Rethinking culture through the multimedia ethnography of the Tiv people of Nigeria

Abstract

Folklorists are increasingly becoming interested to the intersection between oral artistic products and multimedia technology. The production and performance of cultural products in a re-presented multimedia format call for an investigation of the functions and theoretical frame of digital media in its parody, collage, transposition, pastiche, and refocusing of cultural products, especially as some are on the verge of dying out, as they are no longer performed due to the theme of modernity. The revival of some cultural products through multimedia may serve to rejuvenate them, and indeed the society that creates and uses them, but the originality variations in the production and performance pattern engender the need to rethink culture to offer frames of theoretical and thematic referents arising from the changes thereto. Since digitalisation of the cultural products enables the collection, preservation, and collage of texts, objects, audio, and visual performances, there is the need to rethink culture to map up and identify the oral products in their virtual historicity – an exercise not fully explored with the Tiv kwagh-Hir. This research used Russell Kaschula and Andre Mostert’s paradigm of technauriture to cross-examine the Tiv kwagh-Hir used in multimedia technologies, as a measure of rethinking the production, style, format, and uses of contemporary cultural productions. The findings show that the emergence of multimedia technology has created, in its wake, versions, styles, new characters, and a vision for society that probes for fresh analytical dimensions, thematic preoccupations, and theoretical conceptions.