Abstract
This paper uses corpus methods to support the analysis of data collected as part of a large-scale ethnographic project that focusses on inter-religious relations in south-west Nigeria. Our corpus consists of answers to the open questions asked in a survey. The paper explores how people in the Yoruba-speaking south-west region of Nigeria, particularly Muslims and Christians, manage their religious differences. Through this analysis of inter-religious relations, we demonstrate how corpus linguistics can assist analyses of text-based data gathered in anthropological research. Meanwhile, our study also highlights the necessity of using anthropological methods and knowledge to interpret corpus outputs adequately.We carry out three types of analyses: keyness analysis, collocation analysis and concordance analysis. These analyses allow us to determine the ‘aboutness’ of our corpus. Four themes emerge from our analyses: (1) religion; (2) co-operation, tolerance and shared communal values such as ‘Yoruba-ness’; (3) social identities and hierarchies; and (4) the expression of boundaries and personal dislike of other religious practices.
Highlights
This paper uses corpus methods to support the analysis of data collected during a large-scale anthropological project that focusses on inter-religious relations in south-west Nigeria, the primarily Yoruba-speaking region of Nigeria which is referred to as Yorubaland
The research presented is inherently interdisciplinary, in that the findings are based on an extended process through which the authors became familiar with one another’s disciplines; the paper draws on the anthropological literature on community and seniority in Yorubaland, and on corpus linguistic research, that focussed on the interpretation of meaning in discourse
The article’s analysis of the discourse captured by the survey reveals that the subordination of religious difference to both shared Yoruba-ness and humanity relies on the importance of social hierarchies that are associated with gender and age, expressed through the idiom of ‘respect’ and ‘submission’, in particular
Summary
This paper uses corpus methods to support the analysis of data collected during a large-scale anthropological project that focusses on inter-religious relations in south-west Nigeria, the primarily Yoruba-speaking region of Nigeria which is referred to as Yorubaland. The main aim of this paper is to address how people in south-west Nigeria, Muslims and Christians who form the majority of the population, characterise their relations with one another This enables us to explore a field of research that has received little attention: the negotiation and maintenance of inter-religious relations in this multi-religious context. The paper contributes to the scarce literature that explores elicited data using corpus linguistic methods of analysis (e.g., interviews in Gabrielatos et al, 2010; Torgersen et al, 2011; and oral history interviews in Sealey, 2009, 2012a) and addresses an absence of studies that explore survey data It addresses key questions raised by Sealey (2012b) who uses corpus linguistic software to analyse interview data (taken from the Millennibrum Corpus) and archival anthropological data (taken from the Mass Observation Project). By allowing us to handle large amounts of text systematically, these analyses provide insights into how Yoruba-speakers manage religious difference that ethnographic approaches reliant on participant observation on a smaller scale would not have revealed
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