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should focus on the culture-specific ways by which people accomplish this framing
and how performance is “keyed” by, for example, special codes, figurative language,
parallelism, special formulae, or paralinguistic features. 22 Bauman argued that studies
which solely privilege literal frames fail to appreciate the phenomenological reality of
live verbal art performance. When fixed texts move into performance they become
oral communication and thereby adopt other communicative modes than the literal.
Performance studies were also criticized for concentrating solely on contextual
aspects and expanding the definition of “text” to metaphorical heights when there
was a meaningful text, even a physical written text, present. 23 In his book about Tamil
bow songs, Blackburn (1988) argued that performance studies had been too preoccupied
with exploring contextual and formal properties of performance, while the
“texts receded into a metaphor – everything except oral performance was approached
as a text”. 24 Blackburn’s own study was an attempt to bring back a “text-centered
approach to performance”, which “consciously rejects the claim that the meaning of a
text lies only in performance”, but the text “carries meaning as it moves into performance.”
25 A text, written or oral, can set the terms for its formal reproduction, just as
people derive meanings of performance from the content of the text. Text and context
are thus two interrelated aspects of verbal art performances.
Performance theory was widely applied in ethnographic studies of verbal art in
India, especially as folklorists began to fear that local and regional oral traditions
would vanish in face of modernization and a higher rate of literacy. 26 A study that has
succeeded in analyzing the intricate relationship between written text and oral performance
is Lutgendorf’s book The Life of a Text: Performing the Ramcaritmanas of Tulsidas
(1991). Applying Bauman’s theoretical approach to performance as a distinctive
mode of communication with formal and affective dimensions, Lutgendorf offers a
detailed account of living performance traditions which render the Ramcaritmanas
epic in oral recitations, staged “story-tellings” or oral exegesis, and theatrical enact-
22
Baumann 1977: 16 - 22.
23
Whether the text or the context is most significant to performance has been a controversy
among folklorist since the 1970s. For overview of this controversy, consult Ben-Amos 1993.
24
Blackburn 1988: xvii. Ben-Amos observes that the text metaphor has actually transformed texts
into contexts: “By turning terms around, Paul Riccoer has proposed a kind of nominalistic solution
to the apparent dichotomy between text and context by conceiving and naming social actions
as text. In such a renaming, text becomes a metaphor for context.” Ben-Amos 1993: 211.
Hanks (1989) defines “text” as “any configuration of signs that is coherently interpretable by
some community of users”, which could encompass oral and written discourses, paintings,
music, etc (Hanks 1989: 95).
25
Blackburn 1988: xviii- xix. In response Ben–Amos (1993) has argued that texts are still contextdependant,
since it is ultimately the speakers and listeners of texts who attribute meanings they
perceive in them. When a text appears to be fixed in terms of themes and structure it is the
variable contexts that explain differences in meanings (Ben-Amos 1993: 212).
26
Access to printed texts and the ability of reading texts have instead encouraged new forms of
oral traditions (See Kaushal 2001).
9
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008