Quotation in the Constitution of Yor�b� Oral Texts

Abstract

����� ��� ny genre of verbal art, or any single instance of a genre, can be understood in terms of the way it is constituted a s text. Research on oral verbal art usually proceeds by collecting a number of examples of a recognized, named genre (a particular kind of poem, song, dirg e , chant, tale) and then examining them for the “characteristic features” they s h a re. But the analysis should not stop there. We need to presume that textuality itself is culturally specific: that there are diff e rent ways of being “text,” and that genres recognized as distinct within a given cultural field may nevertheless share a common textuality. To grasp the specific aesthetic mode of any verbal art, then, we need to understand how it is marked, and constituted, as text. To develop this argument, I find it necessary to take issue with the prevailing emphasis on oral art as defined exclusively by p e rf o rm a n c e . The notion of “text” itself is suspect to many scholars of oral verbal art , on the grounds that it reifies and objectifies what is emergent, improv i s a t o ry, and fluid. In this view, “text” implies writing, and re f e rring to oral verbal art as “texts” is a by-product of the practice of reducing the oral to the written—a distorting, scriptocentric imposition. It follows from this that a text-centered conception of verbal art “places severe constraints on the development of a meaningful framework for the understanding of verbal a rt as perf o rmance” (Bauman, Verbal Art 8). Richard Bauman’s influential early formulation opened the way to a perf o rm a n c e - c e n t e red, rather than “ t e x t ” - c e n t e red, approach: P e rf o rmance as a mode of spoken verbal communication consists in the assumption of responsibility to the audience for a display of communicative competence . . . an assumption of accountability to an audience for the way in which communication is carried out above and beyond the re f e rential content. . . [I]t is no longer nece s s a ry to begin with artful texts, identified on independent form a l g rounds and then reinjected into situations of use. (Verbal Art 1 1 )