The WAU 2025 Congress (Antigua, Guatemala) webpage and call for panels are now open - Please visit waucongress2025.org for more info.

WORLD ANTHROPOLOGICAL UNION

CONGRESS 2024​

Paper

Unearthing Kinship and Kingship Ties among the Ikodi Community of Egene: From Orality to Audio Recordings

presenters

    Umefien Dakoru Epepe

    Nationality: Nigeria

    Residence: Nigeria

    National Institute for Nigerian Languages

    Presence:Face to Face/ On Site

Orality refers to the way people think and speak in communities where the majority of people are not familiar with literacy tools, particularly writing and print. The study of oral tradition and orality are closely related fields. The Ikodi community in Egene has relied on oral tradition for generations, much like other regions of Africa, to communicate and pass down artefacts, ideofacts, socio-facts, mentifacts, and other indigenous knowledge systems from one generation to the next. Orality is a durable and trustworthy primary source of information for ethnographic research; however, it is only accessible when the source is still living and reliable to the extent that memory recalls. Additionally, a decrease in the human repertoire of ethnographic knowledge has been noted in several indigenous communities, including Ikodi-Egene. There has become a need to embrace other more permanent albeit, secondary sources of data to elicit data for the present and posterity. The paper explores the potentialities of audio recordings in unearthing kinship and kingship ties among the Ikodi of Egene. The paper argues that while writing and print are major means of moving beyond orality, other secondary sources like audio recordings are also important, yet an under-utilized approach to documenting and preserving indigenous knowledge. To date, no study has been undertaken to document aspects of kinship and kingship ties via transcription of audio recordings of sages among the Ikodi of Egene. Therefore, this study aims to advance our understanding of this field of anthropological sciences. The objective includes transcribing available relevant audio recordings to enhance their permanence value. Once more, the study would be useful in the real world as a guide for navigating the kinship and kingship conundrum in the community. These considerations formed the basis of this paper. In light of the secondary ethnographic data gathered for the study, conclusions and suggestions will be made.

Keywords:

Audio Recordings; Ethnography; Egene; Ikodi; Orality