RHETORIC, TRADITION AND COMMUNICATION - THE DIALECTICS OF MEANING IN PROVERB USE

This article challenges certain prevailing ideas about proverbs. The study of such an apparently minor genre might well shed light on some fundamental questions in anthropology. By using the contextual approach developed in folklore research, by borrowing a postulate from linguistics, and by grounding this analysis in a few old but seminal anthropological studies, data collected among the Vute (Cameroon) are examined with the aim of constructing a model of tradition as a process of communication. Meaning is not 'something' given from the start or precisely defined by a set of contradistinctions, as structuralism has let us believe for so many years. Instead, we might conceive of meaning as a potential space in which speech events occur that in turn modify the shape of that space: each utterance of a proverb is at the same time a realization and an alteration of its previous 'meaning'.