METHODOLOGY

The folktale to be used for analysis in this paper was taken from the Courlander’s
collection of anansesεm from Ghana in 1957. He started the ethnographic approach by
recording and transcribing this folktale and so his work serves as our data. We had
recourse to other secondary sources. We used structural analysis, that is, “discovering
minimal structural units, and understanding how these minimal units combine into
traditional patterns” (Bronner, 2007: 127) to analyze the text. We drew on Bronner on
the meaning of minimal unit, a descriptive element in the narrative which has got a topic
(Bronner, 2007: 127), what Levi-Strauss refers to as a code