Anthropological Research - Volume 53, Number 1, Spring 1997

Word, Sound, Image: The Life of the Tamil Text. Saskia Kersenboom. Oxford: Berg Publishers, 1995, xx + 259 pp. CD-ROM disk included. $45.95, cloth; $19.95, paper.

In Word Sound, Image Saskia Kersenboom presents two arguments: (1) Western textual traditions (to not adequately capture the performative aspects of Tamil oral traditions and (2) an interactive, multimedia form Of communication better accomplishes the praxiological aspects of the Tamil tradition. Her arguments, consequently, are made in two different media - one in the form of a book and the other in an interactive compact disc packaged with the text. The work is based on Kersenboom's practical experience as a student of Indian dance and represents an interpretation of the oral tradition that informs the teaching and performance of dance in South India.

Kersenboom's major argument Is that the Western literary tradition over emphasizes theory at tile expense of praxis and distances itself from the sensuous, experiential world that is presented in the synchronic immediacy of performance. Her particular quarrel is with the hermeneutics of Ricouer, which purports to understand meaningful action as text. Kersenboom reverses Ricouer's reduction of action to text and 'argues that the Tamil tradition renders text as action She sees this difference manifest in tile Tamil sign, which Is an organic threefold medium consisting of "word," "sound," and "image."

Tamil signs function within texts that are principally memory aids rather than representations of knowledge. They are not intended as a means for the "recovery of meaning" in the manner of Ricouer's hermeneutics but are, instead, instruments for the "recovery of 'Being... (p. 71). The Tamil sign, in effect, functions within and defines a kind of habitus that cannot be directly accessed by Western literary conventions.

Although Kersenboom characterizes the Tamil sign largely in terms familiar in the literature on orality (presence, immediacy, organicity, sensuousness, concreteness), it is not totally oral but is partly articulated within texts and within a textual tradition. The immediate texts are those of the Saivite prabandham tradition of devotional (bhakti) religion, which are themselves largely derived from an earlier courtly poetic tradition, which is itself a textualization of a still earlier oral, bardic tradition. What gives all of these texts their oral character is the cultural imperative that focuses on performance rather than on reading and interpretation. As Kersenboom notes from the Outset, much of the difference between Tamil and Western understanding has to do with a difference in the idea of "use." What is a text for? For the Tamils these Prabandham texts are riot themselves Ives objects to be decoded and understood they are instead aids to memory that partly enable a performance that uses word, Sound, and image (speech, music and dance) as a means of achieving Unity with the divine.

Kersenboom Organizes much of her text around the categories that inform the texts of the poetic tradition. The Tolkappiyam "grammar" of the fifth (?) century B.C. sets forth the analytic categories of space, time, creation, and perspective, which become primary topics in Kersenboom's interpretation. III her interpretation the performer is a sign that captures the Tamil sense of the real?time real?place, experiential import of the poems The performer iconicall links the community to Its tradition, symbolizes sacerdotal authority, and indexes the rules that govern performance itself in what Kersenboom characterizes as a "dynamic simultaneity" (1). 128), a synthesis of the three worlds (gods, men, and others), the three times (past, present, potential), and the three moments of creation (origin, maintenance destruction),

Example, practice, and embodiment are fundamental to the notion of performance, and Kersenboom throughout notes the way these characteristics of learning a skill contrast with episteme and theoretical knowledge. Rules, for example, are embodied in skillful performance; they are not prior to or outside of their manifestation in performance. They are not universals that inform the per?form?ance. Training in word, Music, and mime requires practices that enable simultaneous Syntheses and lead to freedom of imaginative interpretation rather than mere repetition of formulae.

The content of expression, particularly in mime, is a means of evoking times places, and emotions (the standard topoi of traditional poetry without explicit representation or mention. The cumulative evocation of concurring feeling is produced both by sensory signs such as bodily movements and gestures and by Such known contexts as night the forest, particular flowers, birds, and trees.

In the final chapters, Kersenboom likens these enactive practices of tile Tamil threefold medium of word, sound, and image to the idea of human expert systems and argues that the notion of performance constitutes a different kind of knowledge representation and a different kind of semeosis that is more like that of natural signs organically connected to the world than it is to conventional signs. She argues for a "radical hermeneutics that situates learning in the world of training, how?to apprenticeship, and trial and error" (p. 205.) Mid is "played out in the open, among fellow human beings" (1). 226) In "a dialogical confrontation with the Other" (p. 2:34). We should imagine "a different episteme . . . not pursuing a paradigm of abstract generalities or universals, but one of concrete particulars namely all episteme of 'effective communication'" (p. 233).

Word Sound, Image is a remarkable performance?imaginative and thought provoking. I thoroughly enjoyed reading it, even in those places where I thought Kersenboom was still too caught up in the very epistemic presuppositions she was trying to avoid. I also missed any effective engagement with Derrida, whose ideas of the trace, for example, would seem to resonate with the Tamil idea of marking and whose idea of the text might have constituted a more telling contrast than Ricouer's brand of hermeneutics. In this same sense, it might have been interesting to engage with Gadamer's version of hermeneutics particularly 'since he deals explicitly with tradition and application, ideas that are clearly central to Kersenboom. Everyone, though, has it different collection of resonances, Mid these intertextualities there are in a sense inimical to Kersenboom's project, for they merely continue the kind of hermeneutic she so tellingly argues against. A better way to end this commentary, then, is to recommend interaction not just with Kersenboom's text, but with the CD as well. As for that, it would be inappropriate for me to comment in writing, and I leave it to the reader to decide if an interactive CD is a better way to represent oral traditions. I add only that users of the CD may find that they need some extra software to make it work.

Stephen A. Tyler
Rice University