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Reviewed by:
  • African Folklore: An Encyclopedia
  • Misty L. Bastian
Philip M. Peek and Kwesi Yankah , eds. African Folklore: An Encyclopedia. New York and London: Routledge, 2004. xxxii + 593 pp. Maps. Photographs. Bibliograpies. Appendixes. Index. $175.00. Cloth.

The encyclopedia is a genre that is notoriously difficult to produce, mainly because it is necessarily a hybrid genre. Encyclopedic texts consist of numerous small entries that purport to give the reader basic information on a particular subject, and the sum of the parts is supposed to equal a much larger, more universal body of knowledge than whatever would be constructed by any one author. What this has meant since the time of Diderot is that encyclopedias are bound to be unsatisfying on two levels: first, the small entries are inevitably uneven in their scope, writing style, and informational quality; second, the grand project is inevitably flawed by the inability of any human product to be truly, well, encyclopedic. Although Peek and Yankah's African Folklore is a wonderful undertaking, it ultimately falls victim to both of the above flaws. This does not mean, however, that we should let the editors' great work languish on the library shelf; there is a great deal of good in the encyclopedia, and it is potentially a valuable research tool for those who know little about folklore on the African continent while also offering some refreshing moments for those who may even consider themselves to be expert on the topic.

As the editors note, any attempt to catalogue all of "African folklore" represents a collective feat of great daring; one must try to skirt the line between overgeneralization about the continent and overspecialization in any one culture (what one of my graduate mentors used to call the "in-my-village-we-do-it-like-this" syndrome). I was taken aback, though, to realize that the editors, as folklorists, have few problems with looking at the African world in terms of "tradition" (therefore somehow inherently folkloric in its orientation). As one reads the various entries in the larger text, one is constantly confronted with the modernity of African cultures, whether one is reading about electronic media or Mami Wata in Central Africa. Certainly that modernity stares us in the face with the inclusion of a sometimes brief (sometimes not brief) entry about each nation-state on the continent. Most readers realize how integral the development of the nation-state was to the historical construction of the academic discipline of folklore, particularly in Europe, but it is sometimes disconcerting to peruse these very uneven national entries concerning cultural practices that are frequently regional in their scope—or, in the case of the entry on "ancestors," surely continental! That is an unresolved tension throughout the text, and one that lends the encyclopedic project a feeling of ambivalence. Is folklore still tied to nationalism, in Africa or elsewhere, or does it speak to another sort of entity altogether? Separate entries suggest different approaches to this theoretical problem, and it might have been interesting [End Page 150] if the editors had addressed this and other issues in a more intellectually challenging introduction.

The encyclopedia is organized alphabetically for ease of use, which implies that Peek and Yankah see the text primarily as a reference work. Here again this reader was somewhat bewildered, however, when turning to a particular entry such as "Riddles" and finding that the riddles under discussion are all from West Africa, even as generalizations about riddling behavior are offered as if we were looking at the continent as a whole. Of course, the bibliography of this entry offers some examples of riddling behavior from other parts of the continent, but these examples do not find their way into the actual text. If a student were looking for information on riddles in Africa, she might well think that Mandinka and Fulani peoples live in quite different parts of the continent—or, conversely, upon looking at the bibliography, that Kikuyu speakers must also inhabit (and tell their riddles) in the west. This confusion would be further compounded if our hypothetical student read below the "Riddles" entry to find that there is yet another entry on "Riddles: Sesotho Riddles." The area studies...

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