Celebrating Another Harmony - F&M Symposium Keynote Address

Date: 

Friday, April 8, 2016, 6:00pm to 7:00pm

Location: 

Barker 133

(Main event page: Celebrating Another Harmony.)

Margaret Mills, Ohio State University (Professor Emerita) 

How Stories Lodge in Lives 

Mary Frere’s Old Deccan Days (1868) introduction to the storyteller, Anna Liberata deSouza, abundantly illustrates how the performer’s choices among traditional stories reflected specific challenges of a personal life full of loss. Frere’s framing of the stories set a model for attention to individual artistry and contexts of performance not again pursued in South Asia till the mid-20th century, with the performance turn in folklore studies. In recent decades, Wadley, Gold and Raheja, Narayan, Prasad, Naithani, and Narasamamba, among others, developed text presentations and analyses linking repertoire, performance, and personal history in various ways.  As Ramanujan has pointed out, vrat katha itself is a major ritual genre in which the telling of stories shapes performatively the lives of the tellers and listeners, both in the ostensibly biographical miracle narratives framed within the ritual and the lives of the ritual participants who keep the stories alive. Blackburn’s  Another Harmony itself offered a foundational analysis of relationships of biography, narrative performance genre and ritual efficacy in South Asia.  The present paper reviews trajectories of this complex from biography to ritual studies and ends with some reflections on why the studies of performed narrative in and of lives have more usually, though not exclusively, focused on women protagonists and performers. Are we missing parallels in men’s equally situated narrative performances, or is there a systematic difference in performative focus determined by genre and/or gender?