African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 305
Legon’s School of the Performing Arts has also contributed to the world of music, dance,
and drama through educating students in the Ghanaian artistic tradition since 1943.
JENNIFER JOYCE
GIKUYU
See Birth and Death Rituals among the Gikuyu
GOSSIP AND RUMOR
As “discreet indiscretion” (Bergmann 1993), gossip is a moral discourse about the
behavior, social situation, and character of absent others; it is talk about someone with
someone else. Gossip is a “form of sociable interaction which depends upon the strategic
management of information through the creation of others as ‘moral characters’ in talk”
(Yerkovich 1977). As a speech act, gossip allows people the possibility to express their
community’s values and beliefs on ideal, proper, and moral behavior and also, with
considerable force and intention, to influence proper behavior without risking direct
confrontation. Thus, as scandal, gossip functions as a system that asserts collective norms
as well as creating and maintaining strong, communal bonds because the process of
gossiping creates and strengthens social ties of intimacy (see Gluckman 1963). For an
individual, knowing the latest gossip increases their status, reputation, and social standing
within a social network since they claim special access to knowledge and the privilege to
speak it. Groups and individuals can use gossip as a political strategy to advance their
own interests and also to persuade others. Therefore, as text and as a social activity, there
are three relationships at play when people gossip: between the gossips and the subject of
the gossip, between the gossips and their community; and the personal relationship
between the gossips.
Rasmussen’s (1991) study of gossip among the Tuareg of Niger points to the
important role of gossip in conflict management. Gossip allows for the expression of
familial, social, and political discord indirectly and euphemistically. For the Tuareg,
gossip articulates alternative and contradictory interpretations of social experience and
social ties. The different viewpoints expressed in gossip provides an effective discourse
between individual strategy and collective rules (Rasmussen 1991).
Like gossip, rumor allows people to speak to power indirectly and anonymously.
Rumor is an expression of belief that arises in ambiguous situations where there is little
or no reliable information on events that are important to a community. Sociologist
Tamotsu Shibutani (1966, 32) argues that rumors are “the cooperative improvisation of
interpretations.” He further proposes that rumor is “a recurrent form of communication
though which [people] caught together in an ambiguous situation attempt to construct a