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Programme: accepted abstracts

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Abstract ID: 863

Part of Session 126: Gesture variation (Other abstracts in this session)

"You can't say it without using your hands": Generational Variation in Ideophone and Gesture Usage in Shona Ngano (Cantefable) Performance

Authors: Klassen, Doreen Helen
Submitted by: Klassen, Doreen Helen (Grenfell Campus, Memorial University of Newfoundland, Canada)

Shona grandmothers in Zimbabwe argue that gesture is integral to the use and understanding of ideophones, a form of verbal expressives characteristically found in Shona Ngano, a type of cantefable.  Regional and even idiosyncratic variations in ideophonic usage often render these expressives highly ambiguous, thereby necessitating gestural co-performance for their fuller understanding. 

          Although scholars may suggest that ideophonic gestures are merely mimetic (Kunene, 1978), these and other gestures and forms of bodily movement have a much broader range of functions within the performance of these narratives (Finnegan 2007).  Using a combination of Janis Nuckolls= (1992) and David McNeill=s (1992) categorization of language-gesture correspondences based on Peirce=s philosophical approaches to iconicity (1955), one may classify gestures in these narrative performances as imaegistic, diagrammatic, metaphoric, deitic, or beats.  However, a close analysis of a narrative performance by a masterful storytelling Shona grandmother reveals that through bodily gesture she carefully negotiates between narrational and social space, reveals her understanding of narrative structure (Kendon 1972), and even provides metagestural evaluation of her performance (Babcock 1977).

            Using the range of gestural expression in this master narrative as a template, this paper will explore generational variation in gesture usage among females in Zimbabwe.  The data for this presentation is based on 65 video-recorded storytelling sessions by women of four generations: grandmothers in their sixties, school teachers in their forties, single women in their twenties, and children in Form 1 - 7 of a primary school.

 

References Cited

Babcock, Barbara. 1977. The story in the story: Metanarration in the folk narrative. In Verbal

Art as Performance, ed. Richard Bauman, 61-80. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press.

Finnegan, Ruth H. 2007. The Oral and Beyond: Doing Things with Words in Africa. James Currey.

Kendon, Adam. 1972. Some relationships between body motion and speech: An analysis of an example. In Studies in Dyadic Communication, ed. A. Seigman and B. Pope, 177-210.  Elmsford, NY: Pergamon.

C.  1997. Gesture. Annual Review of Anthropology 26: 109-28.

Kunene, Daniel P. 1978. The Ideophone in Southern Sotho. Berlin: Verlag fon Dietrick Reimer.

McNeill, David. 1992. Hand and Mind: What Gestures Reveal about Thought. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Nuckolls, Janis. 1992. Sound Symbolic Involvement. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology, 51-80.

Peirce, Charles. 1955. Logic as Semiotic: The Theory of Signs. In Philosophical Writings of Peirce, ed., Justus Buchler, 98-119.  New York: Dover.