eloquent knowledge: Lesotho migrants' songs and the anthropology of experience

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Abstract
Oral literary forms such as sefela sung poetry of Basotho migrant workers in Southern Africa have important methodological and theoretical implications for cultural anthropology. The study of such performances privileges subjects' own self‐conscious discourse and provides an internal, reflexive account of the experience of labor migration and its social consequences. As aesthetic formulations of experience these performances both draw upon and are measured against the expressive traditions and authoritative values of Sotho historical culture. Current approaches to the anthropology of rhetoric, poetics, and performance are inadequate to the interpretation of forms like sefela unless they are revised so as to incorporate intra‐societal differences in experience, status, and autonomy among Basotho migrant workers and their women, [oral literature, poetics, performance, migrant labor, Southern Africa, gender and culture]

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