African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 675
performing musicians and experienced by audiences. (Finnegan 1988,
125)
As music notation becomes the object studied, the graphic description becomes the
context. With few exceptions, most research renders performance static rather than
dynamic by adhering to normative structural models (perhaps from a desire for fixity) in
spite of occasional invocations of creativity, invention, and play. Performance process
and the embodied practices and actions of performers as human agents situated in time
and place remain largely unresearched.
Yai blames “the new concept of performance” for this problem:
The common flow of all theories of performance is that by portraying oral
poetry performance not as one moment in its mode of existence but as the
absolute event they unconsciously reify it and endow it with attributes of
finiteness typical of written literature. Oral poetry is thus equated with an
“oeuvre” and a monument, an attitude which blocks the way for
perceiving critical activities outside the “event.” The truth is that a literary
work in oral form is never “bounded” and that we can grasp oral criticism
of oral poetry before, during and after “performance.” To be able to
understand the oral poetics of oral poetry, we must dismiss any theory
which presents this poetry as a “product” or a “work” that has the features
of finitude and closure as implied by these concepts. Instead, we should
talk of uninterrupted “production.” (Yai 1989, 63)
Although Yai refers specificaly to oral performance, his observations could easily apply
to the study of all modes of performance in Africa. It was perhaps folklore’s methods of
studying performance as a fixed and bounded event, rather than as unin terrupted
processes, that drew Yai’s critique. And if Hurston’s folklore studies seemed
unconventional, it is because she brought a sense of this process into her writing,
conveying a sense of the temporal flow of storytelling and of her own role in that process.
A more participatory practice in folklore fieldwork means placing the emphasis on the
participant side of the participant observer paradigm; breaking down the boundaries
between self and other, subject and object, subjectivity and objectivity; and engaging in a
more truly dialogical relationship with the subjects of study so that both researcher and
researched are equal participants in performance discourse (Fabian 1983). This has been
accomplished most successfully in the past by ethnomusicologists who have mastered
African instruments and music styles, and who therefore can join in the music
production. Paul Berliner, John Chernoff, David Locke, and Michelle Kisliuk are only a
few exemplars of this.
Because most performance in Africa is participatory, there are many diverse kinds of
roles researchers can take. What performers understand cross-culturally is that
anthropologist Michael Jackson’s notion of “practical mimesis” is only an initial stage in
learning to perform. The more a performer performs, the more embodied the practice
becomes, so that at some point performing becomes second nature and performers can
begin to “play” with the practice—they can begin to improvise. This is analogous to
acquiring fluency in a foreign language.