開顯Geertz的深描闡微：女書文本的敍說、閱讀與展演

Abstract

To open up the theoretical horizons of Clifford Geertz’s venturesome formulation of ＂culture as text,＂ in this paper I incorporate various textual perspectives developed in the fields of literary criticism, hermeneutics, folklore and linguistic anthropology, including Bakhtin’s ＂ dialogics,＂ Barthes’ ＂the death of author,＂ Ricoeur’s ＂social action as text,＂ and Bauman and Briggs’ ＂ poetics and performance.＂ To illustrate, I use the female-specific literature known as nushu (female writing), which circulated exclusively among peasant women in Jiangyong County, Hunan Province, in south China. Specifically, I focus on an event taking place in the early twentieth century-a divorce claim made by a village woman called Zhuzhu, when she discovered only on her wedding day that her betrothed/husband was paralyzed. My research shows that ＂Zhuzhu＂ as a social event and a nushu text has generated various constructions of (sub) texts via the dynamic function of entextualization, reading, narration, performance, intertextualization, temporality, and personal contexts. This suggests that ＂culture as text＂ involves not merely metaphors and symbols whereby meanings, sentiments, and values are embodied and manifested, but is also a social field where heteroglossia and stereographic plural voices come into being; more importantly, it is a source of vitality by which change or transformation becomes possible. To ＂thickly describe＂ culture, I therefore call for a dynamic textual perspective, that is, one that examines the depths of metaphor in conjunction with how a text is intertextually read, narrated, and performed.