Using the familiar process of “dialogic ethnography,” Katrina Daly Thompson leads us through a never-ending search for the meaning of the enigmatic Popobawa, a shape-shifting “sodomizing rapist” (143) used by the Swahili people as a strategic or pragmatic platform to address a number of taboo topics.
Though never actually seen, Popobawa is commonly described as a large bat endowed with unusual sexual prowess, reasons for which are variously attributed to cultural, linguistic, and psychological factors.
Basing her work on local analysis with permutations derived from a global perspective, Thompson examines this local legend and what happens “when Popobawa goes global, travel that entails not only a shift in context but also crucial transformation from a primarily (local) oral legend to one transmitted through other media” (155), exhibiting “capacity for semiotic mobility” (12). Surfacing in the Zanzibar Archipelago in the 1960s (149) during a period of political unrest, its spread and popularity could also be interpreted, at least partially, as the result of social stress.
The highly gendered, metaphorical, and indirect character of Swahili interactions, as well as increasingly conservative Islam, inevitably contribute to what the author labels as “polyphony,” an infinite multiplicity of variants garnered through personal conversations and a thorough survey of the available literature on the topic. Verbal statements and reports are not the only avenue through which Swahili culture manages the sharing of inappropriate content; Swahili coastal, mostly Muslim, women will use the kanga, a mass-produced fabric often printed with proverbs, to communicate “criticism and other taboo messages…without violating the cultural ideal of the silent woman” (124).
The author generously includes several conversations engaged in during her years of fieldwork on the Swahili coast, and information from her own Zanzibari wedding (126), that undoubtedly gave her access to a more in-depth cultural appreciation, as did her knowledge of Kiswahili.
Whether using Mary Douglas’s stance on jocular interactions (103), Oring’s theory on narrative strategies (66), Lyotard’s postmodern metanarrative interpretations (161), or the many other professional and more popular references, Thompson’s work traces a path of “many layers of meaning, superstitions, sexual and even political” (155) interpretations, extending Popobawa to “Global Metanarratives,” the title of the book’s last chapter (155-174). She does not shy away from mentioning the shortcomings of some of the publications on the topic in the extensive in-text references.
A well-researched and well-documented addition to the body of knowledge on local legends and their global manifestations, the book can be used not only as a good example of fieldwork strategies and puzzling “polyphony,” but also as a survey on the available interpretations of a local popular belief, cautioning us against monologic interpretations (21), with the additional warning about “base stereotypes about Africa…a place bereft not only of modern amenities but of modern sensibilities as well” (105, quoting from anthropologist Michael Jackson’s work In Sierra Leone, 2004).
“Popobawa is just there, everyone interprets him as they like. So have I. So will you” (177).
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[Review length: 490 words • Review posted on January 18, 2018]