Texte remanié de: Th. doct.--Linguistique--Université de Genève. / Bibliogr. p. 196-198.

Texte remanié de: Th. doct.--Linguist.--Strasbourg 2, 1997. Titre de soutenance : Étude contrastive des systèmes phonologiques de l'akan (twi) et du français en vue d'une application didactique. / En appendice, choix de documents. Bibliogr. p. 279-280.

Thesis advisor: Melissa M. Kelley / Thesis advisor: Lisa Sowle Cahill / Thesis (STL) — Boston College, 2016. / Submitted to: Boston College. School of Theology and Ministry. / Discipline: Sacred Theology.

ABSTRACT This thesis deals with the theme of the environmental worth and the contemporary developmental relevance of traditional oral poetry. The specific subject matter is the worth of the traditional oral poetry of Asante/Ashanti (one of the groups of the Akan cultural group in Ghana, Ivory Coast, and Togo in West Africa) and its relevance as a source of inspiration for the raising of environmental consciousness. The premise of the thesis is that there existed within traditional oral literature some environmental knowledge which responded to the needs of traditional society. The knowledge in this literature can be revamped and harnessed to help direct the environmental aspect of current developmental approaches. For that reason, the thesis takes as its point of departure and primary data some traditional Asante proverb-poems. These proverbpoems had the status and role of myths engendered by society to fashion and guide humans’ interaction with Nature. This assimilation between proverb-poem and society’s environmental precepts implied that society had (consciously or unconsciously) cast the proverb-poem in the role of an environmental preceptor to guide society. Beliefs about Nature and the practices thereof which are enshrined in these proverbpoems, therefore, contained the knowledge which guided the use of natural resources and hence the direction of development and sustainability in traditional Asante society. Invariably, the environmental outlook of society, its values and interests, its projections and directions, and its development, all came to be informed by the knowledge contained in this myth/proverb-poem. It is pertinent to note that the type of environmental demands required by contemporary Asante is reminiscent of the sustainability which oral literature helped traditional Asante to attain. This comparison is validated for two main reasons. The first is the fact that today development in perceived as a shift from the prioritization of the military security of states and regimes to an emphasis on seven cardinal areas which complement state and regime security. These are - Economic security, Food security, Health security, Environmental security, Personal security, Community security, and Political security. This thesis focuses on the environmental aspect. Second, development focuses on exploring local alternative approaches to the problem of environmental degradation. In this regard, the thesis argues that aspects of the manner in which cultural communities express their relationship with Nature is recoverable through a literary study of the images and belief system found in their rendition of Nature. These images, their perceptions, and the attitude they express toward Nature, offer a framework within which to evaluate possible culture-specific solutions to contemporary environmental problem. It is for the above reason that this work evaluates a selection of traditional Asante proverb-poems to find out the extent to which they served to mediate environmental consciousness and Nature conservation in traditional Asante. In order to arrive at a more reliable conclusion, this investigation first evaluates the ways in which institutions and practices such as Asante political system, the nature of their myths and taboos, their impact on their environment, their relation with colonial environmentalism, the nature and the archival function of their poetry and their entire cosmovision can be said to resemble or reflect the manner in which the Asante formulated the relationship between humans on one hand and flora, fauna, and landscape on the other. It is revealed that their predilection for co-existence with nature advocated in these literary texts largely resembled the normative values and institutional structures of traditional Asante community. Using Structuralism and Ecocriticism the work presents each persona of the various proverb-poems as opposing some prevailing attitudes to nature by critiquing, teaching, encouraging, condemning, exalting the audience to perceive nature as kin, nature as a beneficent agent to appreciate, nature as a danger to avoid, and nature as a domain to which humans are accountable. The thesis also advances the opinion that those attitudes which sustained environmental viability could be reworked and adapted to feed into the creation of a mind-sets which can enhance human perceptions about Nature today and contribute to the search for solutions to environmental degradation. In addition to the above anthropo-developmental dimension, the analysis reveals some specificities of the literary analysis of oral environmental texts of traditional societies. It equally shows the nature of the peculiar challenges faced in the environmental arena by developmental objectives. The work is, therefore, inspired by the need to contribute ideas and perceptions that can eventually feed into the debates around solutions toward the solving of environmental problems. Thus, the work seeks to do this by using literary approaches to highlight and draw on traditional knowledge to enrich the present search for indigenous ways of conceptualizing human-Nature relations and of solving current environmental problems.

Discussions of Asante stools in Western literature and museum records have focused exclusively on their association with male chiefs. My research, which combines archival and oral histories, and sets the existing literature and documentation on stools in comparative perspective, reframes existing thinking by asserting that asese dwa (sing. sese dwa), or conventional Asante stools, are intimately connected with women, and especially, queen mothers. Although the stool today is known widely as a symbol of male chieftaincy, chiefs do not sit on them in public. They use them only in very specific private spheres. It is queen mothers who sit on stools publically as seats of authority. The physical form of the stool, especially the mmaa dwa or "woman's stool" is a powerful symbol of female fecundity and the propagation of the Asante peoples. By exploring queen mother’s archives of stools and their dynamic uses of them, I present a more expansive history of these important cultural objects that challenges the taxonomies established by R. S. Rattray (1927) and others during the twentieth century. Contrary to the clearly defined hierarchies of symbolism, materials and structure that have informed assessments of historical stools in the West, Asante queen mothers have commissioned and used stools in an ongoing and context-dependent process of negotiation for at least a century. In this dissertation I explore the history of Asante stools since the late-nineteenth century through the lens of queen mothers’ perspectives. / History of Art and Architecture

Indigenous dance music in Ghana serves peculiar roles in the lives of its practitioners from birth to death. This dissertation explores the role of the Kete dance of the Asante people as an Afrocentric agency of meaning-making. As a dance-music form, Kete is one of the most popular dances in Ghana and a major cultural attraction in the diaspora. Apart from ethnomusicological explorations of its music, not much has been done with regard to its movement element. I theorize Kete as a social construction that promotes and sustains culture through gestures. A performance of Kete at a particular context like a funeral can expose indigenous gender disparities, socio-cultural class structure, and embodied agencies for indigenous knowledge propagation. Through a qualitative research methodology including first-person methods of autoethnography and practical experiences, I examine my own experience and understanding of Kete as a practitioner since childhood and the experiences of selected participants in Ghana and the United States. The research also has an advocacy purpose through its affiliation with Afrocentricity. As a reflection of intelligent social structuring where dancers communicate through gestures, I explore the transition of Kete from the Manhyia palace in Kumasi (Traditional Category) to the Ghana Dance Ensemble (Academic and then Professional Category) in the University of Ghana from 1963 and explore the impact of neo-traditional structures on its proliferation today. Specifically, I explore the agency of the Kete dancer as centered within Kumasi and Accra, to ascertain to what extent this embodied knowledge can be explored through first-person methods to understand the structures of its proliferation and anticipated future developments. / Dance

The Social Life of Placebos is an interdisciplinary study of the evolution of placebogenic responses – beneficial ones activated by psychosocial triggers -- and their elicitation in Asante medical contexts. Based on an extensive literature review in social, cultural, and medical studies and over 26 months of intensive research in rural Ghana, West Africa, it examines the therapeutic efficacy of Asante medical encounters by analyzing rites of care-giving within an evolutionary framework. Section 1 investigates why evolutionary processes appear to have made human physiology susceptible to psychosocial manipulation, what the health consequences of that susceptibility are in modern environments, and how culturally specific expectations and healing rituals might dampen or amplify that susceptibility. Because of key transitions in human evolution, the fitness consequences of sociality have increased rapidly and created the conditions whereby endogenous mechanisms have become responsive to sociocultural conditions. This explanation helps us better understand why culturally specific rituals can elicit powerful beneficial (placebo) and adverse (nocebo) physiological responses. Using a mixed methodology of physiological data and ethnographic case studies collected from hundreds of Asante medical encounters, Section 2 illuminates evolutionary and proximate processes in Asante contexts of care-giving and healing rituals in detailed chapters on pain, emotion, and stress. It examines the social and cultural resources and techniques that Asante health practitioners rely on for pain management in contexts where no pain medication is available. It analyzes the biocultural interactions that can take place when healers modify patient perceptions, emotions, and expectations. The dissertation concludes with biometric evidence that Asante indigenous ritual healing ceremonies actually promote significant entrainment and relaxation effects.

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