This book has not attempted to formulate a general approach to text and textuality, nor has it tried to survey the myriad textual forms that exist in the world, or write a history of those that have existed in the past. What I have tried to do is to make some suggestions about what anthropologists can learn from verbal texts produced by the communities they study – and what kind of things we need to attend to in order to get the point of those texts. Texts are the means by which people say things (about experience, society, the past, other people) and do things (affirm their existence, build and dismantle reputations, make demands, imagine communities, convene publics). And texts also are things – by which I mean that they are social and historical facts whose forms, transformation and dispersal can be studied empirically.

The suggestions that I have made about texts, persons and publics arise mainly from a body of African material – oral, manuscript and print – but with an eye on some of the things that have been written about Chinese, Indian, Indonesian, Melanesian, Native American and European genres. I have maintained an African focus not only because that is my area of specialisation, but also because I believe that a comparative-historical approach is most fruitful when it compares contiguous and historically-related forms.