The Global and the Local with a Focus on Africa

Abstract

Among those characteristics shared by all human groups, language is ranked very high. When referring to the informal use of language, we often use the label “talk.” Through various genres and forms of talk, people share their interpretation of events and experiences, public and private. Each social/cultural group labels these varieties of talk with its own terms, but certainly narrative is one of the most prominent forms that occupies a position of great significance around the globe. By whatever individual names the forms are known, the full range of prose and poetry, when communicated primarily through oral performance for an audience familiar with the genre, constitutes a large body of oral tradition, whether the performance is in a face-to-face group, on the radio or television, recorded, or, today, posted on the internet as well. Of equal importance in the communicative repertoires of social life are events in which participants perform symbolic actions through the ritual genres, engaging in celebration, commemoration, transformation, dramatization, and other forms of enactment. In these culturally specific performances, groups of varying identities express their history, preoccupations, and aesthetics, including music, dance, drama, and culinary forms. Whether formal or informal, when the event is familiar because it is rooted in social life and people are free to make commentary, it may revitalize or criticize or reveal or transform the strengths and weaknesses within the group. These events also qualify as oral tradition because they provide the stage on which people can gather to enact the forms that express the shared and the familiar juxtaposed to the strange and exotic. Such performance events create, or sometimes destroy, social bonds because they reveal the significant features of the group and each person’s place within it through actions designed for participants to witness and interpret within the framework of knowledge familiar to them. In studies of African oral traditions two topics have emerged as significant in recent years. The first concerns the interweaving of concepts and practices defined as traditional or indigenous with those originating in the paradigm of modernity, while the second identifies the relevance and the