Quotation in the Constitution of Yoruba Oral Texts

Any genre of verbal art, or any single instance of a genre, can be understood in terms of the way it is constituted as 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, dirge, chant, tale) and then examining them for the "characteristic features" they share. But the analysis should not stop there. We need to presume that textuality itself is culturally specific: that there are different 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 performance.

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, improvisatory, and fluid. In this view, "text" implies writing, and referring 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 art as performance" (Bauman, Verbal Art 8). Richard Bauman's influential early formulation opened the way to a performance-centered, rather than "text"-centered, approach:

Performance 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 referential content. . . [I]t is no longer necessary to begin with artful texts, identified on independent formal grounds and then reinjected into situations of use. (Verbal Art 11)

Recently, however, a more inclusive view of text has been gaining ground, closer to its original sense of "something woven; a tissue." W. F. Hanks proposes as a working definition "any configuration of signs that is coherently interpretable by some community of users" (95)—encompassing not only oral and written discourses of innumerable types but also painting, music, and film. This shift has made possible the reintegration of the notion of text into an open and dynamic approach to verbal art.

Within the broad category of interpretable configurations of signs, certain kinds of texts are specifically demarcated and recognized as texts within the cultures that produce them. In a recent paper, Bauman and Charles Briggs have moved to a notion of entextualization as "the process of rendering discourse extractable, of making a stretch of linguistic production into a unit—a text—that can be lifted out of its interactional setting" (73). This is a promising move. But Bauman and Briggs remain committed to the position that it is performance that brings about "entextualization" and that it is the act of speaking that is put on display, "objectified," and lifted from its interactional setting for evaluation by an audience: "Performance heightens awareness of the act of speaking and licenses the audience to evaluate the skill and effectiveness of the performer's accomplishment" (73).

By contrast, I will argue that in Yorùbá oral verbal art, it is not exclusively, or even principally, the performance that is detached, "objectified," and partially lifted from its interactional setting: it is the texts themselves, in the sense of configurations of words constituted as texts—and that this in part accounts for the texts' power and effectivity. In my view, the oral practitioners themselves may indeed "begin with artful texts, identified on independent formal grounds," which they then "reinject into situations of use."

Hostility to "reified," "object-centered" notions of performance, text and context is almost universal among present-day...