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Anansi ( ) is an African folktale character. He often takes the shape of a spider and is considered to be the spirit of all knowledge of stories. He is also one of the most important characters of West African and Caribbean folklore. He is also known as Ananse, Kwaku Ananse, and Anancy; and in the southern United States he has evolved into Aunt Nancy. He is a spider, but often acts and appears as a man. The Anansi tales originated from the Ashanti people of present-day Ghana. The word Ananse is Akan and means "spider". They later spread to other Akan groups and then to the West Indies, Suriname, and the Netherlands Antilles. On Curaçao, Aruba, and Bonaire he is known as Nanzi, and his wife as Shi Maria. Anansi is depicted in many different ways. Sometimes he looks like an ordinary spider, sometimes he is a spider wearing clothes or with a human face and sometimes he looks much more like a human with spider elements, such as eight legs. ==Stories== Anansi tales are some of the best-known amongst the Asante people of Ghana.〔()〕 The stories made up an exclusively oral tradition, and indeed Anansi himself was synonymous with skill and wisdom in speech.〔See for instance (Ashanti linguist staff finial ) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art which relates to the saying "No one goes to the house of the spider Ananse to teach him wisdom."〕 It was as remembered and told tales that they crossed to the Caribbean and other parts of the New World with captives via the Atlantic slave trade. In the Caribbean Anansi is often celebrated as a symbol of slave resistance and survival. Anansi is able to turn the table on his powerful oppressors using his cunning and trickery, a model of behaviour utilised by slaves to gain the upper-hand within the confines of the plantation power structure. Anansi is also believed to have played a multi-functional role in slaves’ lives, as well as inspiring strategies of resistance the tales enabled slaves to establish a sense of continuity with their African past and offered them the means to transform and assert their identity within the boundaries of captivity. As historian Lawrence W. Levine argues in ''Black Culture and Consciousness'', slaves in the New World devoted “the structure and message of their tales to the compulsions and needs of their present situation” (1977, 90).〔Zobel Marshall, Emily (2012) ''Anansi's Journey: A Story of Jamaican Cultural Resistance''. University of the West Indies Press: Kingston, Jamaica. ISBN 978-9766402617〕 Stories of Anansi became such a prominent and familiar part of Ashanti oral culture that the word Anansesem—"spider tales"—came to embrace all kinds of fables. One of the few studies that examines the role of Anansi folktales among the Ashanti of Ghana is R.S. Rattray’s Akan-Ashanti Folk-Tales (1930). The tales in Rattray’s collection were recorded directly from Ashanti oral storytelling sessions and published in both English and Twi.〔Peggy Appiah, who collected Anansi tales in Ghana and published many books of his stories, wrote: "So well known is he that he has given his name to the whole rich tradition of tales on which so many Ghanaian children are brought up – anansesem – or spider tales." Elsewhere they have other names, for instance Ananse-Tori in Suriname, Anansi in Guyana, and Kuent'i Nanzi in Curaçao. For Africans in the diaspora, the Jamaican versions of these stories are the most well preserved, because Jamaica had the largest concentration of Asante as slaves in the Americas. All Anansi stories in Jamaica have a proverb at the end.〔(Traditional Anansi Stories. )〕 At the end of the story "Anansi and Brah Dead", there is a proverb that suggests even in times of slavery, Anansi was referred to as his Akan original name: Kwaku Anansi or simply as ''Kwaku'' interchangeably with ''Anansi''. The proverb is: "If yuh cyaan ketch Kwaku, yuh ketch him shut",〔("Jamaican Proverbs" ), National Library of Jamaica.〕 which refers to when Brah Dead (brother death or drybones), a personification of Death, was chasing Anansi to kill him. Meaning: The target of revenge and destruction even killing will be anyone very close to the intended such as loved ones and family members. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Anansi」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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