Oral Tradition Volume 12, Number 1March 1997
Editor's Column
The essays in this volume address theoretical and ethnographic issues concerning oral traditions and women’s speech in diverse South Asian communities in northern and southern India and in Nepal, and situated in Hindu, Muslim, and Buddhist milieus.1 Our analyses are brought to bear upon a complex set of questions concerning the relation between women’s speech and those cultural traditions and social practices that partly structure their lives. The papers are grounded, first, in an awareness of the colonial, postcolonial, and academic textualizations that so frequently have prevented women’s speech from being heard or their silences understood; we are aware that our position as scholars working in the Western academy constricts and compromises our efforts at interpretation, perhaps in more ways than we can yet bring to awareness, yet we write with the conviction that ethnography is nonetheless a possible and indeed critically important undertaking. And secondly, we write with an awareness that the relationship between women’s speech, on the one hand, and those more widely known, more audible, and perhaps more pervasive South Asian social and cultural conventions that insist that women be controlled and subordinate, on the other, is seldom a simple or unambiguous one.
We might, with A. K. Ramanujan, express this differently by saying that women’s oral traditions, like those of men and like South Asian expressive genres more generally, “look like single entities, like neat little tents, only from a distance” (1989:189). Ramanujan himself and the other authors of the papers presented here try to think seriously about this issue, to think through the ethnographic and theoretical difficulties of considering women’s speech as critically responding to dominant conventions, without reducing “resistance” to a simple or unequivocally oppositional voice, and without lapsing into a language that would suggest a homogeneity that women’s speech does not possess, or an uncrossable boundary between the speech of men and women. We suggest here only some of the possible ways that the oral traditions of South Asian men and women respond critically to one another, mirror one another, comment ironically upon one another, replicate one another, meld sympathetically with one another, or move to subsume or silence one another, while considering always the relations of power as well as community that frame each performance, each act of speaking.
Read more about The Paradoxes of Power and Community: Women’s Oral Traditions and the Uses of Ethnography
Gloria Goodwin Raheja, Speacial Editor
