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Paper short abstract

This paper explores Yoruba Ifá as a living oral archive of ecology, cosmology, and culture. It examines how digitization reshapes its preservation and meaning, asking what is gained or lost when sacred narratives move from oral performance to digital repositories.

Paper long abstract

Ifá, the Yoruba divination corpus, is one of the most sophisticated oral archives in Africa. Consisting of thousands of verses (Odu Ifá) memorized, recited, and interpreted by trained diviners, it encodes centuries of knowledge about cosmology, ethics, medicine, agriculture, and environmental balance. Far more than ritual practice, Ifá is a living archive, an ecological and cultural knowledge system where stories, chants, and proverbs guide human relationships with nature and community.

This paper, From Oral Traditions to Digital Repositories: Archiving the Ecologies of Knowledge in Yoruba Ifá Narratives, examines how this vast oral archive is being preserved, reinterpreted, and reimagined in the digital age. As urbanization, language decline, and generational shifts threaten the continuity of oral transmission, scholars and cultural custodians are turning to digitization projects, online repositories, and multimedia platforms to safeguard Ifá knowledge. While such transitions expand access and visibility, they also raise critical questions: What is gained or lost when a sacred, performative tradition becomes a searchable database? Who controls these digital archives, and how do they reshape authority, authenticity, and cultural meaning?

By situating Ifá as both oral performance and digital resource, this paper highlights the dynamic nature of archives as ecologies of knowledge, adaptive systems where storytelling and memory intersect with technology. It argues that the preservation of Ifá in digital spaces not only sustains cultural resilience but also challenges us to rethink how archives mediate the entangled relationships between nature, culture, and knowledge in a rapidly changing world.