The Ethnopragmatics of Akan Compliments

Abstract

The essay examines culture and cultural adjustment in Arrow of God by Chinua Achebe. Using Edward Said's theory on culture as a foundation, it explores the elasticity of a fictional, precolonial West African society, Umuaro. The essay pictures culture as a large cell with core elements located at the centre, like a nucleus. The study then proceeds to apply this mental picture to the text, seeing the protagonist as analogous to a core element in his culture and hence as equivalent to the nucleus at the centre of the cell. The protagonist is a pivotal figure initially, and this idea is expressed symbolically in terms of the centralized position of the core element in the cultural cell. At the end of the day, however, he has become a social outcast, a status which again is expressed symbolically in terms of the movement of the core element away from the centre to the periphery. The essay concludes that the symbolic reproduction of culture re-inforces the literal one, and that Achebe recognizes equally the strengths and weaknesses of the community he is describing.