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5.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent ethnography of a special performance genre, May 2, 2005
This review is from: Stigmas of the Tamil Stage: An Ethnography of Special Drama Artists in South India (Paperback)
In the U.S. when we think of Tamil (South Indian) performance, most of us probably think of Bharata Natyam. I know I did. "Special Drama," the subject of Susan Seizer's book, is not well known abroad and it is not highly regarded at home, at least not by the Tamil middle class. It is, in a word that is central Seizer's analysis, stigmatized. She explains, "Special Drama is too mixed to be pure, too popular to be art, too modern to be traditional, and too village to be modern" (p. 11). Thus, Special Drama artists, and the female artists in particular, "are stigmatized for lacking what they and others often refer to as 'Tamil culture'" (p. 3). Of course, Special Drama artists do not lack culture, but the Tamil middle class denies that Special Drama deserves to be labelled "culture" (a word borrowed from English). More over, scholars in and out of India have slighted Special Drama by not paying it the attention that it deserves.
Special Drama is a remarkable performance genre. A Special Drama play is a loosely scripted, eight-hour long, all-night performance put on by actors and musicians who are hired separately. There are no rehearsals or directors and sometimes actors meet for the first time when they appear together on stage. Seizer focuses on the first two hours of a Special Drama, which are taken up by a bawdy comedy. That comedy is followed by a six-hour dramatic piece, which Seizer cites in order to provide context for her analysis of the comedy that precedes it.
In Part One, Seizer draws on oral history and a resourceful reading handbills to review a century of Special Drama history. She also explores the ways Special Drama artists manage their "spoiled identity" (following Erving Goffman), either by avoiding or embracing it. For example, a female artist can reduce the stigma attached to Special Drama in general by cross-dressing in order to perform the less stigmatized role of (male) Hero in the dramatic portion of the play, or she can gain fame by defying the rules of propriety that govern Special Drama.
In Part Two, Seizer analyzes three particular Special Drama scenes. Videos of the three scenes are available on-line at http://stigmasofthetamilstage.scrippscollege.edu/ and viewing them enhances reading the book, where each scene is carefully transcribed (in English translation). The first scene features the Buffoon, a self-deprecating comedian who takes the stage to tell of a series of mishaps involving his interactions with women. What is ingeniuos about the scene is that "the Buffoon manages to tell dirty jokes to a mixed audience and get away with it" (p. 177). Seizer discects the strategy by which the Buffoon gets away with it. Rather than tell a dirty joke to the audience, the Buffoon recounts to the audience -with asides to the on-stage musicians- various situations in which he could not say what was necessary because saying so would offend a woman. In the process he does in fact say what he is not allowed to say, and the women in the audience hear him say it. Taking issue with romanticized theories of transgression, Seizer argues that the Buffoon reinscribes the rules of mixed-gender discourse at the very moment at which he gets away with breaking them. Slippages between actors and their roles are at work in the other two scenes that Seizer analyzes. In "The Buffoon-Dance Duet" the improper meeting of two characters is the occasion for the characters and the actors who play them to comment on the impropriety not only of the female character's behavior but also of the behavior of the actress who players her. Seizer demonstrates that "the [female] Dancer's onstage persona is a mouthpiece for just the kind of social censure so often aimed at actresses offstage" (p. 215). The third of the three scenes is a comical (and thus particularly disturbing) depiction of domestic violence between a Husband and Wife. Again, there are slippages between actors and their roles, such as the Husband warning husbands not to pursue women who are like the actress who plays the Wife. The focus of Seizer's analysis, however, is on the audience. Drawing on Henri Bergson, Seizer argues that the audience's laughter serves as a mechanism of social control, provoking the Husband to prove his manliness by striking his defiant wife, and confirming that the now-subservient Wife got what she deserved.
Part Three focuses on the lives of Special Drama artists off stage. Here Seizer brings in the traditional ethnographic categories of language, spatial organization, and kinship. Again the focus is on how Special Drama artists manage stigma. For example, the artists' "insider tongue" confirms their outsider position but is also "a way of getting by, getting through, and getting away with some things" (p. 300), such as talking about real insiders. "Roadwork" refers to the artists' organization of space when they are on the road, for example, traveling to a gig. Here, drawing on the work of Judith Butler, Seizer observes that "Special Drama actresses struggle to conform to the dominant terms of gendered respectability, but in so doing, they subtly alter -by refiguring- these organizaing terms" (p. 329). Seizer identifies two kinship-related strategies artists use to manage stigma: marrying "across the boundaries of caste and community" (p. 346) and using kin terms as "a 'cover' for what might otherwise appear to be deviant" (p. 347). Seizer concludes that Special Drama artists strategies for managing stigma are "mostly effective" in the short term at making the social world more hospitable for artists, but "actresses still suffer the most" and their long-term prospects are worrisome.
I am a professor of anthropology and gender studies at a liberal arts college and I taught "Stigmas of the Tamil Stage" in an upper-level gender studies class. The book was a great success. It is a scholarly book, published by an academic press, and it makes contributions to scholarly debates that graduate students and professors will appreciate, but "Stigmas of the Tamil Stage" is also quite accessible to less theoretically sophisticated readers. Seizer uses theory but she does not flaunt it, and she is careful to define the anthropological and linguistic jargon and Tamil words she uses to advance her arguments. I foresee using the book for anthropology classes and I am sure it will also find a place in performance studies and Asian studies classes. For me, the great achievement of "Stigmas of the Tamil Stage" is the ethnographic attention to detail Seizer brings to performance studies. Ethnography is hot across disciplines these days, but many so-called "ethnographies," especially in performance studies and cultural studies, have little to do with the grand ethnographic tradition that includes Boas, Malinowski, and Mead. Seizer is clearly a well-trained and a gifted ethnographer. As a result, I find her interpretations of performances quite compelling and I find her book a model for what the ethnographic study of expressive culture should be.
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