The cultural landscape values of a nupe community in Nigeria

Abstract

Cultural landscape is the way of life of people as they relate to their environment. Over time, values are culturally developed by people as they relate to the environment in both tangible and intangible forms. However, preconceived western concepts have continued to influence policies on cultural landscapes which have led to unsuitable physical planning especially in developing nations including Nigeria. Furthermore, minority ethnic groups such as the Nupe in central Nigeria have been subsumed under the major ethnic groups of Hausa, Yoruba and Igbo especially on literature and government policies. This has thus undermined the livelihoods and culture of the Nupe as a minority ethnic group. Correspondingly, there exists a global call in which UNESCO is at the forefront advocating for the need in the preservation of values and identities of cultural landscapes. The thesis, therefore, sets out to study the cultural landscape values of a Nupe community in Nigeria through the perspectives of the inhabitants. Consequently, due to the phenomenological nature of the research, ethnography was employed in the solicitation of data. This involved an eight-month participatory stay with the Nupe community. The data gathered were through four sources which include participant observation, photographs, field notes and interviews. The data gathered were content analysed using QSR Nvivo 10 software towards the generation of categories and factoring into comparative groups of themes. In addition, the transcribed data were subjected to word frequency counts for contrast and comparison of all the data collected. It was then followed by contextual mapping of words to generate the cultural values. The results show that the cultural values associated with the key attributes of the landscape which include the professions of the Nupe people, the family structure, the architecture, and the natural landscape. The findings were the loading of cultural values in both the tangible and intangible forms leading to the formulation a grounded theory. The nexus of the theory stipulates that the leadership of Dazhi, the natural landscape feature of the hill, the fruit trees, and the courtyards defined cultural values of the Nupe community. Most importantly, the findings have policy implications of spatial planning, designs and social transactions of the Nupe ethnic group.