African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African folklore 674
social processes—remain largely unresearched. As long as researchers continue to
privilege one medium, genre, or context, that is, to view a performance as an isolated
event, rather than as part of an ongoing process in continual dialogue and flux, the
concept of performance will remain static and reductive. And it is in this area that a
performance paradigm as a research method can advance folklore research.
Performance challenges the notion of an objective social reality, as well as the notion
that society and human beings are products. Not only is performance production, but both
society and human beings are performative, always under construction. As restored
behavior, both performance and research entail repetition—not as reproduction, but as a
transformational process involving acts of re-presentation with critical differences. As
such, both performance and research necessarily involve relations between the past and
individual agents’ interpretations, inscriptions, and revisions of that past in present theory
and practice.
Instead, however—strongly reflecting a materialist-objectivist bias—most research in
Africa renders performance “thinglike”—by turning it into structures and sets of symbols,
in the case of ritual; graphic notation, in the case of music; and the printed word, in the
case of oral literature. Olabiyi Yai takes issue with folklorists who rely substantially on
transcriptions:
Thus, the “text” of an oral poem is fixed and mummified, paralinguistic
elements being the only elements of variation. This, in our view, imposes
drastic limitations on the generative latitude of the translator-performer,
thereby ignoring the essence of oral translation which is recreation. In our
model, improvisation is basic and the translator-performer may even add
“lines” of his/her own making to the “text” which is never closed, once
he/she is inspired by the mood or the muse of the genre. (1989, 68–69)
To involve oneself in the production of performance means learning techniques and
styles and, above all, learning to improvise. Yai’s model, in fact, would be a good model
for fieldwork on performance generally.
In focusing on transcriptions of texts, research reifies performance as a spatialized
representation for mental cognition alone, as if detached from the human bodies that
practice it. Ruth Finnegan has shown how this works in the study of music:
Musical art too tends to be equated with its written form, so that if
something is not written it is assessed as not “really” music, or at any rate
not worth serious scholarly study. In traditional western musicology
“music” is usually defined as the musical work, itself in turn defined as its
written formulation—the score—rather than, for instance, the process of
playing or singing or the act of performance. This emphasis on text is
reinforced by the western educational system…where formal music
training even in unassuming local schools as well as in conservatoire
settings is usually taken to consist in learning to read music: to cope with
notation, learn musical theory, and pass written (not just practical) music
examinations…. As with oral literature, this definition of music as text
leaves out essential elements of the art form as actually practiced by