Abstract

In the following article, the famous spider stories with Anansi as the main character will be approached from an ethno-cultural angle. In this article, Anansi, a cultural and narrative expression of the Dutch Creole community, is regarded as a particular expression of the cultural identity of a specific group. In the context of the historical dynamics and the metamorphoses that this narrative character has undergone in the past, this study primarily emphasizes the contemporary narrative material in the Netherlands. On the basis of the cultural analysis of a corpus of orally-transmitted stories and a number of folktale illustrations, we will examine the position the spider presently occupies in the cultural identity formation of the Dutch Creoles.