Analysis Of Shakespeare In The Bush By Laura Bohannan

The article, “Shakespeare in the Bush” written by Laura Bohannan, talks about the cross-cultural miscommunication about the relationship between language and culture in the context of an English book, Hamlet, to the African tribe, Tiv. Bohannan lacks about her fieldwork as it did not show detail, but strongly supported two theoretical perspectives, interpretivism and structuralism. Interpretivism is the dominant viewpoint that provide the best understanding of the Tiv community. Anthropologist Laura Bohannan goes on to visit an African tribe called the Tiv. During her stay, where she spends time drinking and hearing stories—an art form in their culture, brings a copy of Shakespeare “Hamlet” to the table in order to contribute. In the mind of Bohannan, she thought that “Hamlet” would be understood by anyone. That’s not the case as the Tiv people interrupts her and becomes frustrated by her storytelling that she misunderstood the whole meaning of the book. The Tiv tribe sees her uncultured and taught her properly from their perspective in order to go back to her home and tell the elders the true meaning of Hamlet. The point across is that the story of Hamlet had lost its true meaning when listeners feel differently about it.

With the amount of cultural knowledge, she had from both her culture and the Tiv culture; it was not as if she used it to her full advantage of trying thoroughly explaining Hamlet. It was almost as if she just gave up on explaining, leaving to whatever the Tiv tribe believe. Similarly, as the Tiv were the informants, while Bohannan was the respondent. This article almost felt like a battle between naïve realism and ethnocentrism—that lead to dichotomy. Where in the article, it comes out that me as reader a naïve realist, believing that the culture mirrors a reality shared by everyone to a culture being better than the other, spreading their culture from their point of