the future.

Emily Mellen  7:18  
I love that, middlemen between the past and the future. So, how did this collaboration get started?

Olanrewaju Lasisi  7:24  
Well, I must say I want to thank Robin Garcia because prior to coming to the University of Virginia, I had carried out excavations, of course, of the Ijebu kingdom, which was one of the reasons why I was accepted as a postdoctoral fellow in the Mellon Race, Place and Equity program itself, but then meeting with Robin Garcia, who is in the Global Studies program, and she keeps on, like, wanting to also collaborate with me because she, she wants to do, she does a lot of work on Oshun, which is a god in the Yoruba knowledge system also. So, then when she sent me the link from CGII that, do you think we should apply? And I look at the link and say, "Okay, it looks like a good one. Let's try it out." And then we reached out to Oludamini and Ayodeji and they all came on board, then we applied. And once we got it, then we had meetings upon meetings. And it was even after we got it, I began to see more the value of having such interdisciplinary scholars from different disciplines coming together for the work itself.

Emily Mellen  8:22  
Yeah, that's definitely a huge value for CGII, for us. So, what are your next steps with the project?

Olanrewaju Lasisi  8:28  
Oh, well, once we are done for the end of this year, once we are completely done with this work, myself and Robin applied for, like, over a million dollars with NSF and, you know, hopefully we get it, so we can, because we would like to excavate each of the towns, you know? So, right now we're just still, we are building the momentum. I would say we're building the momentum itself so we can then apply for something bigger. That will lead to taking students on our field school from different parts of the world. So, making it kind of a large archaeological site for field school for students from all around the world, actually.

Emily Mellen  9:10  
Oh, that sounds fantastic. I can't wait to hear more about it as you go forward. Thank you for meeting with me today.

Olanrewaju Lasisi  9:15  
Thanks so much, Emily.