The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa

by Ruth Finnegan

Overview

With her 1976 book Oral Literature in Africa, Ruth Finnegan almost single-handedly created the field of ethnography of language. Now, Finnegan has gathered and updated a selection of her best work on oral literature, performance, and the creative use of language in Africa, along with several new essays that broaden and extend her ideas.

The Oral and Beyond looks simultaneously backwards and forwards, reviewing and critiquing the achievements of scholarship on African oral literature, revisiting issues of perennial contention, and highlighting some of the most interesting new ideas and approaches in the field. Exploring such fundamental questions as how texts and textuality relate to performance, how ideology inflects language, and how traditional forms adapt to modern media and popular culture, Finnegan essentially crafts an intellectual history of her field. At the same time, she propels the ethnography of language forward, bringing the techniques and knowledge developed through her fieldwork in Africa to bear on issues that transcend African studies and reach into the larger world of anthropology and beyond.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780226249728
Publisher:	University of Chicago Press
Publication date:	10/01/2007
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	320
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Ruth Finnegan is emeritus professor at the Open University.

Table of Contents

Introducing words I ENACTING & DISTANCING WORDS IN LIFE & STORY
The reflective practice of speech & language: a West African example
How to do things with words among the Limba
The arts & action of Limba storytelling
Stories of Africa, stories about Africa
II PERFORMING LITERATURE Literature as oral, the oral as literature
Is oral literature composed in performance?
Time, performance & literature
III WORKING WITH ORAL TEXTS Constructing 'Oral Literature in Africa': hindsights a generation later
Creating texts: transformation & enscription
Conceptualising oral texts & beyond
IV EPILOGUE Words, the human attribute?

Editorial Reviews

"A rich and wide-ranging book, a 'tour-de-force' as one of the enthusiastic readers on the back cover puts it, and the fruit of forty-odd years' experience and continuing openness to new ideas. . . . I believe The Oral and Beyond should become a key text for students in different disciplines, not least because of Ruth Finnegan's ability to synthesise relevant scholarship in a notably easy and jargon-free style and to situate it in time and place."

Oral History - Elizabeth Tonkin

"[The author] explores how humans, not just in Africa but across the globe, use words to talk of their environments and situations, and also to link their past and present, a linkage that shows the interrelatedness of peoples in time and space. . . .The objectivity with which she attacks issues in this work makes it an invaluable resource for linguists, anthropologists, students of comparative literature, and all students of culture."

Journal of Folklore Research - Abdulai Salifu

"This is not an easy work to absorb, but I wholeheartedly recommend it. It is especially valuable to historians for its likely sobering effect, but for others as well it is a state of the art valediction by one of the field's pre-eminent exponents."

African Studies Review - David Henige

A rich and wide-ranging book. ORAL HISTORY
... general issues are discussed with an extremely light touch, a notable and delightful absence of jargon, a very generous recognition of other scholars' work and a charitable approach to those with whose theoretical positions she disagrees. ... the whole volume glories in a wealth of wonderfully detailed and apposite empirical examples... At the end of the book you feel better grounded, more able to go on working in this field, and more alive to its future possibilities. - Karin Barber, Professor of African Cultural Anthropology, University of Birmingham

From the Publisher