Poetics and Performances as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life

Abstract

Scholars have vacillated for centuries between two opposing assessments of the role of poetics in social life. A long tradition of thinking about language and society argues that verbal art provides a central dynamic force in shaping linguistic structure and linguistic study. This position emerges clearly in the writings of Vico, Herder, and von Humboldt; attention from Sapir, the Russian Formalists, and members of the Prague School to the role of poetics contributed to the development of performance studies and ethnopoe­ tics in the last two decades. Nonetheless, poetics has often been marginalized by anthropologists and linguists who believe that aesthetic uses of language are merely parasitic upon such core areas of linguistics as phonology, syntax, and semantics, or upon such anthropological fields as economy and social organization. The balance between these two views shifted in favor of poetics in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a new emphasis on performance directed attention away from study of the formal patterning and symbolic content of texts to the emergence of verbal art in the social interaction between performers and