In Cultural Anthropology 2024, we read Laura Bohannan’s “Shakespeare in the Bush” (1966) not as a settled classic but as a document to interrogate — asking how anthropological representation can silence the very voices it claims to amplify. Paired with Yarimar Bonilla’s critical intervention from Non-Sovereign Futures (2015), the lecture is anchored in Kenneth Guest’s Essentials of Cultural Anthropology (4th ed.) and links up to the full concept treatment at Teaching Shakespeare in the Bush, part of the Cross-Cultural Understanding hub. This lecture belongs to the Cultural Anthropology course.
Key Concepts: Anthropological Representation
- Anthropological representation can silence informants. Bohannan deploys the Tiv elders as evidence for an argument about cultural difference rather than as sources of insight in their own right (Bonilla 2015, xv).
- “Talking to” versus “thinking with.” Bonilla’s alternative is to treat interlocutors as intellectual partners rather than extracting data from them to settle debates elsewhere.
- A concept is not a word. The Tiv reaction to Hamlet’s ghost is not a missing vocabulary item but a different conceptual world about what happens after death — the same point holds for madness and for what water can and cannot do.
- The levirate makes Hamlet incoherent. A widow marrying her late husband’s brother is, for the Tiv, the right thing to do — so Hamlet’s outrage at his mother’s remarriage reads as bizarre rather than tragic.
- Revenge belongs to the age-mates, not the son. A son avenging his father is absurd in Tiv terms; peers and elders adjudicate a wrong, so the play’s central dilemma dissolves.
- Mutual ethnocentrism. Bohannan opens believing human nature is the same everywhere; the elders end by saying the same thing back to her — and promising to instruct her in the story’s “true meaning.”
- The story can be read against Bohannan’s own thesis. The shared appetite for storytelling, meaning-making, and debate can be taken as evidence of commonality rather than of the deep difference she wants to demonstrate.
- Teaching a classic critically is an ethical question. After twenty-plus years of assigning the article, the question is not whether to teach it but how — attending to consent, representation, and the risk that students conclude the Tiv are simply wrong.
📖 Book: Essentials of Cultural Anthropology (Commissions earned)
Why This Article Is Still Assigned — and Why That’s a Problem
“Shakespeare in the Bush” may be the second most widely read piece an anthropologist has ever produced, behind only Body Ritual Among the Nacirema. It has been anthologized endlessly and translated into other languages, including Spanish. Part of its classroom appeal was timing: a generation of American students read Hamlet in their senior year of high school and then met Bohannan’s retelling in a first-year anthropology course, close enough that the collision landed. It shows a large cultural difference quickly, without requiring students to read a whole ethnography first — which is exactly what makes it such an efficient teaching tool, and exactly what makes its shortcuts worth examining.
A small aside worth keeping: students consistently refer to the author as “he.” The article is by Laura Bohannan, a woman writing in the mid-1960s. That reflex is worth noticing, given that the most widely read early anthropologists — Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa, 1928), Ruth Benedict (Patterns of Culture, 1934), and Bohannan herself — were women, at a moment when few other disciplines were reading women’s work at all.
The Universal and the Particular
Bohannan sets out believing Shakespeare is universal — that the meaning of Hamlet will hold everywhere, with only minor changes of local detail. She frames this as an anthropological conviction: “Human nature is pretty much the same the whole world over.” Before she ever reaches the Tiv, an English colleague pushes back, warning that “Shakespeare was a very English poet, and one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular” (1). The rest of the story tests those two positions against each other in the field.
The famous breakdowns follow. The opening ghost stalls immediately — and the point is not that the Tiv lack a word for ghost but that, where Bohannan is working, they hold no concept of an individual returning after death as a personality; the apparition must therefore be witchcraft or something else. Hamlet’s fury at his mother’s swift remarriage misfires because a widow marrying her late husband’s brother — the levirate — is the correct thing to do. And Hamlet’s drive to avenge his father is not tragic but absurd: revenge is the business of age-mates and elders, not sons. Point by point, the play’s engine disassembles.
The turn comes when the elders hand Bohannan’s own thesis back to her. They accept that customs, clothes, and weapons differ from place to place, but insist that “people are the same everywhere” — precisely her opening claim — and offer to instruct her in the story’s “true meaning” so she can carry the correct interpretation home. Her demonstration of deep cultural difference gets absorbed into their confident universalism.
Yarimar Bonilla’s Intervention
For the first time in assigning this article, the 2024 class read it alongside Yarimar Bonilla, whose Non-Sovereign Futures reframes what Bohannan is actually doing with her interlocutors:
The way Bohannan deploys the voices of her informants is not as sources of insight, but as evidence both of and for her argument regarding cultural difference. If anything, her informants are presented as un-insightful. As one commentator notes, it is the Tiv’s unabashed certainty that their reading of Hamlet is the better one, the only possible one, which lends the story its “charm.” Bohannan’s piece is beloved because it fits well with one of the stories anthropology most likes to tell itself about itself: that the discipline can help make the familiar strange and the strange familiar. It does so, however, by ultimately placing Bohannan’s informants on the losing end of a debate to which they were never privy. (xv)
Bonilla’s alternative is a shift from “talking to” people — extracting knowledge to use as evidence elsewhere — toward sitting down and “thinking with” them as intellectual partners. Read this way, the Tiv elders are not just data confirming that cultures differ. Their interpretation offers wisdom about kinship, authority, and revenge that Western readers might actually learn from. But in the article’s afterlife, the elders’ ideas were carried off to a debate about human nature and cultural relativism that they never joined; for fifty or sixty years they have been read about without ever entering the conversation as participants. Bonilla, writing from Puerto Rico — a place long portrayed as charming and small — may be positioned to feel that displacement more sharply than most.
There is a blunt pedagogical edge here too. Assigning the article for two decades meant pulling the Tiv into an argument without anything like informed consent, and some students have historically come away thinking the elders are simply foolish — which is why this lecturer had earlier stopped assigning it. That reaction is not a minor “microaggression”; it is the representational harm Bonilla names. The honest arc of the class is a reversal: beginning ready to defend Bohannan and ending much closer to Bonilla.
Discussion Questions
Why has this article been so popular? What makes it effective for teaching cultural relativism, and what makes it problematic? How does Bohannan use the Tiv elders’ interpretations — are they partners in analysis or evidence for her argument? Did you notice yourself assuming the author was a man, and why might that matter? And, having read Bonilla: should the article still be taught, and if so, how?
Frequently Asked Questions
What is “Shakespeare in the Bush” about?
Laura Bohannan’s 1966 article recounts her attempt to tell the story of Hamlet to Tiv elders in West Africa. Convinced that Shakespeare is universal, she instead finds the elders reinterpreting the plot through their own understanding of ghosts, marriage, and revenge — turning the play into an argument for their view of the world rather than hers.
What is Yarimar Bonilla’s critique of Bohannan?
In Non-Sovereign Futures (2015), Bonilla argues that Bohannan uses the Tiv elders as evidence for a predetermined argument about cultural difference rather than as sources of insight, placing them “on the losing end of a debate to which they were never privy” (xv). Her alternative is for anthropologists to think with people rather than merely talk to them.
Why can’t the Tiv understand Hamlet’s ghost?
The obstacle is conceptual, not linguistic. Where Bohannan worked, the Tiv did not hold the idea of a dead individual returning as a personality, so the apparition had to be explained as witchcraft or something similar. Having a word is not the same as having the concept behind it — the same gap shapes their reading of madness and of what water can do.
Why do the Tiv approve of Hamlet’s mother remarrying?
For the Tiv, a widow marrying her late husband’s brother — the levirate — keeps the family and its inheritance intact and is the proper thing to do. Hamlet’s outrage, central to Shakespeare’s plot, therefore reads to the elders as misguided rather than tragic.
Should “Shakespeare in the Bush” still be taught?
The lecture’s answer is that the question is how, not whether. Taught uncritically, the article can leave students thinking the Tiv are foolish — the exact representational harm Bonilla identifies. Taught alongside that critique, it becomes a case study in anthropological representation and the ethics of using other people’s voices.
Course Navigation
This Cultural Anthropology lecture on anthropological representation uses Kenneth Guest’s Essentials of Cultural Anthropology (4th ed.) alongside Bohannan’s article. (Commissions earned) Following The Mintz Fieldwork Catechism, the course continues with Language and Power. For the full concept treatment — additional video lectures, the Geertz-on-Herskovits debate about moral universals, and further critical readings — see the concept canonical, Teaching Shakespeare in the Bush.