Hoe-farming and Social Relations Among the Dagara of Northwestern Ghana and Southwestern Burkina Faso
Hoe-farming and Social Relations Among the Dagara of Northwestern Ghana and Southwestern Burkina Faso

Author: Alexis Bekyane Tengan

Publisher: Alexis Tengan

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 9783631347973

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This anthropological study of hoe-farming in West Africa outlines the cultural meanings involved in working the land and rearing/raising society. Unlike other studies which usually focus on the kin-group as the basic social unit, this piece of work considers the house society or community as the most appropriate focus by which the Dagara people themselves tend to structure their society and to work out their social relationship including cultural practices of different kinds. With many ethnographic details, the study shows how much the house figure functions as a physical and social institution in Dagara mode of thinking and also in the imagination including the intellectual sphere as an important concept. Therefore, the author sees hoe-farming and the figure of the house as linked themes which have to be jointly studied. Considered as such, the study uses them to outline Dagara mode of thinking about themselves and what they do in terms of social relations.

Dagara Black Bagr English & Dagaare
Dagara Black Bagr English & Dagaare

Author: Alexis B. Tengan

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 320

ISBN-13: 9789052012872

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In this volume, the author presents a version of Africa's longest oral recitation of myth of origination, the black bagr myth found among the Dagara of Northern Ghana and Southern Burkina Faso, and discusses in detail its historical and literary significance for the society. Hence, the author first outlines the historical conditions possibly responsible for the coming into existence of both the mythical narratives and the rites of initiation that accompany the narration; and then presents the literary frame and structure in which the black bagr narrative is composed. The rest of the book is a unique bilingual (Dagara and English) presentation of the black bagr narration recorded and viewed live from within a secret rite of initiation. The narration itself, similar to all black bagr ritual narrative sessions, lasted up to three hours and was performed without interruption by one speaker. The narrative content shows to what extent the rites achieve the double purpose of teaching the initiates culture knowledge and giving them new individual identities that will equip them for different social positions in life.

Dagara Verbal Art
Dagara Verbal Art

Author: Paschal Kyoore

Publisher: International Folkloristics

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781433147043

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Dagara Verbal Art examines verbal art among the Dagara people of West Africa. It provides invaluable primary material for research, and does a close analysis of folktale narration, proverb usage, riddling, chanting of dirges and popular songs by male and female praise singers, and xylophone music performance as forms of verbal art. Folktales are characterized by wit, humor, and satire, and songs within tales are a mise-en-abyme, a story within a story that entertains but also enhances the narration through the participation of the audience in the performance. Moreover, Dagara tales are didactic and moralizing as a way of controlling the behavior of individuals in society. Riddling entertains but also helps to develop the cognitive abilities of children, and demands critical and logical thinking on the part of the participating audience. Proverbs were collected in context and analyzed closely for their meaning. The study also examines closely the art of speech-making, and concludes that a good locutor knows what figures of speech to use in order to enhance communication with the audience. This study concludes that an authentic theory of Dagara--and for that matter, generally African--folklore must be grounded on a thorough knowledge of the traditions, rites and rituals, and the socio-political structures that have held the society together in its historical experience. Dagara Verbal Art is an important resource for areas such as African studies, African literature and folklore, folklore in general, anthropology, culture studies, ethnomusicology, ethnic studies, and gender studies, among others.

Folklore
Folklore

Author: Joseph Jacobs

Publisher:

Published: 1903

Total Pages: 622

ISBN-13:

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Most vols. for 1890- contain list of members of the Folk-lore Society.

Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways
Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways

Author: Keith Cartwright

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0820345997

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“We're seeing people that we didn't know exist,” the director of FEMA acknowledged in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. Sacral Grooves, Limbo Gateways offers a corrective to some of America's institutionalized invisibilities by delving into the submerged networks of ritual performance, writing, intercultural history, and migration that have linked the coastal U.S. South with the Caribbean and the wider Atlantic world. This interdisciplinary study slips beneath the bar of rigid national and literary periods, embarking upon deeper—more rhythmic and embodied—signatures of time. It swings low through ecologies and symbolic orders of creolized space. And it reappraises pluralistic modes of knowledge, kinship, and authority that have sustained vital forms of agency (such as jazz) amid abysses of racialized trauma. Drawing from Haitian Vodou and New Orleanian Voudou and from Cuban and South Floridian Santería, as well as from Afro-Baptist (Caribbean, Geechee, and Bahamian) models of encounters with otherness, this book reemplaces deep-southern texts within the counterclockwise ring-stepping of a long Afro-Atlantic modernity. Turning to an orphan girl's West African initiation tale to follow a remarkably traveled body of feminine rites and writing (in works by Paule Marshall, Zora Neale Hurston, Lydia Cabrera, William Faulkner, James Weldon Johnson, and LeAnne Howe, among others), Cartwright argues that only in holistic form, emergent from gulfs of cross-cultural witness, can literary and humanistic authority find legitimacy. Without such grounding, he contends, our educational institutions blind and even poison students, bringing them to “swallow lye,” like the grandson of Phoenix Jackson in Eudora Welty's “A Worn Path.” Here, literary study may open pathways to alternative medicines—fetched by tenacious avatars like Phoenix (or an orphan Kumba or a shell-shaking Turtle)—to remedy the lies our partial histories have made us swallow.

Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana
Ethnicity and the Making of History in Northern Ghana

Author: Carola Lentz

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2006-07-04

Total Pages: 384

ISBN-13: 0748626840

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Drawing on two decades of research this social and political history of North-Western Ghana traces the creation of new ethnic and territorial boundaries, categories and forms of self-understanding, and represents a major contribution to debates on ethnicity, colonialism and the 'production of history'. It explores the creation and redefinition of ethnic distinctions and commonalities by African and European actors, showing that ethnicity's power derives from a contradiction: while ethnic identities purport to be non-negotiable, creating permanent bonds, stability and security, the boundaries of the communities created and the associated traits and practices are malleable and adaptable to specific interests and contexts.