Shakespear and the Bush

In Bohannan's article she makes the assumption of naive realism, that there is a certain universal truth to all things and that everyone everywhere will perceive basic concepts of morality and culture in the same way. She was hoping that through literature as classical as Hamlet she could get across the same basic story once translated into the Tiv's native language. This experiment ultimately failed due not only to the fact that certain words are untranslatable to other languages, but also because their is no such thing as a universal perception of the world. The Tiv could not grasp the idea of life after death as she attempted to explain what a ghost was, and something as taboo as the king's wife remarrying directly after his death and to his brother was applauded by the Tiv. Bohannan was left frustrated trying to tell them the story as they continually corrected her and she continually condensed the story to make it easier to understand. Her story had become entirely different than Shakespear's original work with the key elements of the language that generated the emotion cast out. However the Tiv luckily still enjoyed the story. :)