Pindar, Paean 6: Genre as Embodied Cultural Knowledge

By linking genre with occasion, scholars of Greek song invigorated the study of performance, ritual, and society in archaic and classical Greece. Recent attention to the reperformance of choral song has not diminished the importance of original performance context. Rather, studies of reperformance have consistently uncovered additional layers of meaning within individual songs, highlighting how the force of a song, a myth, or an image may shift in relation to different audiences andplaces of performance.1 In this chapter, however, Iwant to focus on what remains the same. How does an archaic choral song retain its fundamental generic quality across multiple occasions for performance? How might we preserve the insights gained from the “performance context” model of Greek song genre while also acknowledging the richness and complexity of reperformance? I will argue that understanding genre as a form of “embodied cultural knowledge” can explain how an archaic Greek choral song can be both an artifact of a specific performance occasion and a flexible expressive mode, adaptable to multiple situations and singers. I owe the concept of “embodied cultural knowledge” to dance theorist Deirdre Sklar, whose observations I will discuss at greater length below. In essence, this phrase refers to the somatic and sensory experiences that an individual accrues in the course of living andmoving within a particular society— the ways in which one’s body both participates in and resists the process of acculturation.2 Given that the embodied presence and experience of both performers and audience members are a crucial element of Greek choral song as