The Language of Secrecy: Symbols and Metaphors in Poro Ritual

Beryl L. Bellman's The Language of Secrecy, Symbols and Metaphors in Poro Ritual, published by Rutgers University Press in 1984, is a scholarly ethnographic study of how the Kpelle people of Liberia and neighbouring groups use parables, dilemma tales, gnomic expressions and other indirect forms of speech to communicate and withhold information within Poro, the men's secret society central to Kpelle social and religious life, based on Bellman's own participation in Poro initiation ritual. Its strength is direct ethnographic access to a genuinely closed ritual system, unusual for outside scholarship on Poro specifically. Its limit is that as an outsider granted access, however sustained, Bellman's account necessarily reflects what he as a non-initiate anthropologist was permitted to observe and interpret, a limit inherent to any ethnography of a closed tradition and worth naming rather than treating the account as a full insider record.