Suchergebnisse

"Everyday Life explores the entire range of social gatherings, from chance encounters and casual conversations to well-rehearsed performances in theaters and stadiums. Roger D. Abrahams ties the everyday to those more intense experiences of playful celebration and serious power displays and shows how these seemingly disparate entities are cut from the same cloth of human communication."--Jacket

Book reviewed in this article:The Blues Accordin' to Lightnin' Hopkins. Filmed by LES BLANKA Well‐Spent Life. Filmed and produced by LES BLANKSpend It All. Filmed and produced by LES BLANK

…In the south there was the daily impact upon the white man of the effect of the Negro, concerning whom nothing is so certain as his remarkable tendency to seize on lovely words, to roll them in his throat, to heap them in redundant profusion one upon another until meaning vanishes, until there is nothing left but the sweet, canorous drunkenness, nothing but the play of primitive rhythm upon the secret springs of emotion.W. J. Cash, The Mind of the SouthBoth in Africa and in America the Negro seems to find a decided pleasure in altiloquent speech. Perhaps this bombast is partly due to the fact that the long and unusual word has a sort of awe-inspiring almost fetishistic significance to the uneducated person, and with the Negro, at least, it indicated a desire to approximate the white man in outward signs of learning. As it is, the Negro is constantly being lost in a labyrinth of jaw-breaking words full of sound and fury but signifying nothing.Newbell Niles Puckett, Folk Beliefs of Southern Negroes

Most of the countries in the New World were created by economically motivated European colonizers who invaded this hemisphere and defeated the resident populations. The dominant cultural life of these areas is based on the institutions, values and expressions carried by these seekers after empire, as modified by conditions and cultures encountered in the new lands. This is as true of the West Indies as it is of the various larger regions of the two Americas, but the modifying factors are more numerous in these small Caribbean islands. Rarely is there just one European tradition affecting the culture of each of these islands; as European possessions during this era of large-scale wars in Europe, most of them changed hands repeatedly. More important, the establishment of the plantation system and the resultant waves of imported field workers from alien, non-European societies created a cultural conglomerate of incredible variety.

Speech behavior, among the Afro‐American peasants of St. Vincent, British West Indies, is the focus of a high degree of interest, self‐consciousness, and value judgment. A segment of the speech economy of Vincentian peasants is analyzed in terms of a native taxonomy of speech acts and related terms, illuminating Vincentian ideas concerning proper and improper behavior as well as the realm of speech behavior itself. The analysis paves the way for a consideration of the conduct and significance of the tea meeting, one of the most popular performance events on the island and a key to the dynamics of social change in contemporary Vincentian society.