Reviewed by:

• Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the 'Folk Performance' in India by Brahma Prakash
• Claire Pamment

Brahma Prakash's book, Cultural Labour: Conceptualizing the 'Folk Performance' in India, presents new conceptual frameworks that grapple with the complexities of "folk performance" in India. Against the classist and casteist proclivities that linger even in post-colonial Indian theatre scholarship, Prakash centers the cultural labor performed by bodies on the lower rungs of a casteist-feudal society. He argues that like the progressive Indian People's Theatre Association (IPTA, 1943–1967) and the "theatre of roots" movement (late 1950s–), post-colonial Indian theatre scholarship has tended to capitalize the artistic and aesthetic value of "folk performances," often ignoring questions of caste and labor, invariably maligning these performing laboring bodies. Prakash gives focus to aesthetics and labor by bringing a performance studies analytic of landscape and memory, materiality, affect and viscerality, and performativity, to a wide range of performance practices. The book's ambitious scope spans bhuiyan puja or shamanistic land worship in Bihar, to Gaddar's political songs performed with Jana Natya Mandali, Telangana.

The work is admirable for its depth and breadth of fieldwork. The preface opens with Prakash recounting his memories of a deity's abode on the outskirts of his own village in Bihar under a peepal tree (pp. vii–viii). While on the surface evocative of early performance studies scholarship and intercultural experiments such as Peter Brook's "discovery" of ta'ziyeh from under a tree in a "remote Iranian village [and witnessing] one of the strongest things I have ever seen in theatre … the theatre form became truth" (Chelkowski 2005: 25–26), Prakash bristles against dehistoricized essentialism. Animating his personal memories and changing evaluations of what the village deity evokes over time, he jostles insider and outsider positionalities and weaves into his text archive, secondary sources, and ethnography. His accounts are textured, resisting the liberatory impulses that categorize early performance studies scholarship and move beyond simply valorizing a culture from below. The shamanistic figures evoked under the peepal tree both enslave and empower, subverting and/or conforming to the strictures on body, space, and movement in the caste-based societies in which they are situated.

Both the introduction and the first chapter on historiography offer an extensive (perhaps too much so, with the introduction running [End Page 604] at 60 pages) outline of the field of Indian "folk performance" and its methodological and conceptual shortcomings in neglecting social hierarchies of class, caste, and gender. As Prakash illustrates, the disassociation of culture from labor was pronounced with colonial modernity, heralding culture over menial work, colluding with caste anxieties that have longer genealogies. He retells the allegorical tale from the Natyashastra of the descent of drama from Heaven to Earth, when a group of performers caricaturing the sages were punished for not following moral and aesthetic prescriptions and were demoted to the worker caste category of Shudras. Prakash illustrates the persistence of these tropes; with Brahmanical purity held as canonical, while manual labor a disgrace. The abhorrence of the laboring body is given graphic description in a nineteenth-century review of an actor in Bengali jatra, wielding a broomstick: "their sooty complexions, their coal-black cheeks, their haggard eyes, their long-extended arms, their gaping mouths and their puerile attire, excite disgust" (p. 29, cited from Chatterjee 2007: 120). Prakash attempts to go beyond these representations, exploring the laboring body and its creative and productive processes in making and remaking culture.

The subsequent chapters are organized around key performance concepts, through contemporary case studies of cultural labor largely taken from the northern Indian state of Bihar. Chapter two, underscores the importance of landscape to folk performance, exploring how bhuiyan puja (land worship celebration), while often castigated as superstitious practice, transforms space into place. The next chapter engages case studies of bidesia (theatre of migrant workers) and its launda nach (dances of female impersonators), exploring the materiality and hybridity of the repertoire, which Prakash names an "aesthetics of defilement" working against puritanical strains of Brahmanical high...

审核人：

• 文化劳动：概念化印度的“民间表演”，梵天普拉卡什（Brahma Prakash）
• 克莱尔·帕曼特

梵天普拉卡什（Brahma Prakash）的书《文化劳动：概念化印度的“民间表演”提出了新的概念框架，以应对印度“民俗表演”的复杂性。反对甚至在后殖民时期的印度戏剧学术研究中仍流传的阶级主义和种姓制度倾向，普拉卡什将身体的文化劳动集中在种姓制度的封建社会的下层。他认为，就像进步的印度人民戏剧协会（IPTA，1943-1967年）和“根剧院”运动（1950年代后期）一样，后殖民时期的印度戏剧奖学金也倾向于利用“民间表演”的艺术和美学价值。 ”，通常会忽略种姓和劳动的问题，而总是破坏这些表现出色的劳动者的身体。Prakash专注于美学和通过将对景观和记忆，重要性，影响和内在性以及性能的分析进行性能研究，引入到广泛的绩效实践中来进行劳动。这本书的雄心勃勃的范围涵盖了比哈尔邦的布瓦扬法会或萨满教徒的土地崇拜，以及盖德达尔与特兰甘纳邦的贾娜·娜蒂亚·曼达利（Jana Natya Mandali）一起演唱的政治歌曲。

这项工作的深入和广度令人钦佩。序言以普拉卡什（Prakash）开头，讲述了他对自己在比哈尔邦比哈尔（Bihar）村庄郊外一棵窥视树下住所的记忆（pp。vii -viii）。从表面上回想起早期的表演研究，奖学金和跨文化实验，例如彼得·布鲁克（Peter Brook）对塔齐耶（ta'ziyeh）的“发现”普拉卡什（Prakash）在“一个遥远的伊朗村庄[并目睹]我在剧院中见过的最强大的事物之一……剧院的形式成为真理”的树下（切尔科夫斯基，2005：25–26），发誓反对非历史性的本质主义。随着时间的流逝，他对村庄神灵的生活进行了动画处理，并且对评估进行了不断变化的评估，他推敲了内部人和外部人的位置，并编入了自己的文本档案库，第二手资料和人种志。他的叙述是有条理的，抵制了对早期表演研究奖学金进行分类的解放冲动，并超越了简单地从下面评估文化的范围。萨满教徒人物在窥探之下被唤起 既奴隶制又赋予力量，颠覆和/或遵循树身所在的种姓制社会对身体，空间和运动的限制。

导论和史学第一章都提供了印度“民间表演”领域的广泛概述（也许太过引人注目了，[导论第604页] [第604页]）及其在忽略社会方面的方法和概念上的缺陷阶级，阶级和性别的等级制度。正如普拉卡什（Prakash）所说明的，殖民时代的现代性使文化与劳动的分离显着，预示着文化超越了卑鄙的工作，与具有较长家谱的种姓焦虑相勾结。他重述从寓言故事Natyashastra这是戏剧从天堂降落到地球的后裔，当时一群讽刺圣贤的表演者因未遵守道德和美学规定而受到惩罚，并被降级为斯达拉斯的种姓制度。普拉卡什（Prakash）说明了这些比喻的持久性。婆罗门教的纯洁被认为是规范的，而体力劳动则是可耻的。劳动身体的憎恶给出的图形说明在孟加拉语演员的十九世纪的回顾jatra，挥舞着扫帚：“自己乌黑的肤色，他们的煤黑的脸颊，他们的失神的眼睛，它们的长期扩展的武器，他们目瞪口呆嘴巴和他们脆弱的装束，令人反感“（第29页，引自Chatterjee 2007：120）。Prakash试图超越这些表现形式，探索劳动主体及其在创造和改造文化中的创造性和生产性过程。

随后的各章围绕主要绩效概念进行了组织，主要是通过对印度北部比哈尔邦的文化劳动进行的当代案例研究。第二章强调了景观对民间表演的重要性，探讨了通常被指责为迷信做法的bhuiyan puja（土地敬拜庆典）如何将空间转变成地方。在下一章中，将对比迪沙（移民工人的剧院）及其洗衣店（女性模仿者的舞蹈）进行案例研究，探索剧目的实质性和混杂性，普拉卡什（Prakash）称其为“污秽美学”，旨在对抗梵天高地的清教徒菌株。 ...