Speakers
Description
Language and culture are inextricably tied. Language is a convoluted part of human existence. Where language exist, human beings exist and verse versal, with language their identity is revealed in their way of life technically known as culture. Culture comprises a wide variety of human behaviours and phenomena that cannot be attributed directly to genetic inheritance. Thus, the society is the mother of culture. Culture may be viewed in two perspectives material and social. Material culture refers to the physical products of human societies in response to the demands of the environment. The study concentrates on selected material cultural items of Akan people that have therapeutic effects on the body and mind such material culture are mortar and pestle (woma ni weduru), earthenware grinder and the short pestle (apotoware ni eta), games (aguro), and drums (dondo). The theory of epistemology is used to support the claim that a society exists in its cultural knowledge and norms, which requite the existence of the people. The study asserts that these items from their production stages to the consumers have great benefits, which range from employability, therapeutic effects physically and psychologically, interrelated coexistence and cooperation among the people. The study concludes that the uses of these material cultural items are gradually eroding away in use and usage and are subtly replaced in the contemporary time by modernity. The lexical items associated with them are gradually going into extinction, hence generations to come are not going to be aware of their therapeutic benefits and they are liable to encounter more diseases psychological ineptitude and social imbalance as the lifestyle of modernity is that of sedentary civilization.