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The Story About Life: Biography in the Yoruba Obituaries

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Olatunde B. Lawuyi
Olatunde B. Lawuyi*
Affiliation:
Obafemi A wolowo University, Ile-Ife, Nigeria
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Extract

What we intend to do here is to present the obituary as a simple story in which an individual's life makes sense in terms of cultural assumptions on values, on meaningful relations, and achievements. The brevity of the story we consider is made so by the relative dearth of information which an obituary contains. But, in spite of the scarcity of information, the story still reveals a clear orientation: the obituary has meaning only in the context of socio-economic inequality and the exchange facilitated by that inequality. Our task in this paper is to attempt a description of this orientation to an “outsider”. The emphasis is not so much on the structure of the discourse but the cultural knowledge which guides the discourse.

Type
Research Article
Information
Diogenes , Volume 37 , Issue 148 , December 1989 , pp. 92 - 111
Copyright
Copyright © 1989 Fédération Internationale des Sociétés de Philosophie / International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP)

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