Laura Bohannan’s “Shakespeare in the Bush” has been in many anthropology readers and is also available from Natural History as a free “pick from the past.”
“Shakespeare in the Bush” is one of the most anthologized anthropology articles of all time, vying with Horace Miner’s Body Ritual among the Nacirema. As an extremely versatile article, I have used it throughout my Introduction to Anthropology courses to explore fieldwork, cultural interpretation, and the limits of universal meaning. However, after 20+ years of teaching this article, I now approach it critically as a document that reveals as much about anthropology’s colonial legacies as it does about cultural difference.
Current Critical Perspective: Cultural Anthro 2024
My most recent teaching of this article incorporates Yarimar Bonilla’s important critique about anthropological representation and the ethics of how we use others’ voices:
The Journey: From Traditional to Critical Readings
These earlier lectures show how my approach to this material has evolved over time:
2022: Questioning Universal Human Nature Interrogating whether any human experiences can truly be called universal, incorporating critical perspectives.
2021: Traditional Cultural Relativism Exploring the classic reading of deep cultural differences through the Tiv’s interpretation of Hamlet.
2020: Introduction for New Students A gentle entry point exploring the main themes.
Key Concepts from “Shakespeare in the Bush”
“Shakespeare in the Bush” introduces fundamental anthropological concepts through a deceptively simple story about storytelling. The traditional reading emphasizes:
- Cultural interpretation shapes meaning – The Tiv elders’ reading of Hamlet isn’t “wrong,” but reflects different cultural logic about kinship, authority, and the supernatural
- Fieldwork challenges assumptions – Even trained anthropologists discover their cultural biases through encounter
- Translation involves more than language – Concepts like “ghost” or “madness” don’t map neatly across cultural boundaries
- Elders’ authority in interpretation – The Tiv insist that elders know best, challenging Western notions of individual textual interpretation
- Kinship complications – What seems like straightforward family drama to Shakespeare becomes a complex web of proper and improper relationships
The Critical Turn: Power and Representation
Yarimar Bonilla’s Intervention (2015)
“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… 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.”
—Yarimar Bonilla, Non-Sovereign Futures, p. xv
This critique fundamentally challenges how we should read and teach this classic. The Tiv elders aren’t just providing data about cultural difference—they’re offering alternative wisdom about kinship, authority, and narrative that Western readers might actually learn from. The question becomes: How do we move from “talking to” informants (extracting data) to “thinking with” them as intellectual partners?
Morality, Culture, & Human Nature: The Ongoing Debate
Bohannan tells this tale to illustrate deep cultural difference—differences much deeper than she anticipated as an anthropologist beginning fieldwork. But other readings are possible. The tale also shows what we share: story-telling, meaning-making, morality, and ethnocentrism. However, as Clifford Geertz elaborates, the idea of a shared morality is up-ended by the topsy-turvy moral contents:
What, after all, does it avail us to say, with Herskovits, that “morality is a universal, and so is enjoyment of beauty, and some standard for truth,” if we are forced in the very next sentence, as he is, to add that “the many forms these concepts take are but products of the particular historical experience of the societies that manifest them”? (The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man, 1973:41)
Beyond Capacity: Morality as Embodied Practice
We should emphasize that there is really no “capacity for ethics” outside the particulars of specific moral codes. Even if there were some kind of human program for morality, it always develops as part of a particular history, environment, and culture. This is why we don’t just think something is right or wrong, we feel it. We have a “gut feeling.” Morality becomes biology!
Beyond Us versus Them: Multiple Readings
One of the biggest problems with the Bohannan article is how it relentlessly stresses an “us versus them” divide. The fieldworker forgets and denies the abundant evidence of colonial encounter and historical interconnection.
Internal Variation and Multiple Audiences
As Kerim Friedman noted at Savage Minds, we might ask how different audiences within the Tiv might have reacted to Bohannan’s retelling. Concentrating on the in-group variation Bohannan herself documents reminds us that “culture” is never monolithic. Some readers find the Tiv interpretations quite sensible—perhaps more sensible than Hamlet’s actions themselves.
Further Reading
- Laura Bohannan, “Shakespeare in the Bush” – Available free from Natural History Magazine
- Yarimar Bonilla, Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015)
- Clifford Geertz, “The Impact of the Concept of Culture on the Concept of Man” (1973)
- Laura Bohannan, Return to Laughter – Extended ethnographic novel
Related Living Anthropologically Resources
- Cross-Cultural Understanding Hub – Explore more cases of cultural interpretation
- Body Ritual among the Nacirema – Another classic requiring critical examination
- Cultural Anthropology 2024: Anthropological Representation – Full discussion of the Bonilla critique
Reader Insights from Earlier Discussions
On Hamlet’s Believability
Helga Vierich (2013) offered a perspective that aligned with Tiv skepticism: “When I read Hamlet, it all seemed odd to me… Either he was fooled by someone who pretended to be his dead father’s ghost, or he had an hallucination… All of Hamlet’s subsequent actions never did make any sense to me at all. The man was like a six year old in a man’s body.”
As I noted in response to Helga, my college professor read Hamlet through an entirely different lens. For him, the play’s opening words—”Who’s there?”—weren’t about ghosts but about epistemology. Hamlet becomes an exercise in naive epistemology, a meditation on how-do-we-know-what-we-know, with Hamlet going about verification all wrong. He’s trying to use pseudo-experiments to prove what he thinks must be true. As Helga observed, he was “like a six year old in a man’s body” because his methods of knowing were fundamentally flawed. This reinforces what Bohannan’s English professor observed: Shakespeare “was a very English poet, and one can easily misinterpret the universal by misunderstanding the particular.”
Teaching Resource
SEF (2014) recommended pairing Bohannan with This American Life’s “Act V”, which explores intracultural interpretation of Hamlet—showing variation even within American society.