African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 672
Although useful, the transcription and translation of texts do not address performance per
se in any direct way.
Another problem in applying a performance paradigm in African folklore studies is
the legacy of disciplinary boundaries. This legacy has forced performance in the West,
and by extension folklore research in Africa, into arbitrary dissected and
compartmentalized categories of disparate media such as oral literature, theater, folk art,
dance, music, and so on. Such compartmentalization does not reflect African
performance practices. Media rarely exist in isolation in Africa, yet they are often treated
as if they do because scholars trained in Western disciplines are incapable of dealing with
more than one medium, whether it be oral literature, sculpture, music, dance, song, or
ritual symbols. As a reflection of this general state of affairs, Africanists and others
became interested in various ways different media function together both in performance
and in their interrelationships. The irony is that had the disciplinary tradition not
dissected performance into disparate media in the first place, there would be no need for
scholars to reintegrate them. On the other hand, studies concerned with how various
media function tend to stress their autonomy by drawing distinctions between them, thus
maintaining an illusion of exclusivity (see Bloch 1974). But a gesture or a look can alter
the intent and reading of an utterance, and vice versa. Indeed, either a gesture or a look
can comment on or contradict the other, creating ambiguity. Dancers and musicians, for
example, communicate with and comment on each other during performance.
Performance is in this way not only multivocal, but multifocal.
The overall effect of disciplinary boundaries is that scholars fail to comprehend
performance as a web of multiple and simultaneous discursive practices, and they reduce
performance to a unidimensional, normative sequence of events.
Performance studies as a formally institutionalized area of study in academia emerged
from two distinct historical contexts: (1) nineteenth-century elocutionism and (2) the
avant-garde and political protest movements of the 1960s (see Drewal 1991, 7–8). Until
the 1960s, the field of drama focused largely on written texts. Performance theorists such
as Richard Schechner thus turned to the social sciences, where scholars were engaged
with the study of human behavior. Schechner and Willa Appel’s volume By Means of
Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual (1990) marks a collaboration
that began in the spring of 1977 and included conferences in 1981 and 1982. The
conferences and the volume that grew out of them brought together practitioners, theater
scholars, anthropologists, and others, including Heather and Anselmo Valencia, Monica
Bethe, Phillip Zarrilli, Herbert Blau, Du-Hyun Lee, Victor and Edie Turner, Colin
Turnbull, Barbara Myerhoff, Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gunblett, Yi-Fu Tuan, James Peacock,
and Ranjini Obeyesekere. From the conjunction of these interests in theater and
anthropology, the Graduate Drama Program at New York University changed its identity
in 1980, reconstituting itself as the Department of Performance Studies so that students
might rigorously pursue the interdisciplinary, intergeneric, and intercultural study of
performance (Zarrilli 1986a, 372; 1986b).
The institutionalization of performance studies as an academic discipline in its own
right is particularly significant because it opened up the definition of performance to
incorporate the practice of everyday life, defying disciplinary constraints and boundaries
in order to forge a more truly interdisciplinary research practice. Implied here is that
performers have been either formally or informally trained in body techniques in order to