Proverb scholarship has familiarized us with books that scroll long lists of proverbs, accompanied by comments or mere translations, without any contextual information about their collection, let alone their usage. Even the most context-sensitive scholars have long considered proverbs as dogmatic principles, quotable, that convey—often ambiguous—axiomatic truths. Kwesi Yankah’s The Proverb in the Context of Akan Rhetoric brings insightful correctives, centered on the performance theory in folklore, to these scholarly trends in proverb studies.
Breaking with decontextualized perspectives, Yankah engages his work in an ethnographic exploration of Akan proverbs or ebe, unpacking their very “natural discourse” (1) through which they are created, recreated, and set to evolve without losing their identity. This book demonstrates that the proverbs are not “sacred” dogmas, frozen in an eternal temporality, barring any argumentative possibility because of their binding verities. Rather, like human speech, proverbs are dynamic, malleable, rhetorical, and oratorical tools, which take on variable forms and meanings depending upon situational needs, social rules of communication, and creative wits. By problematizing and transcending the etic/emic dichotomy (6), Yankah optimizes their respective strengths to better unravel the complexity of proverbs, helped in this endeavor by his deep understanding of the proverb scholarship in folklore studies, the insider’s paradigms, and the attendant analytic terms drawn from multiple disciplines such as linguistics, communication studies, and anthropology.
In this book, Yankah makes ground-breaking claims that will prompt the readers to revise their understanding of proverbs. He argues here that proverbs are not simply quotable (15), static short sentences, used for instrumental purposes in traditional societies. Proverbs, by contrast, have a life of their own, and can be subjugated to creative modification, transformation, structurally and semantically. Moreover, their utterance, contrary to previous views, may succeed or fail to exert practical effects or change, contingent upon multiple variables. In Akan society, Yankah further shows, proverbs are vested with rhetorical, persuasive, and often dissuasive functions. Methodologically, the book hinges on an ethnographic approach, centered on verbatim notation and tape recording of proverbs in their natural utterance, and on follow-up comments with performers. Performer-audience connections, communicative events where proverb performance occurs, he contends, should be documented with an aim of explicating immediate cues triggering proverbs, as well as their subsequent impacts on the audience they address.
In chapter 1, which is the introduction, Yankah delineates his goal in this book. He clearly manifests his desire to divorce from Western-centric proverb conceptualizations in Africa as mere instrumentalities, unmovable truths, emphasizing his methodological approach through the combination of the etic/emic perspective. His brief presentation of the Akan society within the broad Ghanaian ethnicities, and African language families, sets the stage for understanding how age hierarchy and gender lines, for instance, play out in proverb performance. Chapter 2 allows him to lay out the theoretical orientation of this work. He provides here an interesting rendition of the notions of social context versus discourse context, inviting for an examination of the latter for understanding how proverbs unfold in performance. The performance approach, he explains, permits access to the terrain where proverb performers assume their responsibility to, and are evaluated by, a savvy audience. It is at this level that the ethnographer can assess, beyond the referential and didactic dimension, how the Akan public judges the communicative effectiveness of proverb utterance, in terms of whether or not the intended rhetorical, persuasive, or dissuasive purposes have been reached.
Chapter 3 offers a rich literature review of the major trends and the most influential scholarly figures in paremiology and performance theory. Offering relevant critiques of their merits and shortcomings, Yankah builds upon them, evoking the challenges and opportunities of his model of data collection (40-41). He points up the difficult, often frustrating, method of recording proverbs from their natural context due to their unpredictability and discourse-dependent character. In chapter 4, he analyzes how indigenous definitions of proverbiality contrast with Western conceptions as they encompass unrepeatable, long-assertion sentences. He argues here that what counts as a proverb is the community acknowledgement, and not popularly widespread, quotable sentences (64-65). Marked by intertextuality, proverbs easily merge with innuendos, tales, and other genres. Yankah shows in this section the weight of traditional and ancestry wisdoms which lend credibility to proverbs, if invoked. Among the Akan, which is generalizable to many African cultures, proverbs are expressed via multiple channels too, including visual and sonic mediums; and are transmitted under culturally defined pedagogy. As it is a vehicle to convey social etiquette, ethical and aesthetic values, proverb performance is conducive to social prestige, like okyeame (spokesman) entitlement (56), or forfeiture depending on the effectiveness or failure of its performance.
In chapter 5, Yankah narrows his focus to discourse situation as the “unit of reference,” identifying verbal and nonverbal proverb cues (94), and further argues that their presence does not force proverb performance, as the latter lies entirely in the discretionary choice of the individuals. Contrary to common belief, Yankah contends that proverbs do not always seek to reinforce ideas enshrined in cues, but can even look to unveil their “flaws” (101). Evaluations by audiences, whether approval or disapproval, he indicates, take various forms, such as verbalized co-performance (corrections, syntactical rearrangement, supplementary information), or gestural acts. It is in chapter 6 that Yankah grants the most telling critique of assumptions sustaining the rigid and ambiguous character of proverbs, highlighting how creativity plays out in Akan proverbs. Through the use of formulas, question marks, personalization, and linguistic manipulations, the proverb performer is able to recreate, modify, or even invent novel proverbial utterances drawing from the traditionally acknowledged repertoire, if armed with enough competence (124-126).
Chapter 7 is devoted to indigenous notions of authorship and custodianship. Yankah suggests a careful look at compositional processes, dramatization, and how authorship is recognized and ascribed to persons, inanimate beings, animals, and imaginary individuals with pre-proverbial formulas (145). He hastens to clarify, though, that because of its lack of social implications, authorship acknowledgement does not hold weight among the Akan (149). However, reference to ancestry or known people as the legitimate users or creators of proverbs just accords credibility to the performer. Yankah evokes the necessity to explore life histories and literary records to better construe community conceptualizations of authorship and custodianship, which remain heavily intertwined with proverb sensitivity, rather than formalized entitlements.
Chapter 8 offers an interesting series of case studies, specifically in a judicial setting. Here, Yankah has had ample occasion to demonstrate the illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of proverbs, arguing that the ability of a proverb to bring the desired behavioral change is conditioned by other parameters, mainly the truth value and verifiability of the argument embedded in the proverb (175). Besides, proverbs bear different functions, involving denunciation, corroboration, and meta-language. Yankah concludes his book in chapter 9 with an attempt at proverb theorization. He schematizes a paradigm shift from text-centered to performance approach. He also claims that proverbs cannot be separated from discourse, nor aesthetics from ethics, advocating a context-specific scrutiny to better understand micro-level processes.
The book is repetitive in some areas. The fieldwork methodology employed, it seems, is very difficult to conduct, generating doubts about how the author had follow-up comments in verbatim data under certain circumstances, especially those collected by his research assistant. He does not specify which proverb is collected through verbatim notation or tape recording, and his presentation of proverb situations can be confusing, because at times the same proverbs are reproduced, and it is not clear how his research assistants shape or limit his data. Apart from these concerns, Yankah’s work clears up a great deal of misinterpretation to which this complex verbal art genre has been subjected in Western academia, thanks to his performance-centered insights. As such, I recommend it to scholars who seek to thoroughly make out how performance theory unfolds at the practical level, especially in the disciplines of folklore and linguistic anthropology. It is a must read, however, for all scholars of verbal art and in African studies in general.
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[Review length: 1322 words • Review posted on February 26, 2014]