Ananse Ntontan: The Web, Not The Spider

Ananse Ntontan, spider's web, refers to Ananse, the trickster spider of Akan folklore renowned across a large body of oral narrative for cunning and inventive intelligence, and Willis notes the symbol takes the form of his woven web rather than a picture of the spider itself, shifting the design's focus from the character to the product of his characteristic skill, the constructed, intricate structure his cleverness produces. He reads the web's combination of apparent fragility and real structural strength, spun from very little material yet capable of catching prey many times the spider's own size, as itself instructive about resourceful ingenuity, a natural object whose properties directly model the abstract quality the symbol is meant to represent rather than merely illustrating it by loose association.

Willis notes carvers render the web with varying numbers of radiating and connecting strands, some quite dense and others sparse, a range of elaboration he attributes to available stamp size and individual style rather than to any difference in which specific Ananse tale, if any, a given rendering is meant to evoke. Willis records this range of elaboration as unremarkable craft variation, the underlying reference to Ananse and his web holding constant regardless of how many strands a given carver includes.