One of the most interesting sources on the history and customs of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana (also known as the Akpafu) is a little book written in 1998 by Rev. H.B.K. Ogbete. This book contains a wealth of material: it records oral traditions, names of ancestors and chiefs, and a lot of background information on the culture of the Mawu. However, it is very difficult to find. Therefore, by popular demand, and with the permission of Prof. Kofi Agawu of Princeton University (who was involved in the publication of the book), I am making available a digital copy of it here.
Download it here: A history of the Akpafus (PDF, 2.5Mb) The Language & Cognition group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics will present a session on The Senses in Language and Culture at the 108th AAA meeting in Philadelphia, December 2-6. Come visit us on Friday morning from 8.00-11.45 in the Liberty Ballroom A, on the 3rd Floor of the Downtown Marriott. What? The Senses in Language and Culture, an SLA-sponsored session (See also the program and abstracts for individual talks below.)
How are the senses structured by the languages we speak, the cultures we inhabit? To what extent is the encoding of perceptual experiences in languages a matter of how the mind/brain is “wired-up” and to what extent is it a question of local cultural preoccupation? This symposium brings together the results of a large-scale cross-linguistic project focused on the encoding of the senses in language and culture, organized by the Language and Cognition group, at the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Nijmegen. Continue reading The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898). Besides some words and phrases (edited and published in 1899 by his friend Seidel), Plehn took down two lines of songs. To one of them I devoted a post some time ago. Now I’ve found a full transcription of the other, buried in a somewhat obscure thesis titled The music of Tokpaikor shrine in Akpafu: a case study of the role of Tokpaikor music in Akpafu traditional worship. How that thesis came to be in my possession is a story of its own, involving an utterly unhelpful secretary at the University of Ghana’s Music Dept, a forged letter, and a surprise parcel from professor Kofi Agawu in my pigeon hole back home — but let me not waste any more time on that. So what do we have? First Plehn’s transcription. Rendered as mekoko lofomadisu, it’s a bad case of garbled transmission at multiple levels. Word boundaries and the contrast between open and close vowels didn’t make it; even the verb is lost in translation, leaving us with a simple apposition of ‘Die Henne, die Küchlein’ (‘the hen, the chicks’). Plehn does have quite an interesting interpretation of the song: Continue reading The AAA is currently conducting a survey on how to implement a website that would be hosting AAA Meeting Abstracts. As they write, Specifically, we’re investigating posting the 2007 and 2008 AAA annual meeting paper abstracts, which would be posted exactly as they were submitted to AAA and would not be interactive, although they would be searchable. Posting these two years is a substantial project, because the combined total is nearly 7,000 specific abstracts.
Obviously, this would be an interesting resource. With a fulltext search you could track down previous research on your topic of interest, find potential collaborators, or just look up specific abstracts to refresh your memory of a talk. Besides, these abstracts are a record of the collective effort of AAA members; it is somewhat of a letdown that hitherto they have only been available in a bulky printed booklet obtainable at the meeting. Continue reading There is a very quirky sentence right in the first chapter of Richerson & Boyd’s (2005) Not By Genes Alone that unintentionally defeats the very point they are making. After explaining why ‘culture is essential’ (the chapter title) and noting the influence of Darwin’s population thinking on biology, there is the following remarkable aside: [I]f through some miracle of cloning Darwin were to be resurrected from his grave in Westminster Abbey, we think that he would be quite happy with the state of the science he launched. (p. 5)
Note how that statement in one breath essentializes biology (Darwin = his genes alone) and totally ignores culture (Darwin’s clone = Darwin now as then). It would be a great miracle indeed if the encultured product of a cloning operation on Darwin’s remains would view Darwinism as ‘the science he launched’ and be happy with it! The Winners and Finalists of the 2008 AAA Photo Contest are now available in a Flickr gallery. The photos are really beautiful — I’m honoured that one of my submissions is featured among them (and happy that Siwu ideophones are getting some press!). Click on a photo in the slideshow below to show the author and the caption; or go directly to the slideshow on Flickr. Edit: The semifinalists are now online, too: Flickr gallery. Science has just published a comment by me on Oard’s “Unlocking the potention of the spoken word” (Oard 2008). It is a critique of the monomodal view of language adopted in that article. (If you haven’t read the original piece, check it out here, or see my brief summary.) Continue reading Funeral dirges (sìnɔ in Siwu) are a special genre of songs to be sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges and their place in the larger context of the funeral have been described in some detail by Agawu (1988) and before him by the German missionary Friedrich Kruse (1911); however, the linguistic aspects of the genre have not received any attention so far. The funeral dirge below was recorded August 17, 2007 in Akpafu-Mempeasem, Volta Region, Ghana (along with six other dirges). It was transcribed and translated with the gentle help of Reverend A.Y. Wurapa. Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser. The Siwu is beautifully economic in expression. It contains only two verbs: pia ‘be (with)’ and ɖe ‘be (existential)’. The sɔ that is translated as ‘said’ is actually a quotative complementizer. An English translation cannot do without marking tense, but in Siwu, the poem does not contain any tense or aspect markers, being set in an aorist-like default that can be interpreted as recent past or present. Some of the poetic devices at work here are lost in translation. One is the focus construction which emphasizes the content words in the last four Siwu lines (‘mourning it is; tears it is; sadness it is; graves it is’). Another is the fact that these content words belong to four different grammatical genders in Siwu: the first is an noun in KA with locative connotation, the second a liquid/mass noun in MI, the third a singular noun in I, the fourth a plural noun in A. I’m not sure whether this pattern is as striking to native speakers as it is to me, but note that the gender is reinforced by the agreement morphology on the ‘be’-verb (ka-, mi-, i-, a-). One could think of it as a case of ‘subliminal verbal patterning in poetry’ (Jakobson 1980). It’s that time again! The 60th edition of Anthroblogging’s very own blog carnival Four Stone Hearth is up at Middle Savagery. Check it out, there are lots of interesting posts. The results of the AAA photo contest have just been announced. Congratulations to the winner, Peter Biella! Of my four submissions, one made it to the finals (best 20) and one to the semifinals (best 54). All 294 submissions will appear in the AAA Flickr gallery in due course; mine follow below. My finalist was the following photo, titled “Kããã“: Kyeei Yao, an age group leader, oversees a festival in Akpafu-Mempeasem, Volta Region, Ghana. The expensive draped cloth, the Ashanti-inspired wreath, the strings of beads which are handed down through the generations, and the digital wristwatch work together to remind us that culture is a moving target, always renewing and reshaping itself. This picture was taken by my wife, Gijske de Boo, while I was busy videotaping the same events that Kyeei Yao is attending to. Together with the other 19 finalists it will be featured in the upcoming issue of Anthropology News; the finalists will also be hung as prints in the AAA office. The photo that made the semifinals is called “The drum makers“: Two artisans repair an atumpani drum in preparation for the funeral of a chief in Akpafu-Mempeasem, Volta Region, Ghana. A newly prepared antelope skin is fastened to the hard wood frame of the drum using a nylon cord and wooden pegs. This picture was taken on the compound of Joseph (the man to the right), very close to my own home in Akpafu-Mempeasem. The earthen wall behind the men is Joe’s house, built of sun-hardened puddled mud like most houses in the village. A submission which I thought was perhaps the most interesting even though it didn’t make it to the semifinals was “Bad Death ritual“:
A ‘bad death’ ritual in Ghana’s Volta Region. On the village cemetery, relatives of a man who died in a hunting accident listen anxiously to a woman who is possessed by the spirit of the deceased. The hunters, who have just brought the spirit home from the place of the accident deep in the jungle, keep their distance. Red is the colour of danger, black that of death. This event took place right after a long and tiring march into the jungle and back, to pacify the spirit of a hunter killed in a tragic accident. I was able to take the picture from this perspective because I was dragged right in front of the possessed woman by Foster, one of my assistants, who had been my guide on the expedition. I also have an audio recording of her speech, which turned out to be a very interesting mix of prophesy and admonition. I’ll have to write more about that some time. My final submission was the photo of Akpafu-Todzi which is also featured on this blog. It’s a sunny day in Akpafu-Todzi, the old mountain citadel of the Mawu people in the central Volta Region of Ghana. The town, which has endured numerous sieges and which was the site of an ancient iron industry, is tranquil because this is the time for most people to engage in collaborative rice farming.
The Senses in Language and Culture
When? Friday December 4th, 8.00-11.45
Where? Downtown Marriott, Liberty Ballroom A, 3rd Floor
Who? Stephen C. Levinson & Asifa Majid (organizers); Asifa Majid, N.J. Enfield, Niclas Burenhult, Gunter Senft, Clair E. Hill, Hilário de Sousa, Connie de Vos, Shakila Shayan, Ozge Ozturk, Mark Sicoli, Sylvia Tufvesson, Mark Dingemanse, Olivier Le Guen, Penelope Brown (participants); Lawrence Hirschfeld, William F. Hanks (discussants)Session Abstract
Bingo! Refinding the oldest specimen of Siwu
AAA Meeting Abstracts online? Only viable if it’s Open Access
Some miracle of cloning
References
AAA Photo Contest galleries now online
The Enduring Spoken Word
I thought I had company (a Mawu dirge)
Siwu
English gloss
mɛ̀ sɔ màturi pia mɛ̀
sêgbe kàku kaɖè
sêgbe nnɔmɛ miɖè
sêgbe ìsoma iɖè
sêgbe àsekpe aɖè
I said, ‘people are with me’
not knowing it meant mourning
not knowing it meant tears
not knowing it meant sadness
not knowing it meant graves
Continue reading Four Stone Hearth #60
Finalist in the AAA Photo contest
Kããã is a Siwu ideophone for ‘looking attentively’.
Bad Death
