All interpretations of culture are based on transformational processes, i.e. understanding one thing in terms of something else. Very often the procedure involves a strictly metaphorical move, such as when the geographical-historical school described the movement of tales as brooks collecting into a river, or when diffusionism employed the image of rings around a stone thrown into a water, or when early structuralism analyzed tales in terms of phrase grammar.The metaphor that we have agreed to use here is the human voice. Metaphors are distinguished by their intimate relationship to the subjects they indicate. The human voice is not a foreign substance for anybody researching folklore. Even those whose subject matter is materials or visuals will have engaged in verbal exchange with the specialists on the culture they study, in the procedure we famously call field work (–another metaphor that has become increasingly obsolete since those verbal exchanges nowadays seldom take place in anything that resembles a "field").
It is however impossible to employ the metaphor of voice at this stage without reference to the fact that it has become a household word in the various brands of (in Habermas' terms) liberating science. Voice now designates the expression of identity, especially of an identity formerly not acknowledged and whose "voice" demands recognition. Social practices, such as public oratory and maybe psychotherapeutic practices of the twentieth century, may have been formative in the way "voice" articulates especially the retrieval of hidden, repressed, or forgotten identities. The metaphor of voice has probably played the strongest role in the discourse of feminism, made famous for instance by Carol Gilligan's In a Different Voice.
The specific kind of voice discussed here today is the garbed or even distorted voice of ventriloquism. A ventriloquist looks as if she or he are quiet and the voice emerges from somewhere else, from somebody else's mouth, very often the mouth of an effigy. One of the questions that may arise when a case of ventriloquism has been identified is why is the ventriloquism preferred to the usual articulation of voice. Or in other words: who causes the mouth of the owner of the voice to hide its activity and to transpose the voice to another, false source, and why? A very plausible explanation, stemming from our experience already as children is that the authentic mouth is forbidden to utter its speech. It may also be ashamed to speak, or have another tactical reason for hiding the source of speech, such as a contrived deception, or simply play.
Voices that are completely out of reach and silenced are those of the past. Stephen Greenblatt has beautifully formulated the longing to hear the voices of the dead as a powerful motivation for studying historical texts, especially literature of past ages. The historical folklorist is tempted to apply the experience of field work in approaching past identities embodied in texts that may demand some cunning to find the voices. The enterprise may seem as a form of reconstruction of a lost world. I want to claim that it may also evolve into something much more dialogic in its nature, where not only the past silenced ones (re?)gain a voice but even the present one, i.e. the folklorist may gain a new voice, garbed as it is, in the voices of the past.
The practice of folklore studies in late antique rabbinic literature involves such a procedure for me. These texts have traditionally been considered patriarchal, rooted in the intellectual institutions of male practices such as the learning and interpretation of the Law in the academies and the reading and preaching of it in the synagogues. Many of the traditions are quoted from named persons. The majority of male names in the corpus is so overwhelming that there is no point in quoting percents. Studying the folk literary aspects of these texts brings out at least two sides of ventriloquism. The first one is the discovery of other social contexts, hitherto unnamed or silenced, for some of these texts. These are significantly the home and some public spaces such as the market place, that were less gender discriminatory than the ones traditionally seen as the locations of textual production, the synagogue, and the academy. This new positioning of the site of text production reveals the first kind of ventriloquism. Women's oral traditions have actually been transformed into male speech. A blatant example, in which ventriloquism is not totally erased, are the various traditions of healing, bodily practices and magic that appear in the Babylonian Talmud introduced by the formula "And Abaye said: mother told me".
Some examples are: "And Abaye said: mother told me:/ go to the salt-pool for a one day fever,/ weigh a new coin with a measure of salt,/ wrap it in hair, around your throat" (TB Shabbat 66b); "And Abaye said, Mother told me:? For a weak heart/ take meat/ from the right loin of a stag,/ take dung/ from the flocks that graze in April" (TB Eruvin 29b). Regarding the experience of the wedding night: "Abaye said, Mother told me:/ Like hot water/ on a bald man's head./ Raba said,/ the daughter of rav Hisda told me:/ Like the prick of bloodletting./ Rav Papa said,/ the daughter of Aba of Sura told me:/ Like hard bread for the gums" (TB Ketubot 39b).
In the third example the attribution of the voice to women, whose identity is effectively hidden behind their male relatives, is a necessity, since the information includes subjective impressions of the experience of defloration, not to be experienced in that sense by a male. The other example reveals the female authority over genres of healing and magic.
One may of course interpret the attribution to the female voice as a double ventriloquism: not that the male name veils an authentic female voice that had uttered the saying, but rather that the male voice uses a ventriloquist technique to project an utterance belonging to a marginal genre on a female source. This is the other mode of ventriloquism characterizing the ancient patriarchal texts. The tradition attributed to women is in fact not solely female, but represents a practice that men do not readily admit to. It is of course quite impossible to make a perfectly valid decision regarding with whom the ventriloquism is situated. The metaphor of ventriloquism as a heuristic device enables us to illuminate the semantic indefiniteness and the propensity to multiple interpretations of the Talmudic corpus, unjustly regarded as a single voiced authoritative canon.
The ventriloquism of the folklorist consists in her appropriation of a tradition that has a history of long male ownership, that has traditionally been claimed by cultural elitists, and that some still think belongs exclusively to those who adhere to religious orthodoxy. Or isn't it rather the unmasking of an ancient ventriloquism?
© Galit Hasan-Rokem 2002
I have been wondering for some time about the surfacing of the term ventriloquism in the metaphorical form in which it is employed here. Would it not be useful to differentiate the use of terminology in this rich example of historical research by taking in account agency?
- from Regina Bendix:
Bringing into play the terms used by last year's symposium, take and cover, I would argue that what is described here as the first form of ventriloquism–"Women's oral traditions have actually been transformed into male speech"–begins as a cover without attribution (aka theft...): a new agent or actor, here a male, has appropriated female words/wisdom and voiced them in a manner that eventually renders all wisdom into a collective, male-authored "tradition" in which differentially gendered origin is erased.
The second form which begins with "Abaye said, Mother told me..." would then be a cover with attribution, allowing for gendered differentiation. But the agent doing the speaking/writing is still the male voice. In ventriloquism, as we see it on stage for instance, and from which the metaphor is borrowed, the agency lies with the "originator"–the puppet or effigy appears to be speaking itself, but it is the muffled/disguised voice of the "owner of the genre/" who is doing both her own performance and that of the effigy.
Attribution is definitely a problem here: how do we decide who the agent is? It seems clear enough in this case of the ventriloquist and the dummy, but would we be as certain in the case of, say, St. Catherine of Siena, who prayed before a crucifix and heard the figure of Jesus speaking to her? What about the child who says her dog loves her? What about African American conservatives, welcomed on one side as authentic individual voices and distrusted on the other as token puppets or at best as opportunist wearers of a convenient mask? What about George Bush, who has become dismayingly real of late?
- from Dorry Noyes:
Agency is conferred as well as assumed: it depends at least in part on recognition. It is a transaction. Extreme cases are found in festival effigies, dolls, pets, the spirits of the dead, and sacred images, which do not generally talk, but are understood as participating in relationships in more or less limited ways. Kay Turner's 1983 Semiotica article on religious icons explains how the gaze, the prayers, the invocations of believers bring icons to life: they are animated by sustained attention.
In a literary key, we have the complementary rhetorical figures of apostrophe and prosopopoeia. Apostrophe--calling spirits from the vasty deep, if you will--is the address to an inanimate object as if it were sentient. Prosopopoeia is the speech of such an object--an abstraction, a natural force, an image or statue. Paul De Man suggests that it is apostrophe that enables prosopopoeia. We can see these as the two sides of the trope of personification.
People have to be personified too: socially conferred names and faces and voices make them agents. When no recognition is granted, agency takes violent form to achieve it. (Lately it has been hard not to think about the valley of the dry bones in Ezekiel, though to suggest that the current conflicts were just there waiting to spring back to life is surely the most dangerous form of attribution afoot in recent public discourse.)
Following on Regina's distinction of covers with and without attribution, we might see a continuum of the ways in which dominant actors use subordinate voices--and potentially are used by them.
- Personification. Granting and/or acknowledgment (it is negotiated) of a name, face, and voice to the Other so that messages will be heard and recognized as emanating from that source. (This is the assumed procedure of the liberal multiculturalism which, as Galit points out, celebrates voice.)
- Ventriloquism. A voice and message are projected into the Other. The other must be seen to speak autonomously: must appear to be an agent. (But we, the outside observers, and presumably though not necessarily the Other, declare this an act of misrecognition.)
- Incorporation. The voice of the Other is internalized, either as a repressed lower self which emerges on licensed occasions (as in festivals commemorating community founding throughout Europe and its settler nations) or as an acknowledged contributor to an enlarged self (We are the world).
- Appropriation. The messages of the Other are taken without voice, and assumed by the dominant actor.
- Invisibility. The Other is not heard or seen. There is no Other.
A troubling question, practically and theoretically. It seems that we are calling ventriloquism a misrecognition--the conferring of an inauthentic voice. The practical question: how do you wrest control of your voice back, and does this demand violence to achieve certainty? The theoretical problem: These complementary notions of ventriloquism and possession, so beautifully presented here by Galit and Deborah (and see also Susan Stewart's new book), seem to presume an alienable and therefore a potentially authentic self. Can we find a way to theorize that self again?
As Regina and Dorry have both suggested, determining agency is a central problem in discussions of ventriloquism, a problem that becomes particularly vexing in cases of texts from the past. When folklore is embedded in literature where characters engage in human interaction, we may be confronted with many simultaneous levels of ventriloquism. To give a prominent example, in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales we are presented with a female narrator telling a highly selective life history. In this text ("The Wife of Bath's Prologue"), Alisoun consistently appropriates the male genres of classical reference, proverb and parable and embeds them in another male genre, a sermon. Other characters recognize this appropriation and metadiscursively comment on it. In Radner and Lanser's well-known article on coding, this kind of appropriation is discussed as a primary strategy of feminist discourse.
- from Steve Winick:
As part of her sermon, Alisoun remembers her deceased husband, Janekyn, and reveals that he often enthusiastically read to her from anti-feminist texts; she then quotes those texts, letting Janekyn speak through her-but adding her own comments in turn.
Clearly, the ventriloquism here is multiple. First, we have Chaucer, who creates the effigy of a woman and speaks through her. The woman appropriates male discourse forms, creating the persona of a "noble preacher," arguing for female self-determination. This persona, in turn, creates the male effigy of Janekyn, her late husband. Both effigies speak through references to classical, biblical, and traditional tales, using them as further levels of ventriloquism, presenting their own points of view as traditional wisdom, voices thrown by people like King Solomon-even though these figures often did not say what the wife and the husband claim they did.
This allows very similar questions to the one posed by Galit: Who is speaking through whom? Is Janekyn speaking from beyond the grave through Alisoun? Has she become the unwitting dummy, speaking in a sexist voice thrown by her late husband? Or is the deceased Janekyn the dummy, his sexist remarks put in his mouth by the wife in a bid for sympathy? Is the wife in turn a dummy, created by Chaucer to express his ideas, or do the ideas come (as some think) from a woman Chaucer knew, making him the willing dummy for her voice?
The upshot is a longstanding debate, seemingly unsolvable, in Chaucer studies. Was Chaucer a proto-feminist or an anti-feminist, or neither? On the one hand, he presents almost exclusively male voices; even the primary effigy of the wife speaks like a man, and through quoting Janekyn (and her other dead husbands) she engages in sexist diatribe. On the other hand, Chaucer presents a strong female character speaking in a discourse style that has since been recognized as a common subversive female (and feminist) strategy: appropriation. Her point of view comes across to many modern readers as convincing. So where does Chaucer stand, and who is the dummy?
At least part of this debate could be recast in terms of Dorry's suggested taxonomy. The question becomes, which strategies is each speaker using? Is Chaucer using ventriloquism, putting his own thoughts in the Wife of Bath's mouth? Or is he using a form of personification, allowing a female voice he has heard to speak through a female character? Clearly, in the course of such deeply embedded "voice-throughs," Chaucer (and his characters) may be using any or all of these strategies at any given time; the trick is knowing what they're doing when.
This question has no easy answers, and perhaps finding an answer would never be satisfactory. After all, in both literary criticism and folklore analysis, one of the real dangers is becoming ventriloquists ourselves, projecting our ideas and desires onto our informants or our authors/texts, then claiming our own interpretation as primary or authentic because it seems to come from their mouths. This is a kind of ventriloquism we see all too often. Is it more productive in some ways to try to be the dummy, affording agency to those who are otherwise silenced, and allowing them to speak through us; or in Galit's terms "unmasking ventriloquism?" Perhaps, but as Dorry suggests, this is both a practical and a theoretical challenge. Allowing ourselves to be voiced through without losing (or throwing) our voice is hard enough. But just recognizing or recovering a primary, "authentic" self or voice that can speak through us may be the hardest task of all.
- from Deborah Kapchan:
I must confess, however, that only after reading Mikhail Bakhtin's great book Rabelais and His World have my eyes become really open to the inner dynamics of a plebeian culture. This culture of the common people apparently was by no means only a backdrop, that is, a passive echo of the dominant culture; it was also the periodically recurring violent revolt of a counterproject to the hierarchical world of domination, with its official celebrations and everyday disciplines. Only a stereoscopic view of this sort reveals how a mechanism of exclusion that locks out and represses at the same time calls forth countereffects that cannot be neutralized. If we apply the same perspective to the bourgeois public sphere, the exclusion of women from this world dominated by men now looks different than it appeared to me at the time (Habermas 1992:427)
It is hard for me not to think of my early work when I read Galit's musings on ventriloquism. In that work, I also explored the processes whereby a speech genre associated with one gender (in my case, men) was appropriated by another (women) with political intent. As in Galit's examples as well, there was a connection to the marketplace (that institution of social openings), and to magic and "women's knowledge". Yet there are important differences in our case studies that speak to the political effectiveness of what might be called "revoicing" and the hegemony that practices like "ventriloquism" contain. It would seem that context -- the social definition and redefinition of space and its pragmatic use -- is what transforms a "voice" that speaks into a "Voice" that speaks to, back and for. In Galit's example, the context is late antique rabbinic literature and the presence of the oral in the textual tradition; for me, it is the institution of the open-air marketplace in Morocco.
In Morocco, men's marketplace speech is full of references to magic, and to verbal and herbal formulae. In this, it may be said to "ventriloquize" a kind of women's private speech and to publicize it for a larger audience, just as in Galit's example. But men also validate their public discourse with lengthy quotes from the Qur'an and the Hadith in higher registers of classical Arabic -- a symbol of literacy and male authority, and one that women have adopted in order to instantiate themselves in the public domain.
In this regard, it is interesting to see the transformation in men's marketplace oratory since the advent of women's entry into the public sphere of the marketplace. Now, in order to distinguish themselves from women (who have re-appropriated the genre), men are employing new techniques of authority-building. Male orators now construct their public authority by reference to genealogy, codeswitching often and drawing on conventional symbols of legitimation and power, such as diplomas and religious literacy. For example, a male herbalist asks,
What is written on this diploma?
And what is written on this authorization?
"The Kingdom of Morocco" is written on it:
"Kingdom of Morocco, Ministry of Interior.
"The Ministry of Interior, Province of Beni Mellal."
Written here is "the herbalist Mohammed Saadi."
I'll introduce you to natural healing.
They aren't the miracle herbs, or cooking spices or les epices.
What kind of diploma is this?
It's in biologie, the science of herbs.
What's written here?
"The kingdom of Morocco, the Ministry of National Education, Higher Studies,
College of Science, University of Hassan II.
Science of Herbs," la biologie,
a B.A. in la biologie.
What is written on this diploma?
This is from Pakistan.
Here it is.
What is written on it?
This [photo] is my younger brother, not me.
As for me, don't even ask!
Written here: Diploma of Herbalism {in English}.
That is, it's written in English, Diplome d'Herboriste.
Written here is "Republic of Pakistan" {English}
"Specialist in Medicinal Herbs.
"The capital of Karachi."
Written here: "Herbalist Mohammed Saadi".
"Born in 1959 in Casablanca.
"Graduate, Herbalist of the State,
"Recognized by the State."
Signed by Doctor Grochola,
the biggest surgeon.
He's the doctor that signed [his name] here.
He's the one that performed an operation on Gorbachov of Russia.
These are the "friends of power" congregated here.
And there are medical doctors, and Ph.D.s and I am here also.
Not just today.
I've been here for three years every Friday
at the door of the mosque.The herbalist in the above example code-switches frequently between Moroccan Arabic, French and English. He emphasizes the authority of his state-certified diploma -- and that of his brother -- in order to distinguish his goods from the "miracle herbs, or cooking spices or les epices" [spices] of other herbalists, including women. By concentrating on diplomas -- including a Ph.D! -- and using several international languages (that the uneducated women herbalists don't possess), this male herbalist ups the ante on authority-building and legitimation in the public sphere.
In a recent publication, Lauren Berlant refers to an "intimate public sphere," a domain whose public nature is constructed via discourses circulating in non-official and alternative arenas. Discussing Harriet Jacobs' 1861 publication, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, for example, wherein a slave thought that there was a Queen of America who wanted the freedom of slaves and to whom the president was subordinate, Berlant remarks:
Jacobs shows that a great deal of language and logic circulating through the national sphere is silly, ignorant, and extremely consequential to the ways people understand and act within what they perceive to be the possibilities of their lives. She takes seriously this failed communication about the nation not only to show how dominated people find ways to sustain their hopefulness in a cruel world, but also to show how the kinds of invention, innovation, and improvisation her illiterate interlocutor practiced with only partial knowledge could be used radically, for the reimagination of collective political life within the nation. (pg. 20 of the ms.)Similar assertions could be made about the discourse of market women, many of whom are illiterate. Although their discourse is considered "irrational" by some -- indexing a premodern world of superstition -- or sinful (haram) by others, as witchcraft is defined in the Qur'an, it is important to remember that the discourse of magic is one that gains its strength adversarially. Magic is a separatist politics, a counter-hegemonic discourse which seeks to wrest power from a patriarchal system in which women are inscribed as powerless .The discourse of women orators reaffirms the system of magic, in which women have agency and are potentially dangerous, while the discourse of male oratory is turning towards a new paradigm -- one based on diplomas and science. Is it accidental that women are finding their voice in the marketplace just as the marketplace itself is being devalued as a cultural institution? Or that women are asserting a feminine discourse at a moment when the public criteria for power are changing?
Galit states that "the enterprise [of tracing voices] may seem as a form of reconstruction of a lost world. I want to claim that it may also evolve into something much more dialogic in its nature, where not only the past silenced ones (re?)gain a voice but even the present one, i.e. the folklorist may gain a new voice, garbed as it is, in the voices of the past."
I would agree, with a caution however -- which is the caution of context. Analysis of women's marketplace discourse might have us believe that a feminine ethic and aesthetic informs public oratory in the marketplace. And indeed at times it is has and does. It is only when we compare it to the most recent forms of male discourse that we realize that the terms of authority are, once again, in flux. The competition of voices in the marketplace, and the competing interpretations of these voices, is never stable and always performative.
As Dorry notes, we "inhabit culture, our intimate architecture, differently (as Bourdieu argued) as a renter, a payer of mortgages, or an inheritor." The person who creates the terms is not the same as the one who employs and appropriates them. To this end, Galit's project is an important one. She asks, "to whom do the terms belong?"
Were there an easy answer!
Dear friends,
- from Galit Hasan-Rokem::
I regret very much the fact that I could not be present at the magnificent celebration of Roger's intellectual and personal significance for each of us who took part in this enterprise in any of its versatile forms (Between Web and Wine - another possible topic...). I am deeply grateful to Regina, Dorry, Steve, and Deborah for their thoughful comments and challenges that will certainly be integrated in any future form this paper may take. I hope that the rich stimulation that was generated by this third in a series of meetings will generate more of the same at AFS, ISFNR and other meetings as well as at the Center for Folklore and Folklife of the University of Pennsylvania. Congratulations to Mary and Dorry for the successful production as well as to Brian, Eric and others who were helpful. Special congratulations also to Joanna, Kwali, and Michael, whose names appear among those who have accomplished their MA studies.
And in a direct voice: Kwali, I am so curious to hear your voice behind the picture in the session I saw in a picture on the website -- all the imaginary ventriloquy in the world cannot retain that, please send any notes you made for the discussion!
Last but not least: Dear Roger may you be the constant inspiration for love for folklore and its study by the highest scholarly standards, as you have always been, "until a hundred and twenty years"!
Friends, if possible, please express your solidarity and support for those who struggle for an equal, just, and humane peace between Palestinians and Israelis at this dire moment.
Yours,
Galit
Back to
t h e SOUNDING
BOARD