‘“Good morning, good morning” does not kill the old lady.’The charm and complexity of greeting in Kwahu, Ghana: Experiences of an anthropologist

An anthropologist looks back on his personal experiences of greeting as a form of communication in a rural town in Ghana. The fieldwork observations took place over a long period, from 1969 until 2015. Greetings are daily performances of cultural competence, hierarchy and relationship. They are also signals of respect, politeness and reciprocity, and provide opportunities for playfulness as well as social and communal engagement and relationships. These qualities constitute their charm. But greetings can also become covert or open requests for money, inquisitive questions or a time-consuming nuisance when they are overdone or used to test the anthropological foreigner. Greeting – finally – is a ritual, sometimes brief, sometimes lengthy, in which words and gestures often serve another purpose than their literal and observable appearance suggests. But this essay is most of all a reflection on how greeting affects the position of the ethnographer. Three interwoven themes constitute the objectives of this essay: (1) adding an ethnographic context of greeting to existing linguistic accounts; (2) highlighting hidden shifts of meaning in greeting habits; (3) presenting and analysing the role of greeting in anthropological fieldwork.