Talk:Yoruba twins

As it stands, the article includes two external links. Does that mean that these were the sources used in writing the article? I think so, so I've changed the heading into 'sources'. I've also added a wikify tag, so that hopefully someone comes along to wikify the article. &mdash; mark ✎ 07:09, 12 May 2006 (UTC)

Ideas for improvement
I've edited this article, but since all I know of Yoruba twins is what I've learned from this article and the linked sources, there are limits to what I can do. Here are some issues I'd like to see someone address:


 * 1) Apparently, Yoruba attitudes toward twins have changed since ancient times. Why? What’s different in Yoruba society now? Why haven’t other African communities’ views changed, too?
 * 2) The lead says Yoruba twins are important. Two paragraphs later, it claims the “priest has a lot of power when it comes to twins” after just one example of that power. These are peacock terms. Rather than tell the readers that things are important or that priests are powerful, the article should give examples of those claims and let the readers reach those conclusions for themselves.
 * 3) When talking about “the gods,” would it be appropriate to make that a link to Yoruba mythology?
 * 4) I found no indication in the given sources that the high child-mortality rate was the reason they perform a ritual to restore the balance of dead twins’ souls. I suspect that given the importance of twins, they’d perform the ritual even if children didn’t die so often. However, Leroy et al postulate that the high twin birthrate in combination with the high death rate would explain why the Yoruba have so many ere ibeji statues.
 * 5) My impression is that the statue’s head is big not because the artist is required to make it that way, but because that’s simply the way Yoruban art depicts humans. I couldn’t find anything to support the “artist requirement” claim, so I removed it.
 * 6) A photo of an ere ibeji would be nice.

The second source is inaccessible at its original location, but Google’s cache of it has the text. The text is a combination of content from, , and.

I’ve removed wikify. If you restore it or something similar, please put a message here on the talk page explaining what you had in mind. I’m keeping cleanup because I think the lead needs significant work. (“Yoruba twins are twins of Yoruban ethnicity.” Duh.)

--Rob Kennedy 22:57, 14 August 2006 (UTC)


 * I have added the photo from the Ibeji article, but it seems to me that the two articles are the same thing and should be combined. --Dumarest 21:50, 24 December 2006 (UTC)

A couple of years later, and I still think, and reiterate, that this and the Ibeji items should be combined. --Dumarest (talk) 11:31, 4 June 2008 (UTC)

I agree, I think the articles should be merged. Rjhatl (talk) 11:27, 8 July 2008 (UTC)