INSIDE THE GURU'S GATE - Anpere

From this perspective “the context” signifies situational and shifting alignments
of speech to interpretative and inferential processes that allow speakers to ratify discourses.
According to Bauman & Briggs (1990), the discipline of performance studies
should have as its main task the highlighting of similar “poetically patterned contextualization
cues” in performance. The shift from context to contextualization can
make performance-based analyses more textually and contextually focused:
In order to avoid reifying “the context” it is necessary to study the textual
details that illuminate the manner in which participants are collectively
constructing the world around them. On the other hand, attempts
to identify the meaning of texts, performances, or entire genres
in terms of purely symbolic, context-free content disregard the multiplicity
of indexical connections that enable verbal art to transform, not
simply reflect, social life. [...] The shift we identify here represents a
major step towards achieving an agent-centered view of performance.
Contextualization involves an active process of negotiation in which
participants reflexively examine the discourse as it is emerging, embedding
assessments of its structure and significance in the speech itself.
721
Instead of viewing context as a set of external conditions independent from the event
or phenomenon under study, contextualization is an interactive meta-level process by
which participants orient themselves towards meanings. People shape both formal
and meta-narrative devices that provide interpretative frames of their actions.
While linguistic practices assume form, function, and meaning when they contextualize
in performance, scholars have also observed that the textual elements of
performance – narratives, spells, discourses ‒ are treated as self-contained objects
detached from the situational context. With the growing scholarly interest for the
ways by which transformation of contexts occur, linguistics anthropologists have
identified and developed the notions of two dialogic contextualization processes
which they call “entextualization” and “recontextualization”. Bauman & Briggs define
entexualization as the “process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a
stretch of linguistic production into a unit – a text – that can be lifted out of its interactional
setting. A text, then, from this vantage point, is discourse rendered decontextualizable.”
722 It is a process that makes discourses detachable from the immediate context
by transforming them into coherent and autonomous oral or written texts. The
more detachable the text is made, the more it will be perceived to remain constant,
shareable, and transmittable across different temporal and spatial borders. 723 En-
721
Bauman & Briggs 1990: 69.
722
Bauman & Briggs 1990: 73. Silverstein & Urban even suggest that culture can be viewed as a
structured process of entextualization which consists of discourses and utterances already
shared by people (Silverstein & Urban 1996: 21).
723
Urban 1991.
456
Published on www.anpere.net in May 2008