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| Imaginative Minds: An Interdisciplinary Symposium30 April-1 May 2004The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AHThe anthropology of the textual imaginationProfessor Karin Barber, FBA1 By the textual imagination, I mean the creative operations by which textuality itself is constituted: the procedures by which evanescent discourse is consolidated to outlast the immediate context of utterance. In modern European literary criticism we tend to assume (a) that the textual imagination is essentially a visual one, the fundamental operations involving fictional or internally-generated 'images'; and (b) that its ultimate purpose and justification is to enable a reader to expand his or her human sympathies by experiencing, as if from within, other people’s point of view. Comparative studies, however, show that modes of textual constitution are culturally specific. The building blocks of African oral genres such as the ubiquitous traditions of praise poetry may be – and often are – striking 'images' which can be visualised, but the connections between one block and the next are more often associations such as puns and grammatical expansions which resist visualisation: they constitute not so much an 'argument of images' as a network of word-affiliations which are understood to arise from underlying ontological connections between things and people. Moreover, these texts do not invite the hearer to picture what it is like to be someone else; rather, they throw out extensions from the speaker’s position into virtual social space and time, such that both speaker and addressee can occupy or affiliate with the 'names' of others - an ancestor, a living kinsperson or a deity. This raises questions not only about the constitution of text but the constitution of persons. I will look at examples from Rwandan and Yoruba oral traditions to illustrate this argument.
1. Professor of African Cultural Anthropology, Centre of West African Studies, University of Birmingham |
