Hidden Voices from West Africa (English)

Would you like to immerse yourself in a culture radically different from your own, and discover

new modes of communication and sociability in a vivid, engaging manner-all without leaving home?

Such is the challenge proposed to readers by the series Hearing Others' Voices, edited by the

distinguished British anthropologist Ruth Finnegan. While primarily designed for high school and

university students, the collection is more broadly intended for anyone seeking, even in a modest way,

to open themselves to the world. In this volume, across eighteen lively short chapters, Cécile Leguy, Professor of Linguistic

Anthropology at the Sorbonne Nouvelle University (France), takes her readers to Mali, among the Bwa

people, where she has conducted long-term fieldwork. Through a sequence of concise

autobiographical anecdotes, told in simple and lucid prose, she recounts her experiences as a "naïve

outsider" who, through the course of everyday interactions, encounters unfamiliar ways of thinking

and speaking-oscillating between bewilderment and wonder. These successive revelations gradually

lead her to become integrated into this new cultural world, for which she expresses a profound

attachment. By way of such ordinary situations, the reader is invited to perceive what is truly

exchanged in this society-between the lines of speech-thereby uncovering the rich complexity and

subtlety of this verbal culture.