Of saints and ancestors: The ethnopragmatics and cultural semantics of religious terms

1 Introduction

In missionization it is typically assumed that the Christian conceptual world is alien to the missionized. It is also assumed that the religious concepts and values are alien to the cultures. No attempt is made to understand the existing world in order to see if there are any similarities or overlap in content that would facilitate the introduction or transfer of knowledge from one system to the other. The existing system is demonized. As the Ghanaian social anthropologist and theologian Emeritus Archbishop Sarpong (1975: 33) notes,

Belief in the spirits of the dead and in their influence over the living is found among all peoples, and in every conceivable religion and culture. … Belief in ancestors and their veneration are therefore not peculiar to any age, religion or society. … When Christians call their dead saints and refer to those of pagans [sic] ancestors, they are not expressing different ideas. Both words express ideas about people who once belonged to their religious group, are now dead, and are supposed to be in a position of influence over the living.

Grosso modo, Emeritus Archbishop Sarpong is right that the ideas embodied in words like ‘saints’ and ‘ancestors’ are not too different. However, as he points out himself, the fact that they do not have the same value in the different worldviews and cultures in contact suggests that they are different. Moreover, even though the belief in these ‘dead’ beings and their influence on the living may be universal, they are still understood in linguacultural specific ways cross linguistically. The similarities and differences between the concepts can be revealed through a cultural semantic analysis. The culture-specific ways of thinking and relating to these entities can also be accounted for in ethnopragmatic scripts as developed in the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM), Minimal languages and ethnopragmatics framework (see e.g. Goddard 2018, 2021; Goddard and Wierzbicka 2014, 2018; Goddard and Ye 2015).^[1] The goal of this paper is to argue for the need for conceptual analysis as a prerequisite for the transfer or adoption of terms and terminology in language and cultural contact situations. I do this through an exploration of the understandings of the Christian concept of ‘saints’ on the one hand, and the understandings of the Ewe^[2] concept of tɔ́gbéwó, literally ‘grandfathers’, on the other in the context of the contact between the two cultures. In the next section, I first provide a context for the themes of ancestors and saints as current and relevant topics of discourse. In Section 3, I review some of the ideas that have been debated over the years about ancestors by anthropologists and linguists that motivate the need for careful cultural semantic analysis. Section 4 explores the comparative semantics of the Ewe terms for ancestors and for elders. Section 5 delves briefly into the understanding of saints in Christian and Catholic faith. Section 6 compares the Ewe linguistic worldview about ancestors with the Christian view of the saints. The concluding section provides an outlook for the study of the semantics of various religious concepts as an aid to the inculturation of the Christian faith in African cultures.

2 Context

The encounters between Christianity and the linguacultures of the Gulf of Guinea, the Gbe speaking peoples, dates back to the middle of the 17th century with the translation of Doctrina Christina into Aladagbe of Benin. In the encounters of Christian missionaries in their evangelization both interlocutors have sought to make meaning through linguistic and cultural practices. Like missionaries everywhere, various strategies were, and are used in the transfer of meanings from Christian worldviews to the missionized linguacultures. A pivotal strategy is that of translation of texts leading to borrowings of matter, that is actual forms, or of patterns (Matras 2020). In the case of Ewe, some terms and concepts were borrowed and adapted to suit the phonology. Thus Jesus Christ (adopted via Portuguese probably) is Yésu Krísto, sacrament is sakraménto, communion is kɔmínio. Other terms are translated in paraphrase, for instance, ‘saint’ is ame kɔkɔe lit. ‘person holy, clean’. For the translation of some concepts into Ewe, the Bremen missionaries also borrowed and adapted terms from Akwapim Twi, a neighbouring linguacultural group where the Presbyterian Basel missionaries were engaged in evangelization and translation work. For example, the term for ‘church’ in Ewe is sɔleme, which is adapted from the Twi term asɔre ‘public worship, church’. Similarly, the term for ‘devil’ is adapted from the Twi term abonsám ‘wizard, witch; devil, demon’ with another synonym based on the English term ‘Satan’ as Sátana (see Meyer 1999 on the translation process of the devil into Ewe). These introduced terms do not pay attention to local understandings of concepts leading to a syncretic conceptual universe. This situation would be ameliorated, I contend, if just as with the introduction of concepts in development practice, there was first a conceptual analysis conducted of possible terms before introducing alien terms.^[3] To minimize the adverse effects of translation and conceptual transfer in the process I suggest that people bringing the message should collaborate with the receiving community members to first undertake a rigorous conceptual analysis of existing concepts, draw out the parallels and see whether to imbue the existing terms with new content or introduce a new term. It is important not to demonize or think of existing terms as inferior or derogatory to the new concept being introduced (see Ameka and Hill 2021, 2022).

If this strategy had been employed in the first entanglements, the challenge of ancestors to Western Christian ideas would have been minimized. To contextualise the rest of the discussion I want to draw attention to the continued contestation of the themes of ancestors and saints in contemporary media reports. The first is a homily by an Ewe Catholic priest from Togo, Rev. Fr Alade, which went viral on social media. Note the titling of it by the person who initiated the share: ‘educative, listen to the end’, see Figure 1. The second is an explanation offered by another Catholic priest of Vietnamese heritage with respect to why Catholics pray mentioning the Virgin Mary and the saints on X, formerly Twitter.

Figure 1:

Homily Fr Jean Baptiste Alade on ancestors and traditions.

One of the messages of Fr. Alade is that unless the members of his congregation (Togolese) understand and have knowledge of their home practices and customs, they cannot be true Christians. In his words:

He goes on to admonish Christians that if they deny knowledge of their home practices then they are being hypocritical. He asserts that it is only when you know and understand the home practices that you can distinguish and discern which is good practice commensurate with Christian practices and which is not. It is only when one has such knowledge that one can be (come) a staunch Christian. One aspect of home knowledge and custom he uses to illustrate the point is how to say a family home prayer according to Ewe norms. He outlines the structure of the beginning part of the cultural activity type of libation prayer (Archer et al. 2021; Levinson 1979) as follows. First, the omnipotent God is invoked, then one calls what he terms the divinities of the family and the next is the tɔ́gbéwó, ‘the dead grandfathers of the family’ i.e. revered ancestors, of the family. However, it is not all the dead grandfathers that are called upon in prayer. It is only those who lived a good life and who did good things for people while in this world who are called upon. Those who did very bad things to people before they died, e.g. causing bad things to happen to other people through their powers are not invoked in prayer. He adds that previously mamáwó ‘grandmothers’ were not called upon in family prayer. Today, by contrast, the grandmothers who lived a good life and did valiant things while in this world of the living (kodzogbe, see Ameka 2024) are called upon. Those that do very bad things to other people through their spiritual powers such as adze ‘witchcraft’ are not called upon. The libation prayer is a pragmatic act or pragmeme (Capone and Graci 2024).

We infer from these statements that, firstly, it is not every grandfather or grandmother who dies who becomes an ancestor to be venerated or is invoked as an ancestor. A critical quality that dead grandfathers and grandmothers must have to be accorded ancestor status is that they should have lived a good life while in kodzogbe ‘the world of the living’. Secondly, veneration is no longer exclusive to grandfathers; grandmothers also belong to the group of ancestors. We will discuss other conditions that have to be met before one qualifies as an ancestor below. Before that, I report on a news item that implies a parallelism between saints and ancestors (see also Ajakor and Nwochoko 2024 for a comparison of ancestor veneration in Igbo culture of Nigeria and the veneration of saints in Christianity).

Rev Douglas Vu, pastor of Our Lady of La Vang Catholic Church, Birmingham, in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on August 23, 2023, reported that when he asked his social media followers to pray to the Virgin Mary, someone responded: “Is this not idol worshipping.^[4] I thought our Lord Jesus Christ says no one cometh to the father except through me.” Rev. Vu responded first with a question: “Do you ever ask family or friends to say a prayer for you when you are sick or have problems?” He further explained: “To ask the Mother of Jesus to intercede for us is not idolatry. In the Catholic Church – we believe like all Christians do – in salvation through Jesus alone! But we also believe in the communion of saints…”. In his further elaboration he connects the relationship between Catholics and the saints and the Virgin Mary in the Catholic tradition to the relationship between the living and their ancestors. I cite the media report:

To whom this may concern: Catholics do not worship the saints!” he wrote. “All Catholics are born again and Jesus is our Lord and Savior. We ‘honor’ His Mother, the saints…. as you and I would honor our own ancestors. We don’t worship our ancestors but we keep their memories alive in our hearts and our lives. Thank you! God bless you all! Peace!

What I find particularly pertinent is this comparison between the honour and reverence Catholics accord the saints and the Virgin Mary and the honour and reverence accorded to ancestors. It is not surprising that Rev. Vu hails from Vietnam where, as in Africa, ancestor veneration is practiced.

3 Ancestor worship or non-worship

Just as Catholics do not worship saints or the Virgin Mary so do Africans, and in this particular case, the Ewe, not worship ancestors. This issue has been contested a lot in the literature. In a much-discussed article by Kopytoff (1971), he charges that “the selection by anthropologists of the phrases ‘ancestor cult’ and ‘ancestor worship’, in dealing with African cultures, is semantically inappropriate, analytically misleading, and theoretically unproductive” (Kopytoff 1971: 140, emphasis added). Based on his ethnographic study of the Suku, a Bantu group of Tanzania, and on linguistic evidence, he suggests that the Suku do not have separate linguistic expressions for elders and for ancestors. He argues that from an emic point of view there is an “elder complex” which is a continuum from the living elders to the dead elders. Others have noted that in other Bantu linguacultures there are expressions for ancestral spirits, so there is recognition of ancestors different from elders (Brian 1973; Mendonsa 1976). I will show in Section 4 that in Ewe and related languages there are two social categories, one of the living elderly people and the other of ancestors. I hope to also show that we interact with the ancestors with respect, honouring and revering them.

Naden (1996: 74) makes a similar point when he suggests that in discussing terms related to what he calls “traditional attitudes of an African group towards ancestors,… a careful lexicological study of the vocabulary used by members of the society under consideration can help”. He invites students of cross-cultural meaning, especially bilingual lexicographers, who are aware of various techniques of analysis and presentation which may help to avoid the worst distortions, to take up the challenge. In this study I use a technique of analysis that has been tried, and tested in the study of cross-cultural meaning to reveal the conceptual content and the attitudes of the Ewe towards ancestors. Naden, like many others before him, was questioning the appropriateness of the term ancestor “worship”. As he pointed out, the English word “worship” has very specific senses and connotations and for which French, for example, has no real equivalent, as culte and veneration and their equivalents in Germanic languages like the Dutch godsdienst and eredienst rather refer to “religion” in English. Naden, like Kopytoff, draws attention to the biases introduced in this discussion by reliance on the English language and Western social categories which do not match African realities (cf. Wierzbicka 2014; Levisen 2019). For example, ancestors do not belong to a religion. As Sarpong points out, ancestors are not part of an Ewe religion, nor Ga religion. This is one respect in which they differ from saints, as saints belong to the Christian religion. Like many other researchers, Naden suggests the term “ancestor veneration”, which he notes is also used by McCall (1995: 257). And “veneration” can apply to the living,^[5] but also has “religious” overtones (and moreover has a corresponding French term which is no faux ami). In the next section we turn to the Ewe linguistic world view about elders and ancestors and the respectful attitudes towards them.

4 Tsitsiawo – elders, and Tɔ́gbéwó – ancestors

5 Saints

We turn in this section to the uses and understandings of saints, and along the way we offer some comparisons with ancestors. It would not be an overstatement to assert that all Christians, as professed in the Apostles’ or Nicene Creed, believe in the “communion of saints”. However, the term “saints” has multiple interpretations depending partly on context and partly on denomination. McBrien (1994: 1109–110) suggests that there are at least four meanings of the term saints. The first pertains to “all those who have been justified by the grace of Christ, whether they be living or dead”. It would appear that this is the sense in which one talks of the “communion of saints”, as it encompasses the living and the dead. Tentatively, I suggest the following description of the understanding of the “communion of saints” in Minimal English (SX2):

In this sense of encompassing both the living and the dead, the term would appear to share features with the “elder complex” proposed as a framework to deal with the issue of ancestors in Africa (Kopytoff 1971). As pointed out above, for the majority of African cultures (including Ewe), there is a distinction between the living elders and the dead elders, i.e., ancestors. Thus, the sense of saints here would appear to be different from that of ancestors who are principally thought of as dead.

The second sense proposed by McBrien is that the term saints refers to “those who, having been justified by Christ on earth, have entered into eternal life”. This applies to people who have died, that is their life on earth ended, but they are believed to be living with God forever (see Wierzbicka 2025 on eternal life). The aspect of ancestors that probably relates to this sense is their being with people all the time, being near them, influencing and interacting with them. They are thought of as being in the spirit world, not necessarily with God.

A third sense in which saints is used is to refer to “particular figures, especially biblical personages who are examples of holiness”. Perhaps the comparative point here is in terms of ancestors being individuated and linked to particular lineages as well as working as a collective. As noted above, they lived good lives, they did very many good things for many people while living in kodzogbe ‘the world of the living’, and they died a good death. In The Children’s Book of the Saints, Louis Savary (SVD) (1986) draws on the etymology of the word in Hebrew, Greek and Latin to explain that a saint is a “holy one”. In the Ewe and for that matter many African linguacultures, ancestors are said to have lived exemplary lives worthy of emulation. However, this is not evaluated in terms of holiness like in the Christian tradition. The emic designation is that they are good people. This is why those who do bad things to people and are judged to be bad people do not qualify to be ancestors. Should the goodness and exemplary lives be interpreted as holy? One meaning component of ‘holy’ in several dictionaries is good. Dictionaries typically add pure and perfect, and worthy of veneration. If we accept the everyday uses of the term holy then it can be argued that ancestors and saints share a feature of holiness as good people.

McBrien points out that while the three interpretations discussed so far are applicable to the Catholic understanding of saints, it is the fourth sense of the word saints which is characteristically Catholic. This is the use of the term to refer to “those whom the Church, either through custom or formal canonization, has singled out as members of the Church triumphant so that they may be commemorated in public worship”. McBrien cites Avery Dulles (1985: 85) as writing that the “cult of the saints” is the most distinctively Catholic practice among all practices. While in the phrasing of the fourth sense the word worship is used, we should recall Fr. Vu’s explanation discussed in Section 2 of the distinction between worship and veneration. Catholics affirm that they do not worship saints, they venerate them and ask for their intercession. Indeed, the first step of recognizing someone as a saint in the Catholic Church is that they are declared Venerable. As Savary (1986) explains in The Children’s Book of the Saints, this means that the person is a deceased person whose life on earth was filled with heroic virtues. I think this is where the comparison is very apt. Ancestors are not institutionally declared, but by virtue of their being invoked in prayer means that they are seen as having lived good lives. And this is where the veneration also comes from.

The Catholic Church has two other steps linked to requirements for sainthood, one, that the Venerable should have performed witnessed miracles. Two, when a miracle is attributed to a Venerable, they may be declared Blessed, i.e. be beatified. When they perform two miracles they can be “canonized”, i.e. declared a Saint. There is nothing comparable to these stages in a person attaining ancestor status. In addition to this difference, there is also the fact that saints can be children while it is adults who qualify to be ancestors.

From the foregoing it should be clear that it is Venerables who are comparable to ancestors. They are dead and before they died they lived virtuous lives on earth. The Venerables have other features endowed upon them by the institution of the Church. These include their ability to intercede for members of the pilgrim church (i.e., Christians living on earth) and the suffering church (i.e., the souls in purgatory), as they themselves are part of the triumphant church (i.e., those living in glory with God).

With these considerations in mind, I propose tentatively, the semantic explicitation in the second column of Table 2. I have juxtaposed the representations for ancestors in Ewe and for Venerables to facilitate comparison.

The parallels and differences are evident when one compares the tentative explications. The shared components are in bold face. The Venerables serve as patron saints where they intercede for people with God. This is the idea that is captured in the fourth block of the explication.

6 Some concluding remarks

In the foregoing I have undertaken a conceptual analysis of the concepts of ancestors in an Ewe linguistic worldview, and of saints as used in Christian discourses. I have demonstrated how semantic analysis of terms can illuminate the belief-related terms. My main argument is that because the first missionaries did not undertake such an analysis any terms that pertained to the beliefs and worldviews of the missionized were demonized and discarded. Had such analysis been carried out, the view expressed by Sarpong (1975), cited in the Introduction to the present paper, would have been upheld that people everywhere venerate their dead whom they consider to have lived exemplary and morally upright lives before they died. The details vary but the kernel is the same and could be thought of as a cultural universal.

Thus, we have noted that the dead who live good lives and do good things for people are venerated as ancestors or as saints. It is also the case that ancestors are dead kin-related persons. Saints in one understanding can be living or dead (see the communion of saints) but in the Catholic understanding of Saints, they are deceased persons who lived good lives and are declared Venerable. On this point the two concepts coincide. There are some points on which the concepts differ. First, saints as we mentioned earlier belong to a religion. And in the case of the Catholic Church, they have to be formally recognized and canonized. Ancestors do not belong to a religion as such, they are part of the linguacultural belief system. Second, saints are not age-bound. Children can also be declared saints, for instance the Holy Innocents. Ancestors have to have lived for some time, not a short time in kodzogbe ‘the world of the living’. Third, ancestors are believed to be able to do bad things to those who do not venerate them, while saints are not believed to do bad things to people.

If such knowledge informed missionary work, there would not be the need to declare certain concepts “pagan”, or to demonize certain practices in veneration of ancestors. There would also be less of loan translation and coinages in order to introduce the Christian concepts into other cultures (see footnote 3). Such shift in thinking and approach is necessary in the context of understanding Southern Christianities and of the inculturation of Christianity in the Global South.