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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. 278–305

Chapter 11
Catching and classifying fish among the Dwang

| University of Florida

The goal of this chapter is to discuss an endangered fishing practice, and the naming and uses of fish among the Dwang of the Bono East Region of Ghana. I discuss a (defunct) communal fish catching process known as kese /kə́sə́/, in which the poisonous plant Adenia cissampeloises, also called kese by the Dwang, was used to kill the fish and harvest them. I then turn to the Dwang names for six freshwater fish, which is a classification of sorts. I explore the semantics of the fish names, especially their classes, such as ka- for singular versus n- for plural (e.g., káwá/nkáwá), on the one hand, and ɔ- for singular versus a- for plural (e.g., ɔtʃwɪrɛ/atʃɪrɛ), among others. I discuss some medicinal and customary uses of the fish which have almost disappeared. The chapter is therefore a discussion of endangered indigenous knowledge of a plant and fish.

Keywords: fish, ethnobiology, ecological knowledge, semantics, cultural meaning
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.The Dwang people and their language
    • 2.1The Sene River
  • 3.Kese
  • 4.Classification of fish
    • 4.1Protopterus annectens (Owen, 1839) (Dankwa et al., 1999, p. 11, fig. 2)
    • 4.2Sierrathrissa leonensis (Thys van den Audenaerde, 1969), Odaxothrisa mento (Regan, 1917) and Pellonula leonensis (Boulenger, 1916) (Dankwa et al., 1999, p. 12, fig. 4)
    • 4.3Heterotis niloticus (Cuvier, 1829) (Dankwa et al., 1999, p. 13, fig. 5)
    • 4.4Gymnarchus niloticus (Cuvier, 1829) (Darkwa et al., 1999, p. 17, fig. 11)
    • 4.5Malapterurus electricus (Gmelin, 1789) (Darkwa et al., 1999, p. 36, fig. 33)
    • 4.6Micralestes (Boulenger, 1899), Rhabdalestes (Hoedeman, 1959) and Lepidarchus (Roberts, 1966) (Darkwa et al., 1999, p. 21, fig. 16)
  • 5.Conclusion
  • 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.23.11ess
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