Like a Crab Teaching Its Young to Walk Straight"

Abstract

Along with greetings and partings, apology formulas, and the like, proverbs fall squarely under the rubric of "small r" ritual, in the sense of formulaic communicative practices of everyday life: utterance forms with a quality of ready-madeness, fixity, and iteration, drawn from (and understood to be drawn from) a limited corpus. Proverbs can also be seen as falling under the rubric of ritual com-munication—or better, "ritualized" communication—in that they recapitulate and reproduce established cultural values. This chapter shows that in some contexts proverbs may become the objects or instruments of a "ritualization of culture," as when Malay peribahasa (proverbs) are used as emblems in a project of ethno-identity maintenance or construction. As unitary, free-standing, fixed utterances, proverbs minimize processing demands, and their typical stylistic characteristics, such as vivid imagery, rhyme, alliteration, parallelism, and contrast, make for easy memorization. The semantic approach the chapter follows is the Natural Semantic Metalanguage approach, which employs reductive paraphrase as its method of meaning representation.

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