Verbal Art as Performance (1975)
Un texte fondateur de l'anthropologie linguistique

 

(Bauman 2002: 94) Thus, it would be fair to say that my notions of performance did not diffuse from folklore into linguistic anthropology; they were oriented toward linguistic anthropology from the start, and, insofar as Verbal Art represents a significant formulation of those ideas, they were introduced into scholarly discourse under the sponsorship of that subdiscipline of anthropology. I feel it worth mentioning that, notwithstanding the gratifying response by folklorists to the ideas presented in Verbal Art, my colleagues in linguistic anthropology have exploited essential aspects of the approach developed in Verbal Art that folklorists on the whole—although with notable exceptions, including the authors of the essays in this issue—have not been inclined to pursue, namely, the formal constituents of performance, the relationships that tie poetic form to social function and interpretive meaning, and the broader role of performance in the conduct of social life.

In the process of attempting to refine and specify more clearly my developing notion of performance in the writing of Verbal Art, I was strongly inspired by Prague School poetics in the work of Roman Jakobson and his colleagues in prewar Prague, especially Jan Mukarovsky, and by Erving Goffman's frame analysis, to which I was introduced by Goffman's lectures and by conversations with him even before the publication of Frame Analysis in 1974. Prague School poetics, especially as developed in Mukarovsky's and Jakobson's writings on the poetic function, and Jakobson's writings on the metalingual function, parallelism, and shifters, rests centrally on dimensions of linguistic reflexivity, the capacity of language to refer to itself, to treat itself as an object (Jakobson 1960, 1966, 1971, 1980; Mukarovsky 1968a, 1968b, 1970). Likewise, Goffman's notion of metacommunicative framing is a fundamentally reflexive concept, and although it extends well beyond linguistic reflexivity in Goffman's formulation, he was keenly interested in language, and his lengthy chapter on the frame analysis of talk had a considerable shaping influence on my conception of performance.

 

bauman_verbalArtAsPerformance.pdf — Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance, American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 77, No. 2 (June 1975), pp. 290–311; repr. in A. Duranti, Ed., Linguistic Anthropology. A Reader, Oxford: Blackwell, 2001, pp. 165-188.

Richard Bauman, Verbal Art as Performance [1977], nouvelle édition, Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1984.

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bauman_sherzer_1975.pdf — Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, The Ethnography of Speaking, Annual Review of Anthropology, Vol. 4 (1975), pp. 95–119.

Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, Introduction to the Second Edition (pp. ix-xxvii), dans: R. Bauman and J. Sherzer, Eds., Explorations in the Ethnography of Speaking [1974], Second Edition, Cambridge: CUP, 1989.

bauman_briggs.pdf — Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life, Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 19, 1990, pp. 59–88.

briggs_metadiscursive.pdf — Charles L. Briggs, Metadiscursive Practices and Scholarly Authority in Folkloristics, The Journal of American Folklore, Volume 106, No. 422, Autumn 1993, pp. 387–434.

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JSTOR_JournAmerFolklore_2002.pdf — The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 115, No. 455, Winter, 2002, Toward New Perspectives on Verbal Art as Performance.

berger_delNegro_verbalArtAsPerformance.pdf — Harris M. Berger and Giovanna P. Del Negro, Introduction: Toward New Perspectives on Verbal Art as Performance, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 115, No. 455, Toward New Perspectives on Verbal Art as Performance (Winter, 2002), p. 4.

sawin_baumans_gendered.pdf — Patricia E. Sawin, Performance at the Nexus of Gender, Power, and Desire: Reconsidering Bauman's Verbal Art from the Perspective of Gendered Subjectivity as Performance, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 115, No. 455, Toward New Perspectives on Verbal Art as Performance (Winter, 2002), pp. 28–61.

berger_delNegro_baumans_verbalArt.pdf — Harris M. Berger and Giovanna P. Del Negro, Bauman's Verbal Art and the Social Organization of Attention: The Role of Reflexivity in the Aesthetics of Performance, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 115, No. 455, Toward New Perspectives on Verbal Art as Performance (Winter, 2002), pp. 62–91.

bauman_response.pdf — Richard Bauman, Disciplinarity, Reflexivity, and Power in Verbal Art as Performance: A Response, The Journal of American Folklore, Vol. 115, No. 455, Toward New Perspectives on Verbal Art as Performance (Winter, 2002), pp. 92–98.