The Mawu of present-day Akpafu relate in their oral histories that their ancestors lived in the mountains between their current location and the Volta river, in an area currently known as the Togo Plateau. Names they use for this area include Mawu kùbe (‘Mawu mountain’) and Àwubeame (‘in the Mawu mountains’). Hunters who frequented the area told me they were familiar with several ìkpakpi (historical settlements). This post is a synthesis of information from historical maps, scientific literature, oral traditions, and my own trips with Mawu community members.
We have a new paper out in which we find that people overwhelmingly like to help one another, independent of differences in language, culture or environment. This is a surprising finding from the perspective of anthropological and economic research, which has tended to foreground differences in how people work together and share resources.
Been reading this paper by Damián Blasi, Jo Henrich, Lila Adamou, David Kemmerer and Asifa Majid and can recommend it…
Natural conversations are a great source of data for all sorts of linguistic research. Linguists and conversation analysts usually study…
The world’s many endangered languages are often characterized as “unwritten” and “oral” languages. Both of these terms reveal the language…
In Kawu on the very final day of my 2012 fieldtrip, I heard something unusual. Some people talked about a…
Food writer Molly Watson from Gastronomica provides us with an update of Bourdieu’s food space, where different types of food…
One of the most interesting sources on the history and customs of the Mawu people of eastern Ghana (also known…
Archaeologists may be interested to hear the following story, told to me by an elder in Akpafu-Mempeasem in Ghana’s Volta…
The Language & Cognition group at the MPI for Psycholinguistics will present a session on The Senses in Language and…
The oldest written fragments of Siwu found so far come from Rudolph Plehn (1898). This post relates how I traced a mangled 1898 fragment of a song to a hard-to-get modern-day MA thesis, and how I was able to translate it with the help of the Rev. Albert Wurapa.
The AAA is currently conducting a survey on how to implement a website that would be hosting AAA Meeting Abstracts.…
“See what I just did? Made another me.” Darwin (Marvel Comics), panel from X-Factor issue 37. There is a very…
The Winners and Finalists of the 2008 AAA Photo Contest are now available in a Flickr gallery. The photos are…
Science has just published a comment by me on Oard’s “Unlocking the potention of the spoken word” (Oard 2008). It…
Funeral dirges (sìnɔ in Siwu) are sung during the period of public mourning preceding a burial. The musical structures of these dirges, the performances, 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. Dirges are rarely heard in Kawu nowadays, but there are signs of a renewed interest in the genre.
It’s that time again! The 60th edition of Anthroblogging’s very own blog carnival Four Stone Hearth is up at Middle…
An intriguing article in Science two months ago suggests that advances in speech processing ‘may soon place speech and writing…
28-11-2008Claude Lévi-Strauss’ 100th birthday German television channel Arte devotes much of today’s programme to Claude Lévi-Strauss to celebrate his 100th…
The 51st installment of Four Stone Hearth is up at Clashing Culture, featuring an interesting mishmash of anthropological topics. For…

