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Part of
Anthropological Linguistics: Perspectives from Africa
Edited by Andrea Hollington, Alice Mitchell and Nico Nassenstein
[Culture and Language Use 23] 2024
► pp. 136–176

Chapter 6
Conceptions of the make-up of a human person in Ewe

| Leiden University

Humans everywhere construct ethnopsychological models of a person which involves a physical body and non-physical aspects. There is variation in how the non-physical parts of a person are construed. Invariably, it is assumed that this other part is “invisible inside” (Goddard, 2018, p. 168; Levisen, 2017; Peeters, 2019a). The question of what the components of a human person in African culture(s) are has been discussed, and debated in the literature (see e.g., Cotzee & Roux, 2004). In this paper, I examine the conceptual model of a person in Ewe communities of practice in West Africa through the prism of language and the meanings of the terms for the ethnopsychological constructs of a person.

Keywords: personhood universals and relativities, Ewe ideologies of personhood, contact effects in conceptualization, diversity of conceptual schemas, cultural semantics
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Setting the scene
    • 2.1Some anthropological views on personhood in Africa
    • 2.2Debates from African philosophy on personhood
    • 2.3The cultural semantics of the components of a person
  • 3.Ewe views on the make-up of a person
    • 3.1Background: How persons come into the world
    • 3.2The structural components of a person
    • 3.3Ewe ethnopsychological personhood constructs
      • 3.3.1“Soul”-like components
        • What is Luʋɔ?
        • What is gbɔgbɔ?
      • 3.3.2“Destiny”-like components
        • What is Gbetsi?
        • What is Sé?
        • What is aklama?
  • 4.Concluding remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • Abbreviations
  • References
Available under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (CC BY-NC-ND) 4.0 license.

For any use beyond this license, please contact the publisher at [email protected].

Published online: 1 February 2024
DOI logo
https://doi.org/10.1075/clu.23.06ame
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