Greeting performance in Eweland: Ethnographic approach and cultural analysis with a historical survey of folklore scholarship in French West Africa

While narrative folklore genres steadily continue to drive scholars\u27 energies to satiety, greetings still remain neglected within the study of verbal arts as performance, generally being left to anthropology and sociolinguistics. The E$\upsilon$e formal greetings that I am concerned with in this study belong to the native category of E$\upsilon$e kcnuwo (E$\upsilon$e customs and traditions), constituting one of the most important E$\upsilon$e linguistic routines. As ritual performances, they govern the community\u27s everyday social life and establish and strengthen the relationships between individuals. As such, the non-performance of greetings in a greeting context is generally perceived as a breaking off of social relations which must be re-established through the observance of appropriate rituals. This study takes as its starting point the premise that greeting performances (especially in an African context) are a fully-fledged folklore genre of the same significance as those verbal performances known as narrative genres. Despite the deceptively simple appearance of greeting performances in E$\upsilon$e milieu, they are actually a complex genre which embodies the worldview of the people for whom they exist. The whole-culture approach to the study of these greeting performances as a ritual speech event, reveals the analytical principles by which they are structured within culturally defined social situations, and underscores the significant social attributes of the participants in their relation to each other and with respect to the culturally recognized strategies for communicating in E$\upsilon$eland. For methodological purposes, the study is introduced by a historical survey of folklore scholarship in French West Africa since 1828, and ends with three appendices which are: (a) Greeting texts, (b) Selected bibliography on E$\upsilon$e culture and language, and (c) Selected bibliography on French West Africa. Most importantly the study suggests some practical ways to approach the study of oral genres in general, and African verbal arts in particular