Ambiguity in the Oral Exegesis of a Sacred Text: Tirukkōvaiyār (or, the Guru in the Garden, Being an Account of a Tamil Informant's Responses to Homesteading in Central New York State)

Abstract

My aim in this article is to describe some ways in which intentional ambiguity, the deliberate crafting of messages in such a way that they invite multiple interpretation, devolves in an ethnographic situation. I take the ethnographic situation to be not a strange one, but a very common one-an example of dialogue taking place across a horizon, between two worlds that are likely to interpret the same tree, let us say, on that horizon very differently. In this case, in fact, we are dealing not with two worlds but with many worlds and an indeterminate number of horizons, since the material of our analysis is an ancient Indian (Tamil) poem that comes to us embedded in many layers of interpretation and can be seen to incorporate multiple voices much more ancient than itself even prior to its own embedding. By intentional ambiguity I mean something more than anomaly, or mediation, or transition, or otherness, more than something outside the structure that has somehow to be dealt with, and more than the kind of once-a-year chaos that is needed to keep some orders well defined. Intentional ambiguity is not interstitial ambiguity-marginal, liminal ambiguity characteristic of what is dismaying or strange to people-but ambiguity at the heart of things, openly embraced where it is found, emphasized where it is hard to perceive, and created where it would not otherwise exist. It entails an acceptance of the fact that the horizon is everywhere, including the place where we stand now. In what follows, I try to show that the ambiguities I encountered in the poem I studied and in the exegesis of it that was offered to me acted in similar ways to bring diverse forms of thought into some kind of mutual awareness. In particular, I try to show how various kinds of poetic ambiguity are used to relate opposed paradigms, opposed theories about the nature of things, or, less formally and self-