LeidenASA Lecture: Hogbetsotso rituals and their cultural significance
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Hogbetsotso is an annual festival of the Aŋlɔ (Anlo) Ewe of Southeastern Ghana. It is celebrated to commemorate the migration of the Aŋlɔ and other Ewe to their present home. In this talk, using the SPEAKING framework of Ethnography of Communication (Hymes 1962, Saville-Troike 2003), the speaker will present an analysis of a segment of the festival known as nugbuidódó, “reconciliation”. He will explore the norms and values embodied in the act sequences that characterise this speech event.
The analysis is based on a multi-media documentation of the Hogbetsotso festival of 2011 as a participant observer. The speaker will argue that festivals provide an avenue for both the leaders (especially the paramount chief) and the Aŋlɔ people to criticise and complain about each other’s behaviours during the year without restraint and without the use of veiled speech. He will also point out in which way the festival is a forum for socialisation and how young people are socialised into Aŋlɔ ways of being through participation in the celebration.
References
Hymes, Dell H. 1962. The ethnography of speaking. In Thomas Gladwin and William C. Sturtevant (eds) Anthropology and human behaviour, 13-53. Washington DC: Anthropological Society of Washington
Saville-Troike, Muriel. 2003. Ethnography of communication: an introduction. Oxford: Blackwell
Speaker
Kofi Dorvlo is a Senior Research Fellow at the Language Centre, University of Ghana and transferred to the University of Health and Allied Sciences in Ho where he works in the General and Liberal Studies Department. He gained his undergraduate degree in English and Linguistics at the Univerity of Ghana, and he did his graduate work at the same university, where he was appointed Research Fellow at the Language Centre. He was awarded a PhD from Leiden University in 2008. His doctoral research, which was funded by the Endangered Languages Programme of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO), focused on the documentation of the language and culture of the Logba people in the Ghana-Togo Mountains. His recent article, Restitution and Redistribution of Ewe Heritage was publisehd in a volume edited by Daniela Merolla and Mark Turin 2017, Searching for Sharing: Heritage and Multimedia in Africa.
He is a LeidenASA visiting fellow at Leiden University. His fellowship will continue his research on the stories and rituals of the Ewes of southeastern Ghana whose tradition has it that they settled in Ketu near the present Benin-Nigeria border before coming to Notsie in Central Togo and finally, because of the cruel treatment under King Agorkorli, decided to escape to their present settlement in Ghana.
Date, time and location
19 March 2019
13:00-14:00
Pieter de la Courtgebouw / Faculty of Social Sciences, Wassenaarseweg 52, 2333 AK Leiden
Room 1A37
Registration
Posted on 7 March 2019, last modified on 7 March 2019