Religion, Tropes in Central Africa

Over the past several decades, anthropologists and historians of African religion have become increasingly interested in the ways that thought is organized and expressed through tropes. Tropes are often called “figures of speech,” but it is useful to consider them as organizational forms for other types of expression, as well. Following David Sapir’s lead, “master tropes” are metaphor, metonomy, synecdoche, and irony. The importance of the latter three tropes will be considered here, and metaphor is elsewhere in this volume.

Tropes define relationships between and among beings, things, and phenomena. Metonomy refers to the relationship of a “shared domain” between a conceptual whole and its parts. As such, it is the logical inverse of the conceptual “bridging” achieved through metaphor. In mathematics, the metonymic relationship can be represented by equations and graphs defining the locus of all points that correspond to some algebraic relationship. In African art, metonomy is seen...