Text and personhood
Texts are central to understanding what it is to be a person, in every culture. If you were brought up on modern western European literature, you will be familiar with the idea that works of literature offer a window onto consciousness or privileged access to other people's experience. One of the dominant genres of the modern West - the novel - was shaped precisely to do this it developed in the eighteenth century from a picaresque action-narrative to a genre specialising in the revelation of...
Prototypes of personal writing
African colonial subjects' diaries, letters and autobiographical writing had prototypes in three domains Christian missions, commerce and colonial bureaucracy. All Protestant missions encouraged private reading to develop the habit of introspection and deepen converts' spiritual life. The Church Missionary Society also required its agents in the field to write journals detailing their activities and impressions, successes and failures, for home consumption - leading to an extraordinarily rich...
Obscurity
Even more pervasive than quotedness in African praise poetry is deliberate obscurity - an obscurity that demands explanation, and thus presents the text as an object of attention. Almost every genre of praise poetry in sub-Saharan Africa is said to be enigmatic or difficult to decipher. It is sometimes suggested that they are obscure only because, with the passage of time and erosion of oral traditions, the original context, which would have made the meaning plain to all, is lost. It is true...
Genres and social structure African epic
To combine a context-sensitive, emic understanding of non-western genres with a larger-scale, comparative view of the emergence and transformation of genres in relation to changing social reality is a formidable project. It requires the collaboration of many researchers, and a sensitivity to the knotty problems of cross-cultural comparison. In the field of African texts which is the central focus of this book, there has been as yet no comprehensive comparative mapping of related and contiguous...
Exchange and substitution
The recent focus on indigenous conceptions of personhood builds on a century of ethnography. Since anthropology is about people, it is not surprising that the question of personhood - that is, howpersons are defined, how they are socially constituted in different societies - should have emerged in so many fields of anthropological inquiry. Kinship, witchcraft, rites of passage, spirit possession, political office, systems of exchange all these classic areas of inquiry have had to get to grips...
Entextualisation and fluidity
Freezing and abstracting speech, however, is not the only mode of entex-tualisation. Utterance can be given boundaries and identity, such that it can be re-created, transmitted and apprehended as text, in many other ways. Some modes of entextualisation are associated with individual, private memory rather than the constitution of communal power and authority. And in some traditions, reified text can be re-inserted into highly fluid, dialogic performance modes. Genres like these bring us, in a...
Textual fields
Texts, then, can be thought of as emerging from and dissolving back into fields of textuality. They get their meaning from their relations to the field from which they emerged. I am thinking of these textual fields in a rather literal and concrete sense - as populations of verbal elements, of varying size and degrees of consolidation, and procedures and techniques for working on and with them. Texts and textual materials are circulated, recycled, assembled, expanded or otherwise employed in the...
An early book
In much of the European-colonised world, Christian missions brought literacy and print simultaneously. In areas that had been in contact with Islam or with overseas trade, it was not necessarily the missions that introduced writing, nor, when they arrived, did they encounter a world of pristine orality. In Africa, literacy in Arabic and a respect for book-learning were well established in the Sahel and on the eastern coast several hundred years before the arrival of Christian missionary...
African contexts of personal writing
In colonial Africa, the literate elites did not manage to consolidate themselves as a confident, culturally hegemonic bourgeois class. Their social superiority was insecure because their status was attained by means potentially available to non-elites too - above all, by western-style schooling and proximity to colonial power. They always looked both ways, interpreting the colonial authorities to the native population, and native customs to the colonial authorities. Their insecurity was haunted...
Entextualisation as freezing
A beautiful case study that develops the idea of entextualisation as the production of remote, frozen discourse is Kuipers's study of Weyewa ritual speech Kuipers 1990 . The Weyewa, an ethnolinguistic group living on Sumba Island in Indonesia, produce a spectrum of ritual speech styles from informal fluid to formal fixed. Ritual speech at its most fixed and monologic is the words of the ancestors. It is produced at the culmination of rituals intended to restore the world after a catastrophe,...
Dinka ox songs
The Dinka of the southern Sudan, at the time when the classic ethnographies were written, were still a relatively isolated and egalitarian people, organised in segmentary patrilineages, and combining transhumant cattle-keeping with a settled agricultural subsistence base.5 Living in a harsh environment, they produced a sparse material culture but a rich poetic tradition. Poetry, along with dance and physical beauty, were attributes ofpersonal honour and good standing, a means by which young...
A modern media genre
The electronic media greatly expanded the potential public initially opened up by the press. Because the electronic media did not require literacy, they could be accessed by much larger proportions of the population.15 They were not divorced from print culture - the media in fact developed modes of communication that were deeply enmeshed with print - but the publics they addressed became more heterogeneous, more popular, and of greater potential extent. The electronic media were harnessed to...
Approaches to oralityliteracy performance and entextualisation
Influential early discussions of the consequences of literacy focused on all the things that writing enables you to do it makes possible, by virtue of its fixity and autonomy, new cognitive operations. It enables you to make lists, store information in unchanged form, compile large amounts of information in one place, cross-check and compare sources, and thus, according to the exciting arguments of Jack Goody 1968, 1977, 1986, 1987 , think in new ways. Goody sees literacy as the factor that,...
Materiality assemblage amplification
Starting from everyday creativity and quotidian acts of entextualisation enables us to widen our field of vision to include forms, genres and generative processes often overlooked or excluded when the object of study is literature conventionally defined. It enables us to recognise the embeddedness and entanglement of texts in the material world. Though all texts are made to be iterable and detachable from context, they are all also ambiguously bound up in context. Texts can be attached to...
Name memory and reputation
Praise poetry in Africa is the strongest affirmation of personal distinctiveness and individual agency it is about making a mark, being outstanding, doing extraordinary and memorable deeds. In some traditions it is also held to spring from a person's intrinsic, essential nature even when not flattering, it is affirmative because it announces what a person is and what he or she has it in them to become. Yet at the same time it is the clearest witness not only to local conceptions of...
Boakye Yiadom the archive the memorial and the shifting self
The idea that the people who write voluminously and hoard texts over a lifetime are in some sense constructing a permanent repository of selfhood - an archive of personal identity - is of course a familiar one. We keep diaries, unlike most other texts, because they are so much about the preservation and protection of the self. . . Diaries are for keeps in fact, they are keeps Mallon 995 xi . The ways in which these strongholds of the self are put together, how they work to assemble or refract...
Yoruba big men
Yoruba social organisation has historically been urban and differentiated, with highly developed occupational specialisation, and an economy based on trading. The area now thought of as Yorubaland was constructed out of numerous independent pre-colonial polities, each centred on a capital city under the authority of an oba king or baale headman who ruled in conjunction with a council of chiefs drawn from the various exogamous lineages that made up the town. Kingship was semi-sacred and...