Boletín de Literatura Oral (Jul 2014)
Anancy stories beyond the moralistic approach of the western philosophy of being / Los cuentos de Anancy más allá del enfoque de la filosofía occidental del ser
Abstract
This article analyzes Anancy’s cogni- tive and sociohistorical identity beyond the moralistic approach of the western philosophy of being. Instead, Anancy stories are studied as a decolonized expression of an afrodescendant Caribbeanness that struggles to survive in an imperial context. There is placed special emphasis on Anancy and his relationship with other animals of the forest present in the stories collected by a group of Costa Rican researchers. Walter Mignolo’s concept of colonial and imperial differences, the notion of the trickster, Mikael Bakhtin’s carnival, the psychological theories of the id and humor are used to support the analysis. Finally, it is concluded that Anancy stories are the result of resistance but more importantly, they reveal a nontraditional subversion that guarantees hope in a hopeless system. In this sense, Anancy does not accept fatalism as a cognitive structure of his identity; even though, he lives in a fatalistic society.
