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Manning (1983) and
Boissevain (1992) have suggested that in Europe
ludic elements have increasingly taken over and
replaced the more august rituals of, and from, the
past. Boissevain has posited an oscillation between
play and ritual: 'There is a dynamic relation
between ritual and play. As play becomes
increasingly organized, as occurs when the scale
expanded under the impact of tourism, then
authenticity, authority, planning schedules, and
order also become more important. Play then becomes
ritual. But as the ritual dimensions. of celebration
increase, squeezing out the ludic elements in the
interest of decorum, order, and general
organizational tidiness, the need for ludic space
also grows' (1992:14). He concludes that "Modernity
is now generating the pressures that give rise to
play' (ibid:15), although he never analyses
'modernity'.
There is no doubt that the ludic element in rituals
has increased, and that growing democratization,
tourism, return migration, etc, have been important
contributory factors. But there are some problems
here. Why separate ritual from play? Perhaps our
image of ritual is too much defined by gravitas,
formalism, repetition, and the absence of fun.
Nowhere does Boissevain define what he means by
ritual, nor by play, although he seems to use them
in a common-sense way. What seems to be at issue
here is that ritual is discrete, bounded, and power-reenforcing;
play is not. Play demands further play, it is more
fluid, and it requires novelty and innovation.
Rather than perceiving play as emerging in
opposition to ritual, and revitalising it, we ought
to modify our views of ritual and play. It is not so
much that play is replacing ritual, but rather that
we now approach ritual as play, or ludically, to use
Victor Turner's terminology (1983). In a related
vein he has long suggested that ritual should be
seen as a 'social drama', and that it has a
theatrical element (1982). Boissevain suggests that
increased anthropological interest in the ludic
elements in ritual has been 'influenced by the
actual increase of ludic celebrations in the
societies in which the observers live and work'
(1992:2). I do not dispute this, but suggest that
our perception of ritual has changed. In the
contemporary world it is not just that we desire
play and therefore change rituals, revitalising
them. It is also because we no longer view rituals
in the same way as in the past. We anticipate ritual
through a long tradition of secularization, through
a history of perception through various means of
representation (including the telling of stories),
and as spettacolo. In a parallel vein ritual
ceases to be a repository of secret knowledge, of
something hidden, but becomes an elaboration of
surfaces. It becomes exotic, something to be
discovered, talked about, and experienced with an
eye (both literally and metaphorically) to its
reenactment elsewhere. Increasingly such experiences
aim to be inscribed in recitation, a point I wish to
explore later. 'Power' therefore shifts from the
control over the organization of (and participation
in) rituals, to one where the ludic ritualization of
tradition through its discovery, performance, and
narration helps maintain social groups' hegemonies
of taste.
MacCannell has suggested that postmodern society can
be characterised by three features: Narcissism, the
embedding of tradition, and putative classlessness
(1992: 95). By narcissism he means 'a collective
striving for self-sufficiency when it comes to
'otherness': an incorporation and domestication of
other peoples and traditions to the point that they
disappear' ( ibid: 95). By the embedding of
tradition he suggests, echoing de Certau and
Baudrillard, that history has become a simulacra of
the past: 'postmodern places are designed around a
totemic exaltation of the past not as history'
(ibid: 95). Finally he suggests 'within the
postmodern community one finds the pretence of
classlessness and a corresponding trivialisation of
political differences.' (ibid: 95).
The otherness of għana is not an exotic
otherness but the otherness of an ultimately
ordinary exoticism. Previously the otherness that
għana represented for the dominant cultural
elites was not outside society, but within it. It
was a familiar but threatening otherness, associated
as it was both with mixed origins ('Arab' roots),
and with the popular classes. This was an otherness
from the inside, and it metonymically represented a
culture the elite was concerned to internally
distance itself from, and externally presenting
itself as a bulwark against. Nowadays għana
has become an other (rather than the other)
like all other othernesses, and therefore
acceptable. It becomes an ordinary otherness rather
than an extraordinary otherness, and just another
vehicle to generate metaphors of difference.
Significantly, the magazine article bypasses the
class basis of the elite misapprehension of għana,
and a main basis of many of the songs in a coded
form. This is not accidental. To a great extent
għana has been disinvested of the sharpness of
(coded) class commentary, as indeed have many other
traditional markers of social distinction. Class has
become 'only one difference among the many that are
embraced or subsumed by postmodernity' (MacCannell,
ibid: 193)
Għana's potency derives from immediacy and
context. The article fails to mention that much
singing has been, and is, banal. This was the source
of active disdain by elite culture (as indeed
leftist views of arabesk in Turkey, (Stokes,
1992), and the middle class views on flamenco
songs (Washabaugh, 1996;Mitchell, 1994). Yet the
elite was also acutely aware of għana's
insinuating threat at pricking the conceits of
power, paradoxically by exposing the banality of the
signs of distinction, and discoursing on the
'naturalness' of popular culture versus the
'frivolity' of the upper classes.(12)
Overall, it could be said that 'good', effective,
għana discomfits. It has to go below the
surfaces of words, and to play with appearances,
showing that the surfaces of things are not what
they seem. It was this aspect that was (and is)
particularly appreciated and sought after. By
contrast modern appreciation of għana
concentrates much more on the voice, even on the
'pain' of the singer, rather than on the uneasy
laughter that greets the singers' risposte.
Contemporary appreciation of għana is thus
very different to that in the past, and it seeks
different experiences. This is applicable to
għana and to flamenco that has been
'revitalised' (Washabaugh, 1996: 94). MacCannell has
suggested that postmodernism 'valorises surfaces'.
It enunciates 'a fetishism of the ordinary, a
hiding of everyday reality behind an overstated
version of the real, an inflation of the value of
the signifier, a splitting of the norm into what is
and what is ideal, which is allegedly only a
technicolour version of what is' (1992: 188). So
fetishised as 'ordinary' has għana and other
aspects of popular culture become, that young
members of the 'popular classes' (to whom it
'belongs' according to traditional folklorists)
disdain it prefering mainstream pop music,
discotheques, etc. |
