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Adwenhoasem: an Akan theory of mind
Vivian Afi Dzokoto Virginia Commonwealth University
This essay explores the way the domain of what English-speakers call the mind – believing, thinking, feeling, and other mental acts – is represented and mapped by Ghana’s Akan ethno-linguistic group. It uses several sources of evidence: mind and mind-related words in Fante (an Akan language); the largest Akan (Twi) proverb compendium; longsemi-structured interviews with forty adult Christians and African traditional religion practitioners; and short-term ethnographic fieldwork by a Ghanaian scholar. The work finds four dimensions of what we might call an Akan theory of mind that seem to be shaped by local language and culture. First, the central function of the mind is planning – not identity. Second, one of the most salient qualities of the mind is its moral valence. The ‘bad minds’ of others are an ever-present potential threat to social harmony and personal well-being. Third, the mind is understood to be porous in nature. The minds of all people are vulnerable to supernatural influences, and some spiritually powerful people can exert supernatural power through mental action. Fourth and finally, some elements which English-speakers would imagine as part of the mind (like feeling) are instead identified with the body.
I come to this essay as a psychologist, born to Ghanaian parents, resident in southern Ghana for nearly two decades, and having conducted research in the country for more than twenty years. A large portion of my work to date has focused on the way feelings are represented, understood, and identified with the body in this social world (e.g. Dzokoto et al. 2018). The current work expands this focus to ask how Ghana’s Akan ethno-linguistic group maps and understands the terrain of what English-speakers – particularly, middle-class Western-educated North Americans – would call the mind. I found an emphasis on planning. My Akan interlocutors represented the mind as the production centre for strategies to accomplish an individual’s goals. Second, I saw that the moral valence of mind is highly salient. My Akan interlocutors understood the ‘bad minds’ of others as an ever-present potential threat. Third, I observed that they understood the mind to be porous in nature. All people are understood to be vulnerable to supernatural influences; some people – witches – can exert supernatural power through mental action. Prayer is thought both to enable benevolent spiritual forces to enter the mind and to keep malevolent spiritual forces outside. Fourth and finally, I
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found that the mind is represented as deeply intertwined with the body. In all these ways, Akan culture imagines mental life differently from the Enlightenment tradition.
Before I lay out the empirical observations that led us to these findings, let me unpack some of the challenges of thinking about mind in an African context.
Thinking about mind in Africa
The obvious difficulty in setting out a cultural representation of mind in any particular African tradition is that the very enterprise is steeped in racism and stigma. Many of the great European philosophers of the colonial era (including Voltaire, Hume, and Kant) took Africans to be both primitive and childlike, with an inability for sophisticated or complex thought production. The perspective dominated European imagination for well into the twentieth century. Furthermore, postcolonial theorists argue that iterations of such stereotypes were internalized by Africans with long-lasting effects that extended far beyond the duration of the colonial era (Abraham 2015; Maldonado-Torres 2007; Mungazi 1996; Ngu ̃g ̃ı 1986). Consider, for example, the following remarks about ‘the African mind’ by the South African-born and British-trained ethnopsychiatrist John Colin Carothers:
The African . . . [is] lacking in spontaneity, foresight, tenacity, judgement, and humility; inapt for sound abstraction and logic; given to phantasy [sic] and fabrication; and, in general, [is] unstable, impulsive, unreliable, irresponsible, and living in the present without reflection or ambition (1953: 89).
The psychology of the African is essentially the psychology of the African child . . . [The African] type of consciousness . . . correspond[s] to a prehypnotic state (1953: 109).
The African is [characterized by] lack of sustained interest, with lack of drive and concentration; [he]can spend much of his life in dreams. (1953: 122).
To be fair, many Europeans disagreed. Robin Horton (1967) challenged the demeaning stereotypes explicitly by describing African thought as logical and rational in character, and treating witchcraft beliefs as equivalent to a scientific theory of reality. Nevertheless, this history haunts the study of mind in Africa. There is always the fear that to compare is to demean.
Malose Makhubela (2016) identifies this history as the reason that the attempt to study psychology in Africa is ‘going nowhere slowly’. Sophisticated scholars in the postcolony are sceptical of the universal claims of psychology, seeing them as tainted by power and domination. Yet when they reject any claim to universalism, everything disappears into particularism. ‘This new polemic has led to a narrow relativism, epistemic populism and the in toto rejection of all research-making claims of universality and western knowledge, where all things propounded by the subalternized are regarded to be valid’ (Makhubela 2016: 4). The problem becomes that in creating a model that sets itself against a dominant Enlightenment representation, one creates a thing (‘the African mind’) that simply does not capture the diversity of the context and creates in turn its own problems of hegemony.
My approach is both/and: an approach towards studying human consciousness that accepts that all humans experience awareness – but also that social groups can represent that awareness differently. Here I agree with Augustine Nwoye’s conception of what psychology in Africa should be:
an inclusive psychology encompassing not only the study of African indigenous psychology but also the study of the human condition and culture and the life of the mind in contemporary Africa, as
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 77-94 ⃝C Royal Anthropological Institute 2020ADWENHOASEM: an Akan theory of mind 79 well as the exploration and adoption, where necessary, of aspects of western psychology that appear
relevant for enabling us to confront the challenges of our present African predicament (2015: 105).
I take this understanding of comparativism to be the point of the Mind and Spirit project. We are looking at particulars, but because we do so comparatively, we do not lapse into particularism and we can reach towards general theory.
I begin with the philosophical tradition within the Akan. In his 1738 treatise on the art of sober and accurate philosophizing, Wilhelm Anton Amo, a philosopher from what is now Ghana, set out an account of mentality, rationality, cognition, learning, and knowability. He purported to provide not an ‘African’ representation of the mind but a representation of mind itself. In 1987, Kwasi Wiredu, himself an Akan, took Amo’s model, his deep understanding of Western philosophy, and his Oxford training to put forth what he explicitly took to be an Akan model of mind. That model was intricately linked with Akan cosmology. Wiredu conceptualized personhood with spiritual components (the sunsum and ɔkra) and a sense that the capacity to will emerges out of the acting human body: it is neither given nor automatically (developmentally) achieved. He observed that for the Akan, ‘thoughts are not in the mind, but are of the mind’ (Wiredu 1987: 159), and that these thoughts seem to be ‘the mind in episodic action’ (1987: 167). In short, Wiredu took mind – as understood by the Akan – to be as much a disposition to act as a repository of thought (see also Minkus 1980). In An essay on African philosophical thought Kwame Gyekye (1995) developed his views into a more general argument about Africa.
In this essay, I develop these philosophical observations with empirical findings. My work shares these authors’ sense that there is specificity in African experiences that is not best defined as falling short of a Western one – or lumped together with all non- Western experiences. Indeed, I believe that as we come to understand the specificity of African experiences more deeply, we may come to rethink the presumptions of Western psychological models. In other words, as we come to appreciate the specificity of an Akan model of mind, we will come to appreciate that the standard representation of mental models in academic psychology is, in some ways, also a local and specific model of how thinking, feeling, and acting unfold. Like Wiredu, I observed an emphasis on an action-focused mind; the mind enables one to do. In particular, I observed that Akan narratives about mind represent it as outward-focused and quintessentially pragmatic. This action-orientation role of the mind leads to a sense that minds matter because of the actions – and the patterns of actions – that they produce and thus should be evaluated morally. I also observed an Akan narrative of consciousness that integrally includes the body, and the spiritual components sunsum and ɔkra. Like Gyekye (1996: 36), I observed that self is imagined as very much influenced by other members of one’s social space. I also observed that for the Akan, mind is understood not as localized primarily to headspace, but as somehow more dispersed. It is not imagined as centred on the interior experiences of the individuated self. Rather, mind impacts and is impacted by other members of the social milieu. In addition, the mind is partly bodily focused in architecture and porous to spiritual forces in disposition.
I support these observations by drawing not only on fieldwork data, but also on two independent sources of evidence. These are the rich proverbs that are of such importance to the Akan, and the Akan lexicon. This has the advantage of providing an historical depth to my model that fieldwork does not always provide. This approach to research is known as ‘data triangulation’: the exploration of multiple, different sources of data for
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areas of possible empirical and/or conceptual convergence (Patton 1999). My goal is to develop and test bottom-up, transdisciplinary, culturally appropriate methods through which African perspectives can both engage with mainstream academic discourse and question its ontological assumptions about human nature.
Interviews
I begin with the interviews. My fieldsite was the southern and central parts of Central Region’s Abura-Asebu-Kwamankese (AAK) district in Ghana. This area is predominantly rural. Adjacent to the Cape Coast Municipal District (Central Region’s administrative capital district), it is estimated to have a population of 120,000. The economy of the AAK district focuses largely on agriculture: food crops – maize, cassava, peanuts, tiger nuts (Cyperus esculentus) – for local consumption and retail, and citrus for export. The residents in this area are predominantly Fante. I conducted interviews over a two-month period during the summer of 2017. In this period, I also attended church services, observed shrine consultations, and discussed my observations with John Dulin, who was in the field at the same time. These interviews thus were set within a rich ethnographic context.
The interviews formed part of a larger, multi-country research project about
spiritual experiences and the mind. The Mind and Spirit project is a Templeton-
funded, Stanford-based comparative and interdisciplinary project under the direction
of T.M. Luhrmann (PI), drawing on the expertise of anthropologists, psychologists,
historians, and philosophers. The project asks whether different understandings of
‘mind’, broadly construed, might shape or be related to the ways that people attend
to and interpret experiences they deem spiritual or supernatural. We took a mixed-
method, multi-phase approach, combining participant observation, long-form semi-
structured interviews, quantitative surveys among the general population and local
undergraduates, and psychological experiments with children and adults. We worked
in five different countries: China, Ghana, Thailand, Vanuatu, and the United States, with
some work in the Ecuadorian Amazon. In each country, we included a focus on an urban
charismatic evangelical church, with additional work in a rural charismatic evangelical
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My interview sample consisted of twenty adult charismatic Christians recruited
from two church congregations in the rural study area, and twenty traditional priests
(akɔmfo, bosomfo, and nyisifo), their assistants (ɔbrafo), and priests-in-training serving
as assistants recruited from shrines in villages and small towns. These traditional
priests, described in more detail by Dulin (this volume), are experts who interact with
and are often possessed by the local gods. They often provide local medical care, but
their primary purpose is to ward off malevolent forces for local clients. There were ten
male and ten female participants in each subgroup, ranging in age from 26 to 79. The
traditional priests were understood to interact with the many lower gods and nature
spirits recognized by the traditional religion. Clients came to them for medical help
and for protection against dangerous powers. Some of the priests (and their assistants)
supplemented their income by farming (both men and women) or working in shops
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church, and in another urban and rural religious setting of local importance.
(women only). One woman served as a traditional birth attendant in her community. In contrast, the charismatic Christians worked in a variety of full-time occupations (farming, dressmaking, driving, carpentry, retail, and teaching). Their churches were small compared to the big charismatic Christians churches in the nearby city of Cape
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 77-94 ⃝C Royal Anthropological Institute 2020Coast. The congregations ranged from 70 to 120 adults – typical for these rural village churches.
The relationship between the traditionalists and charismatic Christians was complicated. On the one hand, many pastors actively denounced traditional priests as devil-worshippers and many Christians described them as invoking evil powers. On the other hand, the traditionalists also served as local healers in their communities (as previously mentioned, one priestess served as a traditional birth attendant). Their services were more accessible and cheaper than clinics. Several of the traditionalists acknowledged the tension between the two groups, and expressed resentment at members of their profession being consulted by priests for spiritual help growing their congregations, and then being labelled as villains when the congregations flourished.
The in-depth semi-structured phenomenological interviews ranged in duration from three to ten hours per person (some people had much to say), at a location of the interviewee’s choosing in one to three sessions. The interviews were conducted in Fante (and on a few occasions a mixture of Fante and English as some interviewees naturally switched between languages); audio-recorded with permission from each interviewee; and translated, transcribed, and checked for accuracy by research assistants.
I set out below what seem to me to be the dominant ways these interview participants described the general domain of thinking, believing, desiring, and other mental acts. I am reflecting here on the comments they made about the polysemous term ‘adwen’ (pronounced ah-jwin, emphasis on the second syllable, same word for singular and plural) in the contexts in which it referred to ‘mind’ over the course of these long interviews. (I revisit the meaning of adwen in my discussion of the mind lexicon later in this essay.) Some comments were made in direct response to questions about adwen; some were made in passing. Four themes seemed to emerge again and again.
Theme 1: Planning
All my participants described planning and problem-solving for the future as the fundamental function of adwen. To be clear, planning was not something our interviews intended to explore. We asked explicit questions about whether people should share their thoughts and feelings, whether imagining things that could not come true was good, and so forth. Yet when asked such questions, both male and female participants, whether Christian or traditionalist, spoke about creating plans to achieve specific future goals such as starting or growing a business, building a house, and purchasing land. In short, my interviewees presented the mind as the tool responsible for creating a plan to achieve the specified goal, and did so with such effortlessness that it seemed clear that they were describing a widely held conception.
E.A., a ‘50+’ year female traditionalist, explained:
As for the adwen it is used for so many things. You use your adwen to plan [lit. take mind]. For example, I want to build a house and need money for it. My adwen will help me know what work I need to do to get the money . . . maybe go and sell this thing it will tell me no; go for fish or imported cloth to sell it will tell me yes. And then I can use the little money I get to lay blocks and start building the foundation.
J.L., a 25-year-old male Christian, stated:
[Adwen] is something that God created as part of a person’s life. It is like the light of a car. It is used to light the way. Or it can be like the engine of a car. Once the engine is started, the car can go anywhere you want to go because it controls the car to move anywhere. Let’s assume I want to do something but
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I do not have enough skills and knowledge on it, the adwen will make me know that if I make a prayer request about it, I might have knowledge to do it well. Or that if I go to see a particular person, the person might give me enough information about that. Or that the plan will succeed if I do it this or that way. By thinking, our thoughts can provide us with accurate ways to do those things successfully, just like we expected.
It was clear from these interviews that to my participants, the most salient function of what English-speakers call the ‘mind’ was its utilitarian function. They talked about adwen as a tool. Of course, implicit in this idea of planning are a host of cognitive processes and capabilities: attention; encoding and retrieval of information; short- term and long-term memory; language processing; perception; problem-solving; option comparison; and thinking. However, these capacities were not part of the narratives my participants told. Only when specifically asked follow-up questions like ‘What is the adwen used for in a school setting?’ did they respond with an account of a container for the storage of information, or a processing centre for facts and ideas.
It seemed that my participants did not think about mind as a headspace-bound model of functioning that centres on the cognitive manipulation of abstract representations of the world, nor as the source of identity and selfhood. Instead, when they described the domain of thinking, feeling, and so forth, they focused on an individual’s engagement with this world: his or her intentions, actions, and efficacy.
Here is an example of the way participants highlighted the importance of action- directed thought. K.O, a 54-year-old male traditional priest stated:
The adwen is there, but before you will think, then it means you are doing it for a purpose. Even if you are thinking of evil, then it means that you are going to use the evil thoughts for a purpose. If you are thinking of a good thing, then it means you are going to use it for a purpose. If you always think of something and you are unable to use it for something, then it is not worthwhile. That will make you sick, those things often destroy people, it makes you go mad.
It seemed to me that people spoke of adwen as a tool for planning for the future. This
observation is at odds with theories about African culture (e.g. TRIOS theory: Jones
2003) that describe temporal orientations in Africa as relaxed and contingent. People
in Ghana and other African countries do tend to score lower on Hofstede’s cultural
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dimension of long-term orientation compared to Western nations. Yet, as my Fante participants spoke, it was clear that they thought deeply about the future and described adwen – thinking, feeling, planning – as what takes one into the future, helps one prepare for the future, and provides a blueprint for the future and the future self. The action orientation of adwen appears to be a way to assert – or at least to try to exert – some control over life; not only in the present, but also in the future. It was as if they imagined adwen as a sea captain charting a course and directing the ship’s path through life’s stormy and uncertain seas, rather than (as Charles Taylor [2007] describes, for example) an expression of identity. When my participants spoke of mind-like things, they spoke about how to be effective, not about who they were.
Theme 2: Moral valence
In these conversations, I was also struck by how often my participants spoke of adwen as ‘bad’ or ‘good’. It is unclear to me whether this is because this is the most accessible or most obvious quality of the adwen (as Adams [2005] notes, the concern about enemies is pervasive in Ghana), or whether it is because our study also included a focus on spiritual experiences. For whichever reason, person after person gave accounts of adwen that were either ‘good’ or ‘bad’. (As we shall see, ‘good adwen’ and ‘bad adwen’
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 77-94 ⃝C Royal Anthropological Institute 2020‘are explicit Fante phrases.) The emphasis on a ‘bad adwen’ was particularly evident. J.G., a 28-year-old Christian male construction worker described the perception that bad minds lurk everywhere, even in one’s household:
Your household members can destroy your life. They can even turn you into a drunkard, you can smoke wee [marijuana] or you can even do things which are uncalled for so you should let God protect you against such things.
The notion that the social world inevitably includes individuals with bad intentions towards the self is commonplace in African epistemology. E.E. Evans-Pritchard (1937: 178) famously observed that witchcraft served as a common explanation for misfortune in everyday Azande activities. Hans Werner Debrunner (1961: 6) found an omnipresent fear of harmful witch activity in Ghana’s Akan group, and Malcolm McLeod (1975: 108) reported that patronage of anti-witchcraft shrines was popular in colonial Asante. Many anthropologists note that witchcraft beliefs influence attributions of misfortune and, in some cases, wealth in contemporary African settings, both urban and rural (Comaroff & Comaroff 1993; Geschiere 2013; Parish 2000). Dulin (this volume) addresses the perceived relationship, in an urban Ghanaian setting, between specific food consumption and experiencing spiritual harm. For my participants, the existence of witches was taken for granted regardless of whether or not they had personally encountered one.
The striking feature of this observation that some people (including, but not limited to, witches) have bad adwen was how fixed my participants took this quality to be. They spoke as if good people had good adwen and bad people had bad adwen, as if goodness and badness was a kind of stuff the adwen had rather than a feature of some situation. Wiredu (1995: 131) also comments on the mind-dispositional attribution connection in his Akan model of the mind. The good/bad dichotomy was quite different from the way that people in other settings seemed to understand moral valence. Smith (this volume) observes that for the Ni-Vanuatu, there is a tendency to situate meaning and moral purpose as external to the mind. For them, people’s moral qualities are always shifting, and always striving. No one is ever good enough; most bad people can change. Aulino (this volume) found that in Thailand, people spoke as if the mind were like a kaleidoscope: experience and even perceptions are ever-changing and contingent upon karma, conditioning, and mental components that can be organized in an infinite number of combinations. For my Akan participants, by contrast, what drives behaviour is dichotomous rather than kaleidoscopic: adwen was either good or bad, not both, and was largely assumed to be stable over time.
Theme 3: Porosity
Our team took the term ‘porosity’ from Charles Taylor (1992), who lays out a contrast between modern ‘buffered’ selves – in which there appear to be distinct boundaries between mind and body, self and other, physical and the cosmic – and a way of being in the world that is more fluid. In his account, ‘porous’ selves and minds are associated with a permeability, a bleeding into one another, such that the self and the other, the physical and the cosmic, and the mind and the body cross over into each other and influence each other, often with discernible phenomenological impact.
It seemed clear that to my participants, adwen was porous. For them, some people with bad minds were able to able to directly affect the physical world without physical mediation. They assumed that a witch can poison someone’s food with nothing more
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than the thought of doing so and a look; that they could make someone fall ill, cause barenness and disruption in marriages, and cause businesses to fail by willing it. Witches and wizards can kill, as E.A. explained:
As for a wizard, whatever you do he is a wizard. Whatever you do to him, no matter how you train him, because of the [wizardry] power that he has, he has done so many bad things that if he doesn’t do that for one day, he is unsettled. He can use his own mind to do it [harm someone] . . . He is a wizard and a wizard is scary. Wizardry is scary so he can do it [harm someone with his mind].
E.A.’s representation captures the potency and permanence of this particular type of adwen. Similarly, V.K., a 35-year-old female Christian, stated:
People have different characters in them. There are people who will instantly make known their displeasure when somebody offends them, and after talking about it, forgive the person. But there are others, even when you have apologized to them they would still be angry. It then means that person has a spirit. It is either she is a witch or a certain spirit lives with her that uses her. So you even motivate her to cause more harm the moment you apologize. And so, there are some people when they do something to you, you don’t have to motivate them because as you motivate them, their spirit grows. Maybe you might say something and she can use that to hurt you.
V.K. further explained that the mind of a non-witch has the power to affect the world if the bad-minded individual vocalizes an evil thought. She stated:
If it is something she has in her adwen, and so she says it wherever she goes that she wishes that a bad thing will happen (for example, that Jane dies), there may be spirits hovering around at the time she said that and that spirit can make whatever she said come true. Cursing is not only about the use of water or going to a herbalist to ‘do something’. When somebody offends you and you keep the pain in you, you will see that wherever you go you talk about it . . . Those things can also harm people.
The porous nature of adwen allows not only for minds to act on the world, but also for forces and influences external to the self to seep into and influence (and in some cases take over) the adwen.
Meanwhile, good adwen can serve as vessels, as conduits for the Holy Spirit, which protects the adwen by filling it up so that bad forces cannot enter. For a traditionalist, a good adwen and the body to which it belongs can serve as a vessel for a god. For example, K.O., a 54-year-old male traditional priest, recounted a transformative experience in his youth when he drummed on the state drum (see Yankah 1995 for an overview of the role of the state drummer) to assemble the township without any knowledge or training on how to do so:
The drummer who was supposed to go and play the drum for them [the community] to go was dead, they were not getting anyone to play [drums] . . . The thought that came into my adwen to leave my mother’s home to go and take the drum and play the drum that the community people should come andlet’sgo … Ididn’tknowwhatIwassaying[drumming] … Andwhentheycameitwasme … They thought it was the [professional] drummer that they went to call, when they came it was me! And what is amazing is that I didn’t already know how to play a drum from my childhood.
K.O. attributed this sudden know-how to possession by the god of the state drum:
I was possessed by the god. Nobody took me to learn how to play any drum. Today I teach how to play every drum because the god is a drummer.
Deities are not the only spirit beings capable of controlling the adwen. Individuals can also get possessed by ghosts for brief periods. We saw this when a teenaged boy died unexpectedly in one of our fieldsites (the we here includes myself, John Dulin, and Kara Weisman, contributors to this volume, all of whom were in Ghana at the time). One of
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 77-94 ⃝C Royal Anthropological Institute 2020his relatives was possessed during the funeral activities and communicated a message from the dead boy about the cause of his death.
A further implication of the porous mind is that these minds are vulnerable to bewitchment (in which the adwen is temporarily taken over by a bad mind or spirit) and madness (in which the adwen is broken by a bad mind or spirit). When this happens, people can lose control of their adwen. Over the past decade and a half, this form of spirit-adwen interfacing has become particularly associated across Ghana with a crime called Sakawa. Here, unsuspecting individuals are said to be temporarily controlled by evil forces, which prevent them from engaging with the world normally, and make them susceptible to being duped by criminals: for example, through email scams. In such cases, evil-minded individuals reportedly seek spiritual help (from local deities via shrines) in order to gain the ability to exert the temporary mind control (Oduro- Frimpong 2014). In none of these cases do the victims willingly give up the control of their adwen. A.B. (a 50-year-old female traditionalist) recounted what she perceived as a narrow escape from such individuals as follows:
I went to Accra about two months ago and two ladies tried to take my money. They use a charm to take people’s money. My god told me that these ladies are thieves and I became alert. If my god wasn’t with me, they would have taken all my money.
Dulin (this volume) similarly observes that his participants perceived the mind as vulnerable to invasion by an external spiritual force. He notes that minds are particularly vulnerable to invasion if their associated bodies make contact (through touch, food, or sex) with a person with malicious intent or an item that has been spiritually tainted. Invaded minds lose their role as the driver of action and intention, and the individual’s thoughts and actions are instead controlled by the invader.
As a result, people needed protection for their vulnerable adwen. That was the reason many of them gave for membership in Christian organizations and engaging in spiritual practices. For example, J.G., a 28-year-old male Christian construction worker, stated:
The reason I pray is that as a human being if you do not pray, whatever the enemy will plan against you, he will achieve it. If you pray and you worship God and you do whatever he wants, if the enemies plan something against you, God will not watch for that problem to befall you. He will take it off you. Yes, I pray for protection. God will protect you, he will deliver you at all times. And whatever you will put before him, he will do it for you.
Traditional priests and priestesses agreed. K.O. explained the need for spiritual protection as follows:
When we seek spiritual protection, we do so to prevent spiritual misfortunes. Sickness can happen to anybody, however; the one which is spiritual that can give you problems will go back [to the sender] when it comes to meet that ‘spiritual security’.
Traditionalist interviewees emphasized the importance of being obedient to their gods (by giving sacrifices as required, and observing dietary and other taboos) as a way of ensuring that they fall under deiform protection. Christian interviewees emphasized the importance of church attendance, fasting, private prayer – in particular invoking the blood of Jesus – tithing, and participating in church-organized prayer meetings as a way of ensuring that they were under God’s protection.
K.D. (a male traditionalist who was unclear about his age) gave an idea of the form such protection might take in his account of what happened after he ‘called his gods’ as he was being mugged by a group of people on an isolated road.
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I called upon my gods to come to my aid . . . I used my hand to hit him [one of the assailants], then he fell on the ground and the rest ran away. So I called upon them [the gods] and they truly came to my rescue. The guy fell behaving like a crocodile or like a fish. He was just crawling on the floor like that . . . So I realized truly there is a god.
F.E., a 38-year-old female charismatic Christian, gave an account of God’s protection taking public transportation out of town thus:
I was the one who stopped [the] vehicle, but after stopping it something told me, ‘Don’t go’ . . . so even the mate [conductor] got angry a little but I told him that I had forgotten something so I wouldn’t go . . . [I took another vehicle, and we passed the first. It had been in an accident] and there were people who were injured inside it! So I told the mate of the [vehicle] I was sitting in . . . And he said it means God loves you, God loves you.
The implication is clear: a good adwen by itself is not sufficient to provide complete protection against misfortune. It neither eliminates feelings such as envy and jealousy from the minds of others, nor thwarts other dangerous motivations from others.
Theme 4: Body
I was struck by how physical spiritual and supernatural experiences were for my participants. These experiences were in some sense presented as ‘mental’. God entered the adwen or spoke to their mind. Yet the account of that event was often quite body- centred. Here a traditionalist, K.O., explains possession:
It enters from your heart into your adwen. Before I had this calling, I did not know that was what was going to happen. So sometimes I got startled, when it happened like that then I would feel dizzy. So it is from your soul, sometimes when the spirit is like that you will realize that the person will be shaking. The shaking comes from his soul to his feet, it does not start from his feet to his head. That is how it is in life. The spirit gets to your adwen through your soul then passes through the body to [get to] the adwen.
Charismatic Christians everywhere describe people who can experience prophecy, when the spirit of God temporarily controls the mind in order to convey a message to an audience or an individual. They can be overcome by a song, or fall to the ground in an experience known as being ‘slain in the spirit’ (see Brahinsky, this volume). These more bodily expressions of worship were strongly embraced by my Christian participants, and seemingly less so in some other settings (Thailand [Aulino, this volume]; urban China [Ng, this volume]; and in ambivalent, comparable ways in the United States [Brahinsky, this volume]). K.B., a 30-year-old female teacher, illustrated her corporeal spiritual experience as follows:
Last week, . . . Pastor asked us to pray about our destiny. What I saw was that all of a sudden I was down rolling on the floor. I felt that was the Spirit of God. [This kind of thing] happens anytime God wants to deliver me.
Here the phenomenology described by the Christians and traditionalists differed somewhat. Traditionalists regularly experienced possession experiences. In these, their gods took over their entire bodies to engage in particular motions (e.g. dancing, walking). The Christian whole-body experiences, on the other hand, tended to involve falling and motionlessness. Both groups of participants reported a variety of physical sensations such as feeling hot and trembling during encounters with the supernatural.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 77-94 ⃝C Royal Anthropological Institute 2020The Fante lexicon for ‘mind’
While in the field, I set out to create a Fante lexicon of the mind to see if the themes I saw emerging in the interviews would occur within it. Fante is an Akan language that has a significant degree of overlap with Ashanti Twi (the latter is the language on which the limited published work on mind from Ghana is based). Similar to Ashanti Twi (the most widely spoken Akan language), the same word (adwen in Fante, adwene in Twi) is used as a linguistic label for mind, thought, idea, and opinion. The specific referent word is determined in use via the accompanying linguistic context.
In consultation with bilingual research assistants, cultural linguistic experts (individuals fluent in Fante with a minimum of forty years of Fante as one of their primary languages, and able to discuss and explain Fante language nuances and patterns), and some interviewees, I generated a list of all Fante mind-related words and expressions, and their literal and non-literal meanings. This was an iterative process, starting prior to the interviews, and continuing after the study’s main interviews were complete. I found evidence that the themes that seemed to emerge from the interviews were also present in the lexicon.
Theme 1: Planning
The verbs ‘to think’ and ‘to worry’ are derivatives of adwen: dwen and adwendwen, respectively. In Fante, an individual can be asked to dwen ho (think about something specific), fa adwen (literally take mind; decide), kyerɛ w’adwen (literally show your mind; show what’s in your mind, voice an opinion), si w’adwen piw (make up your mind firmly), and sor w’adwen hwɛ (test your mind and see/turn on [focus] your mind). These expressions suggest that adwen is indeed understood as the engagement of one’s mental faculties in a specific manner for a specific purpose.
Theme 2: Moral valence
An individual is often said to have either a good mind (adwen pa) or a bad mind (adwen bon). Even though the Fante label adwen also captures thoughts, ideas, or opinions (depending on context), these phrases specifically refer to general mental faculties. Thoughts, ideas, and opinions can be also be bad. However, it is the badness of the mind as a whole – rather than bad thoughts, ideas, or opinions – that features prominently in linguistic expressions within the lexicon. Moreover, the lexicon also suggests that goodness or badness of the mind appears to be considered a constant, or at least long-lasting, quality of the mind and its products. A bad mind is behind a bad person, one who deliberately seeks in some way the downfall of others. Proverbs such as ‘If a head is bad, when you cut it off and put it in the shade, it jumps into the sunshine’ (i.e. if someone is determined to misbehave, they will do so at all times) speak to the inevitability of bad minds engaging in bad behaviour. I discuss proverbs in more detail below.
Theme 3: Porosity
In the Fante mind lexicon, references to the mind’s vulnerability to external forces and influences are present and represented by metaphors of spoilage and control. One such referent is the broken/spoilt mind ‘adwen asɛi’. This communicates the existence of a level of functionality that the broken mind, owing to its sɛi (broken-ness), is unable to achieve. Also functioning as an insult, the notion of a mind that is broken conveys an understanding that something has been done to the mind. In other words, in contrast
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to planning, where the mind is the agent, broken functionality is not a result of the agency of the mind. It is neither something that the mind does to itself, nor is it viewed as the result of decay. The responsible agent is an external influence.
A second expression conveys a similar sentiment: afa n’adwen (‘It has taken his/her mind’). While the cultural narrative includes chemical agents (e.g. marijuana), the spirit world can ‘take’ the mind. The phrase implies that people lose long-term control of their minds because of a spiritually mediated punishment or curse. The phrase is also used for mental illness. For this reason, people with psychotic symptoms, and even diagnoses of schizophrenia, seek out spiritual help as a pathway to healing (see, e.g., Opare-Henaku & Utsey 2017; Read 2012).
Theme 4: Body
While many words for mind-related actions include the Fante mind root word (adwen), not all do. For example, the words for remember (kae), wisdom (nyansa), and knowledge (nyimdzi) do not include the adwen stem. Some of these words which do not use the adwen stem appear to be lexically located in and associated with the body. For instance, self/impulse control (ahohyedo; literally self/body control/suppress) contains a stem (ho) which can include the physical body. In contrast, the Fante word for forgetfulness, awerɛfir, does not include a reference to the body (a denotes noun status; werɛ = soul – or soul mouthpiece/linguist, according to an okomfo interviewee; and the meaning of fir is unclear, possibly a derivative of firi, to leave). However, a variant expression of forgetfulness – ne werɛfir no ho – involves both the soul and the self/body. In other words, some words that English-speakers associate with the mind are also associated with the body in Fante.
Words used for emotions and general subjective well-being are also linguistically associated with the general human body (e.g. ahowoyaw, self/body/skin pain [envy]) and its specific parts (e.g. the stomach in ayemhyehye [literally stomach-burn; anxiety]). As such, the Fante representation of mind includes more than the word does in a Euro- American setting. It is not restricted to headspace (itsir boↄba), but rather is distributed across many aspects of the person. Kofi Agyekum (2016) noted a similar pattern in Twi: in the most widely spoken Akan language, he observes that expressions involving the body (ho) are pervasive and used as metaphors for emotions and character traits.
Proverbs about the mind
I now want to extend these linguistic reflections by examining proverbs, which many Africanist scholars and philosophers describe as a long-standing cultural practice that captures cultural values (Brookman-Amissah 1986; Gyekye 1995; 1996). John Mbiti (1969) describes them as storing the oldest forms of African and religious philosophical insights. Using a compendium of 7,015 Akan proverbs compiled by Peggy Appiah, Kwame Anthony Appiah, and Ivor Agyeman-Duah over two generations (2007), which is to date the largest published collection of Ghanaian proverbs (twice as long as its 1879 predecessor by Johann Gottlieb Christaller), I explored themes relevant to adwen. I also asked interviewees to nominate proverbs they knew concerning the mind, but owing to the exhaustiveness of the compendium (which was collected over decades, and thus much longer than the fieldwork period), they did not come up with any that were additional. While the proverbs in the compendium were in Ashanti Twi, not in Fante, which was used for the interviews and the generated lexicon, the themes noted in the interviews and lexicon were present in the proverbs, suggesting that the observations
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 77-94 ⃝C Royal Anthropological Institute 2020were common across the two Akan dialects. Two bilingual (Fante and English) research assistants went through the proverb compendium and identified proverbs that met at least one of the following inclusion criteria:
i. Theproverbmadedirectreferencetomind(adwene):e.g.‘Themindislikepalmoil; when it lies still, we heat it up’.
ii. Theproverbmadeanindirectreferencetomind:e.g.byreferencingmentalactivity and qualities such as wisdom (nyansa), thought (dwen), or worry (adwendwen). For instance, the proverb ‘Poverty makes the poor man sell his wisdom to the rich man’ refers to wisdom, and not directly to the mind.
iii. The manifest meaning of the proverb (provided by the compendium authors in English) was related to mind, mental qualities, or mental activity. For example, a proverb which translates into English as ‘Whether it is to him who buys on credit or to him who pays on the spot, the owner says he will no longer sell’ is ‘used when someone has decided not to do something and no amount of persuasion will change their mind (manifest meaning)’. Since the manifest meaning contains mind, it is included in the list.
This approach resulted in a set of 268 proverbs which either directly or implicitly
referred to the mind or mental activity. Of these, 144 addressed wisdom, 47 mentioned thought, and 15 contained mind. Other cognitive themes included judgement (11), intelligence (7), and concentration (3). In addition, given the divergence observed in the interviews between Fante representations of mind and the representation familiar to me from my psychological training in the United States, I explored themes of interiority by revisiting a subset of proverbs containing emotion themes (discussed in detail in Dzokoto et al. 2018). While there is certainly much more to say about this collection, and linguists might find this analytic approach dissatisfyingly elementary, here I merely wish to report that the themes identified above were also expressed in proverbs.
Theme 1: Planning
Thirteen proverbs included messages about the need for planning to precede successful action. ‘The hornblowers say: if you prepare before action, you succeed’ (i.e. if you plan before you act, you are more likely to succeed) addresses this theme directly. In contrast, ‘One does not smoke the whole carcass over the fire’ (i.e. you must consider in depth before coming to a decision) does so using food preparation imagery. Another proverb drawing on food preparation imagery is ‘Chew, chew, chew, fufu mathematics, we work it in the mortar’ (i.e. every activity has its own area of planning).
Theme 2: Moral valence
Akan mind-referencing proverbs tend to present dichotomies: child versus adult, foolish versus wise, dull versus active, broken versus in working order, unfocused versus focused, and, as found in the interviews, bad mind versus good mind (in each case the second component is preferred). In general, these dichotomies do not include an in-between, grey area.
The existence of good and bad minds and the need to be wary of the latter can be seen in eight proverbs, including: ‘It may happen one day that a bad man is rare’ (i.e. don’t indulge in wishful thinking in the present even if you think that things will be better in the future). Proverbs such as these suggest a world-view in which bad minds
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are an inevitable part of the social world. The valuing of good thoughts and the negative consequences of bad thoughts are captured by proverbs such as ‘If you think good thoughts, you will achieve good things. If you think bad thoughts, then evil entangles you’. Good thoughts may also have some intrinsic protective power, as the following proverb suggests: ‘If your thoughts are pure [lit. what is in your head is white], the Ntuamoa does not kill you’ (i.e. the powerful fetish priest protects the virtuous).
Theme 3: Porosity
Some Akan proverbs refer to supernatural influences active in the social world, and associated vulnerabilities of the mind. Mensah Adinkrah (2015: 159) reviewed thirty- four Akan proverbs that explicitly mentioned a witch or witchcraft. I found five mind- focused proverbs referring to porosity. ‘Possession amounts to explanation’ (i.e. what has been said enables one to have insight into the situation) refers to the possession of the minds of traditionalists by local deities. Spirit possession often features in divination and (according to the traditionalists interviewed for this project) can result in the provision or generation of explanations of misfortune, solutions to problems, and cures for diseases. ‘We don’t use our mouth to drive away witchcraft’ (i.e. you must use adequate means to ward off danger; mere talking is not enough) refers to the powerful nature of a particular group of people with dangerous supernatural powers, and the seriousness with which this potential threat to well-being should be addressed.
Theme 4: Body
Some proverbs used the body and its parts as metaphors to communicate maxims related to the mind. For example, the body is used to illustrate the actions of a foolish mind in proverbs such as ‘If a stupid person is developing a swollen body, he says he is going to be fat’ (i.e. a fool cannot recognize the truth). Nineteen mind proverbs mentioned the head, seven the mouth, four the nose, and one each referred to the hands, foot, and ear. Take, for example, the proverb: ‘It is the hare that has ears, let us call him so that he can explain things to us’ (i.e. if you are doubtful about something, call on the elders to explain it, for after all they have spent so much time listening to wisdom). It communicates that wisdom enters the mind through the ears and the act of listening. In other work (e.g. Dzokoto et al. 2018), I have examined emotion-focused proverbs. Some of these, such as ‘The skin splits where it is softest’ (i.e. everything or every society has its vulnerable point), use body referents to communicate emotion themes (in this case, emotional vulnerability). While these do not locate the mind in the body, proverbs such as these use the body as a means to describe the mind and associated internal experiences.
Different ways of feeling
These observations resonate with my earlier work on affect in contemporary Ghana. I have previously argued, in a similar vein to Csordas’s work on culturally shaped somatic modes of attention (1993), that in West African settings, including those in which the Akan live and work, people report experiencing and engaging in the world in more somatic and contextual ways than is typical of North American settings. One might think that this may be nothing more than a function of language. More Fante emotion words contain body parts in their literal translations than English ones do (Dzokoto & Okazaki 2006). However, the somatic focus (in comparison to an interiority focus) emerged again and again in my studies, even when the participants were
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 77-94 ⃝C Royal Anthropological Institute 2020English-speakers and completed the tasks in English. For example, in one study undergraduates in Accra and in the midwestern United States filled out questionnaires which asked them about the attention they paid to their emotions and somatic experiences. The Americans scored more highly on the emotion questions, and the Ghanaians more highly on the body ones (Dzokoto 2010). In another study, Americans used more emotion words to describe important events than did Ghanaians (Dzokoto, Opare-Henaku & Kpobi 2013). In another study, this one about Ga and Ewe emotion lexica (two southern Ghanaian languages), we found a focus on body and social context (Dzokoto, Senft, Kpobi & Washington-Nortey 2016). This work is consistent with that of anthropologists and linguists (Agykeum 2016; Ameka 2002; Ansah 2013; Geurts 2009) who see in Ghana a pattern of selective awareness away from ‘headspace’ and towards somatic and social contexts in a variety of settings. This position argues neither that cognition is unimportant, nor that abstract thought has no place. Instead, it makes the case that elaborations of ‘headspace’ are not salient in Akan and other West African settings.
Conclusion
I do not mean to imply that all Akans (past, present, and future) necessarily agree with this model of mind. Neither do I mean to imply that this account of a local theory about the mind is exhaustive. Indeed, this study is informed by Fante and Asante Twi, only two of the nine (or sixteen, depending on which linguistic grouping one observes) Akan languages in existence. However, like Wiredu and Gyekye, I do think that my observations capture the important dimensions of the local theory of mind. I argue here that the Akan cultural context fosters a representation of mental action – thinking, feeling, believing, etc. – that has minimal focus on the inner ‘psychological’ self, and an elaborated focus on other aspects of the self (such as the body) and the social milieu within which the self is located. This is not to say that inward-focused cognition is irrelevant to, absent from, or completely unimportant in the Akan. (There is published work on Akan knowing [Harvey 2015], Akan truth [Wiredu 2004], Akan rationality [Majeed 2013], and Akan conceptual schemes [Gyekye 1995].) I simply suggest that the relative salience of non-headspace components of mind, such as the body, and other aspects of the self may markedly overshadow interiority.
This matters because the local theory of mind I see at work in Akan culture helps to explain behaviours which seem so puzzling to Western observers, who may assume that Charles Taylor’s notion of the modern, firmly bounded mind is not a folk theory but simply a true description of human minds. The porosity of adwen helps explain why witchcraft beliefs are taken seriously, and why interpersonal interactions and spiritual practices are so central to Akan identity. Adwen’s moral valence helps to explain why Akan identity may be based not on what one thinks one is, but on what one does. Because adwen extends beyond headspace, perhaps belief/meaning-making/knowing may not be contingent only on thought, but also include the body. It may be that Taylor’s model of the ‘modern’ mind – where thought is private and supernaturally inert, where individuals feel the need to say what is in their mind because what they think makes them who they are – makes more sense in a pluralistic, predictable world. The Akan model of mind, with its de-emphasis on privacy and interiority and its sharp awareness of dangerous others, may make more sense in an unpredictable environment and a face-to-face society.
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This representational emphasis may help to explain the markedly vivid spiritual experiences described by my interviewees. As Dulin (this volume) illustrates, and as was the experience for many of my interviewees, even when these intrusions did not completely take over the mind, they could be very forceful, taking the form of repeated and often very specific naggings, promptings, or thoughts that experiencers described as impossible to ignore. Experiences of the spiritual/supernatural were strikingly sensory and body-centred. It may indeed be that, as Luhrmann’s work suggests (2011 and this volume), people’s enculturated models of mind may shape the way they perceive, interpret, and respond to their physical worlds, and what they take to be evidence of invisible others. These differences in attention may alter what they ‘deem’ spiritual (Taves 2009).
I conclude with my participant K.O.’s words:
The human body is empty, and then the spirit enters it and gives life to the heart and the head . . . It is like a starter, traffic indicator and a gear. They have their independent functions to play. The starter is the soul, the traffic indicator is the heart and the gear is your mind. That is what changes and controls everything – the eye, ear, nose and mouth. The mind controls it. The starter sends signals to the traffic indicator then the traffic indicator pumps the gears to control everything. That is their difference, they all have their functions to play.
NOTES
I am very grateful to Tanya Luhrmann, the anonymous reviewers, and the Editor of the JRAI for their detailed feedback on drafts. I would also like to thank Chioke I’Anson for feedback on an earlier draft of this essay. Many thanks to the entire Mind and Spirit research team, project advisors, and project manager (Nicole Ross-Zehnder). A big thank you to Joseph Ansah, Eunice Otoo, The Great Mossi, Jojo Lewis, Mohammed Bosu, Nana Ansua Peterson, and Comfort Turkson for recruitment assistance, logistical support, and research assistance during the fieldwork period. Finally, I am grateful to my interlocutors for their openness and patience.
1 This paragraph is based on a description drafted collectively by the Mind and Spirit team and used to illustrate the joint nature of the research
2 For more information about traditionalists, see Dulin’s account in this volume.
3 See the Hofstede Insights Database (https://www.hofstede-insights.com/product/compare-countries/).
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Adwenhoasem : une the ́orie de l’esprit chez les Akans
R ́esum ́e
Le pre ́sent essai explore la manie`re dont ce que les anglophones appellent mind (traduit par esprit : croyance, pense ́e, sentiments et autres actes mentaux) est repre ́sente ́ et situe ́ par les membres du groupe ethnolinguistique akan du Ghana. Il s’appuie sur plusieurs sources de donne ́es : les mots de l’esprit et apparente ́s en fante, une langue du groupe akan, le plus grand recueil de proverbes akan (en twi), de longs entretiens semi-structure ́s avec quarante adultes, chre ́tiens et praticiens de la religion traditionnelle, et une courte enqueˆte ethnographique mene ́e par un universitaire ghane ́en. Ce travail identifie quatre dimensions de ce que l’on pourrait appeler une the ́orie akan de l’esprit, qui semble modele ́e par la langue et la culture locales. Pour commencer, la fonction centrale de l’esprit est la planification, et non l’identite ́. Deuxie`mement, l’une des qualite ́s saillantes de l’esprit est sa valence morale : le « mauvais esprit » d’autrui est une menace potentielle qui plane sur l’harmonie sociale et le bien-eˆtre personnel. Troisie`mement, l’esprit est conc ̧u comme poreux par nature. Les esprits de tous sont vulne ́rables aux influences surnaturelles et certaines personnes posse ́dant un esprit puissant peuvent exercer un pouvoir surnaturel par leur action mentale. Quatrie`mement, certains e ́le ́ments que les anglophones incluent dans la notion de mind (comme les sentiments) sont plutoˆt situe ́es dans le corps.
Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute (N.S.), 77-94 ⃝C Royal Anthropological Institute 2020
