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Shakespeare In The Bush Analysis

Decent Essays

Shakespeare in the Bush is an article written by American Anthropologist Laura Bohannan regarding the incident during her fieldwork in Tiv of West Africa. It demonstrated the relationship between culture and literary translation and illustrated the importance of the concept: cultural interpretation. Due to the fact that our culture is never singular, but plural, elders in Tiv had a hard time understanding the “true meaning” of Hamlet. Bohannan has always thought that Hamlet only had one universal interpretation until she altered her thinking after the elders analyzed the plot in their perspective. Bohannan soon realized that things are hardly universal, different interpretations exist in different cultures.
As an anthropologist, Bohannan joined the local story-telling beer party and expressed her understanding of Hamlet to a group of people who had never been in contact with …show more content…

In other words, she used disorientation as a way to learn from another culture to reflect upon her own. (Widmer …show more content…

This notion is similar to the uncommon practices being conducted in others places, such as the Virginity Test in Brazil. (Robbins 2016, 13–14) In both cases, people are thinking from their own cultural perspective that the rest of the world should adapt to their styles of thinking. Later, incorporating the theory of cultural relativism, similar to Indigenous people’s realization that Canadian Hockey is a way to demonstrate success, elders believed that witches represent all the harms. Both cases have to be thought using an emic perspective in order to make them sound appropriate. (Widmer

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