For this coming week, we will be skipping past Gregorio Cortez. Please read the following “transcription” for monday:EasterSunriseSermon.pdf
Let’s pick up on the issue we were discussing this morning — orality, audience, and the responsibility of the performer. The issues had to do with purpose in performance, how one judges a successful performance, or a good text. Remember too that the Audio Exhibit page includes an Mp3 of this, if you want to hear it.
On Wednesday, we’ll begin discussing Get Your Ass in the Water (pp. 1-94). This will give us the introduction and the first selection of Toasts — on Badmen.
Don’t forget, class will meet at the Commonplace Coffeehouse during the regular time Friday. Bring a “re-oralized” piece to perform.
If you have forgotten where it is, head down the hill between dining and the garage. Behind the tall building under construction, you’ll see a building with a Platterz and Dominoes sign; enter this and in the back of the atrium, you’ll see the commonplace.
There are many resources on the web that give context to our reading of the Night Chant translation / transcription. I found this recent news article from Gallup, NM interesting. Robhenberg has a brief exhibit with sand art images related to a bead chant. Here’s an informal web exhibit that includes images of sand artists at work.
Along with the introduction, these intertexts have me think about oral literature and the idea of a total art: dance, song, visuals. Imagining these other dimensions may be even more important in the case of this Night Chant text since we don’t have as much attention to the “performance qualities” (voice, rhythm, etc.) and so can’t hear it on the page in the same way as some others.
Maria Sabina brings a very big concept to the table, is our culture the only one who shuns different religions the way it would Maria Sabina? Religion to our society is sturctured, balanced, sober and often emotionless. Most people would look at Sabina and say there has to be something wrong with her, she’s chanting and screaming these meaningless non rhyming words. Once anyone where to confirm the fact that she ate a “mushroom” before performing/healing she would surely be dismissed without a second thought. I guess it just makes me wonder what is so different that our culture has become so close minded as opposed to other cultures, what has happened to us?
Sabina’s poetic performance differ from some of what we’ve come to know in several ways:
She practices composition through performance, rather than reciting or singing texts composed in the past
Her words are not primarily narrative or expressive, nor are they oriented towards a group
The spiritual dimension is heightened, as her words are taken to be efficacious (i.e. they make things happen, they heal)
What are some other features of her art or its reception that seem notable to you?
You can read a bit more about her at the Ethnopoetics exhibit on UBU web
http://www.ubu.com/ethno/soundings/sabina.html
This site also features an audio file:
As a reader and fan of Sabina, I have little trouble appreciating her work as aesthetic — as its groundedness in myth and sounding resonate with what I would call poetries origins. But it does not surprise that especially in hearing her for the first time, the music might seem primitive or its spiritual sensibility unsophisticated.
The first hurdle might be in suspending one’s disbelief with regard to Shamanism works towards at least a relativistic appreciation of a world-view in which derranged states of mind are worthy of respect as potential sources of wisdom. We lock such folks up….
I find Hereberto Yepez’s two essays really striking in their insistence on the poetic genius of Sabina and the obstacles her work must face, in terms of an ideology that opposes mind and body, sky and earth, spirit and dirt.
I’m interested in moving beyond the binary oral/literate, as Sean suggests. A friend of Ong’s, Marshall McLuhan famously proposed that the technology of modern culture has brought us back around to oral elements — he called it secondary orality.
Let’s think about our own oral/literate orientations, and have this set of tensions in mind as we finish discussing the Yaqui and begin Maria Sabina for next week. Both of these deal with just this tension or balance in my mind.
with the past readings i’ve been thinking, are we a hybrid of an oral and a text culture?, sure we’ve been ‘hearing’ that we’re a literate culture and we’ve been educated to depend on the text, but in that’s on in terms of science, business, formalities, and part of our educational process, the other, (in my opinion the reason society can bear to exist) is still highly focused in the oral, the music, stories, conversation, improvisation, communication. we might have to read stories and write papers in class, but we often have to hear family stories from aging family orally, we hear music across the radio, etc. what is everyones take on this are we a hybrid, or have we essentially given ourselves to the text?, you don’t need to mention that in most things there is an underlying text, that’s obvious, but you could present mabey the benefits of both a purely oral culture and that of the written culture, and what we gain/loose by having a hybrid,
Walter Ong’s writing on orality and literacy has had a tremendous impact in terms of helping the imagining not only of the dynamics of oral literature (how it is made, preserved, and transmitted) but also in sketching the framework of an oral culture (and consciousness) from which it emerges.
Let’s discuss primary orality, and the habits of mind and word that Ong attributes to it. What does it help us to look for or tune in to in oral texts? What does it help us to understand in traditional oral texts? Where does it seem problematic?
What are some of the key features of the literate mind and its word art for Ong? Do these seem right? Does it make sense to associate them with writing as a technology?
Today our class discussion included a treatment of authenticity when collecting oral literature, with varying viewpoints expressed. I am very interested in the topic, so I’d like to continue that discussion here if anyone has any further thoughts to express.
I mentioned that I feel that no transcription of an oral text, no matter how faithful, can be authentic because an oral text is fundamentally different from a written text–one is fluid and changing, while the other is fixed and unchangeable. The transcription of an oral text creates a script for the creation of a specific instance of the oral text rather than the creation of the text itself (though, to what extent is one performance of a story/etc. the same text as a different performance? What if there is a different performer?).
However, as I ponder more on the subject it strikes me that the same is true of any written text as well–even as I write these words I am making occasional revisions and correcting spelling errors. The version that will eventually be seen is “better” than the version that I am making as I go (in that it conforms more closely to accepted rules of grammar), but it is not an “authentic” version because it overlooks the steps that took place in the creation of these words.
It seems to me that while reading a work like Tedlock’s translation we are extremely aware of the artificial nature of the text in front of us, but that there is a cultural tendency not to look at a “finished” written text as artificial. Where can authenticity be found? In the finished product? In the process? In the mind of the author? Or somewhere else?
Last week we discussed “Songs of Ritual License” with respect to an important contemporary issue for oral literature — the agenda (or paradigm) informing its collection and presentation. Where the composition, editing, presentation and circulation of print literature are typically controlled in some measure by authors — this is seldom the case with oral literature.
We discussed how the frame a “collector” brings to the activity might inform the poems, stories, songs that we experience.
Here are three zones we described, along with their respective emphases:
Literary (aesthetics)
Anthropology (specific cultural information)
Myth/Archetypes (generalizing of human universals)
As we look and listen further to collected texts, let’s continue to reflect on implied relations between teller and audience. Is this text shaped for internal or external audiences? Is it embedded within or detached from a historical and cultural context?
How are the dynamics of collection, presentation, and internal/external audiences relevant to the Zuni stories Tedlock presents?