Managing the "Boss": Epistemic Violence, Resistance, and Negotiations in Milman Parry's and Nikola Vujnović's Pričanja with Salih Ugljanin

Without a doubt, Albert B. Lord's seminal work The Singer of Tales owes much of its success to the series of pričanja ("conversations")¹ conducted with the South Slavic singers in 1933-35 by his mentor, Milman Parry, and his native assistant, Nikola Vujnović. This was an endeavor that Lord initially assisted in and benefited from as a student, and a practice he adopted during his own subsequent research trips to Yugoslavia in the 1950s. Along with the hands-on experience of listening to and recording performances of epic songs and other lore, these interviews proved crucial to the forming of the so-called "Oral-Formulaic Theory" inasmuch as they provided vital contextual information, as well as some basic interpretative tools for approaching the sizeable body of recorded epics. Moreover, in the course of the interviews, the singers offered valuable insight not only into what they already knew and did (for instance, how they acquired their skill, how they composed, or what in their opinion counted as a truthful, beautiful, or "correctly" sung tale), but also into what they could know and do, as the interactive and heuristic nature of the interview presented Parry with ample opportunities to test his hypotheses—those that he brought from Harvard and the Sorbonne, and those that were forming and being transformed during the interviews themselves. The ways of thinking that resulted from such probing and experimentation² must to a significant degree account for the applicability and usefulness of the Parry-Lord method beyond the narrowly South Slavic context.³ As John Miles Foley attests (1998:149): "to date more than 100 language areas have been affected by the approach they initiated."

While explored and exploited as a rich resource for learning about oral tradition, the singers' place within it, and attitudes towards it, these conversations are seldom considered as performances in their own right—that is, as meta-performances—that themselves feature the recitation/telling/singing of epic poetry and other traditional lore.⁴ Although they are likely to be as "genuine" as any other interviews (recorded or not), these conversations bear clear signs of staging. To take those with Salih Ugljanin as an example, just before the "official" conversation begins, the faint whispers of Nikola Vujnović's leisurely, often preparatory chatter with the singer can sometimes be distinguished from the crackling background noise of the phonograph already set in motion. So, too, can some of Parry's barely audible interventions and instructions to Nikola be made out in brief pauses, often marking the turning points of an interview;⁵ even amidst apparently impassioned debates, charged with ethnic and religious tensions (e. g., PN 659, VI:47-48, R 1053: 0:51-0:52),⁶ Nikola will not forget to remind the singer, under his breath and fully composed, to voice his contrary opinion glasnije ("louder").⁷ At other times, the singer himself speaks in a lower voice: when tired or in pain, when insecure, or when he judges the content of his remark as not record-worthy (e. g., PN 654, II:67-68, R 928: 2:19-2:30). In these cases his interviewers rarely follow suit and instead ask him to repeat the remark more loudly, not missing an opportunity, paradoxically, to stage some spontaneity and realism as well.

Casting the conversations in terms of useful, primarily supplementary material⁸ must have obscured, to a significant degree, their performative aspect, as well as rendered all too transparent the otherwise subtle relationships that developed between the collector, the informant, and the routinely neglected third figure that looms large in these recordings, that of the interpreter/mediator. However, one of the more mundane reasons for the conversations' remaining unstudied in their own right must have been the restricted availability of the phonographic recordings to a wider scholarly audience. With the recent establishment of the "Milman Parry Collection of Oral Literature On-Line" (MPCOL) hosted by Harvard University, and their ongoing digitization of Parry's and Lord's recordings, it is becoming more and more possible...