Through a revolutionary ethnographic approach that foregrounds
storytelling and performance as alternative means of knowledge,
Situated Narratives and Sacred Dance explores shared
ritual traditions ...between the Anlo-Ewe people of West Africa and
their descendants, the Arará of Cuba, who were brought to the
island in the transatlantic slave trade.
The volume draws on two decades of research in four communities:
Dzodze, Ghana; Adjodogou, Togo; and Perico and Agramonte, Cuba. In
the ceremonies, oral narratives, and daily lives of individuals at
each fieldsite, the authors not only identify shared attributes in
religious expression across continents, but also reveal lasting
emotional, spiritual, and personal impacts in the communities whose
ancestors were ripped from their homeland and enslaved. The authors
layer historiographic data, interviews, and fieldnotes with
artistic modes such as true fiction, memoir, and choreographed
narrative, challenging the conventional nature of scholarship with
insights gained from sensorial experience.
Including reflections on the making of an art installation based
on this research project, the volume challenges readers to imagine
the potential of approaching fieldwork as artists. The authors
argue that creative methods can convey truths deeper than facts,
pointing to new possibilities for collaboration between scientists
and artists with relevance to any discipline.
Adding her stimulating and finely framed ethnography to recent work in the anthropology of the senses, Kathryn Geurts investigates the cultural meaning system and resulting sensorium of ...Anlo-Ewe-speaking people in southeastern Ghana. Geurts discovered that the five-senses model has little relevance in Anlo culture, where balance is a sense, and balancing (in a physical and psychological sense as well as in literal and metaphorical ways) is an essential component of what it means to be human. Much of perception falls into an Anlo category ofseselelame(literally feel-feel-at-flesh-inside), in which what might be considered sensory input, including the Western sixth-sense notion of "intuition," comes from bodily feeling and the interior milieu. The kind of mind-body dichotomy that pervades Western European-Anglo American cultural traditions and philosophical thought is absent. Geurts relates how Anlo society privileges and elaborates what we would call kinesthesia, which most Americans would not even identify as a sense. After this nuanced exploration of an Anlo-Ewe theory of inner states and their way of delineating external experience, readers will never again take for granted the "naturalness" of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell.
Ethnicity and the Colonial State compares the choices of community leaders in three different West African groups (Wolof, Temne, and Ewe), with regard to “selling” their identifications to the ...colonial rulers. The book thereby addresses ethnicity as a factor in global history. Readership: Readers interested in themes of African history in the context of global history; academic libraries; students (undergraduate and postgraduate) of global, transnational, African history; students of social anthropology; and everyone interested in a critical discussion of ethnicity as an element of identification.
The study centres on the subject of Dance in West Africa, namely a dance of the Ewe in Southern Ghana. Although modernity is having an adverse effect on traditional dancing, it is still important in ...the society and may be viewed as a mirror of culture. The objectives are to describe the dance and embed this form of expression within a theoretical framework. Every movement has a meaning and in this way it is possible to explain a whole story, a person is speaking through dance.
This book is a study of the social organization and religious thought of the Watchi people of South-east Togo. Its principal argument consists in revealing the systematic correlation that exists ...between the two - agnatic and uterine - axes of watchi kinship and two logical modes of symbolic thinking - contiguity and substitution. Kinship thus no longer constitutes a domain among others, but becomes the key to all domains of watchi society. This study endeavors to demonstrate it by applying this key to different "entrance ways" into the watchi symbolic system, such as origin stories (ch. 2), spatial morphology (ch. 3), the matrimonial system (ch. 4), funeral rites (ch. 5), religious art (ch. 7), the culinary code (ch. 8), initiation (ch. 9) and witchcraft (ch. 10).
Cet ouvrage est une étude de l'organisation sociale et de la vie religieuse en pays ouatchi (Togo du Sud-Est). Son argument principal consiste à mettre en évidence une corrélation systématique entre les deux axes - agnatique et utérin - de la parenté ouatchi, et deux modes logiques de la pensée symbolique - contiguïté et substitution. La parenté cesse ainsi de constituer un domaine parmi d'autres, pour devenir la clé de tous les domaines de la société - que ce soit les récits d'origine (ch. 2), la morphologie spatiale (ch. 3), le système matrimonial (ch. 4), les rites funéraires (ch. 5), l'art religieux (ch. 7), le code culinaire (ch. 8), les pratiques initiatiques (ch. 9) ou la sorcellerie (ch. 10).
The trickster character is prominent in the cultural, particularly narrative, traditions of many different peoples throughout the world. Comic and serious, stupid and clever, benevolent and evil, ...winner and loser, the trickster is a study in contradictions. The trickster cannot be pigeonholed, for he does not fit into any neat categories or definitions. This study, first published in 1994, aims to give the reader the opportunity to experience in some small measure the dynamic and exciting dramatic oral narrative performances of the Ewe people of West Africa.
1. The Collection 2. Origins of Trickster 3. Methodology 4. Formal Features of Trickster Narratives 5. Metaphor and Meaning in Trickster Narratives 6. Style in Performance 7. Why Trickster?
Ethnicity and the Colonial State compares the choices of community leaders in three different West African groups (Wolof, Temne, and Ewe), with regard to “selling" their identifications to the ...colonial rulers. The book thereby addresses ethnicity as a factor in global history.
Based on a decade of fieldwork in southeastern Ghana and analysis of secondary sources, this book aims to reconstruct the religious history of the Anlo-Ewe peoples from the 1850s. In particular, it ...focuses on a corpus of rituals collectively known as 'Fofie', which derived their legitimacy from engaging with the memory of the slave-holding past. The Anlo developed a sense of discomfort about their agency in slavery in the early twentieth century which they articulated through practices such as ancestor veneration, spirit possession, and by forging links with descendants of peoples they formerly enslaved. Conversion to Christianity, engagement with 'modernity', trans-Atlantic conversations with diasporan Africans, and citizenship of the postcolonial state coupled with structural changes within the religious system - which resulted in the decline in Fofie's popularity - gradually altered the moral emphases of legacies of slavery in the Anlo historical imagination as the twentieth century progressed.
Based on a decade of fieldwork in southeastern Ghana and analysis of secondary sources, this book aims to reconstruct the religious history of the Anlo-Ewe peoples from the 1850s. In particular, it ...focuses on a corpus of rituals collectively known as 'Fofie', which derived their legitimacy from engaging with the memory of the slave-holding past. The Anlo developed a sense of discomfort about their agency in slavery in the early twentieth century which they articulated through practices such as ancestor veneration, spirit possession, and by forging links with descendants of peoples they formerly enslaved. Conversion to Christianity, engagement with 'modernity', trans-Atlantic conversations with diasporan Africans, and citizenship of the postcolonial state coupled with structural changes within the religious system - which resulted in the decline in Fofie's popularity - gradually altered the moral emphases of legacies of slavery in the Anlo historical imagination as the twentieth century progressed.
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