Caton_1985, The poetic construction of self

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The Poetic Construction of Self Author(s): Steven C. Caton Source: Anthropological Quarterly, Vol. 58, No. 4, Self & Society in the Middle East (Oct., 1985),

pp. 141-151Published by: The George Washington University Institute for Ethnographic ResearchStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3318144Accessed: 02-03-2015 16:47 UTC

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THE POETIC CONSTRUCTION OF SELF' STEVEN C. CATON

Hamilton College

North Yemeni tribes perform an oral verse genre called the balah in their wedding ceremonies. It is argued that the selfofthe honorable tribesman emerges in the compositionalprocess, particularly in a routine of challenge-and-response carried out between competing poets. George Herbert Mead's model of symbolic interaction is used to bring out the idea of the self emerging in an artistic act. Implications for Middle Eastern research are considered.

"Through every part of the Arabian desert, poetry is equally esteemed," wrote the great nineteenth century Arabist and explorer John Lewis Burckhardt (1831:251). "Many persons are found who make verses of true measure, although they cannot either read or write." That poetry is not practiced by an elite few but is an expressive medium open to all, and that it is mainly oral rather than written were to be confirmed by later accounts, of which certainly the most outstanding is Alois Musil's Manners and Cus- toms of the Rwala Bedouins (1928).

The Rwala love to hear, recite, and compose poems... It cannot be denied that the Bedouins are poetically gifted. The composing of all kinds of ditties and songs is mere play to them, and they do not hesitate even at longer poems (pp. 283-84).

To appreciate Musil's achievement one must put his work in the perspective of a certain scholarly tradition. Among the most outstanding Arabists who preceded him were Count Carlo von Landberg (1901-1913) and Albert Socin (1901) who collected, transcribed and translated poetic texts and suppplemen- ted them with grammatical notes and metrical analyses. E. Rossi (1939) was to continue this tradition of close linguistic analysis of poetic (and other) texts. What Musil did was not only to transcribe and translate the texts but also to situate them in their social and political contexts, the result being the first ethnography of poetry on the Arabian Penin- sula (see also Montagne 1935, Serjeant 1951). Relying mainly on Musil's rich corpus of texts and ethnographic descriptions, Michael Meeker (1979) has reconstructed and delineated in bolder relief a "culture of poetry," a picture of tribesmen addicted to, enthralled by, in awe of the poetic word which they employed in the most central institutions of society such as camel raiding and warfare.?

Though the above-mentioned research

has revealed that poetry is used largely for political purposes in tribal conflict (see also Caton 1984), a recent study of Abu-Lughod (1985) of poetry among Bedouin men and women of the Awlad 'Ali (Western Egypt) indicates that it may also be an important expressive medium of sentiments connected with the Bedouin notions of self as shaped by the ideology (or code) of honor. Abu-Lughod's work has prompted me to explore the relationship between poetry and the self in Yemeni male verse, though my data and analysis will differ from hers.

One of my aims is to show how a little known genre of oral wedding poetry called the balah is composed in the course of an ongoing peformance and thus to explicate the "oral" dimension of verse. Another point I wish to make is that the poetic performance is simultaneously a glorious deed of honor (Meeker 1976), hence a "poetic construction of self."

The analysis of the self as an entity emerging in an ongoing process of social composition owes much to George Herbert Mead (1976). As we shall see, the construction of an honorable self crucially entails an Other against whom glorious deeds are performed. Mead's concept of the generalized other, which the self internalizes in an ongoing social act such as a game, is perfectly realized in the balah performance, which is culturally perceived as a la'bah or game. Finally, Mead's construct of the spontaneous and creative "1" as opposed to the conventional, role-oriented "me," and his claim that the "1" would become most promi- nent in artistic acts prove useful in the analysis of the balah, for it is the "1" which becomes the basis for the construction of the honorable self.

The region of North Yemen in which these data were collected is known as Khawlan at-Tiyal.3 It stretches due east of

141



POETIC CONSTRUCTION OF SELF 142

the capital San'a to the outskirts of Marib, famous for the ancient dam by that name located in the vicinity. Khawlin is a confederation of about seven tribes which belong to a yet larger confederation of tribes in Yemen, the Bakil.4 They are sedentary agriculturalists inhabiting fertile valleys and cultivating such crops as sorghum, wheat, corn, various vegetables and qdt (a bush whose leaves are chewed for their slightly narcotic effect). Patrilineal kinship stamps the social organization. There is no longer any head sheykh of the Khawlan tribes (the last one having been killed in the early seventies), and there are now three or four sheykhs vying for power with no one as yet a clear favorite.

The Cultural System of Honor

The studies that have been done on pas- toralist and sedentary agricultural tribes of the Middle East-and for the purposes of this article I would single out Michael Meeker's article "Meaning and Society in the Near East" (1976), William Lancaster's ethnography The Rwala Bedouin Today (1981 ) and Raymond Jamous' reconstruction of a traditional Berber society in Northern Morocco in Honneur et baraka (1981)-reveal that the cultural concept of honor or sharafis crucial for an understanding of society.

As Jamous explains, honor is a certain kind of prestige or value attached to an individual or group and, as Meeker makes clear, this value can be both inherited and achieved. That is, if one has had an illustrious ancestor, a person who has achieved honor in his own lifetime, then one will inherit that value by virtue of blood descent. Meeker goes on to argue that kinsmen of the ancestor can be viewed analytically as a "com- munity of significance;" they understand that they share the same honor or are equal to each other in the degree to which they possess prestige. The result is that blood descent, though present as a notion of kinship among Arab tribesmen, is secondary to honor in defining who one's kinsmen are.5

Let us now consider how honor may be achieved in social action. Meeker refers analytically to those social acts which create or achieve honor as "glorious deeds," among which we can count (following Jamous) acts

of hospitality and generosity such as feasts and various kinds of gift exchange, acts of violence demonstrating courage, martial prowess and physical strength or endurance, and finally acts of public oratory, verbal duelling of any sort and poetry. Jamous' analysis makes clear the fact that honor is achieved in other ways besides performing glorious deeds, the most important being the ownership of land (whose wealth can be con- verted into the food stuffs utilized in gift exchanges) and which is attacked or defended in the glorious deeds of warfare and public oratory.6 In addition to the possession of land to signal a man's honor, there is also his control of women and sons. The control of women is symbolized by all sorts of conventions-from veiling to the determina- tion of whom the daughter will marry-and if these conventions are not publically obser- ved, people will wag their tongues and say, "this man has no honor look at the way his women behave." Jamous calls these other sources of honor in land, women and sons "control over prohibited domains." The point is that a man achieves honor by performing glorious deeds and by gaining control over "prohibited domains" (his own as well as others').

What is important for our analysis of the oral tradition is Meeker's (1976) concept of the glorious deed of honor. He argues that this concept contains an implicit logic or structurefor action. For example, it implies the concept of the Other against whom a glorious deed is performed (i.e., an adversary) as well as the Other who will recognize and acknowledge the honorableness of the deed (i.e., the adversary or the audience). The Other whom one confronts in the glorious deed must be an equal in the cultural system, a person (or group) who is on the same honorable footing as oneself (Bourdieu 1965). If he were weaker, the contest would not be a fair one and the winner would be branded a bully or tyrant. If the other is stronger, then it would be foolish to challenge him and the challenge would never be accepted (nor would one be judged cowardly by not accepting such a challenge). The end result is that the glorious deed must be a challenge of equals. From this it also follows that a person who challenges an



143 ANTHROPOLOGICAL QUARTERLY

equal can expect a counter-challenge in return. There is an exchange of challenges implicit in the glorious deed of honor.

With this cultural system of honor in mind let us now turn to the analysis of the balah performance. My aim will be not only to show how one is a poet in this society, but how at the same time one is a man of honor by composing poetry.

The Social Situation of the Samrah The balah7 is composed and performed

only at wedding ceremonies-during a ritual event known as the samrah. This Arabic noun is derived from the verb samar which means "to spend the evening in friendly conversa- tion" and often a friend will inquire of another nismir al-lel ("shall we samar tonight?"). The friend will make his appearance after supper and the evening prayer (around 8 pm) when the two of them with perhaps some of their acquaintances will sit together in the men's sitting room or mafraj to gossip about the events of the day, listen to the radio, play games and sometimes dance. The groom's wedding samrah, which takes place on the night he is to consummate the marriage, is the same type of event, except that the entertainment takes place on a much more grandiose scale. Up to a hundred or more people might be in attendance in the larger gatherings and the music, dancing and poetic performances might go on until dawn.

The Balah Performance

When the balah performance is about to begin, two servants signal the fact by vigorously playing a drum salute. A group of about eight or more men will then stand up in the sitting room and form a circle, facing towards the center with their arms linked around each other's waists. One of them begins chanting a partiular tune (each genre has specific melodies [sg., lahn; pl., alhian] on which the verse is delivered), and if the others applaud his choice, they will join him. Otherwise, there might be some argument before the tune is decided upon. The circle of men acts as a chorus in the performance (saff-en, literally "two ranks"). One half of the chorus chants a standard refrain line, the other half picks up part of the poetic turn

delivered by a poet in the center of the circle, and together they alternate in the chanting of refrain and verse until a new poet or the same one enters the circle to take another performance turn. Since the poem is constructed verse by verse, the second half of the chorus will be chanting only the last poetic contribution, not all the preceding ones.

One of the requirements of the balah is that more than one poet must participate in the performance. Anyone can assume the poet's role, though of course it is expected that he knows the art of performance, otherwise he will dishonor not only himself but also the group to which he belongs. Ideally, everyone should try to compose at least one verse as a "gift" to the groom, and the spec- tators seated on the floor around the circle of choristers are periodically exhorted to gumu ("rise!") and participate in the performance. Although only a few members of the welling party actually perform the balah, these being the most talented who are relied upon to carry the show, it is an important cultural conception of the event that ideally everyone should contribute.

Poetic Composition as a Glorious Deed

The balah is a type of oral composition. By "oral" I mean not just a poem that is spoken as opposed to being written or printed, but rather one which is composed at the same moment in which it is delivered before an audience.8 While our literary poets might recite or read their works out loud after they have composed them, an oral poet would deliver the poem while he is creating it, thus giving the impression of spontaneous composition. In Yemen as in other parts of Arabia where oral poetry flourishes, the spontaneous poet is held in awe by his audience; he is the performer of the glorious deed.

Meter and Formula.

Our understanding of oral verse has been immeasurably enhanced by the classicist Milman Parry and the slavicist Albert Lord; the fruits of their collaboration resulted in the now famous work by Albert Lord, The Singer of Tales (1960). In their theory of oral verse composition, Parry, the classicist, had




noted in his textual analyses of the Homeric epics a repetition of set phrases such as the "wine-dark sea," "the cords of ruin are fas- tened" or "the rosy fingers of dawn" which have come to be called formulas, a set of slightly varying words that occur at a precise point in the metrical line and that express a fixed idea. While his notion of the formula as such was not original, Parry went beyond traditional scholarship to suggest that it facilitated the rapid composition of a metrically precise verse line created in an oral performance.

In the oral composition of balah poetry, there is a regular metrical pattern of alternating heavy and light syllables in the verse line. A light syllable is the simplest, most univer- sal syllable structure known in human languages, a consonant followed by a short vowel (Cv). A heavy syllable is any other structure that exists in the language (in the case of Yemeni Arabic these would be C1, CvC, CvC, CvCC).9 The following half-line from a balah poem illustrates the pattern of alternating light and heavy syllables:

shafi' ana min jahannam harraha wal-kalil u u -

u__ _ u_ / u - "Our intercessor (keeping us) out of Hell, its heat and fire"

(the symbol/u/ stands for a light syllable, the symbol / /stands for a heavy syllable). The pattern consists of two metrical feet, one of which is/uu_/ and the other of which is/ u _/, the two alternating in the line.'0 Now compare this harf"half-line"" to ones from other bllah performances in which almost the identical words are used.

yishfa' lana min jahannam harraha I-lahibah - - u- I- u- I- - u

_ /- u- "He intercedes for us(to keep us) out of Hell, its flaming heat" najitana min jahannam harraha I-hamiyah

u__ /- u

_ _ u _ /u

_ "You saved us from Hell, its scorching heat" 'ala n-nabT dhT shafa' min hom nTran12 u- u _/ -u - /- - (u) _L "(Prayers) for the Prophet, who saved (us) from the heat of the fire"

In all the examples, one main idea is expressed, that the Prophet Muhammad will intercede with God on the final Day of Judg- ment to prevent pious Muslims from going to Hell. The meter is regular(shortened slightly

in the final example to accomodate a briefer melody), and the words employed are very similar. It is only the end of the harf which shows real variation and this of course is due to the rhyme which changes from one poetic performance to the next.

To indicate how a harf is constructed out of formulas consider this opening of a balah.

wabda' bik ad' ika ya rahman y~ miktafil// u- /_ u / -(u) /- u-

ya mithag at-t&-r bil-jinhen hTn yitahil _

- u -

(u)_ L (u) Lu- "I begin with You, O Merciful One, O Provider'

"He who holds up the bird by its wings when it travels"

The opening formula is wabda' bi- "I begin (composing) with" which has its echo in fil- bid'a "In the beginning" which begins many other poems. Next follow two vocative formulas ya rahman ya miktafil "O Merciful One, O Provider." The following harf begins with another common formula ya mithag at-ter bil-- jinhen "He who holds up the bird by its wings" and concludes with a phrase that incor- porates the rhyming word and is seman- tically congruent with the preceding formula. Nearly the entire line consists of formulas which have been stitched together to form a metrically regular hemistich.

Poets, then, do not create verse completely from scratch. They have a stock of traditional formulas which they use sys- tematically to build the verse line. By this technique they manage to produce a poem that expresses conventional ideas in a highly constrained metrical pattern within a matter of a few seconds. It is an entirely unconscious process, as far as I know, for poets were never able to articulate the methods by which they composed their verse; they would only say, "Allah made it spring from my heart."

The Routine ofDa'wi w-ijtibah

Having just stated that the verse line in balah poetry is composed of pre-fabricated formulas, let me make one important qualifica- tion to that generalization. There are conventional parts that begin the poem and conclude it in which formulas are heavily used: the invocation of God at the beginning,




the call for prayers on behalf of the Prophet and his successor'Ali (North Yemeni tribesmen being Zaidi Shi'a Muslims for the most part), then long and effusive greetings of various honored guests in attendance at the wedding samrah. Now abruptly begins a mid- die section which is referred to as the da'wa

w-ijdabah ("challenge and retort"). It is often highly improvisatory, demanding poets to think up original verse lines. For example, a poet might begin to tease another poet about what happened to him on a previous day of the wedding, a reference which could not be made by a stock of traditional formulas but requires a poet to compose verse de novo. Herein, it is said by tribesmen, comes the real test of the oral poet: that is, has he not only mastered the traditional rhetorical devices but does he also possess the wit, imagination and stamina to compose verse lines in an improvisational manner? Here we come to the true glory of the poetic deed.

Here we also come to the true glory of the honorable deed. A deed of honor implies an act performed against a significant other. Only the best and bravest poets dare to enter the circle when it is clear to everyone that a contest of challenge and retort has begun.

To capture the idea that this verse composition is simultaneously a competition, the poets will refer in the performance (i.e., meta- pragmatically) to the balah as a game. This game, as everyone knows, consists of certain rules, such as that the rhyme must remain consistent throughout the poem of anygiven performance (e.g., if the end-of-line rhyme is -un, then every line must end in this sound) and that the same rhyming word may not be repeated (unless it is a homonym). If one of the poets forgets these rules and the audience catches the mistake, the assembly will shout harf magsis ("a broken half-line") and the poet's offering to the performance will be disqualified. He will have either quic- kly to devise a substitute or concede his turn at versification to a competitor. But the most thrilling aspect of this or any other game is when a contestant must pit his skill against that of other poets. Let us now turn to an extended example of such a game.

A. O time of the b.lah

and (yet) verses of such ignorance!

He who does not polish his lines has no place among us.

B. (taking up A's challenge) May God grant you long life, O poet. I'm not lazy If you have a line, give it and the boys will chant it.

C. (defending A and attacking B). Don't criticize my namesake's poetry-if it's short or long The rest of the poetry belongs to him. Beware! He's only just begun. May God preserve you, O poet. I see that your voice is hoarse I'm one of the men who attacks and carries (i.e., the verse).

A. (responding to B). You call yourself a horned ram. In fact, you're our lamb We'll play the balah all night long and see that you don't shudder with fright.

B. (responding to A). From the weight of the poetry that is on you, you might stumble O what a pity, O my namesake. See that you don't give up.

A. (responding to B). And to you greetings, as many as will fit in our tribe's territory A Faxri, long life to you - you're a horse's ass!

C. (responding to A). O balah, don't wear out the assembly with an unreasonable cut Everyone is trying to outdo the other.

D. (concludes the poem).

The first challenge is hurled by Poet A to the assembly at large. The next turn is taken by poet B who responds to him by saying that he is "not lazy" because he has already contributed a number of turns to the performance, whereas the challenger A has yet to prove his mettle by composing more than one turn. Hence, he challenges him with the taunt "if you have a line, give it, and the boys will chant it." Poet C comes to the defense of the initial challenger A with this admonition, "Don't criticize my namesake's poetry, if it's short or long." The reference to the poetry being short or long is not a reference to meter but to the number of turns which a poet has taken in a single performance. He then warns that his namesake has only just warmed up in the performance and will sure- ly compose many turns to follow. Poet C then follows up the attack on B with this rebuke, "I see that your voice is hoarse." Though B may




have boasted that he is prolific, C would remind him that his strength is failing him and he might not be able to go on much longer. In contrast to B, poet C claims that he does possess the stamina to "attack" and "carry" the verse in the chant. Not only has this poet defended a friend, and thus shown himself to be honorable in one sense, he has also defied an opponent and demonstrated his courage, thus again building a reputation for honor. Now poet A rejoins the fray. He has been previously challenged to compose more verse and does in this turn.

A. You call yourself a horned ram. In fact, you are our lamb. We'll play the bal all night long and see that you don't shudder with fright.

This is indeed a witty line. He suggests that his opponent boasts out of proportion to his true talent (the epithet "horned ram" is used in reference to a brave fighting man) because rather than being a winner in the contest of honor, his opponent will turn out to be its victim (metaphorically, the lamb). In other words, he implies that his opponent will be sacrificed to his poetic blade, and given that he will brandish that blade all night long, his opponent will end up shudder- ing with fright. The sheer humor of the verse signals this to be a superior poetic turn and its poet to have more than established his mettle in the performance, thus also enhanc- ing his reputation for honor.

Poet B now has his back against the wall. He has been attacked by two men in the performance, one of whom has delivered him a stunning retort. He must come up with a rejoinder he hopes to be of equal or greater wit and poetic skill, in order to save face and maintain his reputation for honor.

B. From the weight of the poetry that is on you, you might stumble. O what a pity, O my namesake, see that you don't give up.

The turn is addressed to poet A. He implies that the task of composing verse in the balah is a burden of great weight, and he warns the challenger not to assume a greater under- taking than he can handle. But in the next hemistich he goads him on, telling him not to be daunted and "give up." While his rejoinder does have some force, it is in my view not as strong as A's challenge, nor did the audience

seem as moved to laughter by it. Poet A answers him in rather abusive

terms calling him in the next turn a "horse's ass" which goes beyond the bounds of tact, and that is why Poet C reprimands him for "cutting an unreasonable cut." In other words, he warns the poet that he has gone too far in his attack on a person's honor and therefore should temper his attacks if he is not to spoil the game of the balah. Before things can heat up much more, the next poet concludes the performance on the standard formulaic expression.

Bearing in mind the significance of social acts of honor and comparing them with the balah performance, I think it is clear that we are justified in interpreting the composition of such a poem as a performance of a glorious deed, entailing significant others (poets and audience) whom one challenges and who judge one's challenge. Further- more, built into the composition of the poem is an exchange of challenges between equals which is exactly parallel to the exchange of glorious deeds between honorable men. What is created in this performance is not only a poem, it is also social honor.

What is being created in the ongoing process of the poetic performance is an honorable self. I will rely on George Herbert Mead's model of the self to make the point and will now outline it.

George Herbert Mead's Theory of the Self

For Mead, man is not born with a self, but with a certain reflexive capacity on which the emergence of the self is dependent. He would claim that man is unique for being able to experience himself as an object of his own contemplation (Mead 1962:136-37). The self then is acquired; there is a history to its development.

The self can only emerge in society and through language which Mead defines as a system of significant symbols and their meanings (Mead 1962:45-46). There has to be some significant Other whom the individual experiences, and they have to interact with each other in an ongoing process. At some point in this process, the other must com- municate to the individual his or her sense of and attitudes toward that individual on the



147 ANTHROPOLOGICAL Q UAR TERLY

one hand, and that individual must be able to understand the communication on the other. Communication and the understanding of that communication require language.

Different senses in which Mead's term of the Other can be understood are not always clearly distinguishable in his writings. The most obvious and concrete Other is that of a particular individual's concepts of, and attitudes towards, a person, whereas a slightly more abstract Other would be constituted by a collectivity of individuals and their concepts of, and attitudes towards, a person. But Mead has in mind an even more abstract and complex notion of the Other, called the "generalized Other," which entails not merely the person's awareness of particular individuals' or groups' attitudes towards him, but also their attitudes towards the social activity in which they are engaged as a whole.

Some of the ongoing social processes in which a person acquires a self and a notion of the (generalized) Other, according to Mead, can be seen in how a child learns to adopt the attitudes and behaviors of others in play. One moment it will assume the role of doctor, the next it will be playing the part of the patient. Having been the Indian one day, it will switch to the cowboy the next. But play is still too unstructured an activity for a notion of the generalized Other to emerge. This requires an organized game.

The attitudes of the other players which the participant assumes organize into a sort of unit, and it is that organization which controls the response of the individual. The illustration (is) of a person playing baseball. Each one of his own acts is determined by his assumption of the action of the others who are playing the game. What he does is controlled by his being everyone else on that team, at least insofar as those attitudes affect his own particular response. We get then an "other" which is an organization of the attitudes of those involved in the same process (Mead 1962:154).

A game then is an ongoing social process or situation out of which an organized personality emerges. Through internalization of the attitudes of particular individuals and of the attitudes of the collective, the individual develops that concept of self Mead called the "me." The "me" knows what particular individuals, groups and the generalized

Other expect or anticipate of the selfs responses to conventional situations. The "me" has a memory; it remembers how one acted previously in a situation, the attitudes and responses this action elicited in others, and the expectations these others have of the action being repeated in the situation.

If this were all of Mead's framework, we would be hard put to account for creativity in such individuals as artists who have a strong sense of a "spontaneous" self, therefore Mead incorporated into his theory of the self the notion of the "1."

The "1" gives the sense of freedom, of initiative. The situation is there for us to act in a self- conscious fashion. We are aware of ourselves, and what the situation is, but exactly how we will act never gets into experience until after the action takes place.

Such is the basis for the fact that the "1" does not appear in the same sense in experience as does the "me". The "me" rep- resents a definite organization of the com- munity there in our own attitudes, and calling for a response, but the response that takes place is something that just happens. There is no certainty in regard to it. When it does take place, we find what has been done. The above account gives us, I think, the relative position of the "1" and "me" in the situation and the grounds for the separation of the two in behavior. The two are separated in the process, but they belong together in the sense of being parts of a whole .... If (the self) did not have these two phases, there could not be conscious responsibility and there would be nothing novel in experience (Mead 1962:177- 78).

The "me" is important for the artistic process insofar as conventions (the expectations of form harbored by the other toward the artist's work) are evident in genre, but the "I" is in some artistic traditions even more so, in that it emphasizes the spontaneous and the novel. Mead makes the significant point that it is in art that the "1" is more evident than in any other social process. "In the case of the artist, the emphasis upon that which is unconventional, that which is not in the structure of the "me," is carried as far, perhaps,as it can be carried" (Mead 1962:238).

The Poetic Construction of Self

Let us now interpret the balah performance in Meadian terms. Clearly, the




performance is an ongoing social process entailing language. This is the beauty of using oral poetry for the purpose of demonstrating Mead's claim that the self emerges in a public act, for in written literature the self of the creative artist is further removed in social action from the Other (his audience). The distinctly competitive nature of balah composition, moreover, makes this verse genre particularly relevant for Mead's ideas, because the self emrges in an agon with the other of poets. The the competitive relationship of poets as well as a fairly complex set of conventions for verse composition (meter, rhyme, formulas, etc.) give this performance its quality of a game, the participants in which internalize a notion of the generalized Other. That is, they must understand what others expect of them in terms of organized responses to each other's verse and the ongoing process of composition.

I have been arguing that a balah is not only a game of poetry, for on a deeper level of analysis it is also a game of honor. What emerges in the course of the performance is a notion of both the self and the other as being honor-bound. The creation of an oral poem is considered to be a glorious deed of challenge and counter-challenge. Here again I think the Meadian model is particularly apt in bringing into relief the significant points of the data. Honor can only be achieved by performing a glorious deed in dialectical relationship to an Other.

But let us recall that in Mead's scheme the "1" is the spontaneous, unpredictable part of the self which is especially important in art. This "1" emerges in the course of a balah performance when an opponent challenges the honorable self of an individual in a non-formulaic, particularly witty or otherwise spontaneous fashion, and the "1" of that individual's self must devise an apt reply. Since this routine of da'wa w-ij~bah is the highlight of the performance, it stands to

reason that the "1" gains prominence over the "me" which controlled the balah's more formulaic and predictable parts. It is also in the middle section that the game of honor becomes most intense; to step into the poet's circle at this stage is indeed to risk complete loss of face in the glorious deed. Hence, the construction of the honor-bound self depends largely on the poetic "1" rather than the poetic "me" responsible for the formulaic, predictable parts that constitute the genre's conventions. It is, furthermore, this "1" which distinguishes the truly great and inspired poets from the more conventional and competent versifier. One cannot, then, aspire to heroic heights unless one is also a poet of greatness (an "1" surpassing the "me" of the performance). Mead's model allows us to conjoin some of the most profound aspects of art (creativity and the imagination) with the social emergence of the self, and for this reason should be of interest not only to students of culture-and-personality but also to those concerned with the inter- face of anthropology and particularly verbal art.

To the extent that Middle Eastern tribal societies seem to be dominated by a "culture of (oral) poetry" (cf. Meeker 1979; Samatar 1982; Abu-Lughod 1984, 1985; Caton 1984), it would seem that the Meadian framework-with its emphasis on the emergence of self in a public verbal act-would have wider relevance than the Yemeni con- text. Furthermore, the last decade or more of anthropological research in the Middle East has revealed that an analytical notion of the person may be as crucial as, and perhaps more so than, the notion of the group in social action (Geertz 1976; Eickelman 1976; Rosen 1979). The Meadian "1" of the poetic performance which occurs in Yemeni tribal wedding ceremonies may prove useful in further elucidating the concept of the person in the Middle East.




NOTES 1

Research for this article was funded by Ph.D. field grants from Fulbright-Hays and the Social Science Research Council (1979-81). I would like to thank the following colleagues who kindly read and criticized earlier versions of this article: Paul Riesman, Lila Abu- Lughod, Beverly Nagel, Kim Rodner, Jon Anderson and Dale Eickelman. Also helpful were the insightful comments of Joe Hellweg and Gery Ryan of Carleton College. I am also grateful to the reviewers of the Anthropological Quarterly for their useful criticisms. This version is based on a paper delivered at the 1984 American Anthropologi- cal Association Meetings and I would like to thank the members of the panel "Self and Sentiment in the Muslim Middle East" (organized by Lila Abu-Lughod and Steven C. Caton), and especially its discussant Dale Eickelman, for their comments and questions. Taha Hamudi helped with the translation.

2 Research on tribal poetry in and outside Arabia has recently resulted in a number of works, among which the reader should consult Samatar (1982), Lila Abu-Lughod (1984, 1985) and Caton (1984).

SYemeni Arabic has two long vowels /I/ and /Io/; "classical" qaTfis usually pronounced /g/ and the classical consonants /z/ and /d/ merge into /d/.

4 Khawlan was historically connected to the Himyaritic and Sabaean Kingdoms which ruled southern Arabia in the days of the spice and incense trade to the Roman world. Little archaeological research has been done in these parts and so the history still remains relatively obscure. An issue of interest to the Arabist is whether or not the oral tradition of these same tribes is historically connected with the ancient pre-islamic poetry which it resembles in some respects, although I cannot address it in this article. Some of the major issues raised today about the nature of pre-Islamic verse are covered in Michael Zwettler (1978). It should be noted that the forms of contemporary verse seem, at least at first glance, to be more at variance with, than similar to, the pre-Islamic tradition; but this question will not be resolved until more careful comparative research has been undertaken. Saad Sowayan's Nabati Poetry (1985) came out too late to be considered.

5 Though Meeker does not explicitly say so, it would

seem that he is in sympathy with David Schneider's criti- ques of kinship studies in anthropology which have too often assumed that notions of blood descent are primary in cultural systems of kinship without in fact demonstrating that this is the case.

6 He does not make the economic factor of land ownership the material cause of symbolic forms of behavior, if anything, it is just the reverse in his argument.

7 As far as the poetic system of the Khawlan tribes is concerned, there are at least three major genres in use. The greatest of these, the one most esteemed by poets which may have a long historical tradition on the Penin- sula dating back a thousand years or more, is called the

qasFdah. It is a long ode, sometimes several hundreds of lines long, which usually celebrates some political or military exploit of the tribes. A very much terser, almost epigramatic genre is called the zamil. Only two lines long, it is composed during wedding festivals and especially during tribal dispute mediations, and because it puts less demands on imagination, skill, and sheer stamina than does the qasTdah, it is more accessible to even the least talented of poets.

8 For the development of the idea of oral poetry, see the now classic articles by Milman Parry(1930, 1932) and the book by Albert Lord (1960). For more recent statements see also Tedlock (1977) and Hymes (1981).

9 To completely justify the metrical analysis I would have to present a theory of syllabification, an analysis of syllable structure of Yemeni Arabic and a linguistic theory of meter which go beyond the scope of this article (see, however, Caton 1984).

O10 Students of the Classical Arabic tradition will

recognize this pattern as basit. This technical term, however, is unknown to the tribes of Khawlan. Indeed, I was unable to elicit any terms for metrical patterns in

general. i1 in the local tradition harf refers to a hemistich,

whereas bet refers to a verse line. 12This harf produces a truncated meter. The melody is

shorter than most, so the poet had to abbreviate the verse accordingly.

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Anthropological Quarterly October 1985, 58:4



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