The rhetorical management of dangerous knowledge in Kpelle brokerage

Abstract

This paper argues that Kpelle brokers draw upon the key cultural idea of danger inherent in privileged knowledge to contrive a broker role and to construe its indispensability and threatening power in local politics. Both traditional religious brokers, who mediate between the village and the mystical world, as well as modern brokers, who mediate between the local community and the wider national institutions, use this idiom to persuade the local community that their knowledge of unfamiliar domains is exclusive, critically important, and dangerously powerful. The Kpelle case supports the notion that the broker role is not simply the result of a structural need to link patrons and clients of two different sociocultural domains. It shows that the role emerges as well from individuals' purposive use of cultural meanings to shape and manage those needs and their political significance. [West Africa, political management of meaning, brokerage, knowledge/secrecy, center‐periphery relations]