They are Just for Making <i>Nyanga</i> : Ethnosemiotic Significance of Waist Beads Among Young Women in Nigeria

Abstract

Waist beads are important cultural accessories with different layers of signification among young women in Calabar metropolis, Cross River State, south-eastern Nigeria. Drawing on ethnographic qualitative approaches involving focus group and semi-structured interviews with thirty participants who were purposively sampled, this article explores the social, symbolic and aesthetic values of waist beads based on subjective accounts and nuanced experiences of young women who have used them for varying length of time. The study is anchored on ethnosemiotic methods and anthropo-semiotic framework to foreground an investigation of indigenous system of signs in a particular cultural context. It aims to interrogate how young women make sense of body practices and representations through waist beads in shaping their social universe. Waist beads can be identified as social texts with enormous symbolic capital that is useful in beauty projects, fertility narratives, discourses of spirituality and the expression of femininity. The study concludes that waist beads are essential components of participants' material culture that provide new opportunities for self-expression, self-representation and personal identity construction. Waist beads, therefore, offer a prominent performance site through which the aesthetic of the female body is redefined, recreated and transformed.