Aurcaq: Interruption, Distraction, and Reversal in an Alutiiq Men's Dart Game

Abstract

Folklorists working with living performance traditions would do well to look to Goffman-like multiple frames of reference and distracting out-of-frame activities to develop their understanding. Such frames are constructed and broken not only in social interaction but also in broader religious, historical, and archaeological contexts that intrude upon one another and compete for our attention. The Alutiiq dart game ofAurcaq invokes these interpretive contexts within a Windows-like environment analogous to that used in computer graphics. A NOISY SOCIAL continuum has gradually become integrated into the 20th-century folk and popular cultures we folklorists are trying to document, and it now sneaks its way into virtually every folklore performance as something more than sheer coincidence. Here in Alaska our tapes are full of background noises such as clanking wood stove doors, whistling tea kettles, VHF marine band radio chatter, chain saws, and snowmobiles roaring by in the night, but we continue to discredit them and pretend they are not there. We edit this noise out of our transcribed texts, or we edit it out of our interpretations of texts. In this essay I would like to illustrate what can happen when we foreground some of these distractions and interruptions and accept them as important communicative ambience.