Making words stick

What do we need to know to interpret a text? This question leads into the very constitution of the text itself. We are asking what it is that makes a text textual – what enables it to exist, to be recognised or remarked as a text. An anthropology of texts needs to go below the level of documenting genres and relations between genres, defining characteristic styles, and relating these to a social context immediate or distant. Text is differently constituted in different social and historical contexts: what a text is considered to be, how it is considered to have meaning, varies from one culture to another. We need to ask what kinds of interpretation texts are set up to expect, and how they are considered to enter the lives of those who produce, receive and transmit them.

In this chapter and the next I focus on oral texts, because all societies produce them in one form or another, and because anthropology, despite great shifts in the definition of its subject matter, retains a central focus on face-to-face, small-scale societies where oral and popular genres are the norm.

Oral texts are the outcome of a concerted effort to fix words and make them outlast the here-and-now. But they are also a vivid demonstration of the emergent and the improvisatory.