The Powers of Genre: Interpreting Haya Oral Literature (Oxford Studies in Anthropological Linguistics, 22)

264 Pages·1999·10.46 MB·English

by  Peter Seitel

THE POWERS OF GENRE
OXFORD STUDIES IN ANTHROPOLOGICAL LINGUISTICS
William Bright, General Editor
Editorial Board
Wallace Chafe, University of California, Santa Barbara
Rcgna Darnell, University of Western Ontario
Paul Friedrich, University of Chicago
Dell Hymes, University of Virginia
Jane Hill, University of Arizona
Stephen C. Levinson, Max Planck Institute, The Netherlands
Joel Sherzer, University of Texas, Austin
David J. Parkin, University of London
Andrew Pawley, Australian National University
Jef Verschucren, University of Antwerp
Volumes Published:
1 Guntcr Senft: Classificatory Particles in Kilivila
2 Janis B. Nuckolls: Sounds Like Life: Sound-Symbolic Grammar, Performance, and Cognition
in Pastaza Quechua
3 David B. Kroncnfeld: Plastic Glasses and Church Fathers: Semantic Extension from the
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4 Lyle Campbell: American Indian Languages: The Historical Linguistics of Native America
5 Chase Hensel: Telling Our Selves: Ethnicity and Discourse in Southwestern Alaska
6 Rosaleen Howard-Malverde (cd.): Creating Context in Andean Cultures
7 Charles L. Briggs (ed.): Disorderly Discourse: Narrative, Conflict, and Inequality
8 Anna Wicrzbicka: Understanding Cultures through Their Key Words: English, Russian, Polish,
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9 Gerrit J. van Enk and Lourens de Vnes: The Korowai of Irian jaya: I heir Language in Its
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10 Peter Bakkcr: A Language of Our Own: The Genesis of Michif, the Mixed Cree-French
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] 1 Gunter Senft: Referring to Space: Studies in Austronesian and Papuan Languages
12 David McKmgiu: People, Countries, and the Rainbow Serpent: Systems of Classification
Among the Lardil of Mornington Island
13 Penelope Gardner-Chloros, Robert B. Le Page, Andree Tabouret-Keller, and Gabrielle
Varro (eds.): Vernacular Literacy Revisited
14 Steven Roger Fischer: Rongorongo, the Easter Island Script: History, Traditions, Text
15 Richard Feinberg: Oral Traditions of Anula: A Polynesian Outlier in the Solomon Islands
16 Bambi Schieffelin, Kathryn A. Woolard, and Paul V. Kroskrity (eds.): Language Ideologies:
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17 Susan U. Philips: Ideology in the Language of judges: How Judges Practice Law, Politics, and
Courtroom Control
18 Spike Gildea: On Reconstructing Grammar: Comparative Cariban Morphosyntax
19 Lainc A. Berrnan: Speaking through the Silence: Narratives, Social Conventions, and Power
in ]a.va
20 Cecil H. Brown: Lexical Acculturation in Native American Languages
21 James M. Wilce: Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural
Bangladesh
22 Peter Seitel: The Powers of Genre: Interpreting Llaya Oral Literature
THE POWERS OF GENRE
Interpreting
Haya Oral Literature
PETER SEITEL
New York Oxford
Oxford University Press
1999
Oxford University Press
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Copyright 1999 by Peter Seitel
Published by Oxford University Press, Inc.
198 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Oxford is a registered trademark of Oxford University Press
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
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without the prior permission of Oxford University Press.
Library of Congress Catalogmg-m-Publicanon Data
Seiiel, Peter.
1 he powers of genre : interpreting Llaya oral literature / Peter Seitel.
p. cm. — (Oxford studies in anthropological linguistics : 22)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-511700-X
1. I laya (African people) — Folklore. 2. I-oik literature, Hay a — I hstory and criticism.
3. Oral tradition "-Tanzania. 4. Discourse analysis, Narrative—Tanzania.
5. I laya language History and criticism. I. Title. II. Series.
CR356.72.n38 S43 1998
398.2'089'967827—dc21 98-47851
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 42
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO MY TEACHERS
A GROUP THAT INCLUDES MANY TANZANIANS
AND MANY LIBRARIANS
AND ESPECIALLY RALPH RlNZLER.
This page intentionally left blank
Preface
A long time ago, when I was a graduate student at Penn studying with Kenny
Goldstein, David Sapir, and Dell 1 lymes and working in the library, 1 once
entertained an interesting request for assistance. It came from a man doing
research on a Philadelphia inventor who had devised a perpetual motion
machine, he said. Opening a leather portfolio, he showed me a schematic
drawing of that machine. It had several figures with arrows connecting them.
"This is the head," he said, "and this is the hand, and this is the heart." I nod-
ded slowly. "You know," he said, "you have to live with this for a long time
before you understand it." His words recur to me sometimes when I stand
back from my own careful work.
I also remember sitting in the bar at the Vatican City Hotel in Dar es Salaam
in 1994, with my esteemed colleagues, Drs. Mulokozi and Kahigi, professors
of language and literature at the University of Dar es Salaam. We were dis-
cussing oral literature and touched on the now-cooled controversy in ethnopo-
etic studies concerning the mode of definition of a "line" as the basic unit of
analysis in oral narrative or poetry. Kahigi asked me to recount the dispute as
I understood it, and 1 spoke about breath and silence as defining features on
one hand and about adverbials and syntactic parallelism on the other. He was
greatly amused. "I can't imagine how you can have a line in an oral tradition,"
he said. I begged him, "Hold that thought," and as the discussion continued
we returned to it again and again. The Haya oral literature that appears later
has no lines, although conventions of writing and the analytic methods based
on them would seem to indicate that it does. What it really has is not lines but
breath, voice, silence, parallelism, marked forms, fictional logic, and semantic
contrasts performed all together, <ill the time. (And, of course, gesture, which
I did not record in my field research.) An artist makes these all move together,
not linearly and orthogonally in step as in an official document but in the often
playful dialogue that is a topic of this book. Always remember: There are really
no lines.
This work resulted from my trying to specify the methodology for a pro-
ject of editing and interpreting a collection of Haya epic ballads, which is still
under way. I had worked out the method's basic principles in a book 011 folk-
tales but reduced explicaton of it there to only two pages (Seitel 1980:33—34),
for my emphasis then was on narrative art and cultural meaning rather than on
analytic approach. I decided to postpone my editing of the epic collection
•when, addressing method per se and consequently confronting several genres
at once, I found that 1 could discern patterns in texts previously only intuited;
solve nagging problems of logic and theme; and begin to see concrete evi-
viii Preface
dence of connections between literary genres and traditions and other social
formations. In short, genres—particularly their logical aspect, which Bakhtin
calls composition—became for me an Archimedian lever with which I could
move a world of data. And when I saw these things, as Hayas say, I came to
tell you about them.
Most gratitude for the opportunity to produce this work must be expressed
first to my family, Martha, Jesse, and Elizabeth, who have supported me and
this project for a decade. A nearly equal amount of gratitude must go to many
people in Tanzania, a small fraction of whom are named herein; they gener-
ously provided me the wherewithal to make this happen.
I am indebted to many colleagues who read previous drafts of this work
or discussed aspects of it in detail. Some made positive comments, some
negative, but all without exception were extremely helpful. Responsibility for
choosing advice to heed and for hearing it accurately is of course my own.
In this regard, I thank Herb Shore, J. David Sapir, Gilbert Sprauve, Richard
Kurin, Roger Abrahams, Richard Bauman, Charles Briggs, Joel Sherzcr, Ivan
Karp, Daniel Mato, Ken Bilby, Kamran Kahn, John Rutayuga, Mugyabuso
Mulokozi, Junus Rubanza, Carla Borden, Diana Parker, Olivia Caclaval,
William Hanks, Lee Ilaring, the anonymous readers for Oxford, William
Bright, and Luise White.
A group of designers patiently instructed, advised, and assisted me in the
craft of typesetting; at Oxford—Suzanne Holt; at the Smithsonian—Linda
McKnight, Kenn Shrader, Kristen Ferenekes, and Jennifer Harrington.
I also gratefully acknowledge institutional support from the Smithsonian
Institution's Center for Folklife Programs & Cultural Studies, the Institute for
Kiswabili Research at the University of Dar cs Salaam, and the local and
regional Offices of Culture in Kagera Region, Tanzania.
P. S.
September 1998
Washington, D.C.
Contents
1 Introduction 3
Part I
Style, Theme, and Composition in Genre
2 The Logic of Proverbs 35
3 Emergent Complexities and Complex Emergencies in Folktales 49
4 Heroic Society in Interlacustrme Africa 83
Part I!
A Genre-Powered Reading of Kachwenyan/a
5 Stanzas Need No Rhyme 177
6 Significance Needs Time 196
7 Summary and Conclusion 222
Appendix A 227
Appendix B 233
References 237
index 241