The Strategy of Turkish Boys' Verbal Dueling Rhymes

THE UNDERLYING STRATEGY of specific traditional verbal encounters has not received much attention from anthropologists and folklorists. Anthropologists speak at length of joking or teasing relationships in general, but rarely do they describe in detail actual verbal duels or provide anything remotely resembling explication de texte. Folklorists, who tend to be textrather than context-oriented, do at least present reasonably complete texts of insults, taunts, and retorts. However, more often than not, these texts are presented in no particular order other than the arbitrary one imposed by the collector. Given this presentation of the data, it is virtually impossible to reconstruct even an approximate idea of a live verbal battle in which the texts might appropriately be employed. For example, in Roger Abrahams' valuable study of the Dozens, the classic American Negro example of verbal dueling, he firsts lists thirty different Dozens insults (raps) and then follows them with a separate list of twelve Dozens replies (caps).' It is conceivable, of course, that it really doesn't matter which reply follows which initial insult. Yet, there is obviously a particular order or sequence in any one actual dueling encounter. For those students who are interested in understanding folk rhetorical strategy (for example, what strategic factors influence a verbal duel participant to choose one retort rather than another), it seems clear that knowledge of the particular sequence of exchanges is absolutely essential. Thus full transcriptions of observed or at least participant-reported hypothetical verbal duels must be collected if we are ever to attempt to analyze underlying strategies.