The Anthropology of Cultural Performance

L. Lewis

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137343987
• eBook ISBN: 9781137342386
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Performing Arts
• Index: Social Sciences

Contemporary life in most nation-states is not truly cultural, but rather "culture-like, " especially in large-scale societies. Beginning with a distinction between special events and everyday life, Lewis examines fundamental events including play, ritual, work, and carnival and connects personal embodied habits and large-scale cultural practices.

Chapter 1

Special Events and Everyday Life

Many academic readers will recognize the title of this book as a tribute to the work of the anthropologist Victor Turner (1920–1983), referring to an influential collection of essays published posthumously, The Anthropology of Performance (1987).1 Those newly interested in performance theory would be well advised to begin with an exploration of Turner’s many contributions (see Babcock and MacAloon 1987). My monograph is intended to address two trends that were central to Turner’s interests: (1) the study of performative events as a method for the understanding of cultural patterns in general; and (2) a belief that the anthropological category of “culture” should best be understood as a process, perhaps as a series of performances. These two related positions led Turner to develop, with Richard Schechner, the theoretical approach that became performance studies—something of a merger between drama or theater studies and anthropology. As a legacy of this work, I found myself teaching in those two disciplines at the University of Sydney, still trying to bridge the gap between them to find a common ground.

My graduate training was in anthropology, but my fieldwork and initial research, on Brazilian capoeira (a sparring game), led me into regions of performativity similar to those explored by Turner and his colleagues. The two concerns highlighted above are still very timely, since the discipline of performance studies is expanding and scholars are searching for an appropriate foundational paradigm (Auslander 2008, 2003; Reinelt and Roach 2007; Alexander, Giesen, and Mast 2006; McConachie and Hart 2006; Hobart and Kapferer 2005; Schechner 2002; Handelman 1998; Dailey 1998; Phelan and Lane 1998; Carlson 1996; Bauman 1992; Fitzpatrick 1989). Likewise, anthropologists and other social theorists are still debating appropriate ways to understand the concept of culture developed over a century and a half ago (Fabian 2007; Fuchs 2005; Massumi 2002; Herzfeld 2001; Urban 2001; Ortner 1999; Hannerz 1996). In this debate, I will add my voice to those who see a consensus emerging (or at least a coherent convergence) that associates culture with concepts like embodiment, habit, practice, process, and performance.

This book is an attempt to do something that may appear old-fashioned: to propose a purposeful direction for research based on a synthetic overview and critique of the state of current academic work. I hope this will not be seen as a regression to what some have labeled the “master narratives” of the past—those that attempt to account for everything and to sum it all up. Instead, I propose this work as an antidote to the opposite tendency: the reluctance of many authors to advocate any coherent theoretical position at all or, at best, to take a piecemeal approach. In the case of performance theory, several have been content with summarizing the various positions that have been taken in the past.2 In other words, I want to attempt to fashion a coherent synthetic approach to performance by critical engagement with the literature in an effort to influence future directions for research. Such efforts have often been frowned upon in the recent academic climate, largely due to the modes of theorizing I and others have called post-theory, including such categories as post-structuralism, postmodernism, deconstruction, and postcolonialism. Although I will generally be arguing against these sorts of positions, I am aware of the many varieties of work such categories can encompass, and I am in sympathy with those scholars who use such approaches to build something new rather than merely to attack perceived mistakes of the past.

What I want to object to initially is the attack on logocentrism in general (often associated with the work of Derrida (e.g., 1978)), which results in a positive valorization of the work of deconstruction and a negative attitude toward any attempt at reconstruction. If all forms of logocentrism were to be seen as misguided or even oppressive, as some would argue, then I believe that any form of academic work would be ultimately useless. Instead, I will be arguing, inspired by the work of C. S. Peirce,3 that the possibility of meaningful academic dialogue still exists and is in fact essential. This should consist of discourse in which better ideas (and practices) have the chance of prevailing over worse ones. Such an evaluation of ideas would be based on the potential emergence of a future consensus by a community of investigators as to how phenomena of experience should be distinguished and characterized.4 To be sure, contemporary academics cannot know the form such an eventual consensus might take, but they should be open to the possibility that one could (or the probability that one will) emerge; otherwise, any debate is self-defeating (and often self-aggrandizing) cacophony.

In the spirit of reconstruction, then (assuming that much necessary deconstruction has already taken place), I will begin by trying to argue for a certain understanding of the term performance that will make it a useful theoretical tool for anyone in sympathy with Turner’s and Schechner’s initial project. In previous work, I have discussed some problems in the definition of terms, including issues of intertextuality (cf. Bauman 2004; Briggs and Bauman 1992) and of focal scope and closure in generic and residual categories (Lewis 1999). The basic point is that a middle ground is needed; terms taken from popular discourse, such as performance, need to have their scope delimited to exclude some meanings while at the same time avoiding the illusion of having a neatly precise and exhaustive definition. As Briggs and Bauman noted, “no system of genres as defined by scholars can provide a wholly systematic, empirically based, objective set of consistently applied, mutually exclusive categories” (1992: 164). On the other hand, to be useful as analytical tools, generic categories must exclude some types of experience; there must be an answer to the question, “What are they not?” Accordingly, discursive categories must be refined as tools for inquiry in a way that begins with a process of delimitation while still leaving them open to the empirical process of case study and discovery.

This tool-making was, in the past, a standard aspect of academic work, but in recent times it has suffered somewhat, partly due to the trends already mentioned. Indeed, the process of deconstruction is primarily aimed at terms, many of which were theoretical tools of the past, with the intention of revealing what are taken to be their conditions of possibility.5 Rather than using these revelations to build better tools (ones that are less flawed, as no tool is perfect), the response has often been to abandon fine tools, and therefore construction, altogether. Another interesting approach has been to try to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear—to take a term that seems completely inappropriate (from a common sense perspective) and try to make it do a job it was never fit to do. This is my view, for example, of Derrida’s misguided attempt to make the category writing into something absolutely fundamental to the human condition in general (e.g., 1978). Of course, his “writing” is not a literal one (Is such literality possible for him?) but a metaphorical one. Indeed, his work seems to have contributed to a proliferation of metaphor in current academic writing, which is often problematic (Lewis 2006). Suffice it to say that if Derrida’s approach were to be accepted, it would be very difficult to account for important aspects of human history and prehistory wherein the distinction between literate and non-literate societies has been absolutely formative (see Ong 1982; Goody 1977).6

Therefore, let me return to the category performance and attempt to refine it. This does not mean an exploration into what the term usually means or has meant (though these are good starting points) but rather refers to an experiment into what the term could be made to mean—what it should mean if it is to become a useful theoretical tool. Yet again, however, there is an important caveat. This honing of terms inevitably takes place in a given language-world, in this case the universe of English discourse. Although English is becoming quite widespread as a lingua franca (to the horror of Francophones) for many kinds of communication in the contemporary world, it is by no means universal, nor should it be. Therefore, any honing that is done by English-speaking academics will need to be reviewed—debated, discussed, and reformed—by people in other language-worlds. In anthropology, this is understood as part of the long-term refinement necessary to create theoretical categories that are potentially useful for describing and analyzing events in any cultural life-world. The process will necessarily be multivocal and complex so that the definition I attempt here should be understood as provisional, temporary, and, in Peirce’s terminology, fallible (Collected Papers [CP] 1.135–49). Nonetheless, I presume that any academic who is serious about such endeavors will educate himself or herself on cultural diversity or at least allow for it. One cannot presume to generalize about human experience without accounting for the patterning of such experience into cultural types and styles. As I will develop in what follows, the approach taken here is a pragmatistic phenomenology, whereby human experience, culturally conditioned, is understood primarily through embodied interactions or events.

Defining Performance as a Mediated Distinction

As I already noted, the term performance was initially adopted by Turner and Schechner as a locus for bringing together the disciplinary interests of theater or drama studies with those of (some kinds of) anthropology. In my view, this move was a theoretical opening (see Lewis 1995), enabling English speakers to examine the problems that arise in applying categories like theater to other cultural genres of performance, such as South Asian Kathakali, Japanese Noh, or Indonesian Topeng. Coming from the other direction, Turner was able to enliven the anthropological debates on ritual by reframing such events as performances. One problem with the term performance, as many have pointed out, is that it can be too open—that is, it is difficult to exclude any kinds of events, since almost anything can be seen as a performance. The key question turns out to be, as I already noted, what isn’t performance? The question has turned out to be a deep one, and therefore one that requires a complex answer.

On the one hand, in any society there are what I will be calling “special events”—occasions that are set apart from the ordinary daily round of activities. These can be rare or frequent, highly elaborated and planned or fairly informal, depending on the case in question. Such events are marked or framed7 as special, either explicitly (through naming, rule-making, codifying, prescribing) or implicitly (through simple emergence, unspoken practice, or mere attitude). These events are set apart from a background condition that in English is called everyday life, daily life, quotidian, and the like. I am arguing, along with others (as I will show), that all human cultural worlds are made livable partly through this contrast between special events and everyday life, whether or not equivalent terms exist in a given language.8

A similar argument can be found, for instance, in the work of the folklorist Roger Abrahams in his thoughtful essay “Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience” (1986). In that piece, he argued that any stretch of experience, by being abstracted from the stream of life—by being thematized as a certain kind of experience—becomes ipso facto extraordinary. This is an important way in which special events are generated in cultural worlds: they are frameworks that involve the intensification of awareness. As Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer put it, “participants in performance are thoroughly conscious of their action or practice as a performance to be witnessed or participated in as such” (2005: 11). People single out certain kinds of activity, certain modes of action, certain ways of feeling, and develop events designed to explore those practices and to recreate those experiences. However, just because an event is designed to evoke certain experiences doesn’t mean that it will always do so. Indeed, it is quite common for special events to become routinized—to adapt a well-known term from the sociologist Max Weber (1978: 246–54)—for them to lose their efficacy over time. Thus it is not uncommon for people to have ordinary experiences during special events and for extraordinary experiences to arise from the stream of daily life. Because events are more observable, more public, and more clearly bounded than experiences,9 the former should remain the empirical and analytical focus for fieldwork on performance. The analyst is interested in people’s experiences of events as one aspect of them, but a special event remains special by being set apart or framed as such, even if most people are bored or indifferent when undergoing it.

The anthropologist Don Handelman embarked on a similar path to the one being proposed here when he advocated the investigation of “public events” (1998). His work has been very influential in this field, and I will return to it repeatedly in the following chapters, especially in the discussions of ritual and play as foundational types of performance. I prefer the term “special,” however, for the simple reason that not all special events are public. For example, many rituals require secrecy to be effective, but often members of a group know that such a ritual has been performed, even if they couldn’t attend. This happens, for example, during some phases of the Trobriand Kula cycle (Malinowski 1961). In many kinds of sorcery, shamans divine the activities of rivals through their effects on people who have fallen ill. In these cases, shamans presume that certain magical activities have taken place. Often events in contemporary industrial societies are semi-public, such as celebrity parties or weddings hounded by the media. Likewise, many public events have a private face—activities and areas accessible only to an elite few, with a hierarchy of access. The Olympic Games are one such activity, as are coronations and just about all sorts of large-scale events in the contemporary world.

Nor will I be adopting Handelman’s suggested category of “proto-events” (1998: 83ff.), since I am defining all human activity as consisting of events: all activities must transpire in certain places at certain times. What Handelman had in mind, in my view (and his examples are well worth exploring), is the process by which an event becomes special—becomes thematically discrete, recognized, set apart, marked, or labeled and therefore somewhat removed from ordinary practice. This is indeed an important process, one that I characterize as the initial emergence of a recognizable kind of repeatable practice or pattern. Events begin to become special only marginally in most cases; they first have to be thematized so as to become noticeable before they can be elaborated or celebrated. It follows, therefore, that what are sometimes called non-events or “pseudo-events” (Boorstin 1992) are, in this formulation, special events that were intended to create extraordinary experiences (“hyped” in contemporary parlance) but failed to do so. They are still special events, but ones that have failed to fulfill the expectations of creators and participants.

Performance theorist Richard Schechner engaged in a similar approach to this problem when he argued that an event is a performance only if it is acknowledged as such but that any event in daily life can be seen as a performance (2002: 30). There is a certain slippage between insider and outsider points of view on cultural worlds in his formulation and also a certain confusion that results from using the same term, performance, for both types of events. The key point of agreement here is that there is a process of co-constitution involved in the separation between special events and ordinary life.10 That is, special events are created to illuminate and intensify aspects of daily life, and daily life is often grasped or experienced in the light of reflections and formulations derived from special events. Daily life can often be lived in anticipation of special events or in recovery from them. People understand and talk about the daily round using metaphors taken from special events—for example, existence is like a game or a dance, or “all the world’s a stage.” Insofar as daily life is routine, habitual, even boring, it may go unmarked and unremarked: it may recede from awareness. Special events are designed not to recede but to stand out, to excite and to stimulate, and therefore they tend to engender more salient experiences and more memories. But these excitements and memories return to enliven daily life again, to charge ordinary routines with traces of extraordinary experience.

Performativity as Potential

What makes the problem of performance especially complex is not only that these two aspects of social life co-create each other but also that this co-evolution testifies to a common ground from which they both spring. This common ground might usefully be called performativity, defined here as the potential for enacting self-awareness, or the possible thematization of an event sequence.11 The point here is that people have the potential to single out any event—any stretch of activity or moment of experience—and to dramatize or frame it as something special or something out of the ordinary. This idea was most clearly stated by Abrahams (1986), but it is also implied in Handelman’s idea of the proto-event and in Schechner’s distinction between is and as a performance. One consequence of this potential of performativity is that there can be no hard and fast boundary between special events and daily life, but instead there exists a continuum of more or less special events. At one end are the highly elaborated, specially marked, rare but important planned events (like coronations, cosmic rituals, and important funerals), and at the other end are routine or habitual practices that may fade from awareness altogether. This continuum is always changing; new event types are emerging and old ones are dying out based on the vitality of possible experiences they may generate (or fail to generate; see Table 2.1). This vital performative potential is also at the heart of another fundamental category that I will be exploring in Chapter 2, the fertility of play.

Performativity as the virtual ground for the distinction between daily life and special events can be further illustrated by the effectiveness of metaphors used by theorists to relate the two. One of the most significant for this study is Turner’s concept of “social drama.” In his view, not all cultural life was social drama; instead, the phrase was intended to describe periodic social upheavals, such as political conflict, illness, war, or virtually any disturbance to the normative order. He was influenced here by the seminal work of the anthropologist Max Gluckman, who viewed social conflict as an especially revealing focus for ethnographic case studies (see Evens and Handelman 2006). Turner proposed a four-part scheme for describing the usual process of such dramas: (1) breach, (2) crisis, (3) redress, and (4) schism or continuity (e.g., Turner 1982: 61–88). The third phase (redress) took on the greatest weight in his theorizing, since he argued that it was from this process that rituals, and ultimately most other kinds of regulated special events, developed. The picture that emerged, at least from one central aspect of Turner’s work, was of an ordered social system that is disrupted periodically, and from this disruption people create special events to try to restore order. In the process, they must reflect on who and what they are as a group, and out of these reflexive performances, social change may also be generated. Therefore, I see Turner’s overarching distinction—between structure and “anti-structure”—as a theory of the dialectic between social order and social disorder, in which unplanned or spontaneous events lead to purposeful, programmed events, especially rituals.

One can see in Turner’s work the legacy of British structural-functionalism in which he was trained, and it is this f...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Special Events and Everyday Life
• 2. Play as Performance: Exploring P/p Relations
• 3. Rituals and Ritual-Like Genres
• 4. Performative Processes: Types of P/p Relations
• 5. Embodiment, Emplacement, and Cultural Process
• 6. Problems in Performance and Cultural Theory
• Notes
• References