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发表于 2003-5-20 23:40:40
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RE:当代中国政治对于民俗的压制
芬兰世界民俗学者组织暑期学校(FFSS)1999期的一个工作组围绕The Politics of Textualisation 进行了专门讨论。下面是小组的总结报告及参考文献目录,供参考:
FFSS99, Workshop I
The Politics of Textualisation —I
(FFN 19, March 2000: 2-10)
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Group leaders: Ulrich Marzolph (Germany) and Anna-Leena Siikala (Finland)
Report by John Shaw (Scotland) & P. S. Kanaka Durga (India), Gila Gutenberg (Israel), Anne Heimo (Finland), Flora H. Losada (Argentina), Nasanbayar (China), Patricia Nyberg (Finland), and Nino Tokhadze (Georgia)
Our presentation conceives of textualisation as a process treated here sequentially from the initial interest in documentation to the final published product. At the various stages specific questions and issues are addressed by representatives of traditions existing in various geographical areas (South and Central Asia, South and North America, Eastern and Western Europe) and varied political systems whose working experience provides a particularly informative or challenging perspective.
1. Introduction
Why: the politics of textualisation?
(John Shaw)
We need go no further than those present in this room to understand clearly that no serious folklorist can say today that our discipline is apolitical. This view, which most if not all of us share, can be attributed in no small part to changes in power configurations, perceptions, values of the last thirty years or so. Such is the scale of the shifts in power relationships between groups and social strata that they have inevitably had an effect on exchanges between researcher, informant and the various communities and interest groups involved. Within folkloristics this circumstance has led to an increased preoccupation with fields of study that are potentially political or contested, where many of these - transcriptions of verbal texts, for example - had previously been regarded as stable and circumscribed. The dialogue has become global, expressing a growing awareness of the political nature of the folklore materials and the processes involved in folkloristics. Consequently issues earlier treated as irrelevant or trivial are now regarded as fundamentally political. What, for example, is worthy of being recorded/textualised and who decides?
Current research is less attached to the concept of a fixed text than before and has set its sights beyond the reduction of folklore materials to “single-line written texts”, engendering an increasing awareness of the “constructed nature of what used to look like neutral texts”. There is a movement toward a multiplicity of voices and an interest in looking beyond purely verbal forms to materials exterior to the verbal text and their very real potential to present information that is not as tidy or easily subject to political control as before. In textual criticism analyses have become increasingly politicised (as demonstrated by deconstructionism) with a marked impact on folkloristics manifested, inter alia, in the recent interest in textualisation as a process. (Finnegan 1992: 17-22, 50-52.)
A brief theoretical overview
Such large-scale developments lead to theoretical concerns. The first has to do with the close relation between the folklorist’s textualisation work and the field of anthropology: how they are traditionally linked by ethnography in the field, leading to a challenge to the concept of boundaries between disciplines with consequent political issues arising within academia. In fact all indications for future directions in our field point toward an interdisciplinary framework accommodating “current rethinking across several disciplines”.
Secondly, the emphasis in fieldwork and publications has moved toward the interpretive, culturally specific and “on the ground”. A look at the political implications of the work of the anthropologist Clifford Geertz, familiar to many of us here, serves as a case in point. Geertz espouses a concept of culture, and therefore of the various stages of description and presentation that concern us, as “essentially a semiotic one, believing... that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance that he himself has spun” and that the analysis of culture is therefore not “an experimental scheme in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning”.
Let us look at a few of the political implications affecting both disciplines. In terms of the presentations at this summer school, one of the most striking upshots is the renewed emphasis on the importance of dialogic aspects of textualisation, and the necessity of an emic approach to the material as well as recognising the intellectual contribution from informants at various stages of textualisation. Needless to say, this theoretical perspective calls for further changes in the traditional power relationship around the issue of interpretation. Geertz’s use of “thick” description, which he describes as “a stratified hierarchy of meaningful structures” also has its political aspects to be considered, since it advocates a further remove than ever before from what the anthropologists call ethnocentrism, especially in initial stages of textualisation. At the same time, knowledge generated according to Geertz’s approach, if presented as a scientific, accurate representation of folklore from the field, should by its nature be less subject to political, propaganda, or commercial uses than in the past, and within the discipline and its academic debates this direction may be leading to constraints on political “tweaking” of textualised materials.
“Thick” description further precludes “moving from local truths to general visions” in the field, thus discouraging cultural stereotyping on the basis of one or a few isolated items selected from folklore materials. A consequence of recent interpretive and emic theory behind textualisation is the even greater awareness that the textualising of any folklore material is at best only partial, because “cultural analysis is intrinsically incomplete”. However much the traditional or academic communities might wish otherwise, produced materials will always be open to serious challenges, and at every stage the process must be understood as a mediation between two symbol systems, languages or cultures. (Finnegan 1992: 50-52; Geertz 1973: 5-6, 21-29.)
Two examples
Following the very general summary above of the background to our topic, a couple of brief and specific examples may be in order.
We have agreed in the workshop that the process, and therefore the politics, of textualisation in folkloristics does not begin with the stage of recording or transcription, but long before, at the point where an interest is expressed. The initiative does not necessarily have to be the collector’s or the archive’s, though this is most often the case. In at least one of the areas in Maritime Canada having its own distinctive language and culture the agenda within the community has incorporated strands such as using folklore fieldwork as an acceptable device in order to receive federal government subsidies in the form of make-work grants; the need to appear modern by responding to the “roots phenomenon” which was sweeping North America in the 70s; and the provision of a practical and socially viable means for active and interested individuals to explore their own culture first-hand and contribute to a community project.
In the same region, the agendas outside the community - e.g. those of the Federal and Provincial governments - for the textualisation of materials from the same sources were not always the same. Some of the more obvious ones were to further the national policy of maintaining a cultural mosaic; to channel money into an economically disadvantaged area; to reduce statistical unemployment and keep the poor off the local welfare rolls; to consolidate, through the targeted awarding of jobs, the positions of local politicians; to raise the profile of the local centres for higher education through the founding of local archives with their associated activities; and to provide an archived basis for proposed enterprises as diverse as language teaching materials and regional tourism. Clearly considerations such as these, through the choice of projects, control of resources and selection of personnel, can have a profound effect on the process of textualisation from the very beginning.
Our second example, taken from the same part of the world, concerns the identification of the tradition community in the case of endangered or lesser-used cultures. This is a scenario destined to become increasingly familiar to folklorists in view of the global language prognosis made early in this decade which predicts that by the end of the 21st century 90% of the languages spoken today will be extinct (Krauss 1992: 4-10). With so much of folklore materials being language-based, language death, in North America at least, has created communities that are divided in terms of people’s ability to participate in their own culture, and their orientation toward it. Criteria of belonging, however, whether they are determined by family, local or institutional affiliation, or the command of specific cultural skills, do not prevent various marginalised groups within a culture from feeling a strong sense of ownership over folklore materials along with their treatment, uses and distribution. Experience has made it clear where internal linguistic and/or cultural marginalisation is involved that there can be multiple overt and hidden agendas revolving around the status of such distinct groups within a single tradition community.
Socio-economic dimensions
(P. S. Kanaka Durga)
Text is a sequence of signs with any configuration that can coherently be interpreted by a community of users (Ricouer 1971: 553; Honko 1998: 140). Hence text is predominantly a social phenomenon and textual analysis is about discourse. Textualisation is a process that passes oral discourse into a number of discourses and transfers them from their original to secondary context. Discourse includes and relates both the textual patterning and situating language in a context of use. The context is: (a) socio-economic backdrop, the ground rules and assumptions of language usage and (b) the immediate ongoing actualisation of speech. (Sherzer 1987: 295.)
The process of textualisation is the resultant of human interaction in its respective contextual situation (as referred above) and hence highly flexible/extendable with the dynamics of the culture of society in space and time. To study the politics of the process of textualisation, one needs knowledge of the socio-economic pursuits of the castes and communities that represent different cultures. Society is not a homogeneous entity, but a heterogeneous representation of different groups of people living together and separately in different categories. It reflects cultural plurality in the social arena.
A cultural category, be it a caste or class or community or religion, adapts to changes in its environment and coexists with the other categories, yet keeping their identities intact, which is essential for them to remain ‘distinct from others’ in the society. The politics of the textualisation process of traditions are based on the ‘identity’ and ‘legitimation’ crises among different communities in culturally pluralistic societies like India. The identity is ambivalent and operates at two levels, personal and community or group. This ambivalence is reflected throughout the textualisation of expressive behaviour.
The relative position of different castes and communities at the various socio-economic levels determines the textualisation process, i.e. the way they represent themselves and the others in the textualisation of their traditions. The highest caste (varna), the Brahmins, mostly teachers and priests, depict themselves as custodians of knowledge, capable of organising men and material resources by being ritually pure, best propitiators of the gods and therefore possessing religious authority over the people. The other castes they deem socially low, ritually impure and intellectually inferior.
The second ranking group, the Ksatriyas, traditionally warriors and landowners, claim the right to rule the land and people, to enforce law and order and, by being the strongest of men, to protect the land and people to the point of sacrificing their lives. The other groups they represent in different ways, in neutral or negative terms. An example of the latter is their characterisation of the third varna, the Vaisyas, traders by profession, whom they deem misers and evaders of taxes to be checked upon frequently. The Vaisyas see themselves as ritually pure and twice-born (like the two higher varnas) and possessing a high economic status and the ability to sponsor various activities in the temples. The other castes they depict as lazy and treacherous exploiters of their varna and thus not dependable (a feature which the Vaisyas may apply to their own community, too).
The fourth caste, the Sudras, comprises mainly of landed gentry, cultivators, artisans and other village servants such as washermen, barbers, etc., who view themselves as the base of the socio-economic structure without whom pollution and impurity would reign. They also see themselves as innocent and obedient, yet suppressed by the higher castes. The other castes they view as parasites, exploiters and numskulls who are responsible for their low ranking. The fifth main group, the untouchables, dealing with menial and servile tasks, depict themselves as the original descendants of the gods, born well before the four castes were laid upon them and therefore the only rightful propitiatiors of the village/mother goddess. They regard the other groups as cunning and treacherous, ritually impure and inferior and as having gained superiority over them through the foolishness of the untouchables.
The categories are vividly depicted in the genre of Caste Myths. In the textualisation process each caste develops an overt ethnocentrism which forms the basis of its survival. Yet the categorisation is not rigid. Such a watertight compartmentalisation does not exist in any culture and India is no exception. There is constant reciprocity and flow of traditions between different caste communities and religious groups, making the process of textualisation most accommodative. However, the process of reciprocity depends upon factors such as the need, access, acceptance, means, internalisation and enculturation of different communities in social interaction.
Economic and social reciprocity is reflected in the process. The bard and minstrel tradition voguish in Indian society is an example of this. Certain castes and communities in Andhra Pradesh maintain bards who sing the glories of their respective castes, an age-old practice. They maintain the genealogies, caste histories and mythologies of their community in their oral repertoire and perform them on different ritual occasions. In return they will get a share in the produce of their community or people. The singer and the community are both beneficiaries in the process of textualisation of their community as a whole. The former gets his livelihood and the latter has its legitimised position perpetuated. At the same time both of them become identified with one another in their community and in society. In a way the tradition of singing textualised the community in oral literature, thereby providing a socio-economic cultural milieu for the entire process.
The other important social issue is gender and its construction. This matter occupies a pivotal role in the politics of textualisation nowadays. Gender roles, relations, and power are the aspects of discussion. Since socio-cultural ascription of gender roles, their relations and experiences are also vital in human interaction, they are considered as ‘units of meaning’ in the process of textualisation.
Roger Abrahams emphasises the significance of communicating the role and social identity of the narrator and the audience (Abrahams 1990: 50-55; Abrahams 1992) in the textualising of a performance situation. It may be summarised from the above discussion that the ability to find the importance of role-based and identity-based creations and expressive behavioural patterns of different genders operating in different gender relations in the dynamics of socio-economic dimensions makes it easier to understand the politics of the textualisation process in folklore research.
2. Researcher, field and environment
Dialogue and negotiation in the field
(Patricia Nyberg)
The fieldwork process and the written study are not separate but rather they affect one another (Vasenkari & Pekkala 1999: 1-2). The choices that have been made during the fieldwork as regards, for example, fieldwork methods, informants and interviewers, have an effect on the data produced. That is why the fieldwork situation is the first locus where interpretations are made and plays a central role in the politics of textualisation. In an interview situation there are two subjects, the interviewer and the informant, who negotiate meanings and produce the data. But it has to be noticed that once the fieldwork has been completed, it is the researcher who decides “the form, content and the analytical interpretative frame applied in the representation of the primary dialogue in the written form”. (Vasenkari & Pekkala 1999: 10.)
The process from field to text should be taken into consideration and it should also be scrutinised somehow in the written study. (See the Ingrian Finnish case of producing thick data in Vasenkari & Pekkala 1999 and Pekkala & Vasenkari 1999; see also Dwyer 1982.) The situation is quite different when one is analysing data that has been collected by someone else. By this I mean archived material. How, in that case, can the interview context be brought into the analysis?
Interview as one of the fieldwork methods is customarily hierarchical and discourse is controlled by the research problems posed and the questions asked by the interviewer. He is the one who has brought about the interview situation in the first place and decides the speech genre that is used (Briggs 1986: 2-3; see also Pekkala & Vasenkari 1999: 6). He is also the one who chooses the informants he wishes to interview. But this does not mean that the interviewer has control over the whole interview situation. An informant who is competent and ready to answer the interviewer’s questions is often perceived as the person holding the power. “Good informants” (who can respond to the researcher’s expectations) are often those who are interviewed most. (Alver 1992: 59; Briggs 1984: 21; Briggs 1986: 11.) It means that the data to be collected represent only a narrow group of people. Who are those we choose as our informants? Are men and women equal as informants in collecting and interpreting folklore? How large a group of informants is representative enough for generalisations, for example in studying the identity of some ethnic group? Whose voices do we allow to be heard?
The kinds of roles the interviewer and informant take or are allowed to take also influence the dialogue they develop during the fieldwork process. Michael H. Agar has noted that aspects of “who you are” deserve some careful thought in doing research. He says that the ethnographer is assigned to a social category by the informants. The category may not be permanent, but it will always exist. Defining the researcher’s role will guide the informants in their dealings with him. (Agar 1980: 41.) Creating an interviewer-interviewee relationship and a mutual feeling of trust may cause problems. How does the researcher deal with personal, intimate or even politically delicate information which he may come across? (Alver 1992: 58-59.) Because of the political situation in some areas access to the field may be denied or the informants may not be willing to cooperate. What the researcher’s purposes are thought to be by the informants will affect the interaction between interviewer and informant and the collected data. If the informant sees the researcher as some kind of spy or a representative of the government, the fieldwork may render doubtful results.
The researcher’s gender, personality and cultural background create the initial framework for his/her evaluations of other cultures and attitudes toward the data. (Agar 1980: 43; Camitta 1990: 21-22.) It has been noticed that the researchers from the ethnic majority often tend to pay attention to the archaic aspects of the minority group, and thus underestimate its complexity and differentiation. This has happened, for example, in studying the Saami people. (Keskitalo 1976: 20; Lehtola 1997: 8, 14-15.) The strengthening of the Saami movement in the 1960s gave emphasis to their position as an indigenous culture under pressure from a majority culture. (Morottaja 1984: 329-37; see also Nyberg, Huuskonen & Enges 1999: 2-3.) The use of the Saami language, the interest in Saami history and culture became valuable for the Saamis’ own identity and began to represent a valuable heritage. (Eidheim 1997: 33-35.) It also had an effect on the interest and opportunities for the Saami to study their own culture. There has been discussion of whether the insider or outsider should do the research. How do their views differ? Have the researchers from the ethnic majority the competence to make a decent study of Saami people? Is it enough to have studied the language, if for example, the nature and surroundings of Sápmi (Saamiland) are not familiar? To what length can or should a researcher from the ethnic majority go in learning another culture without the risk of losing his own identity? (See Maranhão 1986: 293-94.)
James P. Spradley says in his book on the ethnographic interview: “Fieldwork... involves the disciplined study of what the world is like to people who have learned to see, hear, speak, think, and act in ways that are different” (Spradley 1979: 3). In the fieldwork situation and during the writing process we researchers should not forget to study ourselves a little, too. As Maria Vasenkari and Armi Pekkala write, “the production of data is... always a two-way street” (Vasenkari & Pekkala 1999: 11).
The changing political context of the field: Georgia
(Nino Tokhadze)
I would like to talk about the ways of textualising folklore which took place after the democratic changes in Georgia. This question cannot be discussed without referring to the previous years, when the situation in this respect was quite different in the Soviet Union.
Georgia is a small but multicultural country in the South Caucasus. People who speak different dialects of the language inhabit various regions of Georgia. Public holidays are often held in various parts and folkloristic traditions vary as well. It is interesting to observe how one and the same folktale, legend or poem is narrated in different villages and towns. Folklore research gives us a chance to represent the national identity: people cite the Vepkhistkaosani epic and “Aminani” (“Prometheus”) myth by heart. Although the epic has been published many times, it is still popular to rewrite it. The poem is the most important present given to a couple on their wedding. The country regions are full of folk performances; seven-voiced songs are transmitted from generation to generation.
In former times, fieldwork and archiving were carried out in a systematic way. Performers were also introduced to foreign visitors occasionally, but there was a lack of publishing: even if the performers dared to say something forbidden, there was very strong censorship. Fieldwork was limited in neighbouring foreign countries, which are populated by Georgians. Once in a while a group of prominent researchers was able to visit them and collect materials. Even then, permission ought to have been given by Moscow.
In recent years a new tradition has been born: famous folklorists, ethnographers collecting materials in a region invite its inhabitants once a year to the capital city, Tbilisi, to participate in a folk concert. Lots of performers - singers, narrators - have become famous: the audience can often see them on TV or listen to them on the radio. Documentary films are made of them. The poems written by them are published. Young performers even continue their study at universities; they become professionals, poets, writers and folklore researchers. Today there is no restriction in this respect and different groups of researchers can easily reach distant villages and towns in Turkey and Iran. Young people from these countries come to Georgia to study at high-schools. Informants provide rich material as they save everything they have heard from their ancestors; we come across all the forms of the language as it was spoken in the 19th century.
New attitudes towards folkloristic research have given the collectors a chance to obtain foreign archive data - in written and taped forms. Recently we have received records from Germany in which the folk songs of Georgian prisoners in World War I have been preserved. The democratic changes in East Europe have opened up ways to mutual relations; several times my country has been host to a group of students from American universities and also from Japan. Singers have performed the most difficult seven-voiced songs with absolute precision.
Effects of the dominant ideology on the collecting and editing of folklore. Experiences in China
(Nasanbayar)
The most obvious examples of the effects of the dominant ideology on the collecting and editing of folklore derive from the period of the Cultural Revolution (1966-76). At that time some collectors of folklore intentionally or unintentionally made certain modifications of folklore materials in the textualisation process in order to meet demands from the domain of ideology. The collector/editor of Balgansang’s tales (a series of Mongol jokes), for example, made modifications in the collections. One day Balgansang saw a person carrying a pot on his head while walking along a road. Balgansang shouted “Look, there are two suns over the sky.” The man looked up and consequently broke his pot. In his textualisation the collector of the tale indicated in the text that the man was a rich official, and as a result, the whole narrative became a class struggle story with an emphasis on how Balgansang made mischief with a person from the ruling class.
In an epic I discovered the word ehe ulas that must have been changed in recent decades because it was a new term coined after 1949 meaning ‘motherland’. It seems that the collector/editor tried to show the aim for which the hero fights. The original word might have been ehe oron or ehe nutag meaning ‘home town’. In this respect the situation in China has improved greatly since 1980.
The dominant ideology has made an impact on informants in ways not yet thoroughly studied. When I participated in fieldwork on shamanism, I felt our informants were very cautious in their words and deeds. Shamanism and other folk religions were considered as superstitions in the official Chinese ideology. The folklorist was considered as a kind of governmental agency by informants in certain places. Some related departments of China’s government had organised large- scale projects to collect, publish, and research cultural heritage, including folklore. I was told that this kind of governmental initiative deeply affected some informants in their performances. But I do not know yet what the actual effects of this motivation were upon textualisation.
Folklore research and the construction of identity: a South American view
(Flora H. Losada)
There are countries such as Argentina lacking institutes and departments specialising in folklore. In such cases the collecting, research, publishing, etc., should be simultaneously enriched. Because it is impossible to collect and research all the folklore materials, the collecting should be connected to research and conducted in relation to the goals of research. But, what are these goals? Here we enter the field of politics of textualisation. For a start, we may begin collecting in order to serve future folklorists or researchers representing other academic branches. There might also be other interests in folklore in the society at large. A government, for example, might develop a plan for folklore preservation and decide to start collecting and researching folklore materials. In that case, a Department of Folklore (if it exists) is involved in the process of deciding what kind of folklore material should be collected, and what topics approached. This work will be done negotiating with the government’s agent, who has the final word in the selection of topics and the data collected.
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