In this work, the author will develop a conception of oral tradition (verbal art) as performance, based upon an understanding of performance as a mode of speaking.
Since the time of the brothers Grimm, more and more interest has been taken in the study of oral tradition. But all these approaches conceive of oral tradition as text-centered, for example, the historical-geographic method by the Finnish school, or, the structural analysis of myths and folktales by Claude Levi-Strauss and Vladimir Propp.
In the 1970s, anthropologists and folklorists interested in cultural performances (ritual, music, oral tradition, etc.) have moved interestingly away from studying them as cultural texts, to looking at them as processes of practice and performance. As Richard Bauman (1977) defined it, performance is a communicative mode of artistic responsibility that the storyteller assumes publicly as a teller of tales. It is, therefore, performance that brings verbal arts together in culturally-specific and variable ways, ways that are to be discovered ethnographically within each culture and community.
However, to describe the oral tradition as performance, there are some restrictions.
① It is hardly possible to name a social variable that doesn’t show up and have its some systemic effect upon oral tradition.
② In the analysis of any single performance of oral tradition, the researcher is limited to concentrating on at most a few aspects of the performance.
③ One aspect of the performance has mutual and complex influence on the others, like peeling an onion.
Understanding these restrictions, we need to describe and analyze the oral tradition as performance.
