Boundaries of Self and Other in Ghanaian Popular Culture (review)

This study of various Ghanaian ritual forms is, the author tells us, performance-based and "intended to contribute to theoretical formulations about performance studies in African contexts" (3). There is a running polemic against hermeneutical forms of interpretation that posit a stable, unitary meaning underneath ritual practices; Adjaye argues, in postmodernist fashion, for the shifting, historically variable character of ritual activities and for the heterogeneous meanings they produce, which are emergent, subjective, and multifaceted. Individual chapters address a variety of ritual forms from several Ghanaian cultures: Akan libations, naming ceremonies, and funerals; the Fante Bakatue Festival in Elmina; Krobo girls' initiation ceremonies; and a satirical song form practiced by Brong-Ahofo young men in Takyiman. Each chapter contains a fairly extensive review and discussion of the relevant theoretical literature, some ethnographic background on the specific culture and cultural forms, and then a description of the ritual with an argument about its multifacetedness.

Adjaye builds a clear, intelligent, and sophisticated framework, always employing several layers of theoretical constructs and thereby demonstrating the intellectual evolution of thinking about his subject. His prose sometimes bristles with terminology, but it does not descend into jargon. The problem with the book is that the framework overwhelms the material. Compared to the extensive theoretical introductions to each chapter, the descriptions of the rituals are brief and sketchy; they are not "thick" enough to allow for a demonstration of the multifacetedness toward which Adjaye is always gesturing. He argues for the complexities of the experiences involved but does not let us see or feel them. The most egregious case is the chapter on the Krobo girls' initiation ceremony, which he seems to have witnessed only once. On that occasion he was excluded, as a man, from several of the crucial events, had to rely on an interpreter, and confesses that the initiates wouldn't talk to him. So he relies on their facial expressions to argue that they weren't feeling what they were officially supposed to be feeling and that therefore the meaning of the ritual was multifaceted and so forth. Surely this is substandard as ethnography. The chapters in which he is dealing with his own Akan culture inspire much more confidence. Adjaye himself performs libations and holds a title in one of the asafo companies that contribute to the Elmina Bakatue Festival. But even here, perhaps because his literary gifts run more to theoretical exposition than to vivid description, the accounts of the events are disappointingly thin.

Because the individual chapters lack depth, the book's overall meanings don't accumulate as much as one would like. The theme of boundaries of the self and other, for instance, which gives the book its title, is not moved substantially past the point of departure in the postmodernist critique of earlier conceptions of selfhood and its relationship with social and ideological structures. Adjaye tells us that "although theoretical perspectives deriving from several disciplines—including anthropology, sociology, and linguistics—are applied, [this book] is fundamentally a work of popular culture, written from the point of view of a social historian" (7). This claim does not seem accurate. Historical transformations in the ritual practices are mentioned in nearly every chapter, and are particularly dramatic in the chapters on Akan funerals and the Krobo girls' initiations. But there is no organizing argument about these historical changes, which tend rather to be mentioned by the way; the organizing arguments, first and last, are drawn from the realm of anthropological theory and quickly return there.