Heroic Poets, Poetic Heroes: The Ethnography of Performance in an Arabic Oral Epic Tradition. By Dwight Fletcher Reynolds (Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press, 1995. Pp. xviii + 243, foreword by Gregory Nagy, photographs, drawings, maps, appendix: Arabic texts in transliteration, bibliography, subject index. $42.50 cloth) The great migration of Bedouin Banu Hilal tribe in eighth and ninth centuries AD, from Arabia across Levant and Sinai to North Africa, is stuff of Arab folk epic, Sira Bani Hilal. A number of informative monographs on Hilali epic have appeared so far (e.g., Slyomovics 1987; Connelly 1986; included also in Lyons 1995), of which Reynolds' work is latest. The book is in two parts (three and two chapters respectively), and ends with an appendix containing Arabic texts. It is well written and provides good ethnographic data on village of al-Bakatush in northern Egypt, where fieldwork was conducted (2347). Reynolds presents a charming account of his experiences as Western Christian field worker in a small rural community of Egyptian Moslems (3740). Aside from usual ethnographic questions, Reynolds is concerned with interaction between tradition and its cultural context (49), reason and manner of patronization of epic, and influence of audience and patronage on performance (102). His second chapter (48-101), where these relationships are analyzed, reaches conclusion that most influential factor shaping performance traditions is poets' identity with poem (100, cf. 208), while performance style of poets is influenced by audience's attitude (128-36). In chapter four, he studies private gathering [sahra] as the basic unit of analysis, and focuses on why of this social interaction, not merely its how (138). In his study of interactive aspects of gatherings (177-212) Reynolds makes reasonable if not entirely novel observation that audience actively participates in performance. However, he lapses into reductio ad absurdum when he claims that audience participation is manifested even by its silence which creates an aesthetic space for performer's artistry (177). Alternatively, one may suggest that periodic silence is necessary for any performance, be it in a concert hall, comedy club, or sahra, and that there must be a difference between participating and being attentive even in northern Egypt. Reynolds' book is a welcome addition to growing literature on ethnography of Hilali epic. Some of its points however, have already been made by other field workers. His description of poets' community as peripheral (48-56) has been discussed in detail by Slyomovics (1987:6-21), and is implied in earlier European research (e.g., Schroder 1977; 1962; Piper 1887-88). His observation that poet's performance is basically an interaction with crowd (e.g., 128), aside from being a case of stating obvious, has been common knowledge for some 45 years (e.g., Wareman 1951). Even American stand-up comics play crowd. Nevertheless, book adds to our knowledge of important detail. The evidence that epic exists also in prose form (e.g., 3-5, 7, 12, 104-5, 156, 211), and in chapbook versions is particularly important in view of academic bias of assuming all epics to be in verse. However, Reynolds' presentation is occasionally misleading. To write, as he does, that chapbook versions of epic run over forty volumes (6, 8), conjures up images of a massive poem of Mahabharata's enormity for uninitiated. In fact, these chapbooks are small and thin affairs, usually under 100 pages long. Some of problems of book are typical of all Western studies of non-European epic traditions. That is, tendency to subject these traditions to tyranny of Homeric corpus, and Aristotelian definition of genre. …
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