Performance: a critical introduction
The performance of culture:
anthropological and ethnographic approaches
Performance
and Anthropology
- - Number of different behaviors lumped into
‘performance’ for different cultures in ANTH
- - Dell Hymes 2 Catagories of Performance:
o Behavior and Conduct:
§
B =
“anything and everything that happens”
§
C =
“under the aegis of social norms, cultural rules, shared principles of
interpretability
o Conduct within Behavior
§
When
one of persons “assumed a responsibility to an audience and to tradition as the
understand it”
- - Performance involved ‘responsibility’ to
audience and to tradition
- - Theory: all performance is based on some
pre-existing model, script or pattern of action
o Richard Schechner: performance is
“restored behavior”
- - BUT – performance can work in society for
underminding tradition and providing a way of exploration and new behavior
- - In almost every culture, there is a
specific cultural activity set apart that can be considered and studied as
‘performance’
Liminal and Liminoid
- Turner defined liminal as:
o “anti-structure” of normal cultural
operations
- The space provided for members of a
culture to think not about cultural codes, but about themselves individually
- Simplified by Sutton-Smith as “letting of
steam”
- Learning from disorder
o Learning from a ‘latent system of
potential alternatives’
o A ‘protocultural system’: the precurser
of innovative normative forms, source of NEW culture
- Liminal may invert the established order,
but never subverts it
o Suggests frightening chaos is alternative
to established order (Elena’s thoughts: some
organized religions? Anyone reminded of the puritans?)
- Turner defined “liminoid” activities as:
o ‘Limited, individualistic’ activities
more along the lines of ‘play’: sport, leisure, art – anything outside of
regular work and business
o Marks cites where conventional structure
is no longer honored
o More likely to be subversive, playful and
exploratory of alternatives to ‘status quo’
- Clifford Geertz: Distinction of ‘deep
play’ and ‘shallow play’
o Differing ideas between scholars for
which one can incite more thought toward change
- MacAloon: Cultural Performance:
o “Occasion in which as a culture or
society we reflect upon and define our alternatives, and eventually change in
some ways while remaining the same in others”
______________ does anyone even want me to continue on with the other 20 pages of notes?______________
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