Shakespeare in the Bush LAURA BOHANNAN Summary This article illustrates the concept of naive - FinalQuiz

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Shakespeare in the Bush
LAURA BOHANNAN
Summary This article illustrates the concept of naive realism, the idea that members of one group believe that everyone else sees the world they way they do, and shows how this belief leads to cross-cultural misunderstanding. Convinced that people everywhere can understand the basic theme of Shakespeare's Hamlet, Bohannan tries to tell the story to Tiv elders during fieldwork in West Africa. From the beginning, she finds that the Tiv translate the story into their own cultural categories. Because the Tiv have no category for spirits of the dead who can talk, they believe Hamlet's father's ghost must really be an omen sent by a witch, or a zombie. And for the Tiv, instead of committing an impropriety, Hamlet's mother did well to marry her dead husband's brother within a month of her spouse's death. The Tiv employ the custom of levirate on such occasions, so it is expected for a woman to marry her dead husband's brother. The Tiv think Polonius should be pleased that Hamlet is attracted to his daughter Ophelia. If they cannot marry, she can at least become his mistress, and sons of chiefs give large gifts to the fathers of their mistresses among the Tiv. At each turn in the story, the Tiv view events as they would in their own society, identifying facts according to their own cultural map and reinterpreting motives. The result is a very different Hamlet than Shakespeare wrote, and an excellent example of how culture defines a people's social world.
The Tiv example demonstrates that naive realism is a human condition that occurs when people hold mistaken ideas about their own nature of their social and natural environment.

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