ETHNOPOETICS AND THE ENVIRONMENT: TOWARDS THE ADVANCEMENT OF CONTEXTUAL PERFORMANCE STUDIES IN AFRICAN ORAL LITERATURE (PART ONE)

With the coinage of the term “ethnopoetics” by Jerome Rothenberg in 1968, a new vista was opened for the study of performance contexts and the intricacies of linguistic manipulations particularly in so called primitive societies and predominantly oral environments. Also, with the term “ethnopoetics,” communication scholars like Jerome Rothenberg, Dell Hymes, Dennis Tedlock, Barre Toelkin and others focused attention not only on the poetics of language use but also on methods of translation and transcription that will portray the artful qualities of oral performances in traditional societies that, through neglect, have almost become extinct or are endangered. It is obvious that oral based African societies face this danger as they are not prone to stabilization or fixity through writing. The “Ongian” concept of primary and secondary orality, therefore, draws attention to the re-emergence and primacy of oral communication particularly with the development of internet media technology. These developments, therefore, call for a reassessment and reinforcement of efforts on the dialectic of ethnopoetics particularly as it relates to the African context as a means of not only bridging the gap between orality and writing and bringing out the centrality of verbal art as a dynamic force in shaping linguistic structure and linguistic study but also to help dispel what Bauman and Briggs have described as the anthropological and linguistic belief that “aesthetic uses of language are merely parasitic upon core areas of linguistics and phonology.” Ethnopoetics affords us a new emphasis on the subtlety of performance and performance contexts in the traditional African environment in the bid to develop an African personality and oral literary aesthetics.
This Research is meant to be a two part study. Part one focuses on the concerns of ethnopoetics and its relevance to contextual performance studies while part two will be an adoption of the Ethnopoetics approach to the study of a Bakor oral narrative with the aim of authenticating the assertion that Ethnopoetics thrives on a concerted effort to lend credence to, concretize and revitalize the personality profiles of otherwise disappearing Languages because of lack of sustained usage. It is, therefore, an ethnographic and Linguistic appraisal of so called minority languages, (of which the Bakor language group is one) and their cultural potentialities evident in the creative or poetic uses of language.