Death has cut off my right hand: Linguistic choices as ethnopragmatic significations in Erei and Agwagune dirges

This article examines the use of indigenous linguistic resources to instantiate the ethnopragmatic relevance of dirges performed among the Erei and Agwugune people in Biase Local Government Area of Cross River State, Nigeria. The study applies insights from intracultural model in folklore analysis and the ethnopragmatic theory to account for how insider-status indigenous knowledge helps in situating and interpreting meaning orientations in situated culture-specific renditions. The data were generated during a three-year field work exercise through participant observation and semi-structured interviews involving 32 participants who have indigenous knowledge on the ethnopragmatic relevance of dirges in Erei and Agwagune. Findings show that the dirge performers draw from the linguistic resources and world view of the people to compose dirges that are culture-specific, satiric, extolling, howling, condemnatory, lamentative, incantatory, commemorative, didactic, or gendered with mixed emotions. In their cosmologies, dirges among the Erei and Agwagune people present death as communal grief and loss, a process, a rite of passage, separation, transformation, transition, commemoration and a cosmic reintegration with ancestors. The current study contributes to cross-cultural discourses on death from the perspectives of micro minority ethnolinguistic groups and serves as preservation material, especially as such performances are presently being threatened by emerging modernisation and Christian practices in the area.