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Preservation or Mummification? The Implications of Subjecting Traditional Texts to Modern Processes
- Research in African Literatures
- Indiana University Press
- Volume 38, Number 3, Fall 2007
- pp. 170-182
- 10.2979/ral.2007.38.3.170
- Article
- Additional Information
The postmodern sensibility encourages doing away with particularizing traits and practices that impede the final emergence of a global community and culture. This reality and its imperatives inevitably come to mind when one works on traditional texts like Yoruba proverbs. The mechanical means at our disposal for recording and preserving such texts effectively release them from their traditional ties to specific cultural, social, and geographical contexts, so the texts lose the properties that scholars have traditionally relied upon to determine provenance, targeted audiences, routes of diffusion, and the like.