The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in AfricaWith her 1976 book Oral Literature in Africa, Ruth Finnegan almost single-handedly created the field of ethnography of language. Now, Finnegan has gathered and updated a selection of her best work on oral literature, performance, and the creative use of language in Africa, along with several new essays that broaden and extend her ideas. The Oral and Beyond looks simultaneously backwards and forwards, reviewing and critiquing the achievements of scholarship on African oral literature, revisiting issues of perennial contention, and highlighting some of the most interesting new ideas and approaches in the field. Exploring such fundamental questions as how texts and textuality relate to performance, how ideology inflects language, and how traditional forms adapt to modern media and popular culture, Finnegan essentially crafts an intellectual history of her field. At the same time, she propels the ethnography of language forward, bringing the techniques and knowledge developed through her fieldwork in Africa to bear on issues that transcend African studies and reach into the larger world of anthropology and beyond. |
Contents
The Reflective Practice of Speech and Language | 15 |
Language as literature | 21 |
3 | 29 |
Copyright | |
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African forms African Literatures African oral literature analysis artistic audience Barber Cambridge Chapter collectors complex concept conceptualisations context conventions creative culture dance Deremu dimensions dub poetry earlier enscription epic European example Finnegan folklore formulated further generalised genres greet griots Hausa hippopotamus human ideophones individual interaction involved kind Limba language Limba stories Limba story-telling linguistic literary forms Literature in Africa Mandinka Mwindo epic narrative narrator nature Ngugi wa Thiong'o Okpewho oral art oral composition oral forms oral literary oral literature oral performance oral poetry oral texts oral tradition oral-formulaic orature organised Oxford participants particular performative utterances perhaps perspective poems poet prose questions realisation recognised Scheub scholars sense Sierra Leone singers social Somali sometimes songs specific speech spider tale textual things with words transcribed translation University Press verbal art village voice writing written forms written literature written text Xhosa Yoruba