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1. Theory and Method in the Study of Ritual Performance A program announced for the 1977 anniversary celebration of the Oj~ Improve.. ment Society, Lagos, which sponsors masked performances called Egungun hon.. oring the ancestors: "BUSH GROOVE [sicl PROCESSION & PARADE of ALL EGUNGUN from Berkley St. Lagos to Oju Olobun in Isale..Eko area. [ ... 1ALL EGUNGUN (ancient as well as modern) will take part in the Procession and Parade with their respective BANNERS." Not only is there a concept of "modern" Egungun, but the establishment of an "Improvement Society" (one of whose improvements was considered to be the printed pro.. gram) is testimony to the idea that Yoruba performers of ritual do not intend to create an exact reproduction of some original. A fundamental problem with the study of ritual has been our understanding of the nature of repetition, which has heretofore been seen as structurally restrictive or-at the very least-confining. Below I theorize repetition as a way to understand the transformational capacity of performance praxis. Repetition is by definition a re..presentation (Derrida 1978:247-248), in.. deed, a representation. It represents an earlier period of time, which itself may have been a repetition. As a representation of an earlier segment of time, repeti.. tion embodies creativity, for representation itself is a form of creativity (Wagner 1972:4). As a representation of time, repetition may create the illusion of recur.. rence, but, in the words of Antonin Artaud (1958:75), "an expression does not have the same value twice, does not live two lives; I . . . 1 all words, once spoken, are dead and function only at the moment when they are uttered, [ ... 1a form, once it has served, cannot be used again and asks only to be replaced by another, and I ... 1a gesture, once made, can never be made the same way twice." Not only would the performance be different, but the audi.. ence-even if it were essentially the same-would experience the performance differently. In other words, phenomenologically a thing repeated is never the same as its, or any other, "original." In this sense, each repetition is in some measure original, just as it is at the same time never totally novel. Or, as Clifford Geertz (1986:380) has put it, "it is the copying that originates." This is because time does not repeat itself; rather, repetition operates within time to represent it, 2 Yoruba Ritual to mark it off, to measure it, to imbue it with a feeling of regularity and perma... neney, or even to substantiate its existence. MODES OF REPETITION It is useful to distinguish two modes of repetition that operate differently, although they are conceptually related. The broader mode of ritual repetition is the periodic restoration of an entire performance, as in annual rituals scheduled to correspond in some way to seasonal change (Schechner 1985:35-116). In this mode, the unit to be repeated is a complete whole, and long gaps of time exist between the repetitions. The other mode is the repetition that occurs within a single ritual performance, and is experienced in a steady, unbroken flow, as in regular, persistent drumming or vocalizing of the sort ethologists, psychologists, and others cite to explain ritual trance (Lex 1979). The practice of dhikr, repetitive vocalization that induces trance in Arabic dervish brother... hoods from India to Morocco, is but one example (Rouget 1985:263,300-301, 317). Indeed, one of the confusions in the literature on ritual is that scholars often apply the concept of repetition to ritual without ever making this distinc... tion explicit (cf. Tambiah 1985:137-146). Repetition within ritual serves to represent (re...present) time concretely, pro... viding a continuous temporal reference. It has a unifying potential, or rather it provides a common denominator for actions and events. Its binding potential is what makes it particularly crucial to any collective action. Repetition within ritual may induce a sense of stability and predictability (Moore and Myerhoff 1977:17). But to what extent does ritual employ this mode of repetition? Repe... tition may b~ .....seen as an attempt to impose a predictable order on what Edmund Husserl (1964:48) refers to as the "running...off phenomena" of time. But, "just as every temporal point (and every temporal interval) is, so to speak, different from every other 'individual' point and cannot occur twice, so also no mode of running...off can occur twice." Repetition within ritual would seem to have the illusory effect of impeding the running...off...

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