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ABSTRACT In southeastern Ghana, among Anlo-Ewe-speaking people, a five-senses model (of sight, touch, taste, hearing, and smell) has little relevance for theorizing about how we know what we know. Instead, Anlo people invoke a domain of experience called seselelame (literally `feel-feel-at-flesh-inside') that links sensation to emotion, disposition, and vocation. This article explores cultural models that govern sensory and other immediate bodily experiences in Anlo-Ewe worlds. Language analysis is interwoven with cultural interpretations of walking and talking, and attention is given to child socialization strategies that kinesthetically instantiate Anlo-Ewe moral codes.
One day, in the middle of a nearly two-year stretch of fieldwork in southeastern Ghana, I drove my car over a rock in the center of the compound in which I lived. A jolt shot through my body as if I had been struck by lightning. Immediately upon entering the house, I told my husband about the experience. He laughed at me and stated, "I told you that rock was a legba!" I recorded this incident in my field notes but promptly repressed or forgot about it.
A month later, I was in Accra, visiting members of the extended family of Anlo-Ewe people in whose ancestral home we resided in the southern Volta Region. Somewhat out of the blue, Kodzo and Kwami observed that my husband and I had a habit of taking our car into the compound (as their brother had directed us to do), and they wondered if we had ever driven over that inconspicuous stone protruding out of the sand in front of Grandma's house. I was mortified by the question. I hesitated, but then admitted that I normally tried to avoid it but had recently run the right tire smack over the center of the rock. I remembered the lightning bolt through my body; I remembered my friend Raphael telling me that Nyigbla, the god of war, never hesitated to strike mercilessly into a group of people holding a conversation, only to take out the single offending individual-bang, he was dead. While these thoughts were racing through my mind, Kodzo and Kwami had shifted to speaking in an animated tone (and in Ewe) and were trying to figure out to what extent I was culpable. Finally they turned to me...