ABSTRACT
While field researchers used to collect proverbs primarily as texts with little attention to their function and context, modern scholars trained in the theoretical aspects of speech acts or performance look at proverbs as part of active verbal communication. E. Ojo Arewa and Alan Dundes began this type of work with a study on “Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking Folklore,” American Anthropologist, 66, part 2, no. 6 (1964), 70–85. Similar studies also dealing with African proverbs are by Tshimpaka Yanga, “Inside the Proverbs: A Sociolinguistic Approach,” African Languages, 3 (1977), 130–157; Kwesi Yankah, “Toward a Performance-Centered Theory of the Proverb,” Critical Arts, 3 (1983), 29–43; and Johannes Fabian, Power and Performance: Ethnographic Explorations through Proverbial Wisdom and Theater in Shaba, Zaire (Madison/Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990).
