Aspects of the Recovery of Context and Performance in a historical Poetics and Pragmatics of Western South Slavic Ritual Folklore
ASPECTS OF THE RECOVERY OF CONTEXT AND PERFORMANCE IN HISTORICAL POETICS AND PRAGMATICS OF WESTERN SOUTH SLAVIC RITUAL FOLKLORE

Summary/Abstract: The author examines some of the possible benefits of an integrated ethnolinguistic and ethnopoetic theoretical-methodological framework for a revaluation of the poetic, magical and cultural 'performativity' of Slavic and Balkan traditional ritual texts. He does so by applying a number of concepts and guidelines provided by this combined framework in a microanalysis of two sample cases from the Bosnian/Croatian/Serbian language area. The presented analyses focus on the various ways in which the poetic and figurative stylization and structuring of verbal-ritual texts correlates (indexically and iconically) with their meanings and functions within the performative (actional-ritual) and broader sociocultural context. As these texts can be seen to encode much of the ritual and sociocultural context of their performance, ethnopoetic micro-revaluations of this kind prove useful, by focusing on traditional ritual folklore, in enriched studies of historically and ethnographically situated 'cultures'.

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