Bangla oratory

[Jim Wilce]

I'm taking this conversation with Barney public--

>
>What is Bangla oratory like?  Did you look at it at all?  How long has it
>been going on?  Do they use a literary register, something like the
>sanskirtized Bengali, on the political stage?  There are actually very few
>discriptions of other oratorical traditions in India in lx.anthro.
>

I looked at a VERY folksy version of Bangla oratory, and did so in a way
that combined semiotic attention to grammar with CA-like attention to the
chaos, in an art. that appeared in Dec. 1996 in J of Ling Anth

Wilce, J. M. (1996      ). Reduplication and reciprocity in imagining
community: The play of tropes in a rural Bangladeshi moot. Journal of
Linguistic Anthropology, 6(2):, 188-222.

Doesn't Freddy Bailey touch on Indian oratory in this source?
 Bailey, F. G. (1983.  ). The tactical uses of passion:  An essay on power,
reason, and reality . . Ithaca:  : Cornell University Press.

Bangla oratory is an H register in the city, but not as distinct from
everyday speech as is the written register.  I think, given the 50+%
illiteracy rate of Bangladesh, speechifying in (Pakistan-era as well as
current) Bangladesh has always been populist, never as diglossic as writing
vs. speaking.  However, I have not analyzed nationally broadcast speeches
or live speeches in Dhaka.

What interests me about the political oratory that is "broadcast" on
loudspeakers powered by car batteries in rural areas such as that in which
I did fieldwork is its singsong intonational contours.  And that in turn
becomes a resource for the mad, the focus of my writing for the last couple
of years.  That is, it seems to me that one of the "mad" men whom I got to
know rather well exploited those contours to index certain positional
claims, which of course failed to "take."

Jim Wilce
      Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Coordinator of Asian Studies
        Northern Arizona University
        Box 15200
        Flagstaff, AZ 86011-5200

fax 520/523-9135
office ph. 520/523-2729
email jim.wilce at nau.edu
http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~jmw22/ (includes information on my 1998 book,
Eloquence in Trouble: The Poetics and Politics of Complaint in Rural
Bangladesh)
http://www.nau.edu/asian