Cultural Rhythms in Emotions, Narratives and Dance

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It was a fine evening. I sat near a window looking at the people representing different cultures who were walking lei- surely on a lane which connects a large colony with a public park. The one question which overpowered me was, what would become of us if we were to be robbed of our culture, of our cultural identity? I shuddered to think of being reduced to a robot. Following the train of thoughts, the next question that arose was, what distinguishes one culture from another? Notwithstanding the contribution of anthropologists, art historians, folklorists and social scientists, the unclarity about the underlying principles of cultures' distinctiveness persists. Beginning with theory of cultural evolution derived from: different hierarchical stages of cultures to the post-modern- ist paradigm derived from recognition of partnership and coequality of cultures, the haze around the bases on which uniqueness of cultures are founded and maintained remains. The present work is an attempt to see through the haze.

The Tamil Brahmin culture given to two apparently opposed traditions: the textual and the oral affords an interesting case for an exploration of this kind. On the one hand are scriptures and other texts by which they swear while on the other hand are emotions, narratives, series of rhythmic movements, rituals and gestures by which they live and in which textual knowledge gets articulated. The culture vibrates in the rhythm of the two traditions between which there is continuity and constant flux. The cultural rhythms making for the design of culture that repeats itself in experience and expression of emotions, narratives, dance, rituals and gestures provide momentum to lifestyle. The rhythms of Tamil Brahmin culture integrate creativity, self-expression and collective identity in various processes of life at one level and merge with the universal rhythm of cosmic order.

One of the chief concerns of human sciences has been to understand how people think, how they construe meaning and make interpretations. Over the years, the intellectual history has witnessed the turn of paradigms from behaviourist to cognitive and from cognitive to post-modernist. This marks a shift in controls of human thought and behaviour from the external in terms of causality and stimulus-response continuum to the internal in terms of cultural rationale and design for living. In this framework, two positions emerge. According to Shweder (1984), the first propounds that the dictates of reason apply universally; unity, uniformity and psychic oneness of humankind are its logical concomitants while the second celebrates the cultural context and holds that action is expressive, symbolic or semiotic; coequality of 'primitive' and 'modern' as also the subordination of deep structure to surface content are its logical concomitants.

In the present age of post-modernism and search for paradigms beyond it, a growing number of scholars have taken to exploring indigenous epistemologies, aesthetic criteria and sensitivity. Marcus and Fischer (1986) divide contemporary experimental texts cantering around culturally variable experience of reality in the context of ideas about self and personhood into three groups, (i) the psychodynamic which focuses on self-reflective commentaries on experience, emotion and self as also dreams, remembrances, associations, metaphors, distortions, displacements and compulsive behaviour repetitions. These works exemplify a perspective in which the concept of person and indigenous discourses about emotions reveal the most radically distinctive level of cultural experience for any society; (ii) the realist which draws initial frames of analyses from the public common sense contexts as life histories, aesthetic genres, the dramatic incidents which provide the means to correlate the principles of social structure and cultural meanings with discrete events in social life. Here, the native point of view assumes relevance and, since everything in a culture is functionally interrelated, one can strategically pursue the description of selected parts that would simultaneously evoke the whole. They raise epistemological questions about rep- resenting experiential differences across cultural boundaries; and (ii) the modernist which arises centrally from the reciprocity of perspectives between insider(s) and outsider(s) entailed in any ethnographic research situation. They high- light the discourse between the ethnographers and inform- ants. There is, therefore, no certainty that experience of different people is a coherent set of cultural codes and meanings. Post-modernism loosens the hold over 'grand theory" style in favour of close consideration of contextuality, meaning of social life to those who enact it and explanation of exceptions and in determinants rather than totalising visions.

**Contents and Sample Pages**