Ancestral Voices: Oral Ritual Texts and their Social Contexts among the Mewahang Rai of East Nepal

Abstract

Maskarinec reviews Ancestral Voices: Oral Ritual Texts and their Social Contexts among the Mewahang Rai of East Nepal by Martin Gaenszle.

NEPAL GAENSZLE, MARTIN. Ancestral Voices: Oral Ritual Texts and their Social Contexts among the Mewahang Rai of East Nepal. Performances: Intercultural Studies on Ritual, Play and Theatre, vol. 4. Münster: LIT Verlag, 2002. xix + 338 pages. Figures, map, drawings, glossary, bibliography, index, b/w photographs. Paper euro35.90; ISBN 3-8258-5891-X.

Ancestral Voices, with its reorientation of "ritual" toward more specific concepts, including tcxtuality, idexicality, and competence, and its high standard of precision, makes a substantial contribution to the study not only of Himalayan peoples but also of oral literature anywhere. As befits a solid German Habilitationsschrift, this book is meticulously detailed, conducting a ponderously exhaustive examination of its precisely delineated topic, certain ritual texts of the Mewahang Rai, a tribal sub-group of perhaps 4000 people living in eastern Nepal. Gaenszle has previously published a substantial study of Mewahang Rai social organization and mythology (GAENSZI.K 1991); in this new work he concentrates on various forms of ritual speech used by them, situating oral text in its performative context. Gaenszle's key thesis, convincingly advanced for the material selected, is that Mewahang rituals consist basically of dialogical speech acts, and that these speech acts do not differ in any fundamental way from those used in ordinary life. An exploration of the ways in which ritual language differs from ordinary speech, how it is linked to ritual action, and of the power that it exercises in Mewahang social life form the core of this study. Gaenszle seeks to balance his ethno-philological study of the relatively fixed qualities of the texts as language with the more dynamic levels of their performative, social, and cultural contexts. The second effort, admirably attempted, is not, however, entirely satisfactory. Despite careful description of their prosody, the "strange experience of a different dimension" that Gaenszle reports upon first hearing a Mewahang ritual text performed is not shared with the reader. This could have been at least partially remedied, and the ethnographic value of the book significantly improved, had a CDROM of the chants been included-I.ORD (2000) and MARCH (2002) are good examples of a new standard of documentation to which works such as this one should conform. I am also disappointed that the study excludes the recitals of the malfpa (shamans), but perhaps Gaenszle's next work will concentrate on these; even with these limitations, the work remains impressive in its attention to detail.

The main text is divided into two sections. Part I of the book analyzes the texts and situates them in the field of Mewahang social activity. After exploring local perspectives on the roles of ritual speech within the Mewahang cosmology in Chapter 1, Gaenszle clarifies, in Chapter 2, issues of competence in ritual speech and the transmission of ritual knowledge. Chapter 3 seeks to develop a comprehensive classification of Mewahang ritual speech genres (exclusive of any makpa material), showing how they can be placed along a continuum of styles anchored at one end by ordinary language, all characterized by polite, dialogical speech. Differences are primarily matters of style, marked by features such as a pervasive parallelism at various levels ranging from canonical parallelism between verses to binomial parallelism within single nouns. A particularly interesting conclusion of this chapter is that "it is not the properties of the texts as such which lead to their restriction to initiated priests, hut the requirement of a special competence to use the textual tradition in a creative and indexical manner, a competence which is legitimized as 'given' by, and thus makes it possible to continue a dialogue with, the divine" (111).

Organized into "time," "space," "personhood," and "reciprocity," Chapter 4 examines Mewahang cosmology by tracing the symbolism, metaphors, imagery, and conceptual orders that figure in the ritual texts. Rhetorical strategies and the poetics of the texts are analyzed in Chapter 5, where it is argued that ritual speech constructs a discursive universe more encompassing that the everyday world. An expanded discussion of the musical properties of the texts would have strengthened this chapter, and one does not need to understand the Mewahang language to realize that translating as "open up the path" a poetically striking phrase like "chelam hemma delam hemtnai" is to lose much of the original richness.

The concluding chapter of Part I, "The Power of Ritual Speech," reexamines the efficacy of this tradition and the uses to which it is put in Mewahang social life. As Gaenszle had earlier concluded (56), "the recitation of the muddum [the totality of the ancestral oral tradition] is used as an instrument to restore an original order and harmony, not so much through a reenactment of this order as such...but through an enactment of a contact with the ancestral world." The muddum is a unique linguistic resource that not only allows one to establish, maintain, and manipulate social relationships and to deal with common existential problems, such as illness and misfortune. A key point is that while an emphasis on tcxtuality infuses ritual speech with ancestral authority, that speech achieves its greatest power when this entextualization "is combined with some degree of indexical reference (contextualization), since this allows for dialogue and negotiation with the divine" (171).

Following the thorough analysis of the first half of the book, Part II documents a disappointingly small corpus of texts. Of the six texts included, the longest is 262 lines long; the shortest a selection of only 19 lines. In fact, the entire work could be characterized as an analysis of 572 lines of material. Of course, a rich appreciation of context is what distinguishes the work and the translations and commentaries are painstaking; nevertheless, of the six texts, one (T. 1) is a staged performance, another (T. 3A) was dictated, and a third (T. 3C, previously published in GAKNSZLE 1996) was performed at the author's request, raising some doubts as to how, exactly, the contextualization of these particular texts can be addressed. Since, as Gaenszlc observes, "even the most textualized texts are generated within the contingencies of a context and turn out different with every performance," (189), the striking conclusions regarding the necessary creative balance between entextualization and contextualization appear less than fully supported by Part II of the book, but they remain, in the end, persuasive. Consequently, despite its shortcomings, Ancestral Voices deserves the careful attention of anyone with interests in the necessarily overlapping fields of linguistic and cultural anthropology.

References

REFERENCES CITED

GAENS/LE, Martin

1991 Verwandtschaft und Mythologie bei den Mewahang Rai in Ostnepal. Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag Wiesbaden.

1996 Raising the Head Soul: A ritual text of the Mewahang Rai. Journal of the Nepal Research Center X: 77-93.

LORD, Albert B.

2000 The Singer of Tales. Second edition, with audio and video CD. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press.

MARCH, Kathryn

2002 If Each Comes Halfway: Meeting Tamang Women in Nepal. Ithaca, N.Y; London: Cornell University Press.