The performative aspect of behavior has become a popular topic in humanistic scholarship and is now being used by historians to better describe and understand the past. The approaches in the book under review range from trying to reconstruct performances which are no longer staged to using contemporary performances to better understand what happened long ago. The book has five sections, each with its own approach.
The first section is called Verbal Art as Performance and the authors who contribute to it try to find traces of the orally performed original within the written texts that have survived to the present. The section begins with a survey by Metin And, the venerable founder of Turkish performance studies to whom this book is dedicated. The other contributors cover a variety of topics. Revital Refael Vivante looks at the art of the maqama and states that these were stories recited before an audience, a performance situation which influenced the texts. Arzu Öztürkmen examines the Book of Dede Korkut, pointing out features which indicate that these narratives existed in oral form before they were written down. Marija-Ana Dürrigl does the same with the Croatian legend which recounts the life of St. John Chrysostom, while Evelyn Birge Vitz takes a similar approach to the legend of the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus. David Rotman explains that Rabbi Joseph Hayyim was particularly successful as a preacher because he used narrative plots derived from folktales, and Michael Curschmann looks at Joinville’s Credo as a written text, but one that was meant to be read aloud over a person about to die. There are many interesting revelations in this section. For example, the reading of the Credo was accompanied by the display of a sacred image to the dying person and was thus a performance that contained both aural and visual elements.
The second section examines evidence of various types of performers in the period in question. Both Przemyslaw Marciniak and Tivadar Palagyi look at mimes and other performers in the Byzantine Empire and try to ascertain who they were and what they did. Mime performances were apparently quite unseemly and some of our information about mimes comes from edicts prohibiting priests from being present at their performances. The same was apparently true of clowns under the Ottomans, as discussed by Özdemir Nutku. Suraiya Faroqhi looks at a performance of a different sort—not human actors but the elaborate firework displays staged by the Ottomans. Koray Durak looks at events that would not normally be considered performances, and uncovers their performative aspects. He describes exchanges of prisoners and shows that these were elaborately staged events that drew large numbers of onlookers and communicated messages of power. Danielle Haase-Dubosc writes about Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who served as the wife of the British ambassador to Turkey. Her greatest performance was bringing back knowledge of smallpox vaccination and demonstrating its effectiveness to her fellow British citizens by having her own children vaccinated.
Section III deals with entertainment. Cemal Kafadar contributes an article which reveals how the institution of the coffeehouse changed Turkish culture by introducing new forms of entertainment and making the night into a period when people could remain awake. Two articles, one by Daryo Mizrahi and one by Mas’ud Hamdan, deal with the puppet shadow theater Karagöz. Karagöz plays could be “scandalously improper” and yet they were watched by modest women and even children. The appeal of these shows lay, not in their obscenity, but in their effectiveness in helping new arrivals to Istanbul negotiate their new, and sometimes absurd-seeming, environment. Music is the subject of the next two articles. Noune Zeltsburg-Poghosyan writes about the rather specialized community of Armenians in Jerusalem and examines the vocal styles of their liturgical music. Judith R. Cohen also looks at a community that relocated from its original homeland, namely the Sephardic Jews, matching song types to categories of performers. Gypsy musicians constituted an even more marginal group and are described by Elena Marushiakova and Vesselin Popov. Some historical narratives state that Gypsies came into the Ottoman Empire as invited musicians rather than of their own accord.
The iconography section deals with visual representations of performers. Viktoria Kepetzi points out that pictures of acrobats, jugglers, and musicians appeared not only in frescos and in carvings, but also as the capital letters of manuscript text. Acrobats who contorted their bodies into unusual shapes or held smaller performers aloft were uniquely suited to forming letters. Emma Petrosyan looks at miniatures decorating Armenian manuscripts and finds that they include portrayals of performers, while Hrant Khachikyan finds representations of musicians in the same sorts of texts. Stylized as the manuscript art may be, it does provide information about the past. Instead of searching for images of performers, Anestis Vasilakeris examines icons as works that portray their subjects as if they were performing on a stage. The buildings and other architectural features look like theater backdrops, and the figures in the icons display exaggerated emotions, almost as if they were stage actors. Finally, Gabriela Currie examines images of musicians on obelisks, frescoes, and small objects, discussing how the positioning of musicians in a scene conveys information about them.
The last section, entitled Ritual Roots of Performance, deals with the modern situation and what it reveals about the past. The first two articles talk about politics. Samia Mehrez claims that, in Egypt, a seemingly scandalous puppet enactment of moulid, one that seemed doubly subversive because of this holiday’s association with the lower classes, was actually a way to uphold the government. In Turkey the government used history to claim Nevruz as a Turkish holiday, thus denying assertions that this celebration was uniquely Kurdish, demonstrating cultural distinctiveness and thus supporting Kurdish claims to independence. Two articles deal with religious ritual. Fariye Dinçer’s piece about the Alevi semah deals with contestation between Alevis and Sunnis over who represents true Islam. Cem Behar’s piece about the Mevlevi and their mukabele shows that this ritual, while deeply religious, was always open to the public, even though an audience was not a necessary part of the performance. Elsie Ivancich Dunin’s article about a dance drama on the Croatian island of Kor?ula seeks to explain how a Turk, the historical enemy of the Croats, came to assume the position of the “good” white king. Finally, Zhenya Khachatryan’s piece on the ritual of Vardan Mamikonyan traces how a modern practice combined history with agrarian ritual. The book concludes with an epilogue by Peter Burke which sums up the volume and puts the performative turn in historical perspective.
Medieval and Early Modern Performance in the Eastern Mediterranean is a very large book with a wealth of articles, and it is difficult to do them justice in a review. As always with collections of this size, some contributions explore their topic with admirable thoroughness while others are short and superficial. Some sections of the book are more effective than others. I particularly liked the first section, which sought to locate the oral basis of written texts. At the same time I was surprised by the fact that none of the articles referred to Albert Lord and the oral theory. After all, it is with Lord’s and Milman Parry’s attempts to explain the peculiarities of written texts that interest in performance began. What Parry and Lord found in the Odyssey and the Iliad was precisely traces of orality, and so it is a surprise that their discoveries are not utilized here and the only reference to them appears in Burke’s epilogue. Sometimes the performative turn seems to go too far and everything is explained as a performance. Sometimes what constitutes performance is not clearly defined, and some of the contributions seem to engage in performer-spotting and nothing more. But in a book of this size the inclusion a few weak articles is to be expected. In general, the book is an important contribution. I found it useful to my own work and can confidently recommend it to scholars in folklore, as well as to historians and specialists in related disciplines. It is primarily a scholarly resource, loaded with footnotes and assuming a fair amount of background knowledge on the part of its readers.
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[Review length: 1363 words • Review posted on March 18, 2015]