Power Through Spirituality: Confronting the Legacies of Colonization in Igbo West Africa
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper was presented in Dakar (Senegal) at the international conference on Africa and its diasporas’ contributions to world civilizations in October 2023. Through a critical decolonial feminist approach, my work challenges the dominant/contemporary depiction of Igbo women as powerless, subjugated, and docile. I do this work by investigating how traditional Igbo spirituality/Odinani is a unique site of power that Igbo women use to negotiate power in contemporary Igbo society. Most specifically, my work investigates the connections between the colonial encroachment of Igbo West African communities and the subsequent and sustained decline of the status/power of Igbo women by interrogating how unique modes of power, specifically spiritual power, utilized by Igbo women, were subsequently diminished through the three-pronged approach of colonization, western religion, and western education. In contemporary Igbo society, the position, status, and power of Igbo women are intricately linked to their role as wife and mother, and their place in Igbo society is understood and elevated mostly through their affiliation with the men in their lives. The construction of power is articulated in masculinist, androcentric, imperialist, and rigid ways that often depart from the ways in which African women have historically negotiated power. Ultimately, my work posits that gendered power exists in the quiet, the mysterious, the taken for granted, the hidden, the unorthodox, and the unexplained.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.024 | 0.046 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".