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The Anthropology of Cultural Performance

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The Anthropology of Cultural Performance J. Lowell Lewis

the anthropology of cultural performance Copyright © J. Lowell Lewis, 2013. Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-1-137-34398-7 All rights reserved. First published in 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-46592-7 ISBN 978-1-137-34238-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9781137342386

Earlier versions of some sections of the book were previously published as, Toward a Unified Theory of Cultural Performance: A Reconstructive Introduction to Victor Turner. In G. St. John, ed., 273–91. Victor Turner and Contemporary Cultural Performance. New York: Berghahn (2008); and Afterword: Theoretical Reflections. In G. McAuley, ed., 41–58. Unstable Ground: Performance and the Politics of Place. Brussels: P.I.E. Peter Lang (2006). Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. First Edition: August 2013 Design by Scribe Inc. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

To all students of performance, past and future.

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Contents List of Tables

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Acknowledgments

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1

Special Events and Everyday Life

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2

Play as Performance: Exploring P/p Relations

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Rituals and Ritual-Like Genres

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Performative Processes: Types of P/p Relations

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Embodiment, Emplacement, and Cultural Process

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Problems in Performance and Cultural Theory

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Notes

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References

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Index

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Tables Table 2.1 Table 3.1 Table 4.1

Special events (Performance) versus everyday life (performance): a mediated opposition

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Criteria for distinguishing types of events on a continuum

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Fundamental relations between special events (Performance) and everyday life (performance)

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Acknowledgments This book was more than a decade in the making, so there are many people I need to thank and some I may not remember to acknowledge. Many times the project seemed to be an impossible task, since the subject is so broad and the potential sources are nearly infinite. I have often thought that I fulfill the stereotype of the generalist who knows nothing about everything. Hopefully, this is not the view that most readers will come away with and, in my better moments, I admit that at least some sections of the book, perhaps many, may prove useful to those who continue the work on performance theory. The manuscript was begun, and mostly completed, during my tenure at the University of Sydney, in the Departments of Anthropology and Performance Studies. Accordingly, I would like to thank colleagues and students in both departments. In Anthropology, special thanks are due to Michael Jackson, Jadran Mimica, Ghassan Hage, Souchou Yao, Jeremy Beckett, and Michael Allen. Thanks also go to my colleagues and friends Alan Rumsey and Francesca Merlan in Anthropology at The Australian National University in Canberra. A special shout-out goes to my former student Asha Persson as well as to many others, especially honours students, who have kept me (relatively) honest over the years. In Performance Studies, I owe debts of gratitude especially to Ian Maxwell, whose collaboration and insight inspired me in many ways, and to Paul Dwyer, whose thoughtful interrogations and warm collegiality helped create a cooperative and supportive departmental atmosphere all too rare in academia. Thanks are also due to Gay McAuley, Tim Fitzpatrick, Amanda Card, Russell Emerson, and Laura Ginters as well as to my many graduate and undergraduate students. Of those, I must single out Paul Dowsey-Magog, who collaborated on an early project and coauthored an article with me, as well as former students Peter Snow and Stuart Grant, now colleagues, whose work is cited in the text. The insights on Balkan dance provided by Teresa Crvencovic, which also appear in the text, were very valuable, as was the sincere friendship she and her husband provided. The postgraduate seminars in both Anthropology and Performance Studies were valuable arenas for trying out ideas and gaining new inspiration.

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Many key ideas were triggered in collaboration with Steven Feld, who cotaught a course with me at Sydney and whose work is a constant touchstone for me and for many. Special thanks are also due to my friend and colleague Sally Ness, whose support and suggestions bolstered me whenever I had cause to doubt and whose work has also pointed the way. I want to thank Val Daniel, who introduced me to Peirce, and Jean-Paul Dumont, my thesis supervisor and a warm, supportive presence ever since. I am grateful for a long-term friendship and collaboration with Greg Downey at Macquarie University in Sydney and to his colleague John Sutton. Many blessings should go to one of my oldest friends and colleagues, Jonathan Tuck, with whom I have discussed many aspects of the work and who always took the time to read outside his own field to keep up with me. I have appreciated the updates on Salvador and the carnival there from John Collins at Queens College, and I thank him for the use of the cover photo. Thanks are also due to Phillip Zarilli and to the several anonymous reviewers who provided comments on earlier versions of the manuscript. At Palgrave Macmillan I want to acknowledge the efficiency and support of Robyn Curtis and her assistant Erica Buchman. Also on the editorial team were Richard Bellis and Susan Eberhart, as well as Sarah Block at Scribe Inc. Most important, of course, is my family. My mother, Felice, serves as a role model, as she continues to write and publish into her nineties. My son, Galen, keeps me smiling and gives me hope for the future. Finally, my wife, Suzanne, has supported me in countless ways, including sage advice, sharp insight, a loving heart, and many reminders to keep active through the process. Any mistakes and shortcomings are, of course, due only to me. J. Lowell Lewis Bellingham, Washington

CHAPTER 1

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any 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

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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

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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,

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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

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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

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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 largescale 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.

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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 coevolution 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

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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 functional relation, between dramatic crises and special events, that now seems outdated. In an early work, he described performance as “a limited area of transparency on the otherwise opaque surface of regular, uneventful social life” (1957: 93). This limpid phrase is a good description of the kinds of special events humans create to understand their social (and cosmic) life-worlds, but it certainly doesn’t describe the “breach” or “crisis” phases of social drama. Nor do all special events merely have to be responses to crises of order. Instead, people often create events for their own sake, as exercises in enjoyment, excitement, and illumination. To be sure, social crises do engender reflective and normalizing events, but events also develop at other times and for other reasons. For example, the cycles of “nature” (admittedly a culturally and historically specific concept) have often presented themselves as marking or dividing human life and have provided convenient occasions for the construction of special cultural events. These are recurring situations that are not crises but rather expected patterns in the yearly or multi-yearly round. The initial point here is that social drama works as a concept because any aspect of social life can become dramatic or can be thematized. Therefore, any practice or event is a potential candidate for intensification, which is to say that human cultural life is permeated with performativity. As Turner noted, one cannot predict with any degree of certainty where or when social drama might arise. Such crises come in all sizes, from personal and family dramas to events with national and international implications. Indeed, things such as terrorist acts or natural disasters often have global consequences these days and therefore can be seen as “multi-social” dramas. A second point is that the relation Turner describes between the transparency of reflexive performance and “opaque” daily life should be recomplicated by pointing out that after experiencing a period of transparency during a special event, ordinary life may seem, at least to some people, a bit less opaque. For example, young initiates such as those of Ndembu (Turner’s initial fieldwork group) may well rejoin daily life understanding much more about their cultural worlds now that many secret aspects of the rituals have been revealed to them. In a similar fashion, the cumulative effect of such periods of transparency or illumination fostered by special events may be to increase the general level of self-reflexivity in the population as a whole. This seems to be a clear trend in human cultural development in general: our degree of self-awareness, or selfreflexivity, has gradually been increasing—but this has proved to be something

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of a mixed blessing. I am alluding here to the question of what sort of a self is being reflected on. For instance, an excess of a certain kind of self-reflection can manifest as narcissism or arrogance. Another theorist well known for exploring the dramaturgical metaphor for social life was the sociologist Erving Goffman. He began by looking at various kinds of interactions in the United States as if they were theatrical and eventually developed a concept of framing sequences of action that has become a standard tool in many approaches to social and linguistic theory, as noted earlier (Goffman 1981; 1974). One key point here is that most human interaction is codified or typified; events are usually framed as something so that experience becomes expectable and controllable to some extent. Special events at one end of the continuum are relatively ordinary kinds of marked interaction, such as a lecture, a purchase, a phone call, a breakfast, a coffee break, and so forth. Ordinary experience may also be relatively unmarked—for instance, it may present itself as a transition between marked events—but if it is completely unmarked, it tends to pass out of awareness altogether. A different kind of case was explored by the sociologist Richard Grathoff (1970) when he noted that sometimes a framework for interaction can be ambiguous or disputed (“What is going on here?”). Such ambiguity must usually be resolved immediately, either through play, as Grathoff suggests, or through direct testing (“Is this a joke?”). Disputes about frameworks may sometimes remain unresolved, though in that case they often provide interesting topics of discussion (“What you took for praise was actually a put-down”). In order to clarify the relation between special events and daily activities, I will sometimes refer to the former as Performance (P) and the latter as performance (p). This allows the extremes of the continuum (P/p) to be contrasted while also emphasizing the ground of potential performativity that underlies their co-emergence. Henceforth I will refer to relations between these two extremes as P/p relations (see Chapter 4). I am arguing that the contrast between special and ordinary events arose out of the undifferentiated field of hominin12 social life as the latter became cultural: as humans evolved increasing self-awareness in interaction with others and with their surroundings. The distinction arose because of the necessity for certain aspects (and the potential for any aspect) of human life to be thematized, celebrated, or set apart for special exploration or intensification. This is a principal mode of self-reflection—of evaluative cognition—for creatures with increased intellectual capacity. The result is a reciprocal or dialectical13 relation in which the binary opposition (P/p) is “held apart” while simultaneously being mediated.14 The two extremes of the continuum—special events and everyday life—are coherent only in opposition to each other, and this coherence is itself grounded in the underlying commonality that I have called performativity. In Chapter 2 (Table 2.1), I

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will elaborate several ways that the distinction between special events and daily life constitutes a mediated opposition. Spontaneous and Planned Events As implied in the discussion of Turner’s concept of social drama, it is useful to see special events as coming in two forms: spontaneous and planned. Spontaneous special events include his social dramas, including many events that seem to arise “from outside” their cultural domains, such as from spirit forces, from gods, or from what most academics would call natural sources. The most troublesome spontaneous events are those that are threats to the social order: natural disasters, anger of the gods, vengeful ancestors, warfare, and the like. In these cases, human efforts will often go toward creating subsequent events to remediate the resultant disorder: appeasing deities or ancestors, restoring, and/or rebuilding. In other cases, spontaneous events are well integrated into the social field, usually when they recur periodically and become part of the expected round, in which case they lose some of their spontaneity and become anticipated. Thus the round of seasons, because it occurs regularly, is adjusted to the corresponding human special events that accompany them according to a particular cultural program. Other special events are more or less sui generis; they arise from cultural interests, are relatively independent of outside or uncontrolled factors, and in most cases are planned, such as weddings, initiations, funerals, and the like. In the majority of cases, special events are somewhere in between, however, since it is human nature to be cultural, and human culture is generally “naturalized” for particular social groups.15 Thus the distinction between planned and spontaneous is mediated by the most commonly found type: partially planned or partially improvised events. For instance, it is expected that people will fall ill from time to time, and there is usually a cultural schema for types of diseases and methods of cure, but the actual event of a particular person (or group) falling ill to just that disease at just that time may require a revision of the usual curing method to accommodate the circumstances. Likewise, if rain comes late or there is an unexpected frost, or if a neighboring group suddenly decides to attack, appropriate activities may have to be altered or modified accordingly. Indeed, every time a repeatable special event is performed, changes occur, sometimes intentionally and sometimes spontaneously. Accordingly, Hobart and Kapferer call performance “a non-reducible emergent phenomenon” (2005: 11). The process of emergence is central to an understanding of culture in performance and will become a recurring theme along with an exploration of the related ideas of habit and practice. Let me emphasize that I believe future work on performance should be based on fieldwork—that is, embodied

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experience of events in a cultural life-world as opposed to the purely textual analyses that are common practice in disciplines such as cultural studies.16 This fieldwork will normally include special events, because the latter are consensually framed, often named, and have clearly delimited boundaries in places and times. Studies of daily life are problematic unless researchers are careful to specify exactly what kinds of events are being explored. As one moves down the performative hierarchy toward more ordinary events and event types, it is important to reduce the scope of generalization (see Lewis 1999). This is because “ordinary life” has no objectifiable specificity, since it is, by definition (or lack thereof ), multiplex and relative to diverse personal perspectives. In other words, the public typification and recognition of special events gives them a certain consensual objectivity that is lacking in the diverse multivocality of what, for convenience, is reified into residual categories, like everyday life.17 Special events stand out, as they are made to do, whereas everyday life recedes from view. Culture as Performance: Meaning and Power It is not within the scope of this book for me to present an exhaustive history or evaluation of the various theories of culture as they have been debated in anthropology.18 Instead, I want to argue for a provisional (and variable) consensus emerging around the idea that culture is best understood as enactment, as a process, and as a series of practices that (in most cases) distinguish one social group from another. This emphasis on practice as a central aspect of culture has been widespread for some time (e.g., de Certeau 1984; Bourdieu 1977) and can arguably be related to an even more longstanding emphasis on social action theory.19 Johannes Fabian has traced some of these strains into anthropological theory and related them to the emerging uses of the category of performance (1990). There is also a parallel but somewhat convergent stream of linguistic work stemming from the critique of Chomsky’s emphasis on “competence” at the expense of the “performance” of spoken language. In anthropology, this critique has resulted in a pragmatic, discourse-centered approach to language known as the “ethnography of speaking,” which is a method still very much alive and vigorous at the present time (e.g., Sherzer 2009; Farr 2006; Bauman 2004; Bauman and Briggs 2003; Hymes 1995, 1975). Accordingly, an initial step is to develop a pragmatic approach to cultural theory as a process as opposed to reifying culture into a structure, a system, or other sorts of imaginary objects. These latter views, many of which are still current, represent synchronic “snapshots” or cross-sections of the flow of practices and events in time and have proved useful in providing synoptic views of social worlds as if they could be diagrammed. But it is well past the time when such

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views need to give way to more fluid patterns in order to do justice to the cultural complexity that was always there but has been increasing in degree in the last few centuries. Although many analysts, including Turner, have been advocating a processual approach to culture for a number of decades, it still seems difficult to throw off earlier habits of using culture as a noun and to come to terms with the complexity of recasting “it” instead as a verb. This sort of struggle can be seen in discussions of the ideas of Clifford Geertz—for instance, when he agreed with the sociologist Max Weber’s assessment that “man is an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun” (1973: 5). Although Geertz’s interpretive approach to culture has been influential in many respects, the rather static image evoked by the above description seems problematically synchronic unless one imagines those webs being constantly rewoven. In a reconsideration of Geertz’s work, Sherry Ortner (1999) argues for a distinction between meaning (noting the problems of the term) and the effects of that meaning. She associates the latter with Foucauldian discourses on power, which act as a corrective or necessary supplement to Geertz’s approach (cf. Asad 1993).20 Although she never returns to the problem of meaning in that piece, I want to do so by noting that for the philosopher Peirce, the meaning of a sign consists of nothing more than the effects that sign has or could have on an interpreter: “Consider what effects that might conceivably have practical bearing we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (CP 5.402). This often-cited “pragmatic maxim” was developed by Peirce as part of a discussion in which he argued that a belief should be seen as nothing more than the actions that it could or would engender. If one follows the intent of these ideas, it becomes clear that power should not be understood as some encompassing regime within which meaning is made in certain ways, as the early Foucault would have it (e.g., 1979; 1973); rather, (what is usually called) meaning and power are two types of effects signs may have on interpreters. If someone punches me in the face, the effects begin with visceral feelings like shock, pain, disorientation, dizziness, and the like; they may then progress to feelings of anger and the desire for retaliation, perhaps, depending on what I take the attitude of the attacker to be; and they could eventually involve ideas of revenge, ethnic difference, or other more abstract categories of understanding. All or any of these effects can be seen as potential meanings of the action, in the Peircean view, and the social relationships of hierarchy that may or may not exist between me and the puncher would certainly be part of the situation of interpretation. The point is that making meaning is a type of performative activity that generally evolves from more visceral, embodied, feelingful effects toward more conceptual, abstract, ideational effects. I call this the micro-evolution of signification, and I believe it is the phenomenological

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basis for the usual, common sense distinction between meaning (as idea) and action (as material reality). To be sure, the punch occurs in a particular place, as part of a particular situation, between particular antagonists. This setting is already imbued with meanings—namely, with the effects of previous semeiotic21 acts that led up to the event in question. Part of this setting may have to do with patterns of social hierarchy, but is this inevitable? Is it necessarily so? I will argue that it is not. It seems to me that relations of domination and subordination are not necessary features of all human interactions, though they may be in many or even most, but that is an empirical question, not one to be decided a priori. Likewise, disempowerment should always be balanced by questions of empowerment, both of which are coherent only in terms of human experience—in other words, from the point of view of some cultural interpreter. Although there can clearly be habitual tendencies, one should resist seeing them as part of any enveloping system of oppression or liberation, if such systems are, as I have been arguing, merely synchronic reifications of what are more appropriately seen as patterns of social interaction: as performances. If I return to an example developed by Ortner of Sherpa guides to sahib mountaineers (1999), the question of power is immediately revealed to be something quite complex and inseparable from questions of meaning as conventionally understood. When a lama at a monastery receives money as an offering from a group of mountaineers (probably, but not necessarily, for the sake of good relations with their Sherpa porters), who is empowered and who is disempowered? Isn’t the relation between monetary power and spiritual power a matter of culturally relative evaluation? Is there a “right” answer to such questions? In the case of the porters themselves, the systematic disempowerment argument seems a bit stronger on the surface, since they are, after all, receiving pay from and “doing the dirty work” of the sahibs. Ortner gives a few examples of sahibs coercing the Sherpas to continue climbing when they didn’t want to, and it seems likely that this was a humiliating and disempowering experience for the Sherpas concerned. But in other cases, it is clear that Sherpas could have decided to quit at most times and frequently have done so. Isn’t this a form of empowerment or “positive agency,” as Ortner calls it? Indeed, she gives many examples of Sherpas influencing the sahibs to change their ways, including participating in what have become regular base-camp puja rituals. The point here is that issues of power (both positive and negative) should be phenomenologically investigated through situated events—through performances—in which relationships are not assumed in advance but are interrogated empirically relative to their significant effects on participants. Geertz’s “webs of meaning” have frequently been associated by him and others with the well-known German term weltanschauung (world view). The

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phenomenological critique of this idea is that people live first and foremost in a lebenswelt (life-world), within which a world view is only one cognitive aspect. Continuing the processual analysis, a world view should more properly be seen, in the first place, as the synthesis of several moments of reflection on experience on the part of a particular interpreter. In much of cultural theory, these individual syntheses are then further (usually speculatively) combined into the world view of a certain group, based presumably on a consensus of opinion or belief. It should be clear that both of these synthetic moves are problematic: first, because people’s reflections on their experience change over time; second, because of who is usually attempting a group synthesis (Is it an analyst from outside the group?); and third, because experience itself is recognized by people in many groups to be beyond the realm of totalizing rational synthesis. The last point relates directly to the importance—indeed, the primacy—of the enacted cultural life-world. Many experiences are there to be had; they have effects in feeling and action, but they may resist conceptualization. This is one implication of the phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s oft-quoted assertion, “Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of ‘I think that’ but of ‘I can’” (1962: 137). Another, perhaps more central, implication is that perception and cognition depend on motility, on action, a point to be explored in later chapters. Different individuals vary as to the amount of reflection on experience they engage in, and some cultural worlds are designed to encourage more selfreflection than others. Clearly, being an academic in a European-derived university community predisposes one to be much more reflective on philosophical questions (though not always clearly based on one’s own experience) than most people in other social arenas. Publishing scholars need to be focally aware of this so as to take it into account and not “fetishize” the results of their own intellectual processes, as the anthropologist Michael Jackson has argued (1996: 1). This has been the case in the past when world views were valued over life-worlds in the understanding of human cultural patterns. Some groups, like academics, worry a lot about meaning narrowly conceived—what the linguist Michael Silverstein has called “semantico-referential” meaning (1976). In other cases, certain ethnographers have tried to engage with all the embodied effects of a life-world, which may well have more direct consequences on how people live in it. Henceforth, when I use the term meaning, it will be in the Peircean sense: including all the effects (actual and potential) a sign can have on an interpreter, of which linguistic or conceptual meanings are a smaller subset.

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Practice and Habit Pierre Bourdieu was well known as a theorist of social and cultural practice, and one key term in his theoretical apparatus was habitus. Over the years, he formulated this concept in various ways, but at the nexus of all these definitions there is a paradox that also underlies the idea of practice itself, as Bourdieu acknowledged (e.g., 1990: 9–14). On the one hand, habitus refers to similar actions repeated in similar situations, although Bourdieu rarely used the term for just a single actor but usually collectivized it to refer to similar actions done by members of a group sharing the same habitus in similar situations. I will return to the problems of habit sharing, but first let me examine the other half of the paradox relative to a single actor, the simplest situation. Habitus for Bourdieu is employed not just to capture the idea of repeated activity but also to capture the creative effort of applying these similar moves to new situations, of adapting them to meet changing circumstances. To his credit, he recognizes (as some behaviorists do not) that accessing habits is not a mechanical process of inserting the desired action at the proper time but rather requires a creative adaptation each time the sequence comes into play. This raises the more fundamental question of what is actually repeated in a repeated action—of how one recognizes a habit, distinguishing it from more innovative activity. This turns out to be quite a deep question—one that will require substantial theoretical apparatus to uncover. The first step is to acknowledge that at least two processes must be involved: one that fixes and stores certain types of action for later use (habit formation) and one that selects appropriate habits for given circumstances and creatively alters them to fit the situation in question (habit implementation). Both processes will most probably need to be further unpacked and subdivided, but it should be clear initially that habitus alone will not do the job, because it covers up this very distinction. Also note that the crucial step from individual habits to collective ones (if indeed the latter exist) is also obscured by the term. As the anthropologist Gregory Bateson noticed quite some time ago, habit formation is a matter of incorporation and embodiment (1972). As one acquires a new skill, for instance, one practices it (note this sense of the word) over and over until it becomes habitual—that is, one can automatically perform the action with minimal conscious awareness. Indeed, as Bateson noted, the more embodied or habituated the pattern becomes, the further it tends to recede from consciousness (1972: 142–43). This kind of incorporation is at the root of what anthropologists have often called the naturalization of culture: the process whereby people see their own habits as inevitable—as the only appropriate way to do things. As infants and children, much of our time and effort are taken up in this process of habit formation, and we are evidently predisposed to be especially good at it when young. This is why the process of play is so centrally

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important to the acquisition and implementation of habits, as I will explore in Chapter 2. As adults, however, it is more difficult to acquire new habits, because this often means having to break old ones, altering previous patterns. Changing habits can be much more difficult than acquiring them in the first place, depending on how central they are to a person’s sense of selfhood. This introduces another central theme: the hierarchy of embodied habits. Some are more fundamental, nearly impossible to alter, while others are more superficial, thus easier to change. In a later chapter on embodied selfhood (Chapter 5), I will discuss some aspects of this sort of hierarchy. Therefore, I will rely on the common word habit, already much refined by Peirce, as centrally implicated in any adequate understanding of cultural performance. I have already isolated three major habitual domains: habit making, habit implementation, and habit change, or what the anthropologist E. V. Daniel has called “the habit of habit-change” (1996: 199). Daniel’s phrase clearly evokes the kind of habit hierarchy I am arguing for: in this case, kinds of metahabits—regular ways in which habits are made and implemented, as well as changed. Some people change habits often, constantly experimenting with new skills and patterns; others do so only rarely. The most embodied or ingrained habits are virtually impossible to change, because people are not aware of them as habits, often reifying them as structures, objects, or what I prefer to call constraints on the possibility of action. Peirce’s radical view was that the inanimate objects that are seen to populate a naturalistic world view are really just (potentially dynamic) signs that have become “hidebound with habits” (CP 6.158). In a similar way, I believe that a sense of self as being in a body is basically a matter of habitual patterns that have been reified and totalized for the sake of secure identity and ease of action. One group that definitely has a strong “habit of habit-change” is the ensemble of professional character actors in the European dramatic tradition. Members of this group make a habit of changing fundamental aspects of embodied selfhood in order to take on a role. They change their voices, mannerisms, ways of walking, appearances, and, in some cases, emotional states, all in order to embody a fictional character on stage (see Zarilli 2008; 2002). Of course there is some truth in this fiction, especially when acted well in a good play, and this is partly because there is a certain “fictionality” to daily life. One aspect of this “may-be” of ordinary life (in Peirce’s phrase) is its imaginal co-constitution— the idea that all human experience is constructed partly through the action of imagination. For example, according to Edmund Husserl, a lived experience of the present depends on a kind of imaginal “protention” into the future, which the philosopher Edward Casey calls a form of primary imagination. It is this constant projection of probabilities that allows “the present to move forward and to become

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an on-going, never-fully-concluded enterprise” (Casey 1991: 146).22 Accordingly, I will employ here a distinction suggested by Henry Corbin (1972; see also Shariat 1991) 23 between the ubiquitous imaginal aspects of daily life and the creation of imaginary worlds, like those of the dramatic stage, consensually understood to be mere fictions. In this usage, imaginaries are overt frameworks created as fantasies (although often to reveal hidden truths), while the imaginal aspects of life are mostly covert, largely unrecognized by social actors, except when interrogated by analysts or in moments of deeper self-reflection. Many such imaginal aspects of the everyday are captured by Peirce in his phenomenological category of firstness, the mere “may-be” that is the ground of possibility for any kind of experience. He often associated firstness with a kind of timeless state or presence (e.g., CP 1.307; see note 3). I will return to this point, but first I want to take a brief look at the importance of role play in the constitution of human selfhood and intersubjectivity. Deep Role Play There is a long tradition of thought about roles in social and cultural theory, and one main initiator of this work is acknowledged to be George Herbert Mead, a social theorist and pragmatist philosopher of the Peircean school. There is far too much literature on role play for me to summarize here,24 but once again let me try to suggest some central tendencies. In sociology and early anthropology, the vast bulk of this work was on everyday social roles, and indeed many writers distinguished between social roles in this sense and “playing at a role” as in the case of stage actors (e.g., Coutu 1951). Since most of the theory resulted in empirical work on childhood “socialization,” this distinction might be seen as overdrawn, because the relations between children’s role play and the processes of stage acting are probably more important than the differences. Hans Joas (1996; 1993) has done important work in underscoring the theoretical importance of Mead’s emphasis on role play for the development of personality and thus for cultural and social life. Mead believed that infants were born into a world of undifferentiated intersubjectivity—a world that Merleau-Ponty later called “preobjective” (1962) and that for Mead was also presubjective (see Thompson 2007; Lewis 1999). That is, Mead believed that infants initially have no ability to distinguish self from others or to distinguish other beings from mere objects. He argued that both of these skills or ideas had to be developed; children must discover a sense of these relations in a series of interactions with mothers and other close nurturers (Mead 1934). The process of differentiating self from others involves role play, for Mead, as a child imaginatively interacts with family members in a dramaturgy of desire. In this view, roles are intersubjective routines—mimetic patterns—available for the play of identification and

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differentiation, essential not only to childhood development but also to the ongoing functioning of social life for adults. More recent work by Daniel Stern (2000) suggests that self-other distinctions among infants begin very early—at least by the age of 2–3 months—and even before that, there is a sense of what he calls an “emergent self.” Stern argues convincingly that there is no period of confusion of self-other in an infant’s experience, as had been posited by Mead, even though many psychoanalytic theorists still agree with Mead on this point. Neither group would dispute that an infant is born into an intersubjectively constituted cultural life-world that was already extant before its birth and in that sense is “prior” to its experiences of selfhood. Yet the picture Stern paints, based on extensive psychological research, is that infant experiences of self and other are there virtually from birth, developing together in interaction with mothers and other close providers. However, his view is that the differentiation between self and other does not just occur once and for all but instead constitutes an ongoing process—a “sense of self-with-other” that increases in complexity as it is renegotiated at various stages in the infant’s (and later adult’s) life (2000: xxi–xxv). Once again, it needs to be emphasized that any socialization process can happen only in a specific cultural world. The way that differences in child rearing created differences in cultural practice was a preoccupation of early anthropologists, including Margaret Mead (e.g., 1930), Ruth Benedict (e.g., 1934), Francis Hsu (e.g., 1961), and many others. They concluded that the development of selfhood will happen in different ways in differing cultural life-worlds since they will have differing communicative fields and different practices, including different sorts of roles. G. H. Mead argued that since a child is animate, it imagines itself in a fully animated world, and therefore the discovery of what turn out to be inanimate objects is something of a desocialization process.25 It seems to me that this idea might reveal the source of fundamental ethnographic differences, since it is clear that in some social worlds animation extends further than it does in Western disenchanted ones. In other words, if one is socialized into a cultural world in which trees, mountains, or rivers have spiritual animation and toward which social relations are appropriate, then Mead’s desocialization process must have operated somewhat differently there. For example, the missionary and ethnographer Maurice Leenhardt observed that the islanders he lived with on New Caledonia had concepts of embodiment that he called “cosmomorphic” (1979 [1947]), such as the link between gender in the wider world (where things like rivers and mountains have gender) and gender in humans. Correspondences between a macrocosm and the microcosm of human embodiment are widespread in small-scale societies—a point I will explore further in Chapter 4. Leenhardt’s formulation resonates interestingly

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with the more recent proposal of a distinction between “egocentric” versus “sociocentric” types of selfhood in various cultural worlds (Scheper-Hughes and Lock 1987). Following such formulations, it would seem possible to differentiate human groups according to the scope of human sociality: How widely, and toward what sorts of entities, are social relations appropriate? These ideas may be useful in the ongoing investigation of patterned differences in types of people brought up in varied social settings. It remains to be determined how different people are as a result of different sorts of enculturation, or what the anthropologist Tim Ingold prefers to call “enskillment” processes (2000). Some anthropologists have argued that these differences go quite deep, while others are convinced that they are superficial and that humans everywhere are basically similar. I believe this kind of disagreement was at the heart of the clash between anthropologists Marshall Sahlins and Gannath Obeyesekere regarding Captain Cook’s death at the hands of the Hawaiian islanders, for instance. Sahlins emphasized the cultural clashes between the Europeans and the Islanders, whereas Obeyesekere suspected that those differences were minimal and were not the cause of the massacre (see Sahlins 1995; Obeyesekere 1992). If G. H. Mead was essentially right, as I believe, about the centrality of role play for children and adults, then it becomes clear why roles are fundamental both for human social organization in everyday life and for the development of special performative genres, like theater, masking, puppetry, trance possession, and the like. As mentioned earlier, the performative approach to cultural process places emphasis on studying these genres as specialized role-enacting events. It’s problematic to generalize across the many sorts of performative types involving role play, but I believe that in many cases, they involve an enactment of issues concerning both personal and group cultural identity (see Pollock 1995). They achieve this through an elaboration or intensification of role constructs that are widely recognized but remain fertile because the situations portrayed are often ambiguous or even paradoxical. They raise questions such as the following: What is the relation between the enactor and the entity or character being enacted? Are these performances by spirits or humans, and in what sense can a human be a spirit? Are there essential selves, or are selves basically just a sequence of roles? These and other similar questions are sometimes answered, more or less, depending on the social world, or are sometimes left hanging. But even when answered for the moment, this doesn’t end the process of reflection or lessen the experience of awe that results from the enactment of identity transformations. For example, Jim Wafer delves into the complex interactions between mediums and the spirit beings who possess them in the world of (Kongo-Angola)

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Brazilian candomblé. He notes the profound confusion (often mixed with awe) he and others feel in trying to deal with the pronouncements of spirits speaking through the tongues of initiates in trance as well as with their bizarre activities (Wafer 1991). This may seem to be worlds away from European stage and character acting, but even such familiar performances (for theater audiences) can raise a sense of awe and inspire deep reflection on the cultural practice of role play. In light of these reflections, I will use the word habit to refer primarily to personal or individual actions that are experienced as repeated patterns. The term practice, in contrast, will refer to intersubjective, public, and widely available patterns of repeatable action around which groups can organize activities. As many readers will no doubt predict, this can never be a completely clear-cut distinction, since as people perform practices, they incorporate them, and the practices become part of their personal habitual repertoires. Likewise, individual habits can be imitated by others and evolve into social practices. Furthermore, remembering Mead, a child becomes a person partly through the acquisition of roles that are themselves socially recognized patterns. But when people acquire practices as personal habits, they do so in their own idiosyncratic ways; they mark them with their peculiar characteristics and thus embody them uniquely. Likewise, when personal habits become public, they change; they become generalized and essentialized in ways that are important for understanding cultural dynamism. Indeed, this generalization of cultural practices is an important element in understanding how patterns move between groups, becoming widespread while also changing, sometimes almost unrecognizably, in the process.

CHAPTER 2

Play as Performance: Exploring P/p Relations

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aving cleared a bit of theoretical ground in Chapter 1, I now want to move on to consider types of special events and their relations to ordinary life in particular social worlds. Following the work of the anthropologist John MacAloon, among others, I refer to event types as genres and will maintain, along with Erving Goffman, that these genres are (usually) named consensual frameworks that punctuate the flow of social life and that, in turn, can be multiply subdivided within themselves. Again, adapting a suggestion by MacAloon (1984), I will begin by distinguishing macrogenres (e.g., theater in Europe), genres (e.g., text-based theater), and subgenres (e.g., theater of the absurd), but these theatrical examples clearly would benefit from even more degrees of elaboration. I will also use his suggested term metagenre, but in a somewhat different way: to distinguish theoretical types meant to be useful for comparing special events from different social worlds. This latter move is somewhat problematic, as I indicated in Chapter 1, but nonetheless inevitable, since the entire project of anthropology as human self-understanding depends on the comparative method, as many have noted. One restatement of this position is what Lee has called “critical internationalism” (1995)—his attempt to retain something of the comparative approach in the face of sustained critiques against it. Unlike named genres in particular social worlds, metagenres are nothing more than analytical tools: part of an effort to make theoretical discourse useful in the analysis of empirical phenomena. As such, their detailed definition is not the main interest. As I argued in Chapter 1, they should be honed enough to make significant distinctions while maintaining a breadth capable of subsuming many different local genres of special events. These specifications of metagenres are primarily useful as means to illuminate and understand specific social activities. If the specificity of analytical categories ends up impeding the inquiry

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into the events (as all too often happens) or muddying rather than clarifying those events, then the category, or that definition of it, should be abandoned. Here one needs to be aware of the phenomenological attempt, problematic as it sometimes is, to distinguish actual experiences from the conceptual language used to try to understand them. There is no easy formula for what has been called the reduction of experiences to the “things themselves,” as Jackson puts it, following Husserl (Jackson 1996), but I firmly believe the attempt itself is salutary. However, as I will explore later, there are limits to how far such a reduction can go. Reflecting on fieldwork experience with the help of Jackson, it occurred to me that this central anthropological practice could itself be seen to require, in many cases, a form of phenomenological reduction. By reduction, Husserl and his followers had in mind interrogation of the “common sense attitude” whereby people classify their experiences in terms of everyday concepts; reduction is a reflective attempt to “look underneath” these habitual concepts to try to get closer to the way experiences present themselves to us.1 Critiques of this approach aside (mainly due to skepticism about whether such reductions are indeed possible), it seems to me that anthropological fieldwork has been and is an effective method for attaining something similar, since common sense attitudes of ethnographers (“cultural baggage”) are clearly next to useless in the settings in which fieldworkers often find themselves. Indeed, it is an ethnographer’s job to try to acquire, and then describe, the practices and common sense attitudes of the people they are living with, and evidence of success can be found partially in how well investigators adapt to the customs of their hosts.2 If one learns how to act properly in a variety of (initially incoherent) situations, one has some claim to having embodied a different schema of cultural common sense. In this view, the experience of “culture shock” could be seen as the symptom of the “forced reduction” one has undergone—a process that is repeated, sometimes even more disturbingly, when one returns to a newly alien homeland. As the anthropologist Roy Wagner has observed, “the more familiar the strange becomes, the more and more strange the familiar will appear” (1981: 11). It is upon this return home that an anthropologist might achieve a version of what Husserl set out to do, perhaps even more effectively than the philosopher himself, especially if that fieldworker had an informed understanding of what he or she was experiencing: a critical engagement with erstwhile common sense—namely, a perspective on culture. With these considerations in mind, I want to devote the next chapters to an exploration of the two most important metagenres of special events: those of play and ritual.3 Victor Turner is well known for his contributions to ritual theory, to which he devoted the majority of his working life, but he came to emphasize the importance of play rather late in his career (e.g., 1987: 123–38).

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His view, as noted in Chapter 1, was that all human performative genres developed initially from social dramas and then from rituals that were outgrowths of the redressive phase of those dramas. These prototypical rituals (and he believed he had witnessed contemporary versions of such among the Ndembu of Zambia) were richly elaborated, multivocal affairs, combining visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, kinesthetic, and dramaturgic elements into performances replete with communality and possibility. He viewed what he came to call liminoid (ritual-like) performance genres of secularized, industrialized societies as derivations from these more fulsome forms, in which certain aspects or themes became elaborated in isolation from the others. For example, the impetus to social change shifted: “In these modern processes and movements, the seeds of cultural transformation, discontent with the way things are culturally and social criticism, always implicit in the pre-industrially liminal, have become situationally central” (Turner 1982: 45). In the same piece, Turner notes that the position of play is also crucial in determining whether an event should be seen as liminal or liminoid.4 What he didn’t clearly realize is that this avowed centrality of play casts doubt on his contention that ritual is the primordial source of all kinds of human special events. Although I share many of Turner’s views on ritual, as I will discuss in Chapter 3, I want to deviate from his speculative scenario of cultural development by allying myself with those, like the poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, the historian Johan Huizinga, and the anthropologist Gregory Bateson (among others), who would begin the story of human cultural performance with the idea of play. In the first place, it is important to recognize our animal origins and to think about how hominini became human, diverging from other similar primates. It seems clear that one major activity we share with primates, as well as other mammals, is the propensity for play, especially in youth. However, humans differ from other animals in how we play and also in the importance of play for adults. Contrariwise, I will disagree with those many animal behaviorists and others who label certain animal activities as rituals, arguing that this is a projection of our interests onto them. This usage of ritual is for me a metaphorical extension of human concerns, an elaborate anthropomorphism. I want to define ritual in such a way as to exclude animal behavior, thus more clearly differentiating us from them in that regard. The Centrality of Play: Free and Bounded The fact that both humans and other animals (especially mammals) engage in play should be a straightforward proposition, one that most social theorists and ethologists could agree on. The perceptive reader will note that I have not yet tried to define what play is; that will turn out to be highly problematic, but for

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now it is enough simply to recognize play in young humans and play in young animals as being similar activities. Those with a functional bent, especially strong in the ethological camp, have often posed the question, “Why play?” For those who see biological worlds only in terms of functions like survival and reproduction, this is an important question and one that has been given several answers. In the human case, such functionalism is much more problematic, though some still attempt it, while others see in play an essential freedom, a non-teleological quality that makes play worth doing for its own sake (e.g., Gadamer 1975). While children may well play to learn adult habits of action, to gain strength and coordination, these and similar reasons seem to leave out an important aspect: that play is simply fun in itself. Why is play fun? In the case of animals, it seems better to leave the response veiled in mystery, but for humans, it is interesting to investigate. We can do this as adults both because we can remember our childhoods (or parts of them at least) and because we still get considerable enjoyment from our adult forms of play—enjoyment that seems similar to our childhood fun. One kind of enjoyment that has been suggested is captured in the idea of the “flow” of experience, postulated and explored by the psychologist Csikszentmihalyi (e.g., 1990). When one is in the flow, in his view, one is fully immersed in the present, in the ongoing stream of events, even to the extent of losing awareness of one’s reflective self completely. One popular manifestation of this may be when sports figures speak of being “in the zone,” a condition of being at the peak of performance seemingly without effort, with actions flowing in the rhythm of the game. This condition can also happen in daily life, but it seems especially common in play; games, for instance, are often designed to create such flow states in the players. In rethinking Cziksentmihalyi’s work on flow, however, I want to supplement his unremittingly rosy view of the phenomena5 by linking them to a more general experience of immersion in a present moment, living through a sequence of events fully and not reflecting (very much) on what one is doing. This can happen, for instance, in grief or other kinds of suffering, although the general tendency in negative experiences is for reflection to intervene as part of an attempt to alleviate them. “Why did this happen and how can I get out of it?” It is much easier to sustain unreflective flow in a positive, pleasurable mode, because one wants it to continue, not to stop. Nonetheless, there are many ways to become caught up or trapped in negative experiences, such as warfare, natural disasters, hostage situations, torture, and the like. These sorts of events, it seems to me, share the radical, presentist, non-reflective character of the flow experience developed by Cziksentmihalyi but not the positive emotional tone. Can one experience flow is when one is remembering, imagining, envisioning, or otherwise involved in thinking about an experience that has happened

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before or may happen in the future? Probably not in sense developed by Cziksentmihalyi. In the case of analytical thought, one may be trying to generalize about what many experiences might have in common, as in this project, or one may simply be playing mental games with numbers, words, or other symbols. In all these modes of reflective thought, one pushes awareness of the present circumstances into the background—reduces it to a subliminal consciousness—in order to focus on the thought process itself. It seems to me that this distinction between relatively more as opposed to less embodied engagement with one’s present circumstances is central to the way human experience has been organized in many cultural worlds. For instance, in a Cartesian life-world, modes of engagement with present situations are associated with bodily activity, whereas reflective or analytical states are defined as mental processes, classified often as inactivity. From this is derived the division of human being into body versus mind, and a whole host of cultural practices and categories follows from this opposition, including ways of classifying different sorts of people (see Lewis 1995; Leder 1990). In reality, both modes of awareness are embodied states, of course, since it should be clear that live human experience is always embodied. In one mode, awareness of bodily engagement with the environment is high; in the other, it is subliminal, relegated to a background condition. Types of play, however, are found in both states of being. Roger Caillois, a play theorist whose work (1961) was influential on Turner, made a distinction between paidia (unstructured play) and ludus (play organized into frameworks). Johan Huizinga attempted something similar in his work (1955) when he distinguished between ludus (free play) and agon (contest). For Hans Gadamer, as I noted, all play has a sort of freedom, but some play is more constrained—more bounded—than others. If one thinks about the development of play in children, in many societies the process of growing up seems to begin in free play, which is gradually constrained and bounded by parents and other adults. Anglophone parents will be all too familiar with phrases like, “It’s time to stop playing now and ‘get dressed,’ or ‘come to dinner,’ or ‘go to school.’” In this scenario, infants and children are more or less constantly “in play” (initially unlabeled, therefore often unrecognized as such by them) until adults set the limits for them and help them to create frameworks of play versus non-play. Adults most often play games or sports but also create playful imaginative frameworks for things like music, dance, and poetry, according to the society in which they live. But even in adult life, play can spontaneously break out in conversation (word play) and in gesture or interaction (mimetic or movement play). Play can be rule governed, but only provisionally, because it is often about the limits of rules or a reflection on how rules apply or how they should apply.

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I remember entire game sessions as a child that were spent discussing, or arguing about, the rules of the game such that the argument became a form of play itself. Games need rules, as well as clear goals and outcomes, but play resists rules and thrives on ambiguity, as the social theorist Brian Sutton-Smith has emphasized (e.g., 1997). If the rules are too rigid, they can destroy the playfulness of a game, but if they are too vague, a game fails to have coherence. I believe, along with Sutton-Smith, that play is inherently ambiguous, and I plan to elaborate on some specific ways that these ambiguities operate. In the first place, play is fundamental to the process of creating social order, in both humans and animals, but in the case of humans, it is also about the problems of order, the limits to it, and the dispensability or impermanence of it. In many cases, these opposing functions operate at different moments, in some instances being mostly pattern affirming while in others being pattern defying. In more interesting cases, however, human play can do both at once: it can be a process of both reinforcing social normativity and, simultaneously, contesting it. For example, this dynamic can be found in the organization of personal identity; making fun of oneself and being made fun of by others can serve to reinforce one’s self-image, but this teasing can also (and at the same time) provide an impetus to change and suggest directions for desirable self-transformation. For example, people may say, “John is always so neatly dressed.” John may initially be proud of his neatness but upon reflection wonder if sometimes he could benefit from a more casual image. Maybe he should loosen up. The reader will notice that such a formulation of play is highly resistant to definition but depends instead on the recognition of playfulness, together with some of the more salient effects it has on human sociality and personality (remember the pragmatic maxim). Humans can often recognize or embody patterns that they are unable to articulate verbally or conceptually—another reason for their absolute dependence on performance. One attempt to define play in terms of its intrinsic qualities was made by Caillois, whose categories were used by Turner in an insightful analysis of Brazilian Carnival (Turner 1987: 123–38). Caillois identified four types or aspects of play (1961: 23): agon (contest or competition); alea (chance); mimesis (imitation, masking, or acting); and ilinx (vertigo or sensory disorientation). Turner’s analysis is incisive, but not because these categories pertain to forms of play alone. Rather, the qualities listed are common to all modes experience; they are found equally in everyday life as well as in special play genres. Accordingly, I will demonstrate how Caillois’s categories can be used, not to define play, but to illustrate relations between the two domains of performance (P/p): the special and the ordinary. Competition (agon) appears to be integral to most forms of violence, from the madness of warfare to the carefully elaborated rules of chess, and is at the heart of Peirce’s category of secondness (duality, opposition, resistance, or

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struggle).6 Imitation (mimesis) is fundamental to ritual, as well as to role play in general, including most forms of learning. From the Peircean point of view, at the heart of mimesis is the concept of iconicity (similarity, likeness, or shared qualities), which forms the basis for all modes of representation. Chance, luck, or fate (forms of alea) have been seen in many cultural worlds as fundamental processes, determining the life courses of ordinary people. The manifold games of chance are also ubiquitous. Note that even the shape of a football—spherical versus ovoid—can influence the degree of chance in a game and therefore determine a fundamental generic style. Finally, sensory disorientation (ilinx) is a category that could usefully be elaborated to include many forms of heightened or altered experience, including the adrenaline rush of extreme sports, alcohol ingestion, taking many sorts of drugs, or the euphoria of dancing in the street. Since all these qualities can be found in everyday life, as well as in forms of play, they serve to illustrate the deep mediation between performative frameworks and ordinary existence that is especially intense in playfulness. Human self-awareness is therefore deeply performative, because we act out in order to understand and think things through during activity. Because play is instrumental in the formation of human reflexivity and because it is a central process in forming frameworks that organize life-worlds and in deconstructing them, play as a concept cannot be easily delimited. Initially it is important to note that the relation between special events and everyday life is similar to the relation between constrained and free play. I will resist imputing any causal connection between the two processes, since at this level of generality it isn’t clear what causality might mean. Instead, it is enough to notice the tendency of both play and performativity to exhibit similar patterns in the organization and reorganization of human experience. Accordingly, it seems evident that both kinds of processes occupy a fundamental position in human cultural life. I have pointed out that performativity is the potential of human experience to be thematized or framed—for human events to be highlighted or set apart, which is primarily a process of intensified reflection. Play, when it is rule governed, is primarily “designed” to highlight or intensify experiences of freedom from constraint or of positive flow. When play erupts spontaneously, on the other hand, it is often a “reflection” on the limits of boundaries, their arbitrariness, and, frequently, their absurdity. These processes are so basic as to be at the limits of conscious awareness; as embodied practices, they are, in many cases, partially preconscious or implicitly intended. A similar sort of embodiment was designated as “tacit knowledge” by Michael Polanyi (1966), and might be correlated with Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s concept of “motor intentionality” (1962: 110). Such practices may be brought into the light of rational reflection, and this is a principle work of theorists and intellectuals, but in many cases, they are lived in a state of heightened experience that is sufficient unto itself.

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One consequence of this latent awareness in play is that there is great potential for misunderstanding and conflict. On the one hand, people can come into conflict about what is or isn’t play, or appropriate play; on the other hand, conflict itself is a central theme of many kinds of play for both humans and animals. Gregory Bateson was one analyst who focused on the importance of animal play, including play conflict, in understanding human developments. He saw the activity of puppies playfully fighting, for instance, as a kind of metacommunication: “These actions in which we now engage do not denote what those actions for which they stand would denote” (Bateson 1972: 180). It was hard for him to resist an overly cognitive interpretation here, even though he also groped with the problem of degrees of consciousness and the unconscious elsewhere. In the puppy example, conflict play often escalates until one or the other animal is actually hurt (or is hurt enough to yelp), which often serves as a signal to stop or lighten up. When playing with their mother, she indicates the limits by growling when things have gone too far or even by nipping. Among adult mammals, competition between males, for instance, although often quite violent, rarely results in the death of the loser or even in serious injury. This is “serious play,” but still something is held back, as opposed to defending against a predator or hunting prey, when anything goes. There are cases, disturbing for humans, of cats “playing” with mice before eating them or orcas (“killer whales”) playfully throwing baby seals in the air, sometimes without even eating them afterward. For some humans, this may seem like play beyond the pale, perhaps offending one’s sense of how nature is, or should be, ordered. Even in “nature,” it seems (remembering that this word is always a cultural category) play happens at the border between order and chaos, a dance in which both principles are working themselves out by pushing toward excess or testing the limits.7 If play is disturbingly ambiguous even among our animal cousins, how much more fraught is it in the human domain? It isn’t difficult to recognize our shadow selves in the play of cats or orcas, of course, since humans have made things like torture and sadomasochism into art forms. These unsettling forms of agonistic play, to borrow Huizinga’s term (1955: 30), as in the animal case, often involve violence that is somewhat mitigated or constrained by the playful approach. One thinks immediately of many forms of competitive sports, martial arts tournaments, and gender “battles.” Even intergroup raiding or head-hunting expeditions of the recent and more distant past frequently exhibited moderated or constrained forms of violence. If one searches the anthropological literature, one can find numerous examples of intergroup conflict being controlled and the violence being reduced by practices that could be viewed as playful—for example, the widespread practice of “counting coup” among Native North American plains groups or the highly staged battles of the Dani in Papua New Guinea, so well captured in the film “Dead Birds” (Gardner 1964).

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On the one hand, the violence of conflict at the margins, between groups, as potential social disorder is controlled and contained—playfully restrained and turned into a form of exciting entertainment or sport. On the other hand, violence potentially inherent in social normativity may be played out until it becomes horrific. The inequalities and uncertainties of social order can be pushed to an absurd excess, toward the ultimate insanity of violence for its own sake, as in civil wars between ethnic or religious groups (see Appadurai 1998; Daniel 1996). These examples demonstrate what I see as the fundamental importance of play for human cultural process, both for controlling sources of social disorder and for acting out the limits of social order, thus as a mode of changing that order. Such change may be beneficial or not, since play is fundamentally amoral and can easily get out of hand. In addition to forms of conflict play, there is a related problem of human conflict about play: When is an interaction mere play, and when is it seriously not play? There can often be differences of opinion on this matter—differences that are quite visceral, even, and experienced as embodied reactions, even provoking violent attacks. Just as extraordinary happenings, like warfare, and staged special events, like competitive sports, are culturally significant, so are ordinary modes of playfulness, senses of humor and the like. Play is implicated in the construction and deconstruction of group boundaries, dividing the world into our group and their group. One way this happens is through shared laughter, a sign of a common sense of humor. In the telling of jokes in English (and doubtless many other languages), for instance, one must first recognize that a joke is being told through picking up the metacommunicative cues. Then, when the “punch line” occurs, there is the fraught moment of response: laughter, groaning, the grudging “that’s funny,” the irritated “that’s not funny,” or the angry “that’s outrageous!” In the fraught moment of response is a micro-process of sociality, of emerging consensus or lack of it: the division of the respondents into those who laughed and those who didn’t. For some, a joke can be not funny because they didn’t get it, and thus they are not a part of the “in” group. An extreme case is when someone misses the cue and doesn’t even realize that a joke was told. This lack of humoristic competence can even be manipulated deliberately, in some groups, to scapegoat outsiders as the habitual butts of jokes. In other cases, a joke can be so seriously not funny that it isn’t seen as a joke at all. Respondents may be aware that a joke was being attempted, but for them it was instead a sign of the teller as other, as someone socially deficient (e.g., racist, sexist, or chauvinist). One example comes from an incident in Queensland, where several Australian policemen were photographed attending a costume party dressed as hung Aboriginals, in blackface and with ropes around their necks. Aboriginal deaths in police custody, often by hanging, have been the subject of several coronal

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inquiries in Australia (e.g., Dalton 1997) and the source of considerable public concern. The costume incident raised a public furor at the time, with many Australians rejecting the joke, seeing it instead as a sign of the racism of the Queensland police involved. Although not in any way wishing to justify the actions of these police, the incident invites the question of why those involved might have thought this “joke” was funny in the first place. An important consideration is the unusual social context of interpretation among such specialist groups in large-scale societies. Police work is highly fraught in any state society, and this frequently intensifies the sense of us versus them felt by law enforcement officials. In such a case, humor is working at this incendiary boundary, created by people whose jobs involve constant conflict and danger. For these reasons, the interpretive setting within such groups can create conditions that seem quite foreign to the population at large. The same has often been remarked for doctors, nurses, and other health professionals, for example. In this way, jokes as a mode of play negotiate boundaries between social groups, and to be effective, they always walk a fine line between humor and acceptability, between outrageously funny and “going too far.” One paradox of play is that it is about both taking control and giving it up. In the embodied experience of laughter, for example, one can laugh intentionally, sometimes called forced laughter, or one can laugh spontaneously. These two laughs feel different and sound somewhat different to others. Spontaneous laughter can be “contagious” and notoriously hard to stop. When it gets out of control, it can even become painful, but this is often a pleasurable sort of pain (another paradox). Intentional laughter is easily stifled, but sometimes it can lead to spontaneous laughter, especially if others are feeling contagious. Spontaneous laughter is usually at least partly under control, and people certainly create events, including joke telling, intended to evoke it. So humans play with control and with the loss of it, exploring intermediate states and their limits, as in laughter so in tears—in fear, euphoria, and all kinds of feelings. Sometimes the only “control” one can exert over a situation is to surrender to it. This intermediate state may be at the root of the human existential imperative, as a person is forced “to think of the world as something one creates, as well as something of which one is merely a creature” (Jackson 1998: 29). The balance between having control over the world and being controlled by it can result in some unusual experiences, and one can even feel that both things are happening at once. I believe that when athletes are “in the zone,” for instance, things are going perfectly because they have surrendered to the game; they have merged with the sport to such an extent that there is no difference between their will and the ongoing flow of events. Similar experiences happen in music, dance, and drama when performers are well steeped in their habitual skills, when they have incorporated them thoroughly and the

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circumstances combine to create a total unity. In the famous words of the poet William Butler Yeats, in such situations, “how can we know the dancer from the dance?” (1956: 214). Of course, such completely integrated moments are rare; more often, one can discern degrees of conjunction—partial control or partial loss of it in particular cases. In this view, the paradox of control and loss of control is another version of the paradox of order and chaos, and relative combinations of the two: mediations that reveal the contested ground from which the distinctions arise. This is similar to the view developed by Sutton-Smith who, early in his career (e.g.,1972), situated play in the ambiguity between “order and disorder,” a view influential on the later work of Turner (1982: 28). This insight can be traced back at least to the work of Friedrich Schiller (1967 [1794]; cited in Sebeok 1981: 1), who proposed an analytical scheme in which Spieltrieb (the impulse to play) is a fundamental human impulse mediating Formtrieb (the impulse toward order) and Stofftrieb (the impulse toward disorder). Thomas Sebeok pointed out that this schema was highly influential on the work of Peirce. Although probably deficient as a framework for understanding all kinds of cultural practice, it seems quite fruitful at least in describing the operation, and the importance, of play in the evolutionary process toward humanity. In this view, play has been a rich resource for the development of human cultural events as well as a central impetus toward cultural change, in both historic and contemporary times. Mediating P/p Relations Let me conclude this section by using play to reflect further on the relations between special events (Performance) and ordinary life (performance). I’ve called this key distinction a mediated opposition and now want to discuss four kinds of mediation I have so far identified. Between these two domains there exists (1) a continuum, (2) a process of co-constitution, (3) moments of transition, and (4) a ground for the possibility of the distinction (see Table 2.1). Beginning with the first type, even the most special event is, in one sense, conjoined to daily life, since it occurs in the sequence of human activities, only differentiated within that sequence by being marked8 or framed as special, explicitly or implicitly (or both). Likewise, many events can be seen as only slightly special relative to more ordinary ones (e.g., weekends versus weekdays; coffee breaks at work; favorite television shows compared to others), and it is difficult to find an event so ordinary that it is in no possible way special. Quotidian events tend to “disappear,” because they are unnoticed, habitual, and thus unremarkable. It follows that there is a continuum of more or less special events, from the unmarked to the very elaborately framed, with no clear division between them in the “middle” but only a gradual transition up or down the scale. The

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Table 2.1 Special events (Performance) versus everyday life (performance): a mediated opposition

Forms of mediation 1. Continuum. There is no clear dividing line between special events and everyday life; events are more or less special and more or less ordinary. At one end of the continuum, special events are clearly and redundantly marked, highly elaborated, keenly anticipated, talked about, and remembered for years afterward. At the other end, everyday life can recede from view and become unconscious, habitual, or boring and tedious. The extremes of the continuum are clear, but the middle is a gray area without a clear transitional boundary. 2. Co-creation or co-implication. Special events can only exist in contrast to ordinary life, and ordinary life only has meaning in contrast to special events. These two extremes divide the contour of human social activity exhaustively and only have coherence in opposition to each other. When engaged in a special event, one may reflect on what it means for one’s everyday life; when engaged in ordinary activities, one often enlivens them by remembering or re-enacting special events—by singing songs, dancing a bit, daydreaming about past experiences, and so forth. 3. Transitional moments. One aspect of everyday life is the anticipation of and preparation for special events. One can make costumes or masks, write or rehearse songs, train athletic skills, stand in a line to purchase tickets, arrange travel to venues, and so forth. Likewise, after events are over, people can replay them over a meal, while traveling home, while at work the next day, by not going to work in order to “recover,” and the like. 4. Ground. Special events emerge from everyday life and can fade back into it; thus they share the same ground: human life itself, which we have chosen to divide in this way as part of the development of our intelligence as self-reflexivity. In principle, any aspect of everyday life can become special by being thematized, marked, or framed as such. I call this potential performativity—the possibility of setting aside any aspect of life and marking it as a special event. Likewise, there is the reciprocal process, which I call habituation—the fading away of a special event back into the undifferentiated fabric of everyday life. This can happen, for instance, when events are no longer anticipated or enjoyed, when they become boring and too predictable, or when the values they were created to intensify no longer apply widely in that social world.

extremes of the continuum are clearly differentiated, but there is no identifiable boundary line between them. As for the second type of mediation, co-constitution, the argument is that the two extremes of the continuum are meaningful only in opposition to each other. For example, generic terms are often used as metaphors for everyday life, thus as means for casting the self-reflexive light of special events back on quotidian activities. The term game, for instance, can be used in a wide variety of ways, such as “play the game” (of life, of work, etc.); “head games” (psychological manipulation); and “she’s on the game” (prostitution). The elder George Bush had a “game plan” in Iraq that his son subsequently teamed up for again. In the latter case, the metaphor acts partly as a euphemism to disguise (perhaps from

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the speakers themselves) the all-too-real effects of violence in death, misery, and destruction—the “daily grind” of warfare. In a similar metaphorical process, one can speak of bullfights as a “dance of death”; there can be a “music of her voice”; unruly people can “make a scene”; and so forth. Likewise, special events are only meaningful because they can “say something” or “be applied” to some aspects of daily life. A fiction or fantasy should always be applicable, relatable, or “true” to daily life in some respect. The truer it is, the more people tend to appreciate it, and the longer its cultural life will be. If a work were to be so fantastic as to seem irrelevant to ordinary reality, to have no possible relation to it, such a work would thereby lose all interest. The cliché is that great works of literature (e.g., Shakespeare) are universal to the human condition. This is patently untrue, since all such texts must continually be retranslated or reinterpreted for new and different cultural situations. In addition, they seem much more relevant to some social worlds than others. What is true is that such works continue to seem applicable: that people in many different life-worlds can come to see them (often with an effort of interpretive work) in relation to aspects of their daily lives. As for the third type, transitions, I noted earlier that ordinary life is often lived in anticipation of special events, including training and preparing for them. Examples of such anticipation include rehearsal, training (athletic, dramatic), choreography, dramaturgy, constant practice (musical, verbal), and such mundane scenarios as waiting in line for tickets. There are named esthetic and ritual subgenres, designed to precede or follow certain events, some of which have developed into event types in their own right, separable from the genres that gave birth to them. For example, an overture to an opera or musical can be played as a concert piece without the subsequent production that it was created to introduce. Likewise, after enjoying, growing bored with, or being disappointed by events, one recovers from them, cools down, discusses, remembers, and so forth. In Brazil it is often said that a proposed work project will be undertaken “after Carnival,” especially in the city I know best, Salvador, Bahia. This phrase can be employed months before the actual event and has become something of a joke about procrastination. The day after Carnival, usually Ash Wednesday, is very sad for many after all that weight of anticipation. However, some people begin to prepare for the next Carnival shortly after that. It might be said that virtually the whole year is lived either in recovery from or in anticipation of Carnival, at least for some Brazilians. So when Brazil is called “the country of Carnival,” the phrase may be capturing a sense in which daily life can be experienced totally in terms of that special event—that is, either in anticipation of or in recovery from it, except for a brief time while being in the midst of it.9 Thus far I have identified the ground underlying the possibility of a distinction between special events and everyday life, the fourth type of mediation,

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with what I have called performativity: the potential for the emergence of Performances (special events) out of that background flux of ordinary activity which is daily life. I also noted that one main phenomenological impetus for performativity is human self-reflection, which seems to require the setting apart of special Performances to create increased understanding. Let me complete the picture by arguing for another process, which I will call habituation. This is the loss of special events as they become routinized, boring, and no longer able to create intense experiences or to fulfill the function of reflection on ordinary activities. After a time, such failed Performances will usually disappear altogether. In other words, special events emerge from the undifferentiated stream of human activity, either gradually or suddenly, and they can sink back into that stream again in the same way.10 Thus the ground for the possibility of maintaining this key distinction is revealed in the historical process of special events being created and becoming obsolete, a major type of culture change. Social formations, such as empires and civilizations, have risen and fallen over long periods of time (on the human scale), but their cultural patterns may last longer (or disappear faster) than the societies that gave birth to them. Cultural patterns can, and often do, migrate between social groups, changing and being adapted, but they may still be recognizable as genetically related forms. Table 2.1 lays out the argument and summarizes the main points. Although these four forms of mediation are analytically distinct, they are clearly interrelated aspects of a synthetic approach to the “trialogical” (threeway) relations that seem to me to underlie many key distinctions that may at first appear to be binary.11 Play, in its most general sense, can participate in all the forms of mediation mentioned here, and that is further evidence for why it should be considered the most fundamental metagenre of human interaction. As noted, play can be organized into special events, and in many cases such activities can be seen to increase social cohesion. People are united in their enthusiasm for games and sports, in their love of being caught up in the flow of those sorts of play. However, insofar as many games and sports highlight competition, they can also be divisive of social fabric, inciting fans of opposing teams to violence, for instance. When playfulness breaks out spontaneously in the flux of ordinary life, on the other hand, the same two-edged character can be observed. Jokes, irony, and the many forms of verbal and nonverbal play may point to social problems—to the inconsistencies or strictures of social order, to the limitations of normative social habits. On the other hand, the laughter that these sallies produce can create solidarity and friendship among the small-scale groups sharing that humor. Both when play is bounded and when it is spontaneous, it tends to create ambiguities between social cohesion and social dissolution or critique. The relation between play and reflexivity is also a complex one, since

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play can be a source of self-reflection as well as an escape from it. For some, the framed play of games and sports is clearly “good to think,” in Levi-Strauss’s famous phrase about totemic animals (1963: 89), but for others, it offers precisely the escape from reflective thought that people are seeking. I hope I have shown how the two fundamental processes of play, on the one hand, and the ground for my fundamental distinction of performativity/ habituation, on the other, are closely linked yet conceptually distinct. It follows that animals other than humans engage in play but don’t exhibit performativity, since they don’t have sufficient self-reflection to frame stretches of interaction into thematized events. Accordingly, human play is a degree of magnitude more complex than animal play, since animals don’t play games,12 sports, music, or anything else generic or typological. All human special events, as complex as they can be, are still simplifications of ordinary life, since evidently they can frame or set apart only some aspects of the multiplicity of the everyday. These simplifications aid the process of reflection, because they reduce the number of elements and relations between them to a more manageable number. In turn, this simplification encourages the possibility of control, since the finite number of relations seems to allow for clear intervention and manipulation strategies. If one can control the game, or the ritual, perhaps one can control the world at large as well. At least, this is the seductive hope, the leap of imagination. Games and Sports The two major megagenres that derive from the metagenre of play are games and sports, found in many if not all cultural life-worlds. Since there is already a large literature in these areas, I will not concentrate too much attention on specific examples but only highlight some of the most interesting aspects of these forms as they relate to the generalities of play theory explored earlier. In his discussion of the Olympic Games, MacAloon notes that games as a genre “are perhaps the most paradoxical of all cultural processes” (1984: 254). In line with such extreme ambiguity, researchers would do well to focus especially on how the genre frameworks are differentiated, maintained, and broken—in short, on the boundary conditions for the constitution of games and sports. For example, as to rules and how they are applied, are they written or customary? Are there designated judges, referees, and the like? What happens when there are disputes over the rules and how they are enforced? Note that there are often tacit as well as explicit conventions—what the anthropologist F. G. Bailey called “pragmatic” as opposed to “normative rules” (1969). Over time, rules are often changed or modified. How have these changes affected the genre in question, and for whose benefit? For example, it is clear that some rule changes in sport have been for the satisfaction of the television audience or even for

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the commercial sponsors of that medium. In addition, researchers would do well to focus on time-outs, half-time breaks, pre- and postgame events, and the like, revealing transition periods in which larger cultural values frequently come into play. Sports and games, like all genres, can be embedded in other types of events, such as festivals, and these sorts of relations can also reveal more general patterns. Not all games and sports are played in front of an audience, but many of the most elaborated and specialized are. Accordingly, the relations between audience and players (as well as officials) are a key area of investigation. In elite sports, mass audiences make a lot of noise, sing songs, yell comments, gasp, sigh, laugh, and cry. There is also some evidence that observers of physical activity produce micro-movements of muscles in sympathy with what is transpiring in front of them. This has been called the “chameleon effect” or “motor contagion,” among other names, and is emerging as an interesting field of neurological research (see Downey n.d.). Such phenomena can be beneath awareness, but at other times they emerge into consciousness to manifest as what Elizabeth Behnke has called “ghost gestures” (1997; cited in Downey 2005). In recent years, it has become clear that William James’s initial insight into what he called ideomotor activity has been confirmed.13 With the discovery of “mirror neurons” in the last decade (e.g., Rizzolatti and Craighero 2004), a body of work called sensorimotor contingency theory has now been established. In this view, human embodiment is seen as a continuous cycle of activity between self and habitat in which sensation and movement are intrinsically linked (Thompson 2007: ch. 9). One would suspect that audience members who have played a certain sport or practiced a certain dance might have different micro-responses as compared with those who have not and thus experience a greater degree of embodied involvement. It would seem to follow that motor contagion would likely be related to larger-scale, more easily observable crowd responses in sporting events, and this also should be investigated more fully. Clearly, audience participation in sporting and gaming events involves a high degree of emotional involvement, as it does for the players. This is no doubt one key reason such events are so popular and therefore the focus of such huge economic investment. Emotional involvement is made explicit, for instance, in the important work of sociologists Norbert Elias and Eric Dunning when they call modern sport a “Quest for Excitement” (1986). In Chapter 5, I will investigate embodied reactions in more detail, but initially I want to point out that, at least in some cases, such events can trigger extreme emotional ambivalence. This is not just the fluctuation between joy and sorrow, which has become a commentator’s cliché, but it is also the coincidence of opposing emotions, or the fraught coming together of many different feelings at the same time. It’s not always, or even usually, a comfortable ride for a spectator,

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especially at a big game, but these moments of tense ambivalence don’t seem to discourage future participation; rather they seem to encourage it—another paradox. Perhaps undergoing emotional turmoil is, for the fan, a sign of vibrant life: an intensification of experience that, even if sometimes painful, is better than a drab existence of indifference or numbness. Sports and games, due to their mass popularity, are often ideological battlegrounds, involving nation-states and local governments, small-scale and multinational corporations, and even churches and religious institutions. These “higher-order” social relations are, of course, of great interest to a cultural investigator and are frequently what serve to recommend these play genres to the academic community. However, to be fully convincing, research on the relations of sports and games to the wider social world should be grounded in the specifics of cultural habits within the events themselves. In my view, one of the most important, and most neglected, aspects of the examination of special events as they relate to everyday life is the way embodied habits move between the two domains. Habits of ordinary life are intensified, formalized, and stereotyped for show, and such special habits developed for Performance are also remobilized into daily activities in a number of ways. This circulation of habits in and out of special events often proves to be one of the most fruitful areas for practical research into cultural patterns, but it is the rare performance study that grounds its claims to social relevance in the details of embodied practice.14 A Note on Work Play and ritual are the two most fundamental metagenres influencing the formation of special events, because they are the oldest and most widespread. As I have been arguing, play is the oldest of all, linking us to the animal kingdom most directly, and therefore is the most ambiguous and difficult to define if not to recognize. However, the way we play, the complexity and importance of play to us, and the way we frame play in games or sports also separate us from our animal ancestors. The development of ritual was, in this view, the second key step in the differentiation of humans from other animals and therefore in the development of self-awareness, social organization, and cultural patterns. Before moving on to discuss ritual in detail, in Chapter 3, I want to highlight a more recent metagenre that is now becoming quite widespread, if not ubiquitous—namely, that of work. Given the frequency of the binary opposition of “work” versus “play” in English, one might suspect that the two are essentially coeval, but the overwhelming evidence of the anthropological record is that work arrived relatively recently on the human scene, probably less than ten thousand years ago. The picture that emerges from many studies of small-scale, pre-agricultural groups is one of a stream of life without a

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clear differentiation between work and leisure, which has now become the more salient distinction. This opposition only arises fully with the advent of complex forms of hierarchical social organization: what are usually called civilizations. In this scenario, foraging groups performed activities like hunting or plant gathering while singing, dancing, praying, and so forth. Therefore, such practices were not separated from what might be called “leisure” pursuits; nor were they in any sense alienated or involuntary activities. Likewise, when people were (or still are) sitting around the fire at night singing or telling stories, they may often be engaged in mending, making tools, food preparation, and similar overtly productive activities. Play emerged as a special form of activity (even if unnamed), because children do it (as do young animals) and adults could sometimes join in or create their own games. This encouraged a distinction between youth and adulthood that is acknowledged by anthropologists to be a fundamental organizational principle in early societies (along with gender and kinship). Accordingly, children’s play emerged as distinct from adult activity, and adult play emerged as an intensification of childlike play, but these were not initially a form of “leisure” since they were not opposed to frameworks equivalent to a contemporary category like work. As noted, the major marked domain that begins to emerge only with the development of human sociality is ritual, and it is this sort of event that is most likely to have involved some of the characteristics of what might be called “work” in a contemporary sense. As many have noted, ritual is intended to cause things to happen, and it is not clearly distinguished, in small-scale societies, from what we now call instrumental or economic activity. Indeed, it is revealing that in contemporary Papua New Guinea, many kinds of ritual events are labeled with the English term work (or the Tok Pisin equivalent), and in Australia, Aboriginal rituals can often be referred to as business. These translations reveal the centrality of ritual action, similar to the importance of work in the capitalist world, as well as the obligatory aspect both tend to share. Some have argued that in Papua New Guinea, this association of ritual with work goes back fairly far into the past (Wilde 2004). In the contemporary world, as noted, the key distinction is that of work versus leisure, which is surely a product of the specialization of activities found in a hierarchical, differentiated society. This pattern of social life arrived with urban development after the agricultural revolution some ten thousand years ago. As this form of organization became virtually ubiquitous with the rise of industrial capitalism, work became one of the dominant metagenres of social life, as it still is today. However, notice that work is more often associated with daily life than with special events, for most people, although it is still a marked form of activity. In a world of alienated labor, many people live for leisure, but one kind of cultural ideal, at least in the European tradition, is for a person to

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love his or her job, even to live for it. Therefore, not having a job may be closely synonymous with not having a life, for many people, although there are those who beg to differ. As a genre of activity such as work begins to become widespread, even ubiquitous, many of these sorts of ambiguities begin to creep in. Let me explore a few more examples. One key area of interest in the study of the development of sports is the evolution of professionalism. Most sports began as pastimes, done for the love of the pursuit, often as a diversion from other quotidian activities. With the rise of industrialism, specialization, and capitalism, many sports became professions: namely, kinds of work. This created a sort of anomaly. What for one group of people was “mere play,” engaged in for enjoyment, became for others a mode of daily life, a waged job. Of the many possible examples, one might point to the evolution of the modern Olympic Games, which originally were envisioned as a celebration of amateurism. (Note that amateur is related to the French word for lover.) Over time, the strictures on paying athletes were gradually relaxed and now highly paid professionals like tennis, soccer, and basketball players compete in the games. Even track and field and other formerly “nonprofessional” athletes these days usually receive a substantial stipend from their national governments in order to train. Increasingly, marathons and other track events pay the top finishers, meaning that it is now possible to be professional in these sports more easily. By contrast, I always think of the tragic case of Jim Thorpe, the Native American winner of gold medals for both the decathlon and the pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics, who was stripped of his gold medals when it was discovered that he had once played semiprofessional baseball. The medals were reinstated, but only thirty years after his death. My father frequently referred to the case of Willie Mays, a famous African-American baseball player and Hall of Fame inductee, who supposedly said that he would play the game he loved for free if they didn’t pay him. In contrast, a postseason of professional baseball was cancelled completely in 1994 due to a long-running players’ strike over pay and conditions. In 2004–5, an entire professional ice hockey season was cancelled for the same reasons, and as this book goes to press, a similar dispute is endangering the 2012–13 season. In Australia, one of the most celebrated cases is that of cricket, in which struggles over pay came to a head in the late 1970s. Often associated with the upper classes in England, having the reputation of being a “gentlemen’s” game, many conservative former players resisted the professionalization of the sport. As a result, younger players, who felt they were undervalued, were encouraged to form an alternative league under the influence of media mogul Kerry Packer. The short-lived World Series Cricket ended in 1979 when a dispute

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over television rights was resolved in Packer’s favor, but the clash marked the beginning of the full professionalization of cricket. In tennis, it is often a matter of speculation as to how many Grand Slam tournaments Rod Laver might have won if he had not turned professional, thereby disqualifying himself for the major events (e.g., Wimbledon), which were not yet “open” tournaments and were strictly for amateurs. This same struggle continues into the present, especially in the case of women’s sports, which do not yet tend to draw the large crowds characteristic of male mainstream athletics. Again in Australia, netball is a good example, with female players struggling to survive on pitifully small stipends and having to work other jobs on the side, presumably doing so for the love of the game. Another interesting case that highlights the contemporary ambiguity between work and play is the domain of art and the “work” of artists. Even more than professional athletes, artists in the European tradition, at least since the nineteenth century, were not supposed to be doing what they do primarily for the money. To do this has often been characterized as “selling out” or pandering to commercial or popular interests. A true or serious artist would never do this, presumably, but note that they almost always refer to their productions as their work. Likewise, a true artist should ideally be a professional, not an amateur, making a living from his or her art and not doing other work to support it (except perhaps when starting out). Of course, many of these cultural expectations have notable exceptions, one well-known example being the case of Andy Warhol. He was famous for disavowing the term artist and calling himself a businessman, and his studio was referred to as “the factory.” Warhol was clever enough to exploit the very ambiguity between work and art that I am highlighting here, in order to create the sort of controversy that he knew would allow him to sell more of his productions. The more he denied his artistry, paradoxically, the more the artistic establishment admired his cleverness in exposing the sorts of cultural contradictions others had only glossed over. In other words, the more he denied his artistry, the more artistic he became, helping to create a new genre called pop art. At least from that time (the 1960s and 1970s), but probably starting quite a while before, many other modes of production that had not been widely seen as art (popular music, cinema, television, comic books), came to be routinely classified under that genre. Theater practitioners and performance artists also refer to their productions as their work, even though the process of creating a theatrical event might equally well be seen as a form of play. What goes on in a rehearsal room often includes playing dramatic games, creating imaginary scenarios, and similar improvisations, in preparation for the development, or the enactment, of a dramatic piece. These activities frequently involve trying things out to see how they look and what effects they might have: playing around with words, movements,

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and interactions. The object of this focused playing around is to discover what seems to “work” in another sense. Yet for these performers to refer to their rehearsals as play, even though that might be much closer to what they are really doing, would be to devalue their activities from the perspective of a society in which work is the only serious and valuable activity. Theatrical performers, visual artists, and athletes are all workers who are paid to play, and this central paradox makes the sorts of events they create especially interesting for performance analysts. Finally, note that the drudgery of alienated work, where such does occur, is often ameliorated by influences from the world of leisure. In Australia, it is often the case that tradesmen will play music on the radio while they are working on building construction, plumbing, or any similar sort of trade. This sort of activity is also common in the United States and Brazil, and in the latter, it is not uncommon for people to sing along as they work. In Salvador, especially during the lead-up to Carnival, one can enter banks, travel agencies, and other workplaces to find people drinking, singing, and dancing on the counters and tables. Office parties or picnics are a common phenomenon in many countries, and white-collar institutions organize work-related conferences that also frequently include leisure activities as part of the agenda. Here, again, work as an everyday activity is contrasted with, but also combined with or enlivened by, various leisure activities, most commonly associated with special events. I will return to some of these convergences in Chapter 3, in an examination of the highly fraught area of ritual and how it might be defined in such a way as to contribute more clearly to the study of special events and cultural patterns.

CHAPTER 3

Rituals and Ritual-Like Genres

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itual is a highly fraught topic in anthropology and has such an extensive literature that some authors, in despair at ever making sense of the category, have even advocated abandoning the term altogether (e.g., Staal 1990; see also Bloch 1992; Goody 1961). In spite of this, the word will not go away in common usage—nor do I think it could in academia—and so the effort to come up with a theoretical approach should continue. As mentioned in Chapter 2, I am arguing that ritual should be seen as a type of human special event (a metagenre) and therefore not something that links us to the animal kingdom (as play does) but rather as something that separates us from it. This is a heterodox view in much of the current theoretical writing but one that I think is justified in the interests of conceptual clarity. Accordingly, I want to confine the metagenre of ritual to the domain of human special events: indeed it is useful to see it in a certain sense as the prototypical special event. That is, I will initially define ritual as the most important kind of special event performed by the members of any given human social group. Here I am following the work of John MacAloon, who agrees with the theologian Paul Tillich’s idea that such practices relate to the “ultimate concerns” of a community (MacAloon 1984: 250). Special events that are created to deal with these ultimate concerns must be recognized by members of a group as the most important events they enact, in order to fit this criterion. The values, principles, norms, or concepts (often spiritual) that are mobilized in such events should be the fundamental ones for that group, in their own understanding. In other words, given a repertoire of more or less special events created by a given cultural group, I want to call rituals only those events they consider to be the most special—engagements with matters of ultimate concern. However, let me emphasize that no one criterion is sufficient by itself to define this category. As will become clear, I want to separate ritual events from ritual-like (or

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ritual-derived) events using a set of criteria, of which importance is merely the first, even though it is also the most central. Clearly this criterion of ultimate concern leaves out animal behavior and therefore any general formal patterns like repetition, formality, stylization, and the like, which are dealt with under the rubrics of habit and practice. Likewise, I want to distinguish rituals from other kinds of human special events that are of lesser importance, employing metageneric terms like ceremony, celebration, and festival for these sorts of events. I believe it is useful, with the term ritual, to begin delimiting event types rather than opening them up further to comparisons and connections. By defining rituals as the most special and therefore, in many cases (though not always), the most elaborated kinds of events, one can preserve many of Turner’s insights into the importance of rituals for the development of other genres while preventing the tendency to “distend the type,” in ritual theorist Ronald Grimes’s phrase (Grimes 1985: 9). This has been all too common in the use of Turner’s concept of “liminality,” especially by those who have adopted the term from him. Many contemporary theorists have extended the category of ritual to include just about any repeated activity, animal or human, which destroys much of the analytical usefulness the term might have. For example, one popular move has been to replace the term ritual with a process called “ritualization,” a dynamic defined in a variety of ways (Bell 1992; DaMatta 1991; Grimes 1982). Catharine Bell’s definition is revealing of the generality of most of these attempts: “A way of acting that is designed and orchestrated to distinguish and privilege what is being done in comparison to other, usually more quotidian activities” (1992: 74). As noted by Felicia Hughes-Freeland and Mary Crain (1998: 2), this equates ritualization with performance itself, thus losing any possible distinction between the two categories. Note that Bell’s definition still excludes animal activities, however, a move some of the even more promiscuous theorists would oppose. A more recent move advocates an abandonment of the project of ritual definition in favor of looking at “ritual in its own right” (Handelman and Lindquist 2004). As a call to privilege the empirical aspect of any performance, I am in sympathy with this approach, as I have mentioned, but the problem here is to delimit what sorts of performances one is talking about with the term ritual (and what sorts one is not). Again, as with Grimes, Don Handelman seems to be willing to include any sorts of repeated practices (or even one-offs) as rituals, in a way that overextends the term and makes it useless for comparative purposes.1 How this fits in with his earlier interest in public events, as cited in Chapter 1, isn’t clear, but I certainly prefer that earlier approach. In his introduction to Ritual in Its Own Right (2004), Handelman develops a series of very interesting ideas about relations between rituals and their sociocultural

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surroundings, which bear exploring (see Chapter 2, note 10), but his refusal to delimit which events might constitute rituals (and which might not) makes it impossible to develop an inventory of performance types. Exploring formal aspects of events, such as whether they have a recursive structure, as he does, is potentially useful (see Chapter 6) but only after one determines what kinds of events are being examined and for what reasons. In a similar move, the work of anthropologist Roy Rappaport (1999) also advocates an approach that starts from “obvious aspects” or surface forms of ritual to arrive at deeper understandings. Although he gives a formalist definition, Rappaport notes that this specific form usually is accompanied by a series of “entailments,” which include such things as the “sacred,” the “numinous,” the “occult,” the “divine,” and the “holy,” all defined in particular ways (1999: 23–24ff.). I am in sympathy with much of Rappaport’s project; note that the effect of his logical entailments, in the end, is to confine or delimit ritual events in a way somewhat similar to my approach. The key here is the status of relations between the formal event “structure” he proposes and those entailments, which are their content, substance, or purpose. Rappaport acknowledges that “in all ritual performances there is a substantiation of form and an informing of substance” (1999: 29, emphasis in the original), but he does not carry that interdependence into his initial definition. For me, certain patterns of events are recognized as rituals (by observers and often through other names by participants) because of those purposes, which precisely differentiate similar event patterns from them. In other words, it is spurious to argue that the relations go only one way, patterns to purposes, when in fact the reverse influence also holds (and even more strongly): purposes to patterns. That is, human events have certain patterns that make them fit to represent certain ideas or accomplish certain purposes, while those ideas and purposes call forth certain kinds of patterned activities. Rappaport wants to begin with the most obvious aspects of ritual events, but he fails to ask the question, “Obvious to whom?” People in various cultural worlds recognize and designate events using a variety of markers, and only academics in the Cartesian tradition imagine that they might isolate events on purely formal grounds. As in practice, so in theory, form and content are always already mediated in actual human phenomena: there is no pure form nor pure content, except as an abstraction—an ideal imaginary that is by no means universally operant (cf. Geertz 1983: ch. 5). To be absolutely clear, I am rejecting the common tendency to define ritual on purely formal grounds, because it is the purpose or substance of ritual that primarily distinguishes it from similar kinds of performances. However, it is common that those purposes call forth the most intense and elaborated kinds of formal patterns as entailments to those important undertakings. The other criteria I propose for the definition of ritual

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(see Table 3.1) involve a mixture of substantive and formal aspects of performances, with the emphasis on the content or purpose of the events. I am aware that the dividing line between the most special events (rituals) and less special events (other genres) is a fluid one, necessarily involving the viewpoints of a variety of social actors, sometimes in dialogue with analysts conversant with their practices. Given this caveat, I am still willing to argue that much of what has been called “secular ritual” (Moore and Myerhoff 1977), including events celebrating the secular state such as independence days, memorial days, inaugurations, and the like (cf. Kertzer 1988) should be seen as “civil ceremonies” (Bellah 1970) distinguishable in important ways from ritual. One reason is that for most of the populace of contemporary nation-states, the values accorded to governmentality and national identity are secondary to more fundamental values and loyalties: religion, family, friends, community, and personal autonomy, for example. Events organized to celebrate the latter sorts of interests would therefore usually be more important to such people than events lauding the nation. A version of this distinction can be found in the anthropologist Bruce Kapferer’s analysis of Australian Anzac Day celebrations. He argues that there is a clear differentiation made between government institutions, represented by such groups as politicians and police (which he identifies with “the state”), and groupings of mates and their families who have actually suffered through the horrors of warfare (labeled by him “the nation” or “the people” [1988: ch. 5–6]). Kapferer notes that the latter are the source of enduring feelings of solidarity, bolstered by sociality and lubricated with alcohol, whereas the former are often regarded with suspicion and distrust. Accordingly, the informal gatherings in the pub to drink and to reminisce might be seen as more important to many participants, in a certain way, than the formal ceremonies around the memorials performed earlier in the day. This makes the ritual status of the latter somewhat problematic, in my view, in spite of their solemnity and formality, although I would agree that they can justifiably be seen as somewhat ritual-like, since they seem to be modeled on Protestant church services. A similar approach to the problem of form versus content in ritual events can be found in Angela Hobart and Bruce Kapferer’s discussion of aesthetics in performance (2005). As they argue, the domain of aesthetics is not merely confined to what investigators have often singled out as “art.” Instead, it permeates all aspects of a cultural world, informing the style with which things are done and how things are evaluated—in short, the entire range of cultural practices and judgments. In their words, “Human beings are beings whose lived realities are already their symbolic constructions or creations within, and through which, they are oriented to their realities and come to act within them” (2005: 5). This perspective echoes my argument about meaning and power in Chapter 1 and also underlies my insistence on

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the substance of form in ritual. Clifford Geertz put the point in another way with his often-cited remark that “art and the equipment to grasp it are made in the same shop” (1983: 118). Formal aspects of ritual events, insofar as they might be distinguished, are always already infused with aesthetic style—with semeiotic qualities unique to the cultural formations within which they are embedded. Accordingly, I want to define ritual with a complex of intentional and formal characteristics in order to preserve the special importance of this genre while also opening it up slightly, relative to those (mostly older) definitions that tried to single out sacred or spiritual activities exclusively. Rappaport tries to evade this trap by redefining terms like sacred, as does the sociologist Bernhard Giesen (2006), whose work I will consider in Chapter 6. Note that Rappaport agrees with Victor Turner’s proposal that ritual is the most fundamental and formative human activity (Rappaport 1999: 31). In my approach, however, play becomes the term (along with habit) that is the nexus for comparing human with animal activities and for exploring the evolution of human sociality; performance becomes the main term for comparing all kinds of human event types; and ritual marks the beginning of a taxonomy of human event types, based initially on a hierarchy of relative importance. Reformulating Ritual The sociologist Emile Durkheim’s early work on religion (1915) was very influential in anthropology, but his reliance on the distinction between sacred and profane activities to define ritual has long been seen as inadequate by anthropologists, since it is both overly simple and somewhat Eurocentric. To get around this problem, rather than trying to redefine sacred as Rappaport and Giesen have done, MacAloon proposed Tillich’s idea of “ultimate concern” to retain the idea of the importance of rituals relative to other sorts of events. MacAloon was thinking specifically of the Olympic Games, which were recreated by Pierre Coubertin as a celebration of “humankindness” (MacAloon 1984: 251). Because Coubertin was a secular humanist, humankindness was his ultimate concern, and therefore, for him and for others with similar views, Olympic events like the opening ceremonies of the games could be categorized as rituals. Viewing ritual events as matters of ultimate concern allows theorists to link those societies with practices celebrating spirit worlds (virtually ubiquitous in the past and widespread still today) with activities in secular state societies (a relatively recent invention of the last few hundred years), allowing for historical continuity as well as differentiation. In many societies, struggles are still going on, overtly and covertly, about ultimate values and the most important things; critiques of science and scientism, as well as critiques of capitalism and “development,” are encouraging a

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resurgence of spirituality in many forms, both old and new. One consequence of this is the widespread interest in reinventing or reviving ritual events (e.g., Grimes 2000; Kitazawa 1992). MacAloon called this development “neoliminality” (1984: 269; cf. Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993), extending Turner’s substantial work on the concept of liminality, which the latter in turn adapted from the anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep (1960). In a similar way, Rappaport’s appeal to ecology as a framework for reviving a holistic approach to human life on Earth constitutes a different approach to this same problematic. He is, of course, joined in the celebration of ecology by many others, most especially the proponents of Gaia theory, which can be seen as an attempt to reimagine the planet as an encompassing being (e.g., Lovelock 1988). I will return to a consideration of the ecological approach to performance in Chapter 6. The mention of ecology brings up a question about how significant even the most important human events are, relative to many kinds of greater powers. Whatever form such powers may be seen to take in different cultural settings, I will argue that ritual tends to situate the human domain in its relation to an encompassing matrix (or group of such matrices). The more powerful domain may be above or below; it may be invisible to the ordinary eye; it may be spiritual or divine; and it may be personified or seen as a disenchanted, secular “nature.” These cases all relate to another criterion I propose for ritual events: that they establish a relation between the human social world and a more powerful, encompassing domain, however conceptualized or named. This domain is what some theorists have seen as the fundamental or transcendental ground for the possibility of human cultural life (e.g., T. Turner 1977). A version of this relation can be found in Bateson’s idea that esthetic objects often function as modes of “integration” between cosmological and social worlds (1972: 129ff.). Once again, there is considerable cultural variability here, and sometimes one might have to allow for the idea of independent or competing cosmological orders or partial disorders. Another complication is that, in not a few cases, dead ancestors form such an alternative domain, or part of one. After death, such spirits are not exactly human in the normal sense and thus are not strictly part of the ordinary human social world, although the connections may be subtle and hard to disentangle easily. In the kinds of small-scale societies most studied by anthropologists, rituals have often been designed to put people in touch with ultimate reality, which was seen in some cases to encompass or pervade ordinary life and in others to constitute an alternative (but not unconnected) world. In all these cases, the powers of that encompassing or pervading domain put a limit on the efforts of humans to control their circumstances, thus requiring ritual as the only available form of efficacious action. To be sure, many of these ideas have to be interpreted from exegeses of ritual events or from analyses of myths, which makes them somewhat problematic,

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especially when the inventors of the genres do not interpret them conceptually (as in many preliterate societies)2 but may merely perform the events. Also, as mentioned, the problem of cultural variability is formidable here. Nonetheless, I think it is possible to generalize that, at least in most cases, ritual process enacts a relation, explicit or implicit, to that which encompasses or overpowers human activities and therefore cannot be encompassed or controlled by them. In many cases, such ritual events are therefore necessary for the survival and continuation of a social group, or even of the universe itself, and thus are mandatory. Likewise, such events cannot be replaced by any other performances, and for all these related reasons, they constitute the most important kind of events for that group. The counterpart to this sort of rational definition can be found in the kinds of human experience many such ritual events are intended to evoke. As the most special kinds of events, rituals have often involved unusual modes of consciousness, what are often called (in Anglophone common sense) “altered states”: frequently induced by taking drugs or engaging in other extreme practices. These states of consciousness are induced in order to put people in touch with what Rappaport called “the numinous” (1999: ch. 12) or to achieve what Giesen has labeled “theophany” or “epiphany” (2006: 328ff.).3 Commonly, this has meant such phenomena as trance, dream, visions, or meditation—attempts to access experiences of a world beyond, or partially beyond, the ordinary senses. This has involved a large variety of techniques, such as fasting, bloodletting, music and dance, and taking many kinds of drugs. It seems to me that there is a link here with what Kapferer has called, following Gilles Deleuze, the “virtuality” of ritual. He argues that this aspect involves “a method for entering within life’s vital processes and adjusting its dynamics” (2004: 48). This involves engaging with modes of embodiment not usually available to conscious access: encountering and perhaps altering habits of being that are fundamental to the constitution of selves and worlds. The common thread in many societies has been to extend the range of human experience past its supposed limits and to commune with those powerful forces, spirits, beings, or energies that underlie, encompass, or mysteriously pervade the world of ordinary experience. This widespread belief in a parallel, shadow, or mirror world that is not accessible through ordinary sense experience is an aspect of ritual that might be said, generally, to differentiate past ritual events from most kinds of contemporary special events. Of course, there are significant exceptions to this, involving revivalistic movements of various kinds, as well as some so-called “New-Age” kinds of activities. However, it seems reasonable to argue that, in general, many people in contemporary urban worlds, influenced by scientism and rationalism, rely on their unfettered (but not unaided) sense data to provide them with reliable understanding and might be suspicious or even fearful of so-called altered

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states of awareness. Indeed, the efforts of scientific practice have been to extend the range of “verifiable” sense data, while at the same time there are critiques, including phenomenological ones, of the extent to which experience can be seen to constitute “data” at all. The current widespread use of drugs for recreational purposes could be seen as evidence, on the one hand, of some attempts at the recovery of a ritualistic past, as has been suggested is the case for serious ravers and their use of drugs like ecstasy (e.g., St. John 2008; Sylvan 2002). On the other hand, the label recreational itself, evoking casual drug use as entertainment, can also be seen to represent the considerable difference between these sorts of drug practices and those of the past. Problems with Liminality Victor Turner argued for a long-term historical sequence—a familiar anthropological scenario—in which a world made up of many small-scale foraging, herding, and horticultural societies gradually developed into a world of largescale empires and nation-states that over time became increasingly secularized and industrialized. He associated liminality with the rituals of the former world and called the leisure genres of the latter world liminoid (e.g., 1982: 20ff.). As already noted, I want to preserve the essentials of this scenario, which has been overlooked by many contemporary theorists outside of anthropology, while modifying some aspects. The first problem stems from the word liminality itself. The anthropologist Arnold Van Gennep used the Greek term limen in his classic book on rites of passage (1960 [1906]), intending it to apply to the middle phase of his threepart schema for understanding these rites: separation (séparation), transition (marge), and reincorporation (agrégation). Van Gennep argued that the primary rites of passage were birth, marriage, and death as well as, in some societies, initiation rituals. However, toward the end of his book, he went further, including such events as seasonal rituals celebrated by an entire group, arguing that these were also transitions, or changes of state. Turner agreed with this inclusion even though others (beginning with Chapple and Coon [1942]) had argued that seasonal group rituals should constitute a different type. Turner therefore came to equate liminality with ritual itself, which seems to be an unwarranted overgeneralization. If one admits that there are other types of rituals besides rites of passage, as most theorists have agreed (even Turner himself at times), then it follows that those forms may be linked to different syntagmatic4 sequences apart from the tripartite scheme proposed by Van Gennep. For example, Margaret Drewal argues convincingly that many Yoruba ritual types in Nigeria are understood to have a five-part movement, in which the activities are seen as a metaphorical journey or pilgrimage: “In many kinds of Yoruba ritual, the

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performance processes embody all of the characteristics of a journey: (1) travel from one place to another, and a return—sometimes actual sometimes virtual, (2) new experiences, (3) joys and hardships along the route, (4) material for further contemplation and reflection, and (5) presumed growth or progress as a result of the whole experience” (1992: 37). Note that this is not a purely temporal sequence—not a formal syntagm the way Van Gennep’s schema seems to be—but instead is a combination of formal and conceptual elements. There is a syntagmatic process involved: the sequence of the journey, mediated by evaluations or contemplations that may happen during the course of events or that can be reflections after the fact. While I said that Van Gennep’s framework appeared to be purely formal, a closer look will reveal that it is not. Instead, the tripartite schema is thematically related to the sorts of events it is meant to encapsulate: life crisis rituals. This is why it works well for those rituals but not so well for seasonal rituals such as harvest or solstice celebrations.5 Indeed, when applied to many varied ritual types, the threepart scheme begins merely to resemble a version of the Aristotelian beginning, middle, and end. This latter is a more purely formal syntagm, and accordingly it is so abstract that it is not very useful for analyzing any particular event. In general, I will argue that as one approaches the extremes of “pure form” (text free) or “pure meaning” (context free) in a theoretical formulation—ideals that are themselves mere imaginaries as abstracted from phenomena—that formulation becomes correspondingly more problematic, at least for human cultural analysis. This critique of theoretical approaches that define ritual based primarily on its formal aspects is necessary because I want to mediate the form-content distinction by considering events as phenomena that inevitably and integrally combine interconnected modes of signification: from sensual to conceptual, from emotional to discursive. The movement toward the category performance and away from such concepts as structure, as well as an emphasis on a Peircean pragmatistic view of meaning as effect, are already steps in this direction. Accordingly, I will suggest a set of criteria, in addition to the two already mentioned, for helping to distinguish ritual events from those that are merely ritual-like as well as from those that should probably fall outside the category. From Liminoid to Ritual-Like The term ritual-like is intended as an alternative to Turner’s usage of liminoid to designate those events that have derived historically from rituals or have been influenced by them and thus share some, but not all, their characteristics (see Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993; cf. Alexander 2006; Bell 1992). As I mentioned earlier, this is intended not as a strategy for classifying all performance

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types but rather as a tactic for exploring the limits of useful comparison between events. I have already given the first and most significant criterion: that events are comparable when they are matters of ultimate concern, ultimate importance, or even ultimate reality. The second criterion follows closely from the first—namely, that such events establish a relation to an encompassing domain more powerful than that of (live) human action. If an event is seen as “mere entertainment,” “an escape from reality,” or “pure fantasy” or is done “just for the fun of it,” this lack of importance distinguishes it from ritual. Since I have maintained that not all human special events derive ultimately from rituals but that some are primarily the offspring of play activities, it is therefore necessary to have the category not ritual or at least not very ritual-like. When one can establish that certain events derived from rituals historically or were modeled on them, an examination of those ritual forms may facilitate the analysis of the derived ones. But when such connections have been lost over time or when no plausible ritual forbears or models can be found, then calling such events ritual-like is not particularly helpful. In the case of games and sports, it seems likely that many were never seen as supremely important but were always considered merely entertaining, or simply pastimes. In these cases, comparing them to other play-like activities will probably be more useful. However, it is also true that some games have become ritualized over time—that is, they have in some cases become matters of ultimate concern. One such case may well have been the pre-Columbian Mayan ball games (Guttman 1978: 19–20), and another was the Ancient Greek Olympic Games. I will return to this new formulation of the term ritualization later in the chapter. It follows that the inauguration of presidents and the swearing-in of prime ministers are plausibly seen as ritual-like since they quite clearly derive from earlier forms of leadership that were cosmologically sanctioned. In this way, the coronation of the queen in England should be seen as more ritual-like than the installation of a prime minister. Indeed, the queen is recognized as the formal head of the Church of England, and her coronation was one of the most important events for many Britons, although arguably less so at present than in retrospect. As rites of passage, Ndembu initiation rituals, so well described by Victor Turner, are clearly comparable to processes like preparing for the Catholic priesthood or becoming a Buddhist monk. Likewise, fraternity initiation in the United States and college initiation in Australia can both be seen as somewhat ritual-like since they seem to have been modeled on coming-ofage rituals. Even basic training for military service in many countries takes a similar form. Because these examples are like initiatory rites of passage, Van Gennep’s three-part scheme can be somewhat useful for analyzing them. However, many sorts of events are modeled on other types of ritual action, not rites of passage in my view, and the Van Gennep scheme does not fit them nearly

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as well.6 Likewise, events derived from or influenced primarily by play forms may be better understood using different kinds of analytical tools apart from ritual theory. In this approach, many of the formal characteristics usually attributed to ritual—like invariance or repetition, decorum, elevated speech, and efficacy— might be seen as entailments of the performance of most important events, in an inversion of Rappaport’s approach. However, it is more exact to say that importance is recognized and identified by social actors due to the presence of at least some of these elements and that these elements, in turn, are used to signify the importance of such events. The reason ritual has been so hard to define is the great cultural variability of both formal and substantive elements of such performances, leading to the resultant arguments about which of those elements are the least variable from society to society. My argument is that importance, or ultimate concern, and a relation to encompassment are the least variable elements and that the others can be seen to follow (logically though not phenomenologically) from them. I will now turn to a brief discussion of some of the frequent, but more variable, concomitants of ritual events in general (see Table 3.1). Efficacy and Obligation One quality that many have argued is central to ritual performance is that of efficacy: in MacAloon’s words, “ritual action effects social transitions or spiritual transformations; it does not merely mark or accompany them” (1984: 250). This was a criterion central to Victor Turner’s work as well, but in my view, it stems from a rather deep-seated materialist ethnocentrism. As Rappaport reveals, older versions of this criterion relied on a common-sense rationalist distinction between acts that seemed to obey physical laws of causality and those that did not seem (to a European observer) to follow them. Rappaport cites the work of George Homans, for example, who argued that “ritual actions do not produce a practical result on the external world—that is one of the reasons we call them ritual” (Homans 1941: 172). One could tease out an entire history of post-Enlightenment Western thought, which by Turner’s time was being increasingly interrogated. The problem of ritual efficacy came under the influence of the philosopher J. L. Austin’s speech act theory in the 1960s when the (ultimately Cartesian) distinction between thought and action began to be questioned in the domain of language. Austin developed his work by arguing that there were degrees of efficacy in speech, which he tried to capture using the tripartite schema of locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary speech acts (1970; see also Searle 1969). From an anthropological perspective, it might be argued that this whole problem

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was created by an academic tradition in which writing had become dominant over speech in the imagination of philosophers. In a preliterate universe, the social and cultural consequences of speech are hard to ignore, and the whole problem of efficacy is turned on its head, as linguists like Dell Hymes (1975) and Charles Briggs (1988) have argued. What sort of language does not produce immediate and subsequent effects on its interlocutors? The answer is an imaginary world of written words with purely semantic meanings, whose apotheosis came in the early work of the linguist Noam Chomsky (e.g., 1968). The same critique can be applied to the problem of ritual efficacy. If all social acts have effects, and if meaning itself, as Peirce argued, is constituted in the accumulation of such effects (actual and possible), then clearly the most important events have very important effects. Why should anthropologists or culturally aware theorists attempt to judge the relative efficacy of these acts using a now largely outmoded Cartesian distinction between material objects (res extensa) and immaterial ideas (res cogitans)? It follows that speech (which I take to be the fundamental form of language, contra Jacques Derrida) is a form of action and that actions have effects. The more interesting question is really whether there is any form of language, let alone action, that might be said to have no efficacy. Peirce would argue that if such a form of language or action existed, humans could not be aware of it. This is not to say that there is no difference between the phrase, “I now pronounce you man and wife” (in an appropriate setting), and the phrase, “Have a nice day.” Differences in degree and type of efficacy are very much the concern of cultural analysts, but the distinction between rituals and other events cannot rest merely on efficacy itself. Instead it must rest on degrees and types of efficacy, since all performances cause things to happen (and are intended to do so). It follows that ritual actions tend to cause the most important sorts of things to happen, and that lesser effects should be classified under other rubrics. A good example here, still in the realm of language, is the singing or chanting of mantra, common in Vedic ritual on the Indian subcontinent. Versions of this practice have now spread quite widely throughout the world—for instance, with the popularity of the teaching of yoga as an aid to health and as a form of spiritual practice. If mantra are a form of language,7 they are clearly an unusual one, because some accounts have noted that the sound of the syllables is meant to resonate directly with the subtle bodies or sheaths (koshas) of a person and with that person’s energy centers (chakras) (see Persson 2000). This sympathetic vibration is said to enliven all those dimensions of practitioners, potentially transforming them by bringing them into harmony with cosmic or divine wave patterns. The chanting of mantra, then, is a form of action (or action as nonaction) and has direct effects not necessarily mediated by ordinary forms of linguistic meaning. These sorts of effects are clearly important in certain social

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worlds, since the chanting of mantra is essential to many forms of Vedic and tantric practice (Staal 1990). This is efficacy of a kind not accounted for by Austin or in any current linguistic theory that I am aware of, but it probably needs to be. It is a direct and visceral kind of sonic efficacy that is distinct from ordinary kinds of linguistic action yet characterizes one sort of ritual practice (sadhana) quite explicitly. The above example alludes to another frequently cited aspect of ritual: that it is not optional but rather obligatory. In many cultural worlds, the performance of ritual is a duty that is essential for the maintenance of the human life-world and even, in some cases, for the continuation of the universe. Thus ritual, in those cultural worlds where it operates (perhaps not in all), cannot be replaced by any other sort of activity. Turner argued that the obligatory aspect of ritual was one thing that separated it from modern leisure activities, which are usually seen as optional. I generally support this view but would point out that there is perhaps more variability here than he allowed for. There are many rituals that are optional for most members of a group, except for the priests, shamans, or other specialists who are required to conduct them. The group may need to know that they have been performed but may not be required to participate. On the other hand, some entertainment events are virtually mandatory for groups in a given social circle, such as opening night at the opera among some urban elites. As the saying goes, everybody who is anybody will be there, so to be absent is to be a social nobody. Accordingly, I will include the issue of obligation in the consideration of the next criterion for ritual definition—that of group consensus and differentiation. Criteria toward a Definition of Ritual What I am attempting here is a complex definition of ritual that is intended to differentiate some types of human special events from others. The definition involves several criteria, which, when met to a greater or lesser extent, serve to separate ritual, ritual-like, and not ritual-like events, mapping a continuum that will hopefully aid in the development of a taxonomy of event types (see Table 3.1.). Let me reiterate that this taxonomy should be seen not as a neat and closed system but rather as a tool for the analysis of actual social events. Those events on the “not ritual” end of the continuum will, in many cases, be derived from forms of play or forms of work, but I want to allow for the possibility that other metagenres might yet be identified and/or that new ones may well be emerging. For example, MacAloon argued for the emergence of one such new genre, which he called “spectacle” (1984). I have not included it here, because I am not convinced that it has yet been constituted as a distinct type, but I will use some of his insights in what follows.

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Thus far, I have argued that for an event to be classified usefully as ritual, it should be understood by participants as (1) a matter of utmost concern or ultimate importance. Likewise, it follows that such events evoke an alternative or encompassing realm (criterion 5 in the table below), however defined—one that represents the ultimate reality for the group in question. Accordingly, ritual events serve to establish definite relations between everyday human sociality and such a domain (or domains). Criterion 2 is that ritual events have often been seen to (2) foster the creation of social consensus and group differentiation through shared (or distinct) practices.8 When structural-functionalism was the dominant paradigm in British social anthropology, the emphasis of theorists such as A. R. Radcliffe-Brown was on ritual as social cohesion and consensus building—thus as a major component of the reproduction of social patterning (e.g., 1952). This view held sway until Max Gluckman pointed out (1954) that rituals also often expressed latent or patent conflicts within and between groups. Since then, many investigators have noted the ways that kinship, ethnicity, gender, and age rivalries can be played out in ritual scenarios. Nonetheless, for me, this is usually a matter of subgroups differentiating themselves from macro-groups while also building consensus among themselves. However, when conflicts between or within groups are thematized in a ritual event, it can be quite difficult to decide where differentiation and consensus reside.9 In other words, social worlds usually involve an embedded complex of groups and subgroups, sometimes overlapping, sometimes in conflict, and sometimes united. Also, a person can be a member of more than one group at the same time, depending on perspective. Any or all of these relations can be thematized in ritual events so that differentiation or conflict in one dimension can often be understood as solidarity in another. Rituals are obligatory for those who want to be part of a certain group formation, but there may be a degree of choice as to which group one wishes to affiliate with. Where there is no such choice, or where the ritual concerns an encompassing macro-group, there may be an obligation to participate. Of course, in the contemporary world, even so-called indigenous people are often required to choose whether to follow “traditional” ways of life or to become Christian, Muslim, or a member of some other world religion. In these cases, choosing which rituals to participate in may well be important to the constitution of certain communities or subgroups within a national or local scene. Such is the case, for instance, in many parts of contemporary Brazil, where a high degree of fluidity between religious affiliations has been noted (e.g., Ireland 1991). I will also argue, along with many others, that rituals involve (3) a high degree of participation by everyone co-present, such that it is often incoherent to see any participants as mere spectators on, or audience for, the proceedings (unless an outside observer is present). In the case of rites of passage, the focal

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participants are said to undergo a transformation, often fundamental to their sense of identity in the group. This is the most extreme form participation can take, but even those not being transformed, such as parents of initiands10 in coming-of-age rituals, often have crucial roles to play as facilitators and celebrators of the transformation. It follows, at the other extreme, that most contemporary modes of entertainment, as Turner (1987), Rappaport (1999), Schechner (2002), and Kapferer (2005) have all noted, are not particularly ritual-like. While it is true that being a spectator or part of an audience does require a certain form of co-participation, I believe that those modes of passive and constrained attention are quite different from the kind of active orthopraxis11 ritual calls for. Going even further, MacAloon (1984) argued for the wider use of the genre term spectacle to describe kinds of activities (like watching television) that encouraged the greatest degree of passivity and involved the largest gulf, or degree of disengagement, between performers and spectators. A fourth concomitant of ritual events is that they have usually evoked (4) a disruption of normal temporal relations usually involving a radical thematization or evocation of the past such that, in extreme cases, these events are seen as recreations of former occurrences or, alternatively, a merging of past and present in a way that has been called “eternal” or “primeval time” (Eliade 1968). Kapferer, in a related approach, has called the virtuality of ritual a “slowing down and temporary abeyance of dimensions of ordinary flow” (2004: 48). However they may be experienced, rituals often involve kinds of temporal distortion that are usually seen as continuous with the way they have always happened. In many cases, this involves a repetition of past events, which also means the repeatability of current ones. Accordingly, events that only happen once or are seen as unique occurrences don’t qualify as rituals. It has been observed of revivalist or fundamentalist movements that, even though they may appear to outsiders as newly emerging practices, the originators usually see them as a return to some previous golden age. As noted in a piece on Australian folk festivals (Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993), this orientation to the past often presents a problem for artists or community groups wanting to create contemporary rituals, since the idea of artistic creation usually implies the emergence of something new as opposed to the reinstatement of something old. Likewise, the preservation of continuity, which is another aspect of this past orientation, might seem to be antithetical to an artistic imperative for innovation. The argument here is that this group of criteria can be used as a diagnostic test to help distinguish events that are so ritual-like that they may as well be called rituals from events that are not very ritual-like. The latter, including mere entertainments, pastimes, occasional diversions, and the like, would benefit more from analysis coming from play theory, embodiment theory, or other sorts

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of approaches. Table 3.1 summarizes the framework I have proposed: the more a given generic framework satisfies criteria toward one end of the continuum, the more justification there will be to classify it as ritual (or not), although I reiterate that classification is not the primary object. As the table also indicates, some frameworks will fall in the middle range, making them ritual-like in some Table 3.1

Criteria for distinguishing types of events on a continuum

Ritual

Ritual-like

Not Ritual-like

1. Importance • Most important events/ types • Matters of ultimate concern

• Of secondary or subsidiary importance • Matters of concern—but not fundamental concern

• Mere entertainment • Elective or optional events

2. Social Consensus • Concerns entire society • Minimal variation in interpretation • Most prominent in smallscale societies

• Concerns subsections of society • Consensus within subsections and variation between them

• Primarily concerns individuals • Maximum variation of interpretation • Prominent in large-scale societies

3. Mode of Participation • Personal or social transformation • Active engagement by most

• Engaged participation by believers • Possibility of detached observation by others

• Passive spectators or audience • Maximum separation between performers and spectators

4. Temporal Orientation • Events seen as continuous with past or as being in “eternal” time • Strong degree of repeatability

• Events recreated as they may • Emphasis on creativity and have been innovation • Imagined tradition • Artistic genius • Unique or “one-off ” events

5. Encompassment • Establish relations between human society and encompassing or permeating powers • Events cannot be encompassed by greater concerns

• Events linked to more encompassing frameworks—but not integral to them • Important events— but secondary to more fundamental concerns (see criterion 1).

• Events of trivial or passing interest • Fads and fashionable events

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ways and not ritual-like in others. Hopefully this table will be useful in the analysis of specific events, allowing for the exploration of similarities and differences between frameworks. Because ritual events are the most important type, in many cases they therefore tend to be the most elaborated, redundantly marked and clearly set apart from everyday life. In other words, important events often have elaborate beginnings and endings as well as complex internal subdivisions. As noted previously, sometimes these frame markers have evolved into separable performance genres in themselves.12 On the other hand, the criterion of encompassment means that ritual events are often understood or experienced as the ground or basis for cultural life itself: as absolutely essential to the possibility of having a daily life at all. Without such events, the universe could collapse into chaos, and normal social life would be impossible in many social worlds. The paradox here is that ritual events tend to be both the most clearly set apart from daily life yet are absolutely formative to it since, in a sense, they “encompass” it. As noted in the Australian folk festival research previously cited (Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993: 208–10), mere entertainment fails both of these requirements, since it is not set apart clearly enough (just show up and buy a ticket; flick on the set) or seen as integral to any version of that life (it doesn’t concern me; I don’t care; it’s of passing interest only; it’s important but not that important). Sometimes sports and games are seen by most members of a group as ephemeral, marginal activities, and participation is sporadic, half-hearted, or can even be suppressed. In Afghanistan under the Taliban, for instance, even traditional sports such as buzkashi (an equestrian game played with an inflated goat skin) were outlawed, as were all kinds of dance and many kinds of music (Koepke 2002). In other times and places, the same disavowal has been belied by a fervent, fanatical participation, which seems to contradict the overt social valuation. Such is the case of soccer in contemporary Iran, for example. In a third case, sports can be seen as extremely important activities, at least by many social groups, engaged in fervently by most but perhaps dismissed by a minority of others. Such is the case of soccer in Brazil. For many in Spain, bullfights are extremely important events, such that one might be tempted to call them ritual-like by some of the criteria mentioned, but what sorts of rituals are they like? Is it more useful to see bullfighting as a sport, and how would the analysis proceed differently if so? Another interesting case is the phenomenon of Carnival in Brazil and elsewhere. When Victor Turner experienced Brazilian Carnival, although he made some use of his previous work on ritual in order to understand it, he was drawn more urgently to play theory, which evidently seemed to offer a more satisfactory tool kit for the analysis of an event that is so deeply chaotic and fanciful (see Lewis 1999 and Chapter 4).

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Ritual-Like Genres and Ritualization I previously mentioned that political ceremonies, inaugurations, independence days, and the like—celebrations of nationality—can be seen as ritual-like because they derived, in most cases, from divinely sanctioned kingship, empire, tsardom, and similar forms. However, I also noted that these are not, for many contemporary people, the most important kinds of events; nor do they usually establish relations with an environing cosmos. In other words, these sorts of events fulfill some of the criteria mentioned above but not others. This will be the case with many genres of special events, especially in the disenchanted global order. The reader will recall that in the inauguration of U.S. presidents, a minister or priest often offers a prayer as part of the ceremony. In addition, the president is sworn in on a Bible. For me, this is an example of the ritualization of these national ceremonies: an attempt to make them seem more important by invoking the presence and sanction of a higher power. In a similar way, many public sports events in the United States and elsewhere begin with the singing of the national anthem, bringing the encompassing framework of nationhood to a mere athletic contest. In this way, the concept of ritualization can be preserved as a theoretical tool: it describes a common process of making less important events seem more significant than they might otherwise be by invoking a higher, more encompassing framework of social or metasocial organization. In addition to ceremonies of nationhood, another important contemporary genre is the festival. There are countless kinds of festivals in the current world, celebrating many things, and they seem to be proliferating rapidly. The question raised in terms of my schema is this: How old is the genre of festival, and did it derive primarily from ritual or from play? Upon consideration, the answer seems to be that festivals are quite an old genre of human activity that to a certain extent mediate between ritual and play. That is, when important rituals are going to occur, festival events often grow up around them as environing frameworks. These celebrations are playful ways of extending and framing the rituals to be enacted, which then come to be the heart, the center, or even the justification for such festivals. Once festivals developed in this way, they could then become detached as autonomous frameworks, being celebrated either with or without rituals to accompany or justify them. Evidence for this scenario can be drawn from many sources: one thinks of Christmas, Easter, Ramadan, Passover, Ramlila, and many other ritual celebrations of the world’s major religions, all of which are accompanied by festival activities. Such conjunctions are no less common in the ritual activities of small-scale groups, which are often combined with feasting, music, dancing, and gift exchange. Of the latter activities, some may fall within the frameworks of ritual, while others may merely be accompaniments.

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When an event is created to be extremely important and vitally necessary, then it makes sense for it to become progressively more and more elaborated. One way that this happens with special events is for the framework to become redundantly marked, with multiple beginnings and multiple endings. Such events may also be ramified internally into many phases, with transitions between them. Accordingly, to embed an important ritual framework inside an encompassing festival is one way to mark its significance and also to encourage the heightened emotions and excitement needed to give it the proper intensity. Such festivals allow for the buildup and diffusion of kinds of feelings that may not be strictly appropriate for the ritual events themselves, if they are solemnities, but can add to the force of those solemnities by contrasting with them. According to Alessandro Falassi (1987) and John MacAloon (1984), the most salient characteristic associated with festivals is enjoyment, and the main requirement is engaged participation. Rituals also require engaged participation, as noted, but there are many non-ritual modes of embodied enjoyment as well, including playful frameworks and quotidian activities. Eating, drinking, playing and listening to music, dancing, and playing games all are common forms of festival participation. In some cases, these activities may be part of the rituals themselves, or they may be restricted to the festivities surrounding the rituals. For example, Holy Communion for Christians is certainly a form of eating and drinking, but it is not usually associated with gustatory enjoyment or inebriation. Likewise, many forms of ritual dancing are more controlled and specialized than social dancing in the same societies. Another genre that has evolved from festivals, it seems to me, is the intensification of that type known in the English-speaking world as Carnival. In Chapter 4, I will explore two versions of this genre in some detail, but for now, let me note that in the European tradition, this festival was the precursor to the most important Christian calendrical event—namely, Easter (itself preceded by Lent, an elaborated embedding). If one goes back to two of the putative historical precedents for Carnival in Roman times, Saturnalia and Lupercalia, note that these were also festivals surrounding religious rituals. In Catholic countries like Brazil, Fat Tuesday (Mardi Gras in the French) is followed by widespread observance of Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent. However, Carnival in Brazil (Carnaval) has taken on such importance that its relation to Christianity almost seems beside the point. Play and Ritual Compared In conclusion, it is useful to examine the relations between play and ritual in general, insofar as they can be determined. Handelman, for example, argued early in his career for a fundamental contrast between play and ritual; he saw

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them as “complementary, yet mutually exclusive” (1977: 187). Whereas in that piece he understood these genres in terms of contrasting frameworks, I am arguing instead that both of them should be seen as contributing to the fundamental processes of framework construction, maintenance, and dissolution. In this view, ritual is primarily an attempt to establish fundamental sociocultural patterns in relation to an environing cosmos. This involves questions of morality, normality, legitimacy, authority, and the like. In other words, ritual is mostly constructive: it is the basic framework used to create social and cosmological order and meaning. On the other hand, play may be used either to establish frameworks or to deconstruct, critique, or alter them. The event frameworks that play is used to create, such as sports and games, are rarely seen as the most important ones. At the same time, playfulness can erupt spontaneously during many kinds of events as a way of (implicitly or explicitly) questioning the appropriateness or usefulness of that framework. This doesn’t usually happen during ritual events— particularly the most important ones—unless play is understood by a group to be a fundamental aspect of the cosmos. Such is the case, for instance, among groups who make use of “ritual clowns,” the subject of a later work by Handelman (he used examples from Pakistani, Mexican Indigenous, and Native American groups). In that piece, he seemed to moderate his earlier position, arguing that ritual clowns “have crucial functions of boundary-dissolution, of processuality, and of reflexivity, for the organization itself of such rites” (1981: 21). This is very close to the position that I have just outlined. Many other groups put play or playfulness at the heart of their cosmological performances; for instance, in some parts of south Asia, the gods are said to spin out the cosmos in play (lila), from which mortals may try to extricate themselves (O’Flaherty 1984: 230, 295). In Yoruba cultural worlds, both in Africa and Brazil, the spirit of Exú represents the trickery and treachery of divine forces, which can often also be expressed in forms of playful dance (Browning 1995; Drewal 1992). In these and other cases, play is seen as a cosmological process and therefore fundamentally important as a link between human cultural life-worlds and the greater environing conditions. In short, ritual events can be playful in societies where play is seen as a central aspect of universal organization (or disorganization). In other societies, ritual is serious, sometimes even deadly serious, and set off in contrast to play, which is accordingly marginalized or even suppressed. Play can be an ultimate concern, but where it is not, and where ritual is highly serious, play will usually break out elsewhere as a counterpoint to ritual solemnities. This “high seriousness” of ritual life can certainly be seen in fundamentalist versions of JudeoChristian practice as well as in many versions of Islam, as current world politics make all too evident. In general, when social life gets too serious, play tends to

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erupt to strike the balance. On the battlefield, grim humor is widespread, as it is for doctors, police officers, and others in deadly or dangerous situations (as I noted in Chapter 2). In such darkened circumstances, humor must be edgy and painful to be effective. Now that I have discussed the two most important metageneric frameworks and the relations between them, I will turn to an examination of the logical relations between special event frameworks and daily life in Chapter 4. This is an area that has greatly interested researchers in the past, and it is still helpful in situating performance as an aspect of cultural theory. As I will attempt to demonstrate, however, logical relations can be illuminating, but they are only part of the story when it comes to understanding performance. The lure of embodied practice also involves how it feels to perform and to watch performances. These visceral feelings are often as important to participants as any cognitive meanings or interpretations that may be offered about the events.

CHAPTER 4

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n Chapter 3 I made a case against the overly formal approach to ritual, arguing instead for a set of criteria that favored content or purpose over form but ultimately combined the two. Accordingly, I argued that Arnold Van Gennep’s three-part schema for understanding rites of passage was not particularly useful for other kinds of ritual activity with different aims. I suggested that theorists needed to relate the formal properties of events to the types of events they are fit to accompany, that different genres may well have different syntagmatic patterns, and ultimately that any formal aspects abstracted must be related to the intentions and understandings of the creators (i.e., the meaningful contents) of the events. In general, the point here is that while the form of an event may be partially distinguished from its content, the two cannot be dissociated—that is, one cannot imagine a pure form without content or vice versa. For Peirce, this is what separated distinction, the weakest form of category division, from the stronger modes of dissociation and precission (CP 1.353).1 Thus the many attempts by art historians to separate form from content in a general way should be seen as misunderstandings of the mediating ground of cultural practice that is their field of possibility. The same problem is found not just in ritual analysis but also in similar attempts to isolate the “formal structures” of performative events in general without recourse to the type of event being considered. In other words, theorists need to connect syntagmatic relations (between events in a sequence) with paradigmatic relations (the comparability of one sort of an event, or aspect of it, with another) for a given performance setting rather than trying to separate them analytically. The spectrum of relations I proposed in Table 2.1 was an attempt to make the need for this kind of mediation more apparent. In order to illustrate the consequences of ignoring this problem, let me turn to a consideration of several previous attempts to isolate the formal tendencies of performative processes universally.

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As I embark on this discussion of P/p relations (special events compared to everyday life), let me first reiterate the important point that such relations are merely cognitive and linguistic (semantico-referential) interpretations of what events might “mean” to participant observers. In line with a Peircean approach to meaning as effect, there is another universe of meaningful effects that have to do with the embodied experiences of events on the part of both performers and the audience (if any). This will be the subject of Chapter 5 and has been a particular focus of much of my previous work. Such effects are difficult areas to analyze or even discuss, since embodied experience can never fully be captured in language or ideas; it must be felt. An important—perhaps the most important—“reason” people engage in special events is the feeling of participation these events evoke: the joy and excitement of dancing, of making and hearing music, of listening to or reciting poetry, of wearing costumes and masks. These are all reasons in themselves, or “reasons of the heart,”2 which no amount of verbal explanation is sufficient to capture. As Hobart and Kapferer expressed it, “it is the feeling, intuiting body that is vital in the very production of the schemes of reason and in the creation of abstract, objective knowledge” (2005: 4). The question of the relation between special events and ordinary life hinges on what is being related. Accordingly, there are going to be multiple sorts of relations for any given event as compared with any particular aspect of ordinary life. As I pointed out earlier, “everyday life” is nothing more than a residual category, a repository of many sorts of events and the experiences of them. The result is that any scheme which purports to isolate and list formal P/p relations will, at best, capture only a certain tendency of those events, often involving a certain interpretation of their significance. Since these interpretations are situated (are relative to points of view on the events), it is clear that there can be no final or complete set of such relations. This is the most important caveat to bear in mind with what follows, and it applies to all the types of relations to be analyzed. Ultimately, any set of possible relations will need to be reformulated in terms of the specific events being considered, and any list alleged to be complete would be suspect. The aim, once again, is not to develop a taxonomy of all possible formal relations between events, which is impossible, but rather to develop tools that can help in the description and understanding of given events. It is the phenomena themselves that must be the object of inquiry, and theory should become, not an end in itself, but rather a means to that end. I will begin again with Victor Turner, simply to reiterate most of the critical points already made and as a basis for the examination of those who followed in his footsteps. As I pointed out in Chapter 3, Turner’s reduction of the ritual process to the concept of liminality was an unwarranted generalization from rites of passage to all kinds of ritual action. Liminality is an appropriate term for

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the central stage of life crisis rituals, narrowly defined, but should not be distended to include rites in general or sequences within them. The term certainly should not be used, as it so often has been, to include any sort of “betwixt and between” process or to refer to marginalized social groups. Even within the category of rites of passage, Turner probably overgeneralized a bit from initiation ceremonies that, as he rightly noted, tend to emphasize the transition phase of Van Gennep’s schema. In contrast, for instance, marriages in many societies frequently give more prominence to the reincorporation phase rather than to the liminal one. Given these caveats, however, Turner identified several ritual processes that have been found to be useful in analyzing many different kinds of performative events. In early discussions of liminality, Turner noted that initiands in the process of induction were in an ambiguous situation, which he initially called unstructured, destructured, or prestructured, putting them in an “interstructural” position (1967: 98–9). Eventually, Turner came to contrast ordinary life, a regime of structure, with what he came to call the “anti-structure” of ritual process (1969). As noted earlier, Turner more or less inherited this preoccupation with structure from his training in the British structural-functionalist school of anthropology, while the newer, alternative terms indicate many of his innovative ideas with regard to processes of human self-reflexivity and the engines of social change. Accordingly, he characterized normative regimes of ordinary life as the “indicative mood” of sociality, whereas ritual anti-structure was the “subjunctive mood” (e.g., 1987: 101). This was an important insight, as far as it went, but the model was still burdened by an overly objectivist view of culture as structure, in dialectical opposition to its counter-object, antistructure. Even though Turner was one of the first to argue for a processual understanding of culture in performance, he was not able to carry this project fully into fruition (see Lewis 2008). One interesting critique of Turner compares him to the literary and social critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who argued for the “heteroglossia” (variable meanings) of what might seem to be ordered textual, and also social, systems (e.g., 1981: 272). In an analysis of medieval passion plays, the literary critic C. Clifford Flanigan makes the argument that Turner underemphasized the structural force of so-called anti-structural events, whereas Bakhtin exaggerated the inherent disorder of normative texts and social arrangements (Flanigan 1990). One could recast this view by noting that in repeated practices, the heart of what was once called social structure, there is always an interplay between reproduction and adaptation or improvisation. As noted previously, any re-enactment is always partly a re-creation as well as a repetition, a process usually called emergence. Therefore, any typified event adheres somewhat to the normative constraints of

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the past while also creatively reconstituting those patterns to account for present circumstances. As I have been arguing, special events are basically intensifications of some of the tendencies inherent in an ordinary event, sometimes tendencies that are latent or subliminally present. It follows that normative practice carries the seeds of its own dynamism; it exists in a field of alternative possibilities, some of which may never be acted out. Turner was right in that he saw how ordinary life events were mostly about continuity—about “habitude,” to use Casey’s term (1998)—whereas special events mostly highlight creative possibility. However, Turner should also have explored more fully the innovative and creative aspects of daily life. A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, the dean of the British structuralfunctionalists, had argued (like Emile Durkheim before him) that ritual primarily acted to reinforce and reproduce the normative social structure (1952). Because Turner was engaged in pointing out the limitations of this overly static view of ritual process, he didn’t bother to reiterate Radcliffe-Brown’s point— that sometimes periods of ritual anti-structure served mostly to reinforce social normativity. In a similar way, Bakhtin was correct that language, for example, is not a completely unified system—that it contains significant heteroglossia and ambiguity—but he did not dwell on the fact that, most of the time, especially in ordinary everyday discourse, habitual usages allow relatively clear communication to take place. Reinforcement and Inversion If special events are intensifications of certain kinds or aspects of ordinary events, it then follows that a fundamental relation between them is one of replication, reinforcement, or reproduction of normative social patterns. This is the process that Radicliffe-Brown and Durkheim emphasized, Turner de-emphasized, and Bakhtin virtually ignored. This type of P/p relation was characterized by the anthropologist Roberto DaMatta as reinforcement, a term that I adopt, and his canonical example was the case of Brazilian Independence Day.3 The main event for that commemoration is a parade, during which civil, military, and church hierarchies are displayed, arrayed, and celebrated (Da Matta 1991: 55 ff.). Don Handelman highlights a similar process that he called “presentation,” which he said “deals with the substantiation of affirmation” (1998: 48). His examples include events like royal coronations, and he does an extensive analysis of Israeli Remembrance and Independence Days that resonates quite closely with Da Matta’s work. In both of these formulations, the events in question are intended, by their organizers, to reinforce social normativity, especially as it concerns the operations of the nation-state and its allied institutions.

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Accordingly, social and institutional hierarchies are displayed on grandstands and in marches, speeches are made that reiterate normative values, and society is represented in modular uniformities of coordinated movement or static tableau. DaMatta notes, however, that after the speeches and parades of Brazilian Independence Day, groups break up into informal family units, and people drift off for meals at home or for picnics. Likewise, in Bruce Kapferer’s analysis of Australian Anzac Day, mentioned previously, he points out that after the marches and solemnities, people retire to pubs and clubs for heavy drinking, gambling, and reminiscing (1988: 154 ff.). In these informally organized “counterpart” events, other processes are clearly at work besides reinforcement, including practices that may not be officially sanctioned or normatively approved. One point here is that special events, especially if they are large-scale, are rarely univocal but instead combine quite disparate kinds of activities together into loose wholes. Even during the prescribed events of state-sanctioned celebration, people’s experiences of what is occurring may differ substantially depending on their relations to the powers that be. During the long period of military dictatorship in Brazil, for instance, attendance at the military parades of Independence Day was rather sparse, and many who did attend had a rather negative or adversarial view of the proceedings. Similarly, in the 1970s, there were active feminist protests in Australia against Anzac Day on the grounds that it glorified a paternalistic, warrior culture. Another kind of P/p relation described by Turner, and widely employed in analysis, has been called inversion. In this formulation, normative social and conceptual relations and/or values are turned on their heads—the polarities are reversed. DaMatta identified inversion as the main theme of Brazilian Carnaval, and a similar idea underscored at least some aspects of what Bakhtin called the “carnival principle” in medieval Europe (1984: 10). Handelman identified a process he called “mirroring” (for him, a form of “re-presentation,” but also called inversion), playing on the reversal of directions in a mirror, and he also cited carnival-type activities as examples, such as mumming festivals in Newfoundland (1998: ch. 7). One kind of reversal commonly mentioned is cross-dressing, seen as a case of gender inversion: men impersonate women, and women imitate men. It has been observed, in many cultural worlds, that the first practice is much more commonly found than the second—that is, men imitating women seems to be a rather common cultural phenomenon, whereas there are fewer cases of women impersonating men. Scheper-Hughes argued that in Brazilian Carnival, men often dress as women, whereas women frequently undress (1992: 492). The initial point here is that inversion, when it can be clearly identified, is often asymmetrical; the result is only a partial inversion. Accordingly, in Brazilian Carnaval it is common for poor people to dress up as rich, as royalty or nobility, but less common for the wealthy to imitate

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homeless people or beggars. Likewise, in age inversion, adults may wear diapers and suck pacifiers, but children less often put on beards. These asymmetries, or partial inversions, tend to reflect the normative values of the society, to some extent, or the most frequent contours of desire. One way to understand this asymmetry is to notice that normativity cannot easily be subverted—that inversion usually happens under the influence of the stronger pull of reinforcement. Looked at another way, Carnival play can be seen as an enactment of the interplay of values inherent in normative practices themselves. As I have been arguing, any practice, whether seen as normal or unusual, is constituted in a field of possibility that includes the paradoxes of reproduction as well as the explicit (and implicit) oppositions of difference. For example, the judicial system of a nation is partly formed by patterns of criminality and the usual responses to it, as well as by the forms of negotiation that constitute legal processes. The latter involves which crimes police choose to enforce and how they do so, as well as the workings of lawyers, judges, and prosecutors in court proceedings. The former involves which laws criminals choose to break, how often they break them, and the manner in which they do so (or what new crimes they invent), all of which then need legal response. These two aspects of legality are clearly complementary, but they are analytically distinct, since they involve different sorts of events: law breaking versus law enforcing. Thus the problem of inversion as a P/p relation can be seen to involve interpretations of the complex processes of event formation and not just reductions of those events to some sort of discursive “meaning.” As noted earlier, since events are embodied actions, they cannot be “read” or even understood conceptually in a completely satisfactory way. For instance, what is the inversion of walking along a path? It could be walking in the opposite direction, walking backward, or walking upside down (on one’s hands). These are all inversions, but with very different consequences or effects. Any formal or logical P/p relation, including reinforcement, as I noted earlier, is subject to these same problems. At best, such formal relations capture partial tendencies of some aspects of the events in question (as compared to some version of daily life), and as such, they can be useful tools but should never be taken for total explanations. In truth, a variety of conceptual and analogical tools will be needed to theorize or analyze any given performative event, and there can be no final end to such a process of understanding. For Peirce, the final interpretant (a consensus reality) is what a community of rational investigators would agree on in some indefinite future (CP 5.311). However, since we are dealing with partly irrational beings—creatures of emotion, feeling, and performative embodiment—no rational interpretation will ever be completely satisfying. No discursive account of a dance event, however subtle and nuanced, will ever capture the totality of that sort of experience,

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as Isadora Duncan expressed in her famous reply: “If I could tell you what it meant, there would be no point in dancing it” (cited in Bateson 1972: 137). Nonetheless, even though theoretical reductions of embodied events will only ever be part of the story, they are still an important part, since academics as theorists (and those who follow them) are creatures steeped in the need for linguistic meaning. Therefore, such analytical tools are worth refining. Neutralization, Transformation, and Reformation DaMatta, in his important work on Brazilian performative events, identified another sort of P/p relation, which he called neutralization. His prototypical example of this process was a Catholic saint’s procession of the sort that is common throughout Latin America and many Mediterranean countries. In his view, the “grace” of the saint, which is thought to emanate from the statue as it is carried through the streets, effectively neutralizes the status differences between priests, town officials, and ordinary residents, since “everyone is united by fraternal ties with the saint” (1991: 76). Once again, this is clearly a complex process that could be characterized in several ways, depending on one’s selection of features and their discursive interpretation. Turner tried to capture something similar with his concept of “communitas,” which was also a leveling of status differences—for instance, between youths undergoing initiation rituals. Notice, however, that in both cases, the status leveling is only partial. The Catholic priests and the saint’s devotees are somewhat privileged in the former example, since the devotees carry the saint and renew its clothing and the priests occupy a privileged place in the procession. Likewise, the priest/shaman and/ or elder initiates have dominant roles in initiation ceremonies, since they are in charge of the initiates, perform the rites, and have control over the events. In both cases, some neutralization is taking place, but so are other processes, including normative hierarchy. Accordingly, it is useful to delve deeper into the implicit values underlying both types of events in relation to everyday life. Handelman proposed a type of process he called “modelling,” which was intended to capture the way ritual events, in some cases at least, evoke cosmological models intended to “re-form” ordinary existence in their image. That is, ritual events, in this view, create models of cosmic order that are then instantiated or reproduced in the social sphere: the microcosm is made to replicate the macrocosm (or the reverse) (Handelman 1998: 23–41).4 In thinking about these sorts of relations, it became clear to me that cultural relativity would greatly influence the putative form that they might be said to take. Handelman’s “modelling” seemed to me to capture some kinds of ritual events fairly well but was not well suited to the case of Catholic

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saints’ processions. Likewise, DaMatta’s idea of “neutralization” seemed to me to be productive but only of minor importance in that particular event type. Thinking about the neutralization of values or contrasts in general, it occurred to me that it can happen not just when a higher-order set of values makes one sort of opposition moot (as in DaMatta’s example) but also when inversion becomes an iterative process or when opposite values become paradoxically juxtaposed. For instance, once one inverts a certain pair of opposing values, there is a tendency to experiment with re-inverting—inverting the inversion—and this process is repeatable indefinitely, in principle. One sees this conceptually, for instance, in certain kinds of theoretical formulations, such as Richard Schechner’s idea of acting as “not not me” (1985: 112–13) or Clifford Geertz’s advocacy of “anti-anti-relativism” (1984). In the realm of embodied relations, one popular area of inversion frenzy is gender; indeed, in nineteenth-century scientific language homosexuals were commonly referred to as “inverts” (Smith-Rosenberg 1985). Margaret Drewal elaborates on how gender boundaries are mutable and in play in various kinds of Yoruba rituals. Cross-dressing and frequent gender inversions are evidence that the complementarity of gender, which is cosmological5 in that world, does not strictly map onto the sexuality of humans (1992: 172–90). Even in Shakespeare, one finds various cases of women imitating men imitating women—for instance, in the plays As You Like It and Twelfth Night. When a value inversion is re-inverted, it suggests to the playful human mind the possibility of infinite iteration, which in turn implies value neutralization. “What is maleness or femaleness anyway?” one might ask when confronted with such examples; is it purely arbitrary or meaningless? Some proponents of what has been called queer theory have exploited this potential of gender neutralization for political ends with the development of the concept of “gender fuck” (e.g., Browne, Lim, and Brown 2007). Using this approach, analysts and performers try to advocate the arbitrariness of gender categories as a way to undercut or problematize heterosexual normativity. I will return to this kind of neutralization in the discussion of Carnival later in the chapter. The question of the relation of ritual practices to ordinary events is often linked to fundamental conceptions of the cosmos in which a group is thought to be living. One might ask how many sorts of universes humans have invented for themselves throughout history. Are these reducible to a finite number of types? For some time, it has been a common assertion in European academia that the idea of a unified, ordered cosmos was invented by the Greeks and that previously most humans had operated in a piecemeal world of spiritual fragmentation (e.g., Gaster 1961). Although the evidence seems to be that relatively ordered, systematic cosmological understandings were independently invented in a number of regions (one thinks of ancient China, India, and Meso-America,

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for instance), the general point is valid that many groups, especially small-scale societies without writing or professional priest classes, probably have existed in such non-cosmological, unsystematic spiritual worlds. Reading the anthropological literature reveals many examples of groups without rationalized, unified world views—people who are not troubled by seeming paradoxes or contradictions in aspects of what is not really a belief system. Indeed, I have been arguing that a view of culture as practical performance reveals the unsystematic aspects of all social worlds—the ways they are cobbled together from diverse interpretations of experiential events. How many people in the United States or Australia are living within hybrid universes pieced together from popular understandings of science mixed with the vestiges of ancient religions and magical superstitions? With these caveats in mind, I still want to suggest a few possible cosmological relations that might be useful in analyzing ritual events in given societies. In the case of monotheistic religions, such as the Semitic “siblings” of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, the basic question seems to be the relation between humans and that one universal being, however named or unnamed. Specifically, the problem of why things go wrong, or right, and the relation of human works—human society—to the divine will or plan comes into play. An aspect of this is the position of evil or error (theodicy), the role of Satan as the source of this, and the relation of God to Satan. The religious scholar Karen Armstrong presents a nice summation of some of these issues in her book on fundamentalism in the three religions (2000), noting the similarities between these fundamentalisms. In most cases, the ideal is for human rulers and citizens to be godly and for social normativity to correspond to divine doctrine. In these cases, rituals mostly serve to bring the human social world into correspondence with divine order, when error or sin creeps in. Of course, the vexing question for all these religious groups is why the divine one, if all powerful, should have let this error or evil arise in the first place, and whether this, too, is part of “his” plan. In general, however, one could argue that there is seen to be a divine order, overseen by God, and that ritual is designed to transform or reorder human life (steeped in error, evil, or sin) back into the divine harmony. Hence the main operation of Christian ritual events, such as saints’ processions, is not so much, as DaMatta would have it, the neutralization of values but rather their transformation from profane to sacred.6 One sort of limited or faulty value or practice is replaced by or transformed into a more eternal or perfect sort. Thinking about the usefulness of this category of transformation as a fundamental sort of P/p relation, it became clear that the term could also be usefully applied to secular events, such as political protests. In these cases, participants are hoping for and advocating kinds of social and political change, conforming to some sort of desired ideal value. Resulting events can be organized either around short-term goals, as in the changing of a law, or in favor of a long-term

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ideal, such as gender equality or the end of war. Transformation as a relation can thus be useful for desired changes in line with sacred or transcendental values or, alternatively, for ideological or ethical values rationally or humanely determined. Such values can be anchored in past traditions, as with most rituals, or oriented toward future goals, as with most social and/or political movements. Only with difficulty could ritual transformation of this sort be cast as a form of “modelling,” in Handelman’s terms. Instead, I think he had in mind not monotheistic systems but rather small-scale societies in which different sorts of cosmologies might be seen to apply. For example, in the case of Bali, often seen as one kind of (loosely) Hindu traditional cosmos, there is no overarching unity but rather a group of powerful gods opposed by a group of powerful demons. The gods are generally superior, but only just, and in some cases the demons can dominate temporarily. In this scenario, the universe is more diverse and loosely organized and is something of a constant battlefield between good and evil. For example, consider the setting of the Mahabharata as a field of battle in the South Asian Vedic tradition. Several authors have argued that in such a world there are, at best, islands of divine order that must be constantly renewed through ritual action (H. Geertz 2004; Boon 1990; Hospital 1984). These islands are constructed through the ritual action of humans in conjunction with the gods they recognize as helpful, as a protection from the depredations of the demons. In this case, the only order that exists does so partly through the agency of human action, so ritual action is actually co-constitutive of divine harmony, in a process that I will call reformation or re-creation.7 Without human ritual action, in conjunction with the gods, these sorts of universes or “multiverses” would descend into chaos. A similar sense of urgency underlies many sorts of Australian Aboriginal ritual action, although they don’t have the same sort of theodicy as the Balinese (if I can be allowed to generalize widely, as I have been doing). In these cases, the Dreaming Beings, the creators of “country,” who are in some senses ancient, are also contemporary, and relationships with them must be periodically renewed through the “business” of ritual action. During such enactments, these beings (at least in some cases) are thought to inhabit or unify with the ritual participants, and through this unification the country is renewed. There is some controversy, of course, as to just how close this ritual relationship between Dreaming Beings and live humans could be in particular instances (see, for example, Redmond 2001). In many cases, it is thought that currently living people can establish more or less complete harmony with the Dreaming Beings, if the former follow the social/spiritual “law” and participate accordingly in the appropriate periodic ritual activities. Failure to do this could result in dire consequences, not just for human transgressors, but for the maintenance of

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the country and thus the life-world as well (see, for instance, Charlesworth, Dussart, and Morphy 2005; Swain 1993). Many examples of reformation could be adumbrated from the anthropological literature, but in all cases what I have in mind is a communion between microcosm (the ritual event framework) and macrocosm (the domain that encompasses the social world) in which ritual action brings the two into iconic relation—that is, a relation of likeness, similarity, or congruity. Such iconicities are common in the cosmologies of many small-scale societies, wherein human bodies, dwellings, and village patterns are “mapped onto” or seen as isomorphic with landscapes, territories, starscapes, or other aspects of their surrounding habitats.8 These homologies can be more or less complete or partial, universal or piecemeal, depending on the cultural understandings in question. As I will argue, the consistency of such iconicities, from small to large scale, is how I understand truly “cultural” worlds to be constituted: in degrees of selfsimilarity. In such societies, reformation is the primary mode of ritual framework in relation to everyday life. I have proposed that, in spite of the caveats, the processes of reinforcement, inversion, neutralization, transformation, and reformation constitute useful tools for understanding some of the fundamental relations between special events and everyday life in particular societies (see Table 4.1 for a summary). The suggestion is that a given event may contain instances or moments of several of these processes at different times and some of these relations can even operate together at the same time. The named relations are most clearly identifiable in events that are most distinct, and some of them, especially reformation, apply primarily to ritual frameworks. Many contemporary performative genres tend to involve complex mixtures of these relations, due to the presence of accompanying discursive practices and the increasing complexity of technology. In addition, these suggested types of relations most clearly apply to nonverbal aspects of special events, in which proto-symbolic9 movement, sound, and visual patterns predominate. In contrast, special events like text-based theatre, in the European tradition, clearly contain many more detailed linguistic tropes that have been identified by literary critics, art historians, and the like. These include manifold relations, such as critique, irony, sarcasm, caricature, and ambiguity—as well as more specific tropes, like metaphor, metonymy, and the like. European drama and other classical performative genres that rely on a major linguistic component (Chinese opera, Javanese Wayang, Indian Kathakali, Japanese Noh, etc.) cannot be understood without recourse to these sorts of complex tropes, although the basic logical relations I have outlined still may be useful in such analyses. Certainly, when one wants to look at musical, motor, or visual aspects of these genres, these basic logical relations can also be helpful. As stated previously, many special events in the contemporary

Table 4.1 Fundamental relations between special events (Performance) and everyday life (performance) 1. Reinforcement—when a special event displays and celebrates the institutions, offices, and/ or statuses of social normativity in everyday life: the bases of social organization. In the past, this would have included kingship, chiefdom, priesthood, warrior status, kinship, age groups, and the like. In the contemporary world, this involves nation-states, religious hierarchies, police and military groups, and even some transnational institutions, such as the United Nations or the Olympic Movement. Examples include coronations, inaugurations, elections, and independence and memorial celebrations such as those in Brazil, Australia, and Israel. 2. Inversion—events that reverse, or put into opposition, normative social relations and/or the cultural values that may be seen to underlie them. It can especially be found in carnival celebrations or other kinds of “misrule” events—but also in the liminal phases of some rites of passage. This often involves gender inversion, age inversion, class or status reversal, and the like. For example, men dressing as women and women as men, old people dressing as babies, young people dressing as corpses, poor people dressing as rich people, and slaves ruling over masters. Notice that these inversions are often asymmetrical, with one side of an opposition favored over the other, and the short period of misrule may act as a de facto reinforcement when the event comes to an end. 3. Neutralization—events, or aspects of them, that seem to undermine normative social contrasts or value oppositions, making them seem to be moot, arbitrary, or paradoxical. This happens most often when inversion is an iterative (repeated) process, as in multiple re-inversions of gender opposition, or when oppositions are paradoxically juxtaposed. Examples include iterative gender reversals in theater and the “gender fuck” of some versions of queer theory and practice. Neutralization is also found in many contemporary performance genres that create extreme framework ambiguities and/or confuse normative social values. 4. Reformation—applies primarily to ritual events in which a microcosm of the universe is created in order to bring it into harmony with the macrocosm. This sort of ritual was most common in the small-scale societies of the past but is still found in the remnants of those existing today. In these cases, the iconicities (similarities) created between micro- and macro-cosmos can be seen to flow in both directions, such that the continued order of the universe (or life-world) is seen to be dependent on the careful performance of human rituals. Examples include many versions of Australian Aboriginal sacred business, Balinese and Vedic ritual, many indigenous traditions (Dogon, Andean), and some “New-Age” ritual re-creations. 5. Transformation—special events in which an existing social situation is seen as problematic, needing to be brought into line with a more perfect, ideal, or desired social or cosmic order. This includes most rituals found in the monotheistic world religions, in which humans are subject to sin or error. It also applies to movements for social and political change in which ideals like justice, peace, democracy, or ethnic harmony are advocated and attempts are made to bring them into being. 6. Linguistic tropes—a residual category that includes the many sorts of relations found in genres like European theater and other classical types (Chinese Opera, Indian Kathakali, Javanese Wayang, Japanese Noh), which have complex linguistic patterning central to the performative events. In these cases, such devices as irony, satire, critique, and ambiguity create multivocal relations with everyday activities, using specific tropes like metaphor, metonymy, and the like. These sorts of linguistic forms are also found, to a greater or lesser extent, combined with many of the more fundamental relations enumerated in the first five items in the table.

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world are hybrid types that have at least been influenced by more literary forms. Furthermore, all event creation these days is accompanied by extensive written accounts, discussion, commentary, and similar kinds of critical reflective activity. The suggestion is that the fundamental relations between special events and everyday life I have identified can be helpful in understanding many types of performances, especially those that are ritual-like or involve primarily nonverbal forms of signification. For other, more ramified types of special events, a broader set of semeiotic relations will be necessary, and these can be used to supplement and enlarge the repertoire of tools involved in the project of self-revelation that is the understanding of human cultural performance. Let me reiterate again that these theoretical tools are only useful insofar as they help in the uncovering of significant effects manifested in particular performative events. These effects or meanings are not just those currently available to interpreters, as Peirce repeatedly emphasized, but also include meanings and effects that might appear in the future (or those that could possibly appear). In this way, the Peircean model is dynamic, building creative potential into the theory, thereby accounting for the inevitability of changing interpretations over time. The question arises as to what degree different sorts of performances are intended as comments on the normative social world, and it seems that there must be significant variation on this point. To capture some central tendencies, one might state hyperbolically that one plays for play’s sake, participates in ritual to get in touch with the fundamental nature of the universe, and seeks out entertainment to reflect on current social conditions and/or to escape from them. If one accepts the thrust of this (extremely broad) generalization, it follows that many kinds of contemporary performative events, in contrast to ritual, are both too close to ordinary life (mere comments on it) and, paradoxically, too far away (fantastic escapes from it), to be deeply affecting. For example, there is the phenomenon of “reality television,” which purports to take segments or scenarios of ordinary life and, through a disguised form of mediation, create entertainment from them. The fame of the participants in these shows is partly the allure of celebrity, which in fantasy can be seen to descend upon anyone at any time (“it could be me”). Celebrity itself, in this climate, paradoxically becomes something deeply ordinary yet still exotically fantastic. Carnivals in Social Settings In order to put more flesh on the theoretical framework I have laid out so far, I will now turn to an extended example: a comparison between Brazilian Carnaval and the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras. I hope to show, through this discussion, something of the usefulness of the above categories of P/p relations

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for gaining a deeper understanding of specific events. In addition, I will use some of the concepts developed in the discussion of play to emphasize especially the mediating influences that complicate the picture. In an earlier piece (1999), I discussed some embodied experiences of Brazilian Carnaval (mine and those reported by and observed in others) in relation to a range of discursive interpretations such events have been given. This link between feeling and understanding is one important goal of any fieldwork study of performance, but it cannot be achieved without a sustained, practical apprenticeship and immersion in the relevant habits and practices. During my time in Brazil, I was studying the martial game of capoeira, and the experiences of Carnival were incidental to that work. In the case of Sydney, I have merely observed the Mardi Gras parade on a few occasions and discussed it with friends. It remains for someone else to do a more thorough study of the embodied experience of participation in both cases. All I can hope to do here is to examine some of the logical relations already sketched out, leaving an in-depth discussion of embodied practices for others.10 Hopefully, I can demonstrate the efficacy of the schema I have argued for, while also indicating some directions future investigations into carnival studies might take. To begin the comparative exercise, the first step is to note the relative importance of the genres to the societies in question. Clearly, Brazilian Carnaval is central to the image many have of that country, as has been widely noted (Da Matta 1991; Parker 1991), whereas the Australian Mardi Gras, as the name indicates, primarily involves the city of Sydney. The latter event has become increasingly well known in the rest of Australia, however, especially among Gay and Lesbian people, since the national television broadcaster (ABC) began airing the parade in 1994. For a few years afterward, the Sydney parade was seen on free-to-air commercial channels, and now it is covered on cable television. Accordingly, the Sydney event has also become quite widely known and visited by people from other countries, but these are primarily people of alternative gender interests, mostly from the United States and Britain. In contrast, the Brazilian Carnival clearly has a widespread international reputation far exceeding the Australian one, with a very large number of tourists visiting the Rio Carnival in particular. Other cities in Brazil also have famous parades—notably, Salvador, Recife/Olinda, and São Paulo—and each regional center has variant traditions that allow the expression of local styles and interests. In short, Brazilian Carnival is a major defining event for national identity, whereas the Sydney parade is only a regional festivity, important primarily to those of alternative gender orientation. The Brazilian events originally lasted for three days, the triduo: Sunday, Monday, and Tuesday, ending on Ash Wednesday. Over time this period has extended backward to include the weekend, meaning that, in most places,

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things get started on Friday or even Thursday, leading into the weekend. In Recife, some parade groups even “go out” (sair) on Ash Wednesday and afterward. The point here is that important special events tend to distend—expand past their original boundaries—as the lead-up and cool-down transitions become events in themselves over time. In Salvador, there are several months of street parties leading up to Carnaval, each in a different neighborhood, and in Rio, the ensaios (“rehearsals”) of the major samba schools and smaller blôcos intensify and become longer and more elaborate as the time for the main event grows near. In Sydney, the main parade lasts only a few hours on one evening, with an “after party” that continues for the rest of the night.11 The latter is indoors, with admission by ticket only, a good example of a special event that is not exactly public. However, over time this one-night celebration has become situated within a range of other events. These include the Sleaze Ball, which occurs a few months earlier, and a range of festival events nearer to the parade time, including a film festival, concerts, cabaret events, and the like. Following the parade and after party, there are a range of “recovery” events at bars, pubs, and cafes for the next few days. For those readers who do not know the Australian background, the main event, the Mardi Gras parade, began primarily as a form of political protest march, and the first one concluded with a large number of arrests by the police. It was organized in 1978 to commemorate the ninth anniversary of the Greenwich Village Stonewall Riots (Carbery 1995). Over the years, it evolved from this agonistic encounter to a more ludic celebration of alternative gender, but there are still political aspects to the parade, including placards with protest and advocacy messages. The antigay sentiment among police and other officials was clearly quite strong in 1978, and this resurfaced at several times in subsequent years. In the last decade or two, however, a contingent of gay and lesbian police officers and their supporters have entered the parade, and other public officials are now also happy to participate. This dramatic change clearly indicates that community and government sentiment toward gays and lesbians has changed fundamentally since the march began. How much of this change is due, directly or indirectly, to the performance of the Mardi Gras events is open for discussion, but they clearly have had a significant influence. In the early days, the event was known as the “Gay Mardi Gras,” but this usage was soon challenged by lesbian groups. As the number of lesbian participants in the events rose, these challenges increased until, in 1988, the title of the organizing committee, and of the parade itself, was changed to include the word lesbian (Carbery 1995: 103). This sufficed until the late nineties, when more and more alternative gender identities demanded to have their voices heard: transsexuals, bisexuals, transgendered people, and so forth. The acronym LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender) has been used widely in recent

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years, but even that was amended subsequently to add a Q (queer) for all those who still can’t find a place in the other categories. The arguments over categories continue, and they coincide to some extent with issues of border policing and participation: Who is to decide how alternative genders are designated and which ones are appropriate or inappropriate for participation? Questions such as this sit awkwardly with the purported freedom that is generally expected to characterize carnival play. The greater degree of expansion and regional variation in the Brazilian frameworks, as compared with the Sydney Mardi Gras, has an interesting resonance with variations in the ethos of participation. The Brazilian events, in principle, are intended for any and all Brazilians, while foreigners are also (usually) made welcome. In contrast, the Sydney parade is only for LGBTQ people, with straights encouraged (or at least allowed) to watch the parade from the sidelines. In recent years, groups who are working with HIV/AIDS sufferers, in addition to others who are supporters of gay or lesbian organizations, have been allowed to parade, but organizers are wary of too much “straight” participation, and frequently the question of appropriateness is raised. The controversies about parade participation have been even more biting with regard to the after party, since the presence of bisexual couples in the mix has sometimes been seen as inappropriate by lesbian and gay participants. Some have argued that, along with the widely used category of heteronormativity, there should also be, in juxtaposition, the more problematic category of homonormativity to capture this sort of conflict over sexual play (Browne, Lim, and Brown 2007). In general terms, the fundamental problem here is that of rule-governed activity, since carnivals are usually created to play with, parody, and challenge normal social organization. That is one reason creating boundaries and enforcing rules can be seen as problematic. Since, in addition, people who themselves have been victims of the rules of social normativity are clearly uncomfortable in the role of rule enforcers, even for an alternative regime, it is understandable why these issues are so fraught. Problems of exclusion and inclusion are cast somewhat differently in the case of Brazil, since the general ethos is that everyone should be encouraged to participate. However, a closer look reveals that issues of class and race, so pervasive in everyday life, rear their heads in the Carnival events as well. It has long been observed that, in general, poorer and darker-skinned people go out onto the streets for Carnival, whereas wealthier and lighter-skinned people tend to go to private clubs or else leave the cities to avoid Carnival altogether. This tendency has also affected the organization of the largest parade groups, known as Escolas de Samba (Samba academies), in Rio de Janeiro. Many of the oldest groups, such as Mangueira and Portela, were originally organized by poor people who lived in the slums (favelas) of the city. Traditionally these

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groups funded themselves by charging for costumes—a sort of annual subscription fee for those who wanted to parade. The top-class parade groups compete with each other for prizes and recognition each year, and the effect of this has been to increase the elaboration of the costumes and floats to the point that the costs for subscription have skyrocketed. This has been offset somewhat by commercial sponsorship, but in many cases the increasing costs of subscription have prevented the residents of the original neighborhoods from parading with their own academies. Groups have experimented with a sliding scale, and some have now begun to offer free membership to core participants while charging wealthy outsiders top dollar to participate. However, the poorer participants sometimes protest when media celebrities purchase subscriptions to the groups simply to enhance their publicity. The commercialization of the Rio Carnival was further increased with the construction, in 1984, of the Sambódromo, a permanent framework of bleachers that is used to control admission to the top-class parades and to facilitate television coverage, which is another major source of revenue. All of these developments have raised class and color issues more and more strongly, as many of the poorer and darker-skinned12 revelers in Rio have been reduced to watching events on television or participating in alternative parades in other areas of the city. In one study, the author alleges that light-skinned, middle-class Brazilians have “stolen” Carnival participation from the darker, poorer originators (Sheriff 1999). In Sydney, because there is little or no monetary competition in the parade itself, there is scant opportunity for commercial sponsorship of the events. Although substantial tourist revenue is generated every year, this doesn’t reach the organizing committee directly, so from time to time the issue of funding has threatened the viability of Mardi Gras. In contrast, the increasing costs of the Brazil carnivals, especially the Rio parades, fueled by competition, have transformed the events, in some cases calling into question the original purposes and effects of the celebration. As noted in Chapter 2, competition (Caillois’s and Huizinga’s category of agon) is clearly a major organizing factor in the capitalism of everyday life. It seems likely that the emphasis on competition in Brazilian Carnival has pushed the quotidian issues of class and race, formerly somewhat veiled in fantasy, more overtly into the celebratory framework, perhaps damaging it beyond repair, as some believe. In the case of the Salvador Carnival, the more Afrocentric groups (afoxés and blôcos Afro), in contrast with the whiter, more middle-class groups, have struggled for sponsorship and for more prominent parade times (see Williamson 2012).

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Sex and Gender Play Since at least the turn of the twentieth century, cross-dressing homosexual men have been prominent features of Brazilian Carnival, but this celebrity was not carried over into acceptance of transvestism in everyday life (Green 1999; Kulick 1998). In this case, Carnival represents a mode of inversion, which also serves to reinforce normative patterns: when Carnival ends, things go back to normal, and such men are again mocked and tormented if they appear on the streets in drag. A different case, with a similar effect, surrounds the crossdressing of heterosexual men. For example, in Recife I witnessed the Carnival parade of the Virgems de Olinda (Virgins of Olinda), who were very macho men, footballers and the like, dressed as women. The joke was that they were playing around with this incongruity, very much in dialogue with the spectators (in 1983). Again, they were inverting gender norms under the license of Carnival, but the effect was primarily a reinforcement of their macho normativity. However, it has been observed that, in Brazil, macho men can engage in anal sex with other men without damage to their heterosexual status as long as they are the penetrators and not the penetrated (Kulick 1998; Parker 1991). This raises interesting questions, for some analysts, as to the relations between homosociality and homoeroticism (Chavez-Silverman and Hernandez 2000; Case, Brett, and Foster 1995). It seems possible to argue that gender normativity itself has been slowly changing in Brazil such that machismo in men is losing favor in light of increasing awareness of the widespread problem of domestic violence, usually against women. Since the 1970s, laws favoring men in domestic violence situations have begun to erode, and in 2006, Brazil enacted the “Maria da Penha” law,13 making violence against women in many forms illegal for the first time. Since then, although enforcement is inconsistent and problematic in many ways, general awareness of violence against women has altered attitudes toward gender relations among many. However, abortion rights for women have not kept pace with these other attitudes, at least in part due to the influence of Catholicism. At present, it is still illegal to abort a fetus in Brazil except if the mother’s life is in danger or in the case of rape. In 2012, it became legal to abort if the fetus exhibited anencephaly (a fatal condition), but according to recent estimates, more than a million illegal abortions are still performed every year in Brazil, according to a piece on the website Hivos (2008).14 In Sydney, when gay men dress up as women, they sometimes choose to imitate female celebrities, and the ones they choose to imitate are usually the most feminine women (e.g., Marilyn Monroe, Kylie Minogue) often associated with sexuality as a central aspect of their fame. Notice that even though such cross-dressing is a form of inversion, the reinforcing of stereotypical femininity

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is also, paradoxically, a reinforcement of gender norms (at least those of a more traditional sort). However, in these cases there is also a degree of neutralization, since the men dressing up are not machos but rather men attracted to other men. A more extreme example would be the case of those transgendered former males who have had sexual reassignment surgery in order to become women. They dress as women but were formerly male; most are attracted to other men, but some are transgendered lesbians, and others profess to be bisexual. These kinds of multiple inversions and confusions constitute good evidence for gender neutralization. In this case, I believe that the effect has become socially transformative, as general attitudes toward gender normativity are softened through the understanding that gender preferences are fluid, changeable, and therefore somewhat arbitrary. One can find similar gender conundrums in indigenous societies, as in the case of Native American “contraries” (Roscoe 1998; Williams 1986), or the homosexual practices of some groups in Papua New Guinea (Herdt 1984), for instance. As I noted earlier, in Shakespeare there are celebrated cases, like those of Viola and Rosalind, in which actors play a woman disguised as a man impersonating a woman. Since the actor in Elizabethan times would have been a young boy, an interesting form of gender neutralization is clearly present in this case as well. So the performativity of gender, in many types of events, often involves a normative heterosexual opposition that can be celebrated either through reinforcing displays or with temporary inversions that nonetheless reinforce such normativity. In other cases, the inversions can themselves be re-inverted any number of times or result in paradoxes, producing more or less strong versions of gender neutralization. In the anthropological cases, it can be argued that varying sexual ideas and practices create regimes of gender normativity that need to be accounted for anew in each society. In the case of Elizabethan England, some believe that sexual normativity may have been quite different from what a contemporary observer might expect: Was it, perhaps, even less rigidly binary and fixed than previous (and subsequent) standards in many places in Europe? (See Bray 1995; Smith 1991). I am arguing that the degree of neutralization in special events often reflects the rigidity or flexibility of gender boundaries in everyday life, so that changes in the marked frameworks reflect and are reflected by changes in everyday attitudes and practices. In general, Brazil has had somewhat extreme everyday gender divisions as compared with Australia—but arguably not as rigid as those in many other Latin American cultural worlds, where the machismo/marianismo formation is even more extreme (see, for example, Gutman 2006; Lancaster 1992). Things have changed somewhat in Brazil during recent decades, but the normative world of everyday life still does not afford much tolerance for alternative gender practices. For instance, police officers, soldiers, and politicians in

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most cases cannot “come out of the closet” as homosexual and still have public careers in Brazil, although artists and other “alternative” practitioners have been able to do so. At least until recently, police officers in Salvador, Bahia, periodically abducted transvestite male prostitutes and subjected them to beatings and sometimes rape (Kulick 1998). Such transvestites (travestís) cannot walk the streets at non-festival times without routinely being subjected to verbal and sometimes physical harassment. On the other hand, “stand-out” figures (destaques) in the Rio Carnival, who wear the most elaborate costumes, are frequently homosexual men who are widely celebrated for their contributions to the parades. Such men have also contributed to a long tradition of drag balls in Rio, and homosexual men (not usually cross-dressers) are frequently chosen as the artistic directors of the large samba school parades (Green 1999). The difference is that most of these men do not cross-dress in daily life—only during Carnival (if at all). In this case, Carnival inversions usually result in a reinforcement of heteronormativity outside that framework. However, the prestige afforded to destaques and the winners of drag ball contests has arguably been an influence on how artistic directors, singers, dancers, and the like are able to come out as gay or bisexual in everyday life. These indicators might be seen as the first move toward a more overt neutralization of gender opposition, perhaps a signal of more radical social transformations to come. In the case of Sydney, gender neutralization can clearly be seen as an overt attempt at social transformation—as a plea, or sometimes a demand, for more tolerance and political reform. Indeed, as noted, some groups are openly transformative, parading with banners for legal changes more favorable to LGBTQ people. In Brazil, however, social change of gender norms seems to be proceeding more slowly, and in fewer cases can Carnival be seen as transformative in my sense, at least overtly. Instead, issues of race and class inequality are highlighted more clearly in Carnival scenarios, emerging mostly as disputes about funding and parade priority while being somewhat masked as imaginative potentials in the costume themes and song lyrics. One case is point is the mythologizing of the historical figure of Chica (or Xica) da Silva, a slave in the eighteenth century who became a wealthy society matron. She lived with a Portuguese diamond merchant with whom she had several children, and he treated her as his wife, although they never officially married. She enjoyed his great wealth, and although it was a scandal at the time, she achieved an elevated social status to some extent. Her story is often told in a variety of media: it has been a frequent theme in Carnival parades as well as on television and in film. The story is interpreted in a variety of ways, but it is usually seen as being concerned with race and class and not primarily with gender relations. Certainly Chica used exotic sexuality to get ahead, a common

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practice among African slave women since few other areas of advancement were open to them. However, her rise is seen primarily not as a feminist triumph but rather as an illustration of the victory of the oppressed in a climate of ethnic and racial domination. Many Brazilian women, especially those of color, still employ a strategy of sexual allure to try to improve their social mobility (Pravaz 2003), but does this stereotype impede the progress of women in other ways? Has Carnival play, highlighting women’s sexuality, enhanced or inhibited social developments like the Maria da Penha law and abortion rights? Religious Differences One significant way the Brazilian and Australian carnivals are different is in how religion is portrayed and negotiated. Brazil is, after all, a Catholic country, such that many people are involved, one way or another, in church activities and most people are influenced by Catholic standards of morality. In most areas of Brazil, Carnival ends on Ash Wednesday, ushering in the season of Lent.15 In my experience, there were few, if any, Carnival costumes, floats, or other displays portraying Christian themes, and church leaders often urge their true followers not to participate in the pagan festivities. An example of pervasive Christian morality is the scandal created when President Itamar Franco was photographed kissing and cavorting with scantily clad Playboy playmate Lilian Ramos on a balcony overlooking the parade in 1994. He was vilified in the press for this indiscretion, amid calls for his resignation, which persisted long after the event. This outcry occurred in spite of the fact that such fraternization is known to be widespread, but many people are not comfortable when the display of “immorality” is quite so openly public or when influential public figures are involved. Again, here is a case where Carnival, as an event clearly set off from, but punctuating, the church calendar, can serve as an inversion of normal religious morality, but at the same time, it can reinforce the latter. In this case, even the putative Carnival framework boundary, within which it is said that “anything goes” (vale tudo), was not enough to justify the moral transgression in the eyes of some. However, an alternative point of view on religion is sometimes also expressed, as in the song lyrics of Caetano Veloso, a famous Brazilian musician: “O carnaval é invenção do diabo, que Deus abençoou” (“Carnival is the invention of the Devil, which God has blessed”).16 The church authorities would clearly not agree with this sentiment, but the fact is that many Brazilians participate in Carnival and still consider themselves good Catholics. If this is true, then the lyrics express a kind of neutralization of religious morality, wherein God and the Devil have a moment of accommodation. This may be understood also in light of the complex relationship between Catholicism and Candomblé, the

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Afro-Catholic religion widespread in Bahia, with versions throughout Brazil. In this uneasy mix, African deities are often associated with Catholic saints, and the Devil is sometimes identified with Exú, Yoruba deity of the crossroads, who facilitates communication between humans and the spiritual world. Even Brazilians who don’t have direct experience with Candomblé, Umbanda, or other similar syncretic beliefs and practices are aware of these connections, which can be said to be a common aspect of Brazilian cultural understanding. Depending on which god is doing the blessing, the Devil can be more or less easily accommodated. In this example, the potential for the neutralization of Catholic morality in Carnival can perhaps be seen as the possibility for, or actuality of, change in the everyday social world. Indeed, for many people it seems that normative heterosexual relations are often honored in the breach, under the rubric of sacanagem (“doing the dirty”) (see Lewis 1999; Parker 1991). To recap this argument briefly, it seems to be the case that many, if not most, Brazilians find satisfaction in sexual acts that are frowned upon by mainstream Catholic morality: acts outside marriage; acts involving anal sex, bondage, or other “kinky” practices; and acts between same-sex couples. Arguably, everyday sexual practice has been diverging from Catholic moral codes more and more in recent decades, although many times a thin veneer masks such activities from overt public view.17 To some extent, the loosening of heterosexual morality from the strictures of the Catholic Church, which has been considerable and is a main theme of Carnival, has aided in the acceptance of alternative gender roles. However, change in the former has clearly been much faster than change in the latter. A completely different situation exists in Sydney with respect to religion in the Mardi Gras parade. In this event, Catholicism is often mocked and lampooned in a way that would be totally inappropriate in Brazil. For example, there is a group of gay men who parade each year dressed as nuns, calling themselves the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence. Clearly, morality and gender norms are inverted here, and both are in play in a lively way. One year, I saw a mock-up of the Popemobile driving down the Oxford Street route, complete with a gay man dressed as the Pope throwing condoms to the crowd. Homosexual Australians feel free to mock the Catholic Church, primarily because all forms of Christian religion have only a tenuous relation to mainstream society. Although a slim majority of Australians would probably associate themselves with some form of Christianity, Catholics are in the minority, and church attendance is notoriously low for all sects. In addition, many LBGTQ Australians are particularly unhappy with the Catholic Church because of its continuing failure to accept them as good Christians—let alone to allow them into positions of authority. Furthermore, the strong Church stand against birth control is seen by many as outrageous,

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especially since AIDS is spreading rapidly in many parts of the world. So one might say that Catholic morality, at least as laid down by papal authorities, is in contradiction to a more general Australian cultural standard of “a fair go for all.” This egalitarian sentiment has facilitated the increasing tolerance of straight people toward alternative-gendered people in Australia, which is not to say that there is no homophobia or violence in some places. However, it would be hard to argue that the Sydney Mardi Gras has had no influence on the legislative changes that have gone some way toward guaranteeing equal rights to gay and lesbian citizens, although the playing field is still far from level. In the case of Brazil, some evidence of the neutralization of Christianity in Carnival could be seen as evidence that the hold of the Catholic Church is waning somewhat, especially over sexual mores. However, few if any overt events are organized that constitute a direct confrontation with Church hierarchy. Since the 1970s, the popularity of “liberation theology” has been quite strong in Brazil, though its influence seems to have waned somewhat in recent decades. This movement is evidence of a desire for social and religious transformation, but to my knowledge, it has never been overtly staged as a Carnival theme. Note that liberation theology has had virtually nothing to say about sexuality or gender issues but is instead focused primarily on class inequality and secondly on racial discrimination. Once again, these issues take the fore in the domain of transformative special events, such as political protests and land reform struggles, but such overt political discourse is rarely if ever directly present in Carnival celebrations, although it has been a factor behind the scenes. In Australia, the secular view holds sway in the public domain, especially among the alternative-gender positions, and the lampooning of the Catholic Church in Mardi Gras provides evidence for this. To be fair, fundamentalist Protestant sects and figures are also freely lampooned, such as the notorious “wowser” (puritanical conservative) Fred Nile. Some gays and lesbians in Australia would still want to transform Christianity, while others are content just to laugh at what they consider to be its foibles. Politics in Festivity Many of the differences between the carnivals of Brazil and Sydney can be captured by a central tendency in the former to avoid overtly political and governmental themes, whereas in the latter they are commonplace. Insofar as protests against poverty and racism can be divined in the Brazilian parades, they are usually masked in historical scenarios relating to slavery and the colonial past or are present in the struggles around funding and prominence in parades. In this way, overt relations between the parades and contemporary everyday life are covered over in a veneer of fantasy, which then makes any clear messages

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a matter of interpretive debate. For the most part, Brazilians seem to want to avoid serious issues during Carnival, even though such problems may preoccupy their lives at other times. Brazilian parade groups are not usually formed around issues or problems, or even by occupational groups, but mostly according to neighborhood associations. Some exceptions to this are the well-known Filhos de Gandhi (Sons of Gandhi) in Salvador as well as afoxés and blôcos Afro, such as Ilê Aiyê and Olodum. These groups have offered protest songs in the past, and some have tried to restrict membership to people of color, but these efforts have caused widespread criticism. Filhos was formed in solidarity with Gandhi’s efforts to combat racism in South Africa early in his career, and the other groups were founded much later, in the 1970s and 1980s, under the influence of the Movimento Negro Unificado (Unified Black Movement). In recent years, members have self-selected for an interest in Afrocentric cultural solidarity, since any effort to restrict membership on the basis of color or class is met with criticism, seen as a violation of the egalitarian principle frequently called “racial democracy.” The latter rubric has largely fallen into disrepute, especially in the eyes of academics and intellectuals, since it is seen by them as a veil covering up the continuing racism still to be found in Brazil. Nonetheless, many ordinary people still operate as if this principle were in effect, depending on the situation, and will defend it under some circumstances. Disputes about racial discrimination in Brazil continue, but problems often arise when Carnival groups try to involve themselves directly with specific political or social issues. Therefore, when groups of police officers or firemen parade in Sydney as homosexuals or in support of them, this represents a clear difference from the Brazilian case. When some groups carry placards asking for legislative changes or advocating for particular political positions, this is not seen to conflict with other groups who have a more ludic interest in costume, music, and dancing. Instead, the serious and the playful come together, if not seamlessly then at least amicably, to foster the general message of “gay pride.” In Brazil, police officers would never be allowed to parade as a group, and I doubt that many of them would be willing to publicly express sympathy for homosexual people, let alone come out as such. Indeed, it is forbidden for anyone to dress up in police uniform as a costume, since they might be confused with the real police, who are patrolling to enforce order. Such prohibitions, as well as the constraints on political and religious critique, belie the frequent motto that “anything goes” in Brazilian Carnival. Instead, the Carnival framework there is carefully maintained, not just before and after the events, but also during the festivities. In Sydney, alternative ways of life are more easily accepted as part of the everyday, except when they go too far into excess. The result is that normativity itself is much more difficult to define in Australia, since there is no widely

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accepted moral code and cultural practices are much more diverse. In Brazil, everyone can easily recognize and delineate normal standards of behavior, but this often represents a façade behind which the interesting stuff of life takes place. So the Carnival theme of “anything goes” expresses this disdain for the ordered world while also seeming to keep it within the limits of the pre-Lenten celebration. In such a world, reinforcement and inversion operate relatively clearly and in harmonious opposition with each other, although thematic ambiguities and struggles behind the scenes allow for some gradual social changes. By contrast, in Australia, the dominant forms during Mardi Gras might be better seen as different forms of relative neutralization combined with cases of overt transformative desire, and the result is fairly rapid cultural change, at least in some areas. Overt and Tacit Effects of Performance If attitudes toward sexuality, gender, race, and class are changing in Brazil at different rates, how much is this due to performances in the various Carnival parades and events? This question is very difficult to answer convincingly. One aspect of the problem was illustrated by Victor Turner using an “infinity symbol” diagram, which was meant to demonstrate the relations between overt performance (his “stage drama” and “social drama”) as opposed to covert or implicit “rhetorical structures” and “social process” (1990: 17). The details of the labeling could be argued over, but the insightful point is that the relations between special events and everyday life are often indirect: mediated by attitudes, practices, sentiments, and other signs that circulate back and forth between the two event fields (special and ordinary) via human embodiment. I have been arguing, by extension, that the ways P/p relations are mediated encourage this process; the possibilities opened up by performativity/habituation mean that all overt acts or events may have covert or implicit effects. From the perspective of human embodiment, overt signs of movement or feeling can trigger effects that remain latent in the human organism or indirectly influence the consciousness of a being. On the other hand, however, contra Turner, signs can also be transferred more or less directly from staged or planned performances to daily life, and vice versa, without having to go through indirect channels. One interesting example of this latter sort of interchange was noted in a New Yorker article about the importance of television in Brazilian daily life (Guillermoprieto 1993). In this piece, Alma Guillermoprieto mentions the influence of Brazilian telenovelas (prime-time soap operas) on ordinary people, noting that the television shows of the dominant network, O Globo, routinely draw as many as fifty million viewers. She documents a fascinating interplay between one telenovela, Os Anos Rebeldes (The Rebel Years), and the political struggle

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that marked the end of the Collor presidency. The Rebel Years was intended by its author to be a re-creation of the tumultuous 1960s, which had the added frisson in Brazil of protests, not over the Vietnam War, but against the 1964 coup, which ushered in twenty years of military dictatorship. The downfall of Collor in 1992 was hastened by massive street demonstrations calling for his resignation, and these demonstrations seemed to take some impetus from the portrayals of the earlier demonstrations enacted in The Rebel Years. One of the anti-Collor placards read, “Anos Rebeldes: Ultimo Capitulo” (“Rebel Years: Last Chapter”). Guillermoprieto quotes the author of the soap opera, Gilberto Braga: “In Chapter Eight, we showed clips of Haight-Ashbury—hippies with flowers painted on their faces,” Braga recalled. “At the very next demonstration the caras pintadas—kids with their faces painted with colors and slogans—made their first appearance. Simultaneously, all over the country.” (Guillermoprieto 1993: 53). This sort of direct correspondence, or transference, of signs is obviously a fairly rare occurrence, but it nevertheless illustrates a much more overt relation between event types than Turner’s diagram implies. A political demonstration is a spontaneous special event, relatively unplanned, whose driving force, as I have been arguing, is a desire for social transformation. In contrast, the status of television as a live event, and thus as a performance, is problematic. I will discuss the issue of “liveness” in Chapter 6, but for now it is clear that highly mediated (or “mediatized”)18 genres such as television can be very influential on cultural life-worlds in contemporary societies. This influence is, arguably, especially strong in a place such as Brazil given the dominance of the Globo network there. Some analysts have claimed that a salient feature of television and film is that it keeps people off the streets, making it more difficult to get them out of their houses for political protest and other live events. The case of The Rebel Years would seem to provide a counter-example to any such easy generalization. Since the biggest parades of the Rio Carnival are televised every year in Brazil, a similar argument has been applied: that it keeps people off the streets and steals energy from the live celebration. There may well be a certain amount of truth to this view, although in many places, even in Rio, alternative parades have arisen for those not interested in staying home to watch the grandest spectacle. A more serious critique is that Carnival itself is an “opiate of the people,” in Marx’s well-known phrase, although in his view the critique applied to religion (see O’Malley 1970). The argument is that Carnival distracts people from “real” political and social issues with which they would be better advised to concern themselves. My view is that this argument is misguided, since “reality” and “fantasy” are everywhere intermeshed, both in the imaginal constitution of daily life and in imaginative frameworks of Performance. I hope I have demonstrated

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clearly here that carnivals can have many transformative effects, both overt and covert, on social life-worlds. In analyzing these examples of relations between carnivals and everyday life, a general model for social change has been suggested, as a hypothesis. In the first place, events that serve to reinforce normative social practices can comfortably coexist with occasional inversions of those relations, especially if the latter are clearly bounded within discrete frameworks, like gender normativity and class/race hierarchies in Brazil. However, even such carnivalesque inversions can begin to emerge as influences on daily life when imaginative potentials become realized over time. If and when such inversions “intrude” into daily life, they may also begin to replicate there and to iterate within special events, resulting in neutralizations of normative values by undermining the rigidity or arbitrariness of such norms. As this sense that norms are outmoded becomes more and more understood and accepted—as it is brought into awareness—this provides the ground for increasing social change in daily life and for special events to become more and more challenging of those norms. Accordingly, the boundary mediations of special events lead increasingly to boundary violations in everyday life and therefore to events intended to foster social transformation. This model would suggest that social change (often, sometimes, always?) begins in the realm of the imagination and gradually (or sometimes suddenly?) evolves into a more concrete reality. As I have noted repeatedly, such a process is not merely, or even primarily, a conceptual one; it happens initially in the realm of embodied experience. The next chapter explores this fundamental aspect of performative practice more fully, building on previous work in this area, which has now become a vibrant academic and artistic interest.

CHAPTER 5

Embodiment, Emplacement, and Cultural Process

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ultural performance has frequently been implicated in the creation of group identities and in the differentiation of one group from another, but it is also central to the phenomenon of celebrity and other forms of enhanced personal identity. As I indicated in Chapter 2, childhood play has repeatedly been shown to be involved in both personal and social identity formation, and children’s play is clearly connected to adult play in a variety of ways. Given the manifold relations between types of play and cultural performance, it is no exaggeration to assert that together they are central to both group and personal identities: to their creation, maintenance, and re-creation. In an earlier work, I began to explore the problem of selfhood as related to embodiment, arguing (along with many others, notably Drew Leder [1990]) that Cartesian dualism, also known as the mind-body split, represents a cultural and historical misunderstanding of human being, at least a partial one (Lewis 1995). In that piece, I tried to bracket out the problems of intersubjectivity by focusing heuristically on the relations between self and body, but clearly this artificial separation could only be an opening move. Accordingly, in this chapter I want to continue the exploration into the relations between personal and group experiences of events. The main question I want to address is this: In what sense could the phenomenological focus on experience relate to groups rather than to separate persons only? If shared experience exists, how does it occur and what are its manifestations? My approach to embodied performance follows a similar schema to that proposed by the social theorist Hans Joas, who speaks of “situation-corporealitysociality” as fundamental to his theory of action (1996: ch. 3). His concept of “situation” refers not only to location but also to the coherence of a stream of events from the point of view of social actors. Humans “always already” find themselves in situations that are, at best, only partially of their own choosing

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and over which they have, at best, only partial control. These situations prefigure agendas, expectations, and desires, constraining possible responses and methods of engagement. A key aspect of situations is their location, which, as the philosopher Edward Casey argues, is never a simple matter; he speaks instead of “non-simple” location (1993: 65–67), a concept that involves multiple aspects of emplacement (dimensions, directions, horizons) as well as histories, memories, feelings, social constraints, imagination, and the like. In Casey’s view, which I share, there can be no embodiment without emplacement. An embodied being must be in some place; it cannot exist in “no place.” Furthermore, places and bodies co-construct each other; humans create places to accommodate their bodies, and bodies are modeled on and experienced in terms of the places in which they dwell.1 The same is true of events, of course: they must occur in specific places, and the “locatability” of events is a major reason they are useful as an analytical category. Let me begin by summarizing some salient points of embodiment and emplacement theories that form the basis of this approach. As noted, I agree with both European and American phenomenologists that the Cartesian “split” (mind vs. body), although intuitively appealing for some aspects of embodied experience, is not an adequate model for understanding corporeality. Instead, humans live in the fluid interaction—the intermediation—between embodied minds and intelligent bodies. For example, Evan Thompson argues that human embodiment involves a “pre-reflexive self-awareness,” which is a kind of “intransitive and non-intentional bodily self-consciousness” (2007: 265, 315).2 This is, so to speak, the implicit feeling that my embodiment is my self—that my experiences belong to me, located here within. From this baseline, higher order “meta-awareness” of phenomena may initially well up as subliminal consciousness, which Edmund Husserl called “involuntary affective influence.” For instance, a background noise arises that one initially may not hear but only dimly sense as a perturbation on current activity. Eventually one may isolate and focus on the sensation as a noise, hearing it fully by locating its source and identifying it. In this case, the sensation arises into full consciousness by a process Husserl called “affective allure,” which encourages an active receptivity or “turning toward” the sound (cited in Thompson 2007: 373–74). This dynamic, described in the realm of sensation, is also found, I maintain, in the awareness of emotion and bodily habits and indeed is a general contour for all experience. For Charles Peirce, this process is a movement from firstness to secondness, as a sign emerges from its background condition and becomes salient due to its appearance as a contrast or disjunction in the perceptual field, calling one’s attention to it. The sensation arrives fully fledged in thirdness when it is identified and labeled. As previously mentioned, I characterize such a development, in general, as the

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micro-evolution of signification, involving the propagation of effects: first from pre-reflexivity through subliminal sense to conscious awareness and then from vague feelings to linguistic concepts and ideas. In the reverse process, humans consciously strive to acquire skills as embodied habits, and as the skills become incorporated fully, the habits often recede from consciousness. This results in the formation that Maurice Merleau-Ponty called “motor intentionality” (1962: 110) and that Hubert Dreyfus has recast as “absorbed skillful coping” (Dreyfus 2002: 378). Because adults learn how to walk and speak at such a young age, they often can’t remember the struggles these activities involved, but a parent can clearly observe such striving. Then later, as an adult, one cannot easily access or influence one’s movement or speech patterns, precisely because they are so deeply embodied. However, athletes and theatrical actors, to name two examples, are often confronted with the need to change or influence these deeply embodied habits. Accordingly, they may try to develop techniques for communicating between unconscious or preconscious habits and higher-order modes of thought and action that are more readily accessible. One good example is the work by John Sutton on the sport of cricket, in which he notes that batsmen have so little time to react to fast bowling that they must rely on deep-seated patterns of play that are beyond their conscious control. Therefore, the general wisdom is that thinking too much is an impediment to good batting, a truism in baseball and many similar sports as well. However, when conditions in the game change, a good player must be able to adjust his stroke making accordingly—for instance, to play more conservatively or to hit toward a certain area. Even more important, when players are in a batting slump, they feel compelled to make adjustments and may fall back on verbal cues or practice techniques, which seem at times to be able to “percolate downward” into the embodied depths and have indirect effects on those deepseated habits. Sutton gives the example of a cricket player telling himself simply to “watch the ball,” a familiar phrase in many sports, as a way of setting off a chain of effects, from more to less conscious, which hopefully can relax him and refocus his efforts, refreshing or reinvigorating the useful bodily habits that he has relied on in the past (Sutton 2007). This scenario confirms that there is a hierarchy of human habits, in which some are more deeply embodied and some are more superficially so. At times we may use more superficial habits to try to “communicate” with, or influence, deeper habits that are out of our direct control. Another good example is the process of falling asleep, described by Merleau-Ponty as a meaningful loss of intentionality or as “passive intentionality.” He notes that actively trying to go to sleep is often self-defeating. Instead, we engage in habitual actions designed to relax and prepare us—lying in a certain way, breathing deeply, thinking

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certain thoughts—in the hope that sleep will come to take us over (MerleauPonty 1962; cited in Joas 1996: 169–70). The reliance on higher-level habits to influence more deeply embodied ones means that even the latter, though not really under conscious control, may still be open to influence and thus to the possibility of change. A similar negotiation is also found in cultural worlds, wherein customs and traditional practices, the deep-seated foundations of social organization, need to be followed at most times, but if these practices are blindly enforced or become rigidly “calcified,” the group may not be able to adapt to changing conditions. In other words, both longstanding cultural practices and deeply embodied personal habits are important for normal functioning, but sometimes ways must be developed for influencing these habits and practices so that they are flexible enough to adapt to changing circumstances. A similar scenario has been proposed for some theories of evolutionary biology. One recent synthesis has put forward the view that developmental processes need to be both robust and flexible: robust in that they maintain self-organization in the face of change and flexible in that they also have the capacity to adapt to changing conditions (Gerhart and Kirschner 1997). Leder (1990) has expounded on the many ways that human embodiment is outside our awareness, resulting in corporeality that oscillates between bodies as selves at some times and bodies as objects3 at others. For example, when a part of one’s body becomes injured or diseased, it may become an alien presenceas-object, taking on a distance from one’s central self: my sprained ankle keeps me from walking properly; my stomach reacts badly to certain spicy foods. In other words, part of my body, instead of being integrated into my self as a gestalt, becomes an impediment to my normally functioning selfhood; that part becomes an “it” relative to me. Leder calls this form of self-alienation a mode of “dys-appearance”: my body, or part of it, appears in consciousness—but only as problematic, as an obstacle to be overcome (1990: 69–99). This is in contrast to the many ways normally functioning bodies can disappear from active consciousness. Perhaps the most fundamental has to do with Husserl’s concept of the sensory nullpunkt (null point), the transparent foundation or ground for the possibility of sensation, establishing a “here” that is the location of the self (Husserl 1989 [1929]). Accordingly, Husserl noted that the eye reveals a visual field but cannot see itself. Although one can get an image of one’s eye in the mirror, this is not the same as seeing one’s eye in the act of seeing, while looking out on the world. The idea is that an experience of this “null point” of vision, the location in and behind the eye from which vision opens outward, is essential to the constitution of one’s experience of the visual field and also to the existence of a “point of view” that becomes identified as a locus of personal existence. It follows that my personal “here” is assembled

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partly by the conjunction of all the null points of my sensorium. Leder argues that these sensory “arcs” are implicated in the “ecstatic” mode of experience, the “from-self-to-world” (intentional) process of perception, which is the normal or default mode of being (1990: 11–20). However, in reflection on the different sensory modalities, it seemed doubtful to me that all were equally ecstatic and that all were formed from null points as clearly as vision was. In the case of touch, for instance, there seems to be an active intermediacy whereby one can, in a sense, touch oneself touching. For Merleau-Ponty, such an encounter depends on a kind of “reversibility” and is centrally implicated in his non-material concept of “flesh”: a generalized “incarnate principle” that is prior to any division between subject and object (2000: 139ff.). If touching can be “con-fused with” being touched, then this sense of intermediacy is integral to touching in a way that makes it fundamentally different from the sense of vision (see Lewis 1995). Current research indicates that some aspects of touch act together in a process of “interoception”—providing sensations about the position and motion of our bodies, including possible courses of action (e.g., Paterson 2007). Some of these sensations correspond loosely to Husserl’s concept of pre-reflexive self-awareness, while others are quite present to active consciousness. The argument is that our sensorium provides an array of senses, some of which clearly distinguish inner from outer worlds (sight) whereas others are more intercorporeal (touch), in that they allow inner and outer to co-mingle under certain circumstances. In other words, some senses create a relatively clear division between subject and object (observer and observed), while others are capable of mediating that distinction by creating fields of sensation in which experience simply “happens,” without clear agents or patients. Examples of the latter are the intense confusions of tactile sensation in lovemaking and the deep immersion in sound dynamics of musical ensembles. As I will explore in what follows, the concept of intercorporeality can be a useful tool in providing embodied examples of intersubjective relations and in developing evidence for the existence, and perhaps the fundamental importance, of group experience. In addition to the normative “ecstatic” mode of embodied experience, another important synthetic sense that provides a focus for personal selfhood is what psychologist Paul Schilder called the “body image” (1950) and MerleauPonty later relabeled the “body schema” (1962). Schilder argued that humans build up, through a variety of sense impressions and embodied habits, a synthetic body image that is integrated and nucleated. Some phenomenologists, following the work of Merleau-Ponty, now tend to distinguish between body image and body schema. Whereas the former is an intentional object of consciousness, the latter (on many accounts) describes the inner sensory and motor processes that organize perception and action and are largely unconscious

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(Gallagher 1986).4 A similar approach underlies the work of Leder on what he called “body thematization” (1990: 91–92). The fact that the word body has been used to invoke an aspect of selfhood that seems at times autonomous provides some evidence for a total sense of self (at least in English and several other languages) that is the node or center for many embodied relations. Many people often think of themselves as being their bodies and identify with these as objects to such an extent that a category called “the body” appears to be fundamental in many theoretical accounts of selfhood.5 This identification of self with body is another indication of the strength of individuality, especially in Anglo-European societies, since a body, in those worlds, can be seen as an isolate bounded by the skin. This kind of Cartesian body image corresponds closely with the development of personality as “in-dividual,” which is characteristic of a certain extreme version of selfhood familiar to many readers. In other social worlds, such as South Asia, a different sort of body schema may underlie a sense of self as more of a “dividual,” to use anthropologist McKim Marriott’s term (1976; cf. Appadurai 1990; Daniel 1984). This dividual self may be usefully compared to what others have called a sociocentric self, in a formulation where the latter is opposed to an egocentric sense of selfhood (Scheper-Hughes and Locke 1987). The conundrum of personal formation, singular or multiple, integrated or divided, is clearly related, in this approach, to the question of embodied experience and the hierarchy of habits. When theorists use phrases like social body (B. Turner 1991; O’Neill 1985), this raises serious questions about how such “bodies” might experience themselves and the world and thus creates more confusion than clarity. Even phrases like the social construction of subjectivity (Grosz 1994; Butler 1990) aren’t often used in such a way as to spell out how such “construction” might be achieved in practice but rather appear most often as unproblematic givens. On the one hand, I want to argue in sympathy with those who believe that all human selves, whether more or less unified habitually, must have, at least at times, a sense of self as an isolated totality. On the other hand, it should be apparent that no human can be so individual as to be totally isolated from all social relations, however pathological that person may be. The phenomenological evidence seems to support the view that human selfhood is best thought of primarily as multiple rather than singular—as rather more dividual than individual—in the most general case, even allowing for cultural differences. Because of variations in the way we experience our embodied selves, and because of constant mediations between ourselves and others in this process, human selfhood and human sociality are inextricably linked. Accordingly, we constantly shift between isolability (the potential to experience ourselves as autonomous individuals) and intersubjectivity (the experience of being in relation to others and perhaps even of sharing in a group field of experience).

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I believe it is also possible simultaneously to be aware of both aspects of self at once—both singular and plural, both isolated and in relation. As I discussed in Chapter 1, one of the key practices of childhood development, highlighted by George Mead and many others, is the process known as role play. For Mead, a social role is an intersubjective device for the coalescence of habits of selfhood. Therefore, roles precede organized social selves or subjects, and any self has available a variety of roles as models or templates for embodied social relationships (see Joas 1996: 181–90). One radical response to this has been the view that human subjects are merely collections of role possibilities, with no central or essential self at all. This has been the implication of some postmodernist views of selfhood, especially those that emphasize the performativity of gender (e.g., Butler 1999) and other social categories. Although I don’t agree with this radical view, it does underline the importance of role play and social roles in the development of human subjectivity and in its continued operation into adulthood. Accordingly, even though role play is essential to how humans learn to be themselves and how they continue to interact in social groups, I argue that most humans, at least at times, also have a sense of themselves apart from the roles they play. Especially as an adult, one plays roles aware (if only potentially) that they are consensual habits—social constructs—but one also plays them in one’s own unique way. This sort of situation is only accentuated with the performance of staged roles. When unique abilities are celebrated in stardom, what is being celebrated, paradoxically, is also the ability of the actor to blend perfectly into the role, without apparent gaps or incongruities. Such seamless blending is even more important in ritual enactments, especially those in which spirits seem to take over the bodies of performers, such that someone or something else is said to be doing the moving, singing, and/or talking. Accordingly, it follows that playing with identity formation is integral to everyday practice and that this play is heightened in special events, during which role play, or role transferal, is an important cultural activity. If these premises are accepted, it becomes apparent why social roles are so important to the development of children and also to the organization of adult cultural life. If role play depends on roles that are intersubjective signs, recognizable to anyone within a given cultural life-world, then acting them out can be seen as a form of group experience. That is, playing a role does not quite mean being oneself, or perhaps it entails being only an aspect of oneself.6 Roles are one place where self as isolate and self as group merge in an experience of mediation. And since, if one agrees with Mead, roles precede the development of personal selves, it follows that selfhood “itself ” is grounded in intermediacy—in neither self nor not-self, and in both self and not-self. From a Peircean perspective, as animal sign play became fully developed into anthroposemeiosis7 and language

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developed, significant effects evolved in a way that made this ambiguity of role play possible (see Deely 1994). Signs in their thirdness are consensual products, formed by rules, laws, or habits that are culturally constituted. Signs in their firstness have the quality of uniqueness, whereas signs in their secondness are experienced in opposition and struggle. Thus experience that is “significate” requires both isolability and relatedness as well as the struggle between them. This scenario sustains Peirce’s well-known deep metaphor that man “is a symbol” (CP 7.583) as well as his assertion that “man’s circle of society . . . is a sort of loosely compacted person” (CP 5.421; cf. Colapietro 1989). Further evidence for these ideas comes from the fact that spoken language is clearly a matter of personal style and idiolect while also being constituted in a field of consensual practice and meaning that allows for communication. Linguistic terms invade one’s thought process, such that it becomes difficult or impossible to think about experience, or even to have it at all, without linguistic mediation. The cases of role play and language, and the general semeiosis that underlies them both, illustrate the fact that experience itself is intermediate: the argument is that one cannot have a purely individual experience; nor can there be a purely group experience. Group experiences must be instantiated, embodied in nodal selves, whereas personal experiences are always constituted upon semeiotic, habitual ground that is consensual and intersubjective. If experience is always already both personal and cultural, it follows that selfhood is as well. Because language has an idiosyncratic as well as a cultural dimension, it is common for communication to go hand in hand with miscommunication, understanding with misunderstanding. Because selves are internally divided and socially multiple, the dialogic (or trialogic) of communication often has unclear origins and destinations—that is, the creators of sign sequences (themselves internally divided) are usually different from the interpreters of those sequences (also so divided). Language reveals one voice while concealing another, clarifying one area at the expense of another’s mystification. This is yet one more reason that performance, as embodied action, is essential for the creation and maintenance of human cultural life-worlds: performance allows for the expression and communication of feelings that language can only grope for in metaphors and other tropes. In this way, performative action allows negotiations between selves and worlds to be expressed in all their satisfying ambiguity without having to be more explicit and rationalized. When language falls short, people sing, dance, paint, sculpt, and enact scenarios that enable them to deal with the paradoxes and absurdities of life on the planet and in the cosmos.

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Emplacement, Temporality, and Consciousness As I noted above, human embodiment necessarily also involves emplacement in situations, and our relations to places are manifold and intermediate. Edward Casey has argued that experiences of emplacement are fundamental to human understanding, whereas the idea of space as a “homogeneous and isotropic medium,” only navigable by Cartesian coordinates, is an abstraction from those embodied experiences (1993: 9). In this view, space is an imaginary conceptualization that is commonly misunderstood as a fundamental aspect of reality in Western-influenced common sense and also in much scholarly thinking. Casey goes on to show how the distinction between space and time was an extension of that same abstraction, since places always have a temporal dimension inextricably bound up with them. He uses the example of the measuring of longitude, among others, to show how locatability depends on the temporal aspect of emplacement. As European navigators discovered in the nineteenth century, longitude cannot be calculated exactly without an accurate clock (see Sobel 1995). Finally, Casey tries to show how a conceptual preoccupation with space and time has contributed to the impoverishment of human experience and perhaps even to the devastation of the human biosphere. With regard to the latter point, I offer a caveat by pointing to some of the ways in which the concept of space as a void, or a region of possibility, has also been a useful idea— for instance, to creative artists or to practitioners of meditation (Persson 2007; Lewis 2006). In other words, if one understands that the concept of space is an imaginary abstraction from embodied experience, one can use the term more carefully and advisedly instead of allowing misunderstandings to do violence to our experience and our habitat. The abstraction of time is no less damaging to human understanding, since we also live in a complex flow of temporal processes that are not well captured in the even measurement of intervals on clocks. At least since the work of Henri Bergson (1913 [1888]), it’s been widely accepted that the human experience of time is variable—that it speeds up and slows down in unexpected ways, “long” intervals seeming “short” at times (note the linear metaphors), and vice versa. In addition, what we call (in English) past, present, and future interact with each other in dynamic and complex ways. Both Husserl and Peirce argue that any human experience must include all three of these temporal dimensions at once. In other words, no experience can be only of the past, present, or future but instead must contain aspects of all three.8 In Chapter 1 I referred to Casey’s analysis of Husserl’s work on time consciousness, in which he argues that experiences of the present must include “retention” (the present as just recently past) and “protention” (the present as soon to become). In other words, experience of the present is not a “point in time” but instead involves a temporal span, which

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the psychologist William James characterized beautifully as “no knife-edge, but a saddle-back” (1950: 609). The immediate past of retention recedes into the “past proper”—primarily the domain of memory—while the immediate future is projected into a distanced possibility through the work of imagination (Casey 1991: 144–48). One conclusion here is that human consciousness always involves both memory and imagination in the constitution of any experience. This complex situation has consequences for events as well, because their locatability in time and place is always only provisional. For instance, as previously noted, special events are anticipated in the lead-up, and they have effects that still reverberate after they have concluded. In the recalling of past events, they are often reconstrued in memory and imagination as these processes interact with each other in the evolution of experience. One might ask when an event actually begins or ends, since it lives in this complex temporal field, where indeed all experience resides. This is in turn recomplicated by the fact that all the participants in an event experience it from different perspectives and with different expectations and preoccupations. The best one can do is to point to the frame markers that have been consensually agreed on as the cues for delimiting a stretch of activity; this locatability of an event is helpful, even if the experiences of it are themselves not wholly contained within the frame. The curtain rises and the curtain falls; the flame is lit and it is extinguished. If these points are accepted, it is clear that emplacement involves both spatial and temporal relations that are complexly intertwined. This is borne out in many current versions of physics, of course, where “space-time,” as a compound term, may be seen to come in many dimensions. According to rival versions of superstring theory, the universe could be made up of 10, 11, 26, or even an infinite number of dimensions (e.g., Davies and Brown 1988). If emplacement is multiply complex, this adds weight to the argument that embodiment is as well—that we negotiate many selves in the course of changing situations, as explored earlier. One interesting example comes from work on racial terms and relations in Salvador, Brazil. Cecilia McCallum has demonstrated convincingly, in an insightful thought experiment, that the usages and effects of racial or color terms and the way they are embodied vary significantly in different areas of the city and at different times of day. In other words, racial descriptors and enactments vary with situation in a complex cultural and socioeconomic geography of neighborhoods in that city (and probably many others) (McCallum 2005). Casey has also argued, following Merleau-Ponty, that places have “primal depth,” which is the source of the possibility of measurement and includes the simultaneous processes of envelopment and exclusion (1993: 67–70). I want to extend this concept of primal depth to capture also the feeling of limitless expansiveness, both outward into a cosmos and inward into the microscopic realms. In this view, primal depth not only is the ground for the possibility of

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dimensions and directions but also is experienced as the limitless potential for more to be revealed in the process of exploration. Building on this idea, I maintain that such depth is foundational to lived experience in places, especially in “wild” environments: that being in such expansive, fulsome places enables feelings that, in their detail and vividness, animate embodiment to the greatest extent. I will argue that being in such places can be stimulating to the person in ways unequalled by more mediatized situations, which often involve simplifications of the sensorium in order to explore certain dimensions, to the exclusion of others. For instance, television employs only the visual and auditory channels, and the same is true of most computer experience.9 I will return to this theme in Chapter 6 when I make an appeal for an ecological approach to performance. Selfhood in Development The problem of human being as person or self has been approached in a great variety of ways, but one fruitful way to explore this complexity has been to distinguish between the existence of an adult person and the development of that self from the experiences of an infant or a child. Clearly, the experience of being an infant or child is fundamentally different from adult experience in many ways, and the comparison is made more difficult by the fact that most adults only dimly remember their earliest experiences. In spite of efforts to overcome this phenomenological distance through experiment and observation, the scientific, observer-based approach is somewhat problematic with respect to the actual experiences of children, let alone infants (cf. Stern 2000). To some extent, memory and experiment might be supplemented by what Peirce called the logic of prescission—namely, the abstracting of elements from adult life in order to reveal what would have had to be the case in order for us to have become what we are (see Chapter 4, note 1). This mental experimentation seems quite similar to the phenomenological method of reduction, discussed in Chapter 2, which Merleau-Ponty called a kind of “archaeology” to rediscover the basic processes of perception (1964). In the case of childhood development, reduction has been an attempt to bracket the adult categories and concepts of experience in order to reclaim something of experiences as they might have appeared to a naïve or innocent interpreter. Through a combination of these methods, several more or less plausible scenarios have been suggested for what infants and children most likely experience as they grow up. These scenarios are complicated by the fact that they need to be informed by cultural relativity, since children always grow up in certain times and places, into given cultural language-worlds. Many of the scenarios suggested have not been sensitive to this source of variation, unfortunately,

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although some have,10 and the question of how greatly adults themselves differ as a result of culture has still not been answered definitively. I will begin by outlining what I hope are some aspects of a plausible scenario for the evolution of adult selves from infant and childhood experiences and will then suggest some ways that such a schema can contribute to elucidating the cultural variability of adult life-worlds. It is obvious that the influence of culture is somewhat limited, though by no means absent, in early infant experience, becoming increasingly more important as a person becomes a toddler and an older child. Although humans don’t have the longest gestation period of all mammals, we are toward the top end, but what really distinguishes us from our fellow creatures is the length of our infant and childhood dependency, which is by far the greatest. Indeed, placing a limit on this period is complicated by the fact that, unlike most animals, humans tend to be intertwined with their parents for their entire lives, and even after. In this sense, defining a certain period as that of dependency is already misleading, imposing a link to animal rearing that really doesn’t apply to us. Nonetheless, it is clear that human infants are extremely dependent for survival on parents and other caregivers, and a plausible minimum range of such dependency might be given as 13 to 18 years. Certainly any child living on its own before the age of 13 would justifiably be considered deprived, at least from the point of view of a contemporary Western sensibility. This long period of dependency has sometimes been linked to an evolutionary theory called neoteny, which has been used to explain how we evolved important differences from other species in the first place (La Barre 1991; Montagu 1981; Murchie 1979). Some have argued that what seems to be an increasingly long period of childhood and youth and what now (in many contemporary societies) seems to be a reciprocal dependence of adults on the young are an extension of this biological process.11 In this way, one could argue that biological neoteny has been culturally elaborated into a process that continues to differentiate us from other species and from our historical past. Another piece of evidence for neoteny as cultural process is the importance of adult play for humans, even though some adult play has been reported in other mammals as well. The long and seemingly increasing period of human youth requires a corresponding elaboration of play forms and of reflection on the relations between play and non-play. Many developmental psychologists and other social scientists have tried to identify and enumerate stages of human self-unfolding. However, although the idea has been an appealing one, no consensus has so far emerged as to just what those stages might be. For example, in the complex work of the neo-Freudian Jacques Lacan, it is unclear whether his idea of the mirror stage is locatable at a certain period of childhood or is in fact an ongoing aspect of all human experience (e.g., Gallop 1985: ch. 3). The psychologist Daniel Stern has suggested a set of stages that have ongoing influence

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in adult life, in which an encompassing stage doesn’t nullify the issues of earlier ones but simply reorganizes relationships in new ways (2000).12 These and other approaches, and their critiques, indicate that, in many ways, the human project is always an unfinished one—a matter of “becoming” with no final resolution except the artificial caesura of death. Even after death the effects of our lives reverberate in society, for some more loudly than for others. One important point to emphasize is that all human cognition, from perception to ideation, is accompanied by affect and emotion.13 Indeed, Walter Freeman has argued, that “emotion is essential to all intentional behaviours” (Freeman 2000). One recent scenario that has been suggested is a description of the development of affectivity into “emotional self-organization.” This schema proposes an evolution from the micro-development of affect over seconds and minutes to the meso-development of moods over hours and days and then into the macro-development of personality over months and years. These processes interact in “appraisal-emotion amalgams” at all three time scales (M. Lewis [2000], cited in Thompson 2007: 371–73). In this view, the organization of selfhood is a developmental process that involves multiple temporalities at a variety of time scales. These processes build on each other into a schema of habits, most of which are variable, but some of which solidify into virtually unchangeable aspects of self-identity. Therefore, embodied personality is an ongoing temporal synthesis that begins in the womb and continues after birth and throughout life, rigidifying into old age and death. But even after death, lives can be reinterpreted and reimagined by others, so change and continuity are in dynamic balance even then. Studies of childhood interaction have often revealed what have been called “joint attention scenarios,” involving both child and adult focusing on some object or project together, as an important developmental activity. As Merlin Donald (2001) has pointed out, this often involves a reciprocal coupling of their lived bodies, including eye contact, facial expressions, voice, touch, and gesture (cited in Thompson 2007: 405). This account seems to resonate nicely with an early musical analysis by the phenomenologist Alfred Schütz. He captured the dynamic process of musical audiences and performers “growing older together” through a process of being mutually “tuned in” (1977 [1951]: 116). I want to argue that childhood joint attention scenarios develop into large-scale performative events in adult communities by using quite similar embodied patterns. Two important aspects to be identified in this process are isopraxis (doing the same thing at the same time) and orthopraxis (doing complementary things at the same time). One example of isopraxis can be found in unison singing, as in the development of sacred “plainsong” from the medieval period in Europe. In contrast, harmonic choral singing would be an example of orthopraxis. Likewise, military parades involve a high degree of isopraxis, as do other kinds

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of movement and dance in which people try to do the same movements in coordinated patterns. In contrast, most social dance involving couples requires complementary movement and, therefore, modes of orthopraxis. Clearly these principles exist on something of a continuum, since bodies cannot be in the same place at the same time, so even isopraxis can only be a similarity, not an identity. In addition, one can do the same (or similar) practice at different times and in different places, and these kinds of iconic propagation14 are key to the development and perpetuation of performative frameworks of many kinds. Of course, each time a practice is repeated, it is at least somewhat different, and these changes can either be minimized to emphasize continuity (as in ritual) or accumulate more or less rapidly into patterns of cultural change, so characteristic of our contemporary life-worlds. If an individual human life is an unfinished project, how much more so is the general trend of humanity itself? A related question is how much variation there has been, and could be, in the types of selfhood and sociality found in the multiplicity of cultural worlds? In spite of these indeterminacies, I wish to conclude this theoretical scenario-building by reiterating that human experience in general evolves from a rather inchoate, undifferentiated (and initially unconscious) stream of feelings, desires, and sensations into a relatively coherent, patterned embodiment, constituted in a given cultural life-world (or perhaps several such). Babies are not born with an organized body schema but must learn to habituate patterns by enacting, distinguishing, and naming discrete motor and sensory capacities. Each of these qualities and categories must in turn be organized through culturally inflected valences, such as avoidance and attraction, polar directions and dimensions, and sensory continua. In addition to the micro-organization of embodied patterns, the entire system has to be integrated together in a relatively coherent unity, as the senses are conjoined with emotional and ideational cognition. This organizing work/play is done in a climate of desire—of pleasure and pain—and involves fully embodied practice. The work/play of infants happens in a previously constituted social world among adults and other children who are already informed by language, thought, named emotions, sensations, feelings, and other cultural practices. However, as I will attempt to demonstrate in Chapter 6, societies have been changing at an unprecedented rate in recent centuries, and it remains to be seen exactly how “cultural” these life-worlds are today. Intersubjectivity as Intercorporeality Many accounts of the human situation suggest that from the beginning an infant exists in intersubjectivity: in a social/cultural matrix that it is largely unaware of, yet which exerts a strong influence over the ways it will experience

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itself and its world (Jackson 1998; Joas 1996; Mead 1934). Discussions of intersubjectivity have varied: first in the definition of the term and then in the extent to which the process might influence social and cultural formations. Rather than review and critique the many arguments connected with this idea, I want to suggest one way that it operates, in concert with some others who have been exploring the concept known as intercorporeality or intercorporeity (see Paterson 2007; Weiss 1999; Jackson 1998). The concept seems to have originated with Husserl and was taken up by his students, including Mikel Dufrenne and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, though none of them developed it fully nor clarified its relation to intersubjectivity. I believe that the concept of intercorporeality might help to ground the discussion of intersubjectivity in more specifiable forms of human cultural engagement and might open the way for establishing the usefulness of the concept of shared experience. In this way, the tendency of intersubjectivity to be assumed or to be left in the realm of vague generalization might be overcome. This discussion necessarily involves the sensorium, and it seems that several types or domains of intercorporeality might be delineated, even if in practice they often work together. It is appropriate to begin with touch, since this is the perceptual system most widely shared in the animal kingdom (and even among some plants) and is understood by many analysts to be the most basic sense.15 Touch is also the most ramified sense, since it includes direct contact with the skin (texture, heat, pressure, and pain—all part of tactility) as well as the largely interoceptive feelings of proprioception (posture and mode of embodiment), kinesthesia (movement), and vestibular information (balance, acceleration). All of these senses together form what are now widely called the haptic senses. Accordingly, the most basic intercorporeal relation could be called intertactility—the feelings intermediate between touching and being touched. In addition, there needs to be a second term, like interhapticity, to include all the other ways people sense together in motion and at rest, usually combining cutaneous sensations with some or most of the others. In recent decades, Ashley Montagu was influential in emphasizing the importance of touch in mother-infant or caregiver-infant relationships, an insight that has now become widely understood (1971). Certainly, intimate and sexual touching are implicated in the development of marital relations in many societies, a bond that is arguably at the center of kinship formations (although not all marriages involve sexuality or even intimate touching). In the case of romantic love as a cultural ideal, in those societies in which it is championed, some have maintained that the degree of intercorporeality available in lovemaking is more intense than in any other kind of activity, to the point that couples may be able to completely merge, momentarily losing or suspending their sense of individuality in the jungles of intertactility.16 In dance, the importance of

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interhapticity is manifest in many styles, especially highlighted in such genres as contact improvisation. As with the previous example of two hands touching each other, it is possible to be absorbed into a process of touch to such a degree that inner and outer sensations, agency and patiency, are confused—that touching and being touched cannot easily be distinguished from each other. This becomes even more evident when metaphorical senses of feeling and touch are also included. The degree of skin contact between adults varies considerably among cultural groups and is somewhat related to proxemic habits of congregation, as explored in the work of Edward Hall, for instance (1977; 1969). In Brazilian Carnival, the degree of close contact is quite important to the sense of a successful festival, for many, and is directly related to a positive valuation of what they call movimento (literally, movement; figuratively, something like the English colloquial sense of “where the action is” at a party scene or perhaps a “happening” situation; see Lewis 1999). Brazilians generally have a close proxemic range, and casual touching between friends and acquaintances is commonplace. Accordingly, degrees of intertactility and interhapticity may well be higher in Brazil than in Anglophone societies, for instance, and such differences could be implicated in distinguishing the wide variety of cultural formations. Habits of touch in childhood rearing were widely investigated in the early days of psychological anthropology, in classic studies by Margaret Mead and Ruth Benedict (among many others), as noted in Chapter 1. Skin registers temperature, pressure, and texture—hot and cool, soft and hard, smooth and rough—and many similar qualitative contrasts have become important ways to describe kinds or aspects of events in many languages. What might be seen as metaphoric language—jazz as “hot” or, again, as “cool,” for instance—can thus be re-examined in terms of the sorts of events created to experience such sensations. When people are packed close together, things heat up quite literally, and when they are far apart, things cool off. Skin is sensitive to pressure, both in forms of touch and in atmospheric density. When one refers to the “atmosphere” created at a certain kind of event, this language, again, may be not only metaphoric but also an attempt to capture some elements of interhapticity for which there are no more specific categories. It is possible that such atmospheres also might be experienced as electromagnetic fields, probably only as subliminal impressions, since human neurological activity clearly creates such magnetism. Magnetoception has been demonstrated in many animals, including some mammals, but hasn’t been clearly shown in humans. Could this type of sensation, admittedly only subliminal at most, contribute to the stimulation people feel, both in the intimacies of direct contact and when in large crowds? How metaphorical is the “electric” atmosphere often reported at special events, in what has now become a common cliché?

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Proprioception and kinesthesia emanate from a complex set of neurological impulses involving the skin, muscles, inner ear, and various organs. Many students of perception and sensation have noted that the process depends crucially on human movement, following the seminal work of Merleau-Ponty (e.g., 1962). In Chapter 2, I referred to work on “mirror neurons” that has provided increasing evidence for a significant degree of coupling between sensation and movement. If human embodiment is a sensorimotor continuum, as has been widely argued, then it is likely that this integration of sensing and moving is involved in intercorporeality as well. I noted that spectators at sporting events or dance concerts who have participated in the activities being performed probably have a stronger visceral reaction to such movement patterns than do those who have never practiced them. Along with the activation of the motor system under sensory stimulation is an accompanying process called “affective resonance,” which has also been called “emotional contagion” (Thompson 2007: 395). A classic example is when newborn babies begin crying at the sound of other babies crying. I want to argue that these and related phenomena reveal a kind of direct intercorporeality that does not depend only on empathy or other analogic processes involving the imaginative transposition of oneself into the situation of another. It seems clear that many genres of special events are created in an attempt to foster and encourage group sensations and feelings—to exploit this tendency of human beings to be intercorporeal. Anyone who has been in the audience at an important, large-scale sporting event, for instance, should be able to provide many examples of affective resonance or emotional contagion. As noted, many people who watch professional sports have played them at an amateur level and may still be doing so. It certainly fosters a depth of visceral co-participation when lovers of the sport become fans in the stands. In a more specific example, many kinds of folk dancing require people to move together in circular formations while holding hands. According to Croatian dancer Teresa Crvencovic, such circular group movement is coordinated not only by vision but also by feel. If the hand and arm positions are not correct, especially in various kinds of “basket” holds, the circle can become unbalanced. Experienced dancers can determine right away, by feel, when the hands and arms are correctly positioned, even from across the circle (see Crvencovic 2005). This is clearly a type of interhapticity, and it is probably found in many forms of group movement. As noted, moving together can involve people doing the same movements at the same time (isopraxis) or moving harmoniously, complementarily, or in concert (orthopraxis). In both cases, the process is mediated by a variety of senses, but an important one is the “feel” of being together, which is a kind of kinesthetic intercorporeality. Notice that the word feel itself is a metaphoric extension from the domain of touch to include other forms of sensation and

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even thought. This union of thought with the realm of intertactility not only is found in English language-worlds but also has been reported in a number of others, such as the Balinese (Wikan 1991). In a similar way, the word touch in English can be metaphorically extended to refer to emotional contact— accordingly, “That story was ‘touching,’” or, “His plight ‘touched’ me deeply.”17 In Steven Feld’s work on the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, direct, adult speech is called to halaido (hard words), another tactile metaphor. But in the context of song, especially in the ritual of gisalo, the effects of the poetic allusions also “harden” as they develop, sometimes causing men to weep (1990: 131–34). This happens in a ceremony dense with sound, smell, and movement as weeping men respond by burning the skin of the singing dancers who caused them to remember loss (Schieffelin 1976). In another example, there is a clear difference between “soft” and “hard” rock and roll and in the sorts of activities engendered when listening to them: one can bang heads in a mosh pit or cuddle with a loved one on a couch while listening. It seems likely that these and similar “metaphoric extensions” of touch can be related to more direct sensations of interhaptic relations at event settings. The point here, again, is that such metaphoric extensions may be based on more direct sensations. Given the prominence of such metaphors, it is interesting to remember that Aristotle believed the fundamental organ of touch to be the human heart (Paterson 2007: 17). In the realm of taste and smell, one might suggest the terms intergustation and interolfaction, the first being directly associated with tactility, since one has to touch things to the tongue and palate in order to taste them. So the infant tastes and smells the breast milk and the breast itself, and the mother imbibes the smells, feelings, and perhaps the tastes of her infant. Does the infant inhabit a world of intercorporeality when lost in the taste and touch of the suckling experience, without clear boundaries of self and other? Does the mother feel the paradoxical sensations of a body that used to be part of hers and is still inexorably attached at such times? Whatever the answers, this fundamental communion is certainly implicated in the central importance and solidity of the mother-child bond. More indirectly, the acknowledged importance of commensality in all social worlds can surely be related to the sharing (at least attempted, if not successful) of olfactory and gustatory sensations at a feast or any shared meal. Note here that the creation of events, such as shared meals, often depends on attempts to encourage occasions for intercorporeality, even if the sharing of these experiences is also mediated by language—for example, “This dish is delicious!” or, “How do you like the wine?” One point here is that cultural habits, which are clearly implicated in deciding what smells wonderful and what smells putrid or what tastes sublime and what triggers a gag reaction are plausibly reinforced through processes of intercorporeality. Indeed, much work has been done in anthropology on the

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different ways the senses are construed, combined, and embodied in various cultural settings (e.g., Howes 2003; Classen 1993). It is clear from these studies that the project of intercorporeality may need to be reformulated for each cultural group in its own right. The influence of cultural practice and linguistic habit on sensory experience is hard to exaggerate. Both imaginal and memorial aspects of experience are culturally variable and will help determine the qualities of sensation in personal and shared embodiment. Nonetheless, I believe that the basic processes of intercorporeality are quite similar across human groups, even though the details of the practices may differ radically. In some cases, the memory of a bad-tasting dish may prevent a person from ever liking it again. In contrast, there is the phenomenon of the “acquired taste,” which can happen either between or within cultural domains. Children may gag, for instance, on the bitterness of beer but may learn to love it later in adolescent or adult life. What I am suggesting here, as others have also argued, is that the phenomena of sensation are complicated in humans by imaginal and memorial influences and mediated by social conventions. Some of these are aspects of cognition, usually linguistically mediated, which may directly influence what are problematically called “immediate” sensations.18 It follows that modes of intercorporeality are not completely unmediated experiences; in many cases, they are framed to coincide with cultural expectations. Such frameworks are organized to predict or to prefigure, to some extent, what those experiences are likely to be, although they can never determine them completely. Personal experience is also idiosyncratic and may differ from general expectations, thereby being a possible source for cultural change. The realm of sound is a particularly fertile field for intercorporeality, since acoustic waves directly link sources with receivers of sound by resonating through the medium of air between (and within) the two. Here one needs at least two terms: interaudition, the shared reception of sound and what Feld has called intervocality (1998: 471), the co-production of sound, initially with vocal cords, but ultimately with any other instruments as well.19 These processes may often come together, of course, since, when speaking, one hears one’s own voice, although not in the same way one hears the voices of others. This asymmetry “speaks” to the intermediacy of voice as something shared (as well as individual) and corresponds to the quasi-locatability of hearing. For instance, sound waves vibrate in many parts of a body, not just in the auditory canal. One cannot exactly hear oneself hearing,20 but one can be lost in the indeterminacy and intermediacy of sound. In his work with the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea, Feld argues that one aspect of their cultural world is constituted by an “acoustemology”—a soundscape that includes the blended voices of human speech and song in an intervocalic mix with the sounds of birds and other animals and features of the Bosavi forest (1996b). He also describes experiences

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of being fooled by the location of bird calls and other forest canopy sounds, in which height and depth became confused by his culturally untutored sensorium (1994: 127). In this case, a shared matrix of sonic experience helps to create a kind of intercorporeality that is central to cultural variability. For the Kaluli, according to Feld, intervocality extends much further into what English speakers usually call nature (as noted, a cultural concept) than may be the case for some other cultural groups. The Kaluli sing with birds, crickets, waterfalls, and their dead ancestors, among other things. It should be evident that there are many different types of intervocality and interaudition in different social worlds or cultural habitats:21 one can sing in a choir; one can sing along at a folk or rock concert; and monks can chant mantra in an ashram or sing plainsong in a monastery. These are all examples of “con-vocality” as positive or harmonic vocal interaction, of course, and negative ones could easily be adduced: heckling a speaker, chanting in protests (us vs. them), having an argument, and so on. Likewise, one could extend the idea of intervocality metaphorically to include playing instruments in an ensemble or any other kind of human sonic interaction. Greg Downey gives a good example of interaudition in Brazilian capoeira when he argues that hearing the music involves a total process of immersion in the sport. He describes changes in the way he experienced the sound-world of capoeira as he became committed to the apprenticeship process of training. As his embodiment changed to accommodate sparring in the ring and playing the berimbau (musical bow) on the periphery, so did his experience of hearing the music (2002: 97–101). In discussions with him, I noted that I had experienced changes also in the realm of vocal production, as my voice changed in sympathy with all the other changes he enumerates so clearly. As I trained in the game, my voice became stronger and more forceful; I was able to “holler” loudly in the distinctive capoeira style and at a somewhat higher pitch than previously. As I retired from active training, my voice weakened accordingly, and the shouting became more forced and difficult. I have vivid memories of masters and senior players who used the sheer volume of their voices to emphasize their power and accomplishment in the sport. The common experience of being in an audience is centrally implicated in the idea of interaudition, as the term implies, especially in European-derived forms, like at classical music concerts and theatrical events, where one is not supposed to talk. Even in these cases, it is occasionally appropriate to laugh, gasp, groan, sigh, and, of course, applaud. At jazz concerts, one may yell out exclamations and even carry on conversations if the setting is a bar or nightclub, meaning that intervocality becomes a more focally central part of interaudition. At rock concerts, one may sing along or yell at the top of one’s lungs and still feel the music, since primary audition is frequently through other bones and

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tissues than those of the middle ear, due to sheer volume. Thinking about the difference between being in an audience and being a spectator brings me at last back to the visual channel, to reiterate that it is, in many ways, the sensory mode least suited to the creation of intercorporeal experience. Any of what we differentiate in English as the senses can be used to create fields of potential intercorporeality, although to varying degrees. Vision seems to be the most isolating sense, the best case of a null point, since rarely does one confuse the seeing with the thing seen (except perhaps in hallucination or other altered states). The hierarchical valuation of the five senses, accompanied by an overvaluation of sight in the European tradition (what Martin Jay has called “ocularcentrism” [1994]), undoubtedly contributed to the development of a sense of self as individual—as a unique and autonomous “point of view.” Even here, however, considerable cultural work can go into efforts to create a shared sense of vision. In many forms of group movement or dance, the eyes are an essential element in coordinating shared patterns. In the same way, movement is often paired with costume and body ornamentation as well as decorative elements on a set to create a harmonious blend of complementary or repeated motifs. One might, in this way, argue that art museums are primarily venues for the creation of intervisuality—for the sharing of visual experiences. In some cases, of course, the opposite effect may be desired, and asymmetry or disharmony can be suggested visually instead. Humans are unique in that they can communicate in patterns and about them, while they can also communicate about and share chaos (to some extent). The sharing of disharmony may be a form of intercorporeality or a kind of anti-intercorporeality, the latter sometimes framed as radical individual autonomy, as an anti-sharing. Many kinds of so-called postmodern art, especially performance art, are attempts to exploit these incongruities, as I will examine further in the final chapter. The work of performance scholar Peter Snow was influential in bringing home to me some of the forms and limits of intercorporeality. His dissertation was on the Butoh-derived practice called Bodyweather as it is practiced in Australia and in Japan (2002).22 Many of the exercises used in the development of Bodyweather work make use of unusual modes of intercorporeality, forcing performers to confront other members of the group and their environing habitats in creative ways. One exercise Snow described was group travel across an Australian outback terrain while blindfolded, relying primarily on sensations derived from a piece of string held in one hand by each practitioner, connecting them all in a line. Talking was discouraged, and the result was an exploration of interhapticity as a replacement for more usual experiences of sound (as language) and vision. Since hapticity is perhaps the most intersubjective of all sensoria, as I argued above, the exercise forced people into a group experience of the terrain to an unusual degree, as practitioners became aware not simply

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of the string holders on either side but ultimately of the entire string group and the obstacles each had to encounter over the course of many hours of difficult travel. These sorts of experiments illustrate the differences of sensory modes in creating experience and the relative group-centered versus person-centered sorts of awareness that might result from deprivations of, or restrictions on, intercorporeality. It strikes me that a sort of inverse experiment to the Bodyweather example is the now rather common attempt to have sex over the telephone or the Internet, where only sound and/or vision is available (in most cases) and mutual touch is usually impossible. Another student of Bodyweather, Stuart Grant, was intrigued by the challenge to create a “dictionary of atmospheres” in response to similar experiments in various places in Australia (Grant and de Quincey 2006). This work led me to think extensively about the general use of the term atmosphere to describe certain aspects of the experience of places and the events occurring in those places. For instance, the atmosphere I experienced at the Olympic opening ceremony in Sydney in 2000 (only a dress rehearsal but still intense) was the result of a combination of several of the various forms of intercorporeality just described. The initial point here is that human experience is almost always the result of a synergy of various modes or channels of sensation combined with forms of cognition, including memory and imagination. In the case of the opening ceremony, things began with the expectation that I was about to have an extraordinary experience, which started when I received the invitation to attend and slowly intensified in the lead-up to the event.23 All my senses seemed to be heightened as I made my way by train, along with many others, to the venue at Homebush, through a city already consumed by an Olympic “fever” that had been building for several years. As I got off the train and headed in a stream of fellow humanity, directed by teams of volunteers, excitement seemed to be contagious. This metaphor of disease, inverted to become a positive value, was surely a case of “affective resonance,” disseminated through sight, sound, and proximity. The charged atmosphere became more intense as we entered the stadium, filled with one hundred thousand people, the sounds of the crowd magnified by the shape of the amphitheater. Due to the degree of anticipatory imagination, even a song as prosaic as “Waltzing Matilda,” sung by bush balladeer Slim Dusty, and intervocally echoed by many, seemed to take on special significance in the moment. It struck me that practically anything that happened in this atmosphere would seem exceptional and deeply meaningful with the weight of so much intercorporeal energy and expectation behind it. When I watched the actual opening ceremony the next night on television, the experience was intensified for me by my fresh memories of the live dress rehearsal.

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From Aristotle to Merleau-Ponty, many theorists have argued for the unification of the senses: that there is a common ground for all forms of sensory experience, a “sense-ability” that underlies all the sensory modes. Scientific work on multimodal perception and the “binding problem” has tended to show the reverse—that the sensory modalities are distinct—which makes the problem of the unification of perception a conundrum. It’s not clear what the many documented cases of synesthesia (the confusion or substitution of sensations) can add to this debate, but some researchers have correlated synesthesia, in its milder forms, with creativity in artists and intellectuals (see Campen 2008). Anthropological work on the diversity of sensory worlds might seem to indicate that the potential for substitutability and crossover between senses is high. In any case, it is clear that, at least at the cognitive level, experiences in one sensory domain can be imaginatively linked to other domains by analogy, in a process that I have been calling iconic propagation (1992: 190) or that Feld identified as “iconicity of style” (1994). If some process like synesthesia (which, after all, means “the unity of sense”) can be demonstrated to be a fundamental aspect of cognition, this might also help to account for the synergistic quality of human experience. Often the atmosphere of an event includes many modes or aspects of experience that come together in a kind of gestalt. This gestalt can be deconstructed, to some extent, into sights, sounds, smells, touch, and so forth, but many subliminal sensations may remain beneath the threshold of awareness. Other impressions register peripherally rather than focally and also contribute to the overall impression. This impression is in turn influenced by imaginal and memorial consciousness to produce an experience that is both holistic and multivariant. In the growth of an infant human, it seems appealing to argue that experiences of intercorporeality constitute a ground for what will develop into a sense of intersubjectivity as well as a sense of personality. Stern has argued that infants develop identity in the process of corporeal relationships with mothers and other caregivers: self and other develop in conjunction, not in sequence (2000). Phenomenologists mostly agree that intersubjectivity is also there from the beginning, even if they can’t always agree on how it comes about. The scenario I have outlined involves the construction of initially inchoate but, with age, increasingly coherent patterns of being as “being-with” and “being-without,” wherein neither exists without the other; they exist in a process of mediation as co-creation. From these encounters, then, comes the more developed sense of self as an isolable person in the midst of, and connected to, an organic group, as both autonomous agent and part of a collective whole. If intercorporeality is accepted as one mode, perhaps even the foundation, of intersubjectivity, then this provides a fairly solid and embodied basis from which personal and social selves, in their singularity and their multiplicity, can be seen to originate, and

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it also gives some insight into why modes of cultural performance operate as they do. Basic Cultural Patterns: Iconic Propagation and Repetition Perhaps the most important reason to study performance is that it holds the key to the creation, maintenance, transmission, and adaptation of cultural patterns within the many frameworks of social and personal organization. These patterns are recognizable as cultural styles both to group insiders and to outside observers but often in different ways and to different degrees. By looking at specially marked events, fundamental cultural signs are highlighted, which provides insight into the basic practices and underlying values that permeate both ordinary and special activities. These cultural patterns often become apparent in formalized, exaggerated, or intensified forms during special events, giving an outsider opportunities to understand strange cultural forms by making them stand out. For insiders, it is mostly a question of acting out patterns in order to experience them fully, even if one is not able, or only partially able, to articulate such values or patterns in verbal expression. Through participation, one can feel a cultural unity with others who perform as part of the group process, recognizing one’s being through forms of shared experience and appreciation. Therefore, a degree of embodied interaction, dialogue, or “trialogue”24 between cultural insiders and outsiders is the best method for illuminating performance forms as a mode of understanding social life-worlds and is the basic method for fieldwork practice in this area. In addition to speaking together, co-respondents can dance, make music, eat, play, and perform together. Many of the cultural patterns in question go very deep into embodied selfhood, as I have explored. The highest goal of ethnographic depiction, in my view, is to trace such patterns from largely unconscious habits into fully expressed worldviews and cosmologies, showing the links clearly from covert or inchoate to explicit and celebrated.25 Ethnographic observers are best situated to uncover the former (preconscious patterns), whereas insiders are required to explicate the latter (explicit cultural meanings and understandings) and also to embody modes of skilled activity. In other words, a dialogic (or trialogic) process is best suited to exploring culture, first as performed and experienced, and then as analyzed and explained. The evolution of patterns within one cultural world—from feeling to concept, from preconscious to explicit—I have been calling iconic propagation, following the semeiotics of Peirce. In this view, iconicity is self-similarity: repeated cultural patterns that are recognizable even across different media. I am arguing that culture, in the strong sense developed by early anthropologists, involves a high degree of self-similarity, in which patterns percolate through a social order and are maintained over time by repeated

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performances and practices. Therefore, iconic propagation requires iteration, or repetition, recognizable as cultural style, or “taste,” as Pierre Bourdieu would have it (1984). The invocation of self-similarity should be understood as a reference to chaos theory: “Self-similarity is symmetry across scale. It implies recursion, pattern inside of pattern” (Gleick 1987; cf. Mosko and Damon 2005). Although culture is not amenable to the mathematical exactness of chaos equations, I believe a similar principle is at work. At the deepest level, human social organization is a problem of order versus disorder—of a cultural pattern being imposed on a universe that seems to be both ordered and resistant to order. Accordingly, humans must impose order where there appears not to be enough, yet they must also accommodate or adapt to variations, which are more or less constant. These changes threaten, at times, to undermine any temporary social and cultural formation; therefore, the order needs to be reordered, more or less drastically, on an intermittent basis. The deepest ambiguity between order and disorder is found in the framework creation and disruption of play forms, as explored in Chapter 2. This is connected to the evolution of play as the oldest performance mode, the one that links us to animals but also distinguishes us from them in degree of complexity and awareness. The propensity of humans to create and recognize patterns is arguably one of our most important characteristics. Although there is a large literature on pattern recognition at the micro-level in neuroscience and cognitive psychology, the vast bulk of the research has been on computational models and artificial intelligence (see Grenander 1996; Pavel 1989). The fact that humans have been working so hard to make machines that can recognize patterns is an eloquent testimony to how important pattern recognition is to us as sentient beings. Some of this work involves complex mathematics, but what most of these approaches share is the belief that patterns are merely “out there” in the world, independent of human consciousness. The phenomenological critique, of course, takes issue with this view, arguing that meaningful patterns are cocreated by human interpreters in the process of interaction with a habitat that we also co-create. There is little point in developing elaborate theoretical models if the premises of those models are ill conceived or misguided. Of course, as Peirce maintained, we are not free to create any patterns we want (unless we are crazy), because the world in its secondness resists our efforts: the cosmos restricts us, acting as a constraint on the possibility of pattern creation and recognition. The concept of recognition itself is already fraught with multiple interpretations, as Paul Ricoeur has ably demonstrated (2005). One large body of work has been in relation to the need for mutual recognition between humans of their reciprocal moral and ethical rights and obligations (e.g., Honneth 1995). Ricoeur tries to demonstrate the relation of this ideological interest to other,

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more basic ideas of recognition: the “grasping” of a concept or the linking of disparate elements into a unity or an identity. He points out that making connections so as to fit things into an overall pattern also involves a process of distinguishing that pattern from what surrounds it, meaning that identity and distinction are complementary and coeval (2005: 25). Although the ethical issues raised in the recognition of the rights of other people are important, they are not my main concern here, and I will not comment on Ricoeur’s success in making the connections between various types of recognition. Instead, I will focus on pattern creation and recognition, in general, as fundamental to the making of meaning in human cultural life-worlds. I hope the reader can accept the proposition that this is a process that resounds through a hierarchy of dimensions, from small- to large-scale human endeavors. Ricoeur’s important move toward the basic processes of pattern recognition can also be explored through the fundamental Peircean categories of experience: firstness (positive qualitative possibility), secondness (opposition, struggle, constraint), and thirdness (mediation, habit, law) (Peirce in Buchler 1955: 74ff.).26 Notice that any pattern of regularity, as perceived, depends on the possibility of ideal regularity that is never quite actualized. In other words, all patterns exist against a background of variation: perceived order emerges out of phenomenal chaos. A regularity is perceived, or assembled, by ignoring irregularities that inevitably occur in any actual phenomenon and focusing instead on the repeated pattern as a kind of ideal type. The pattern, in some sense, needs to be there in order for the experience to attain coherence. For example, in the human heartbeat, EKG recordings reveal small irregularities, even in normal hearts, including subtle variations in the timing of the contractions, pauses that are too long or short, and of course variations in tempo. Indeed, if a heartbeat is too regular, this is usually a sign of pathology, as is also the case if it is too irregular, of course (Julian, Campbell, and McLenahan 1998). Out of these manifold variations, the regularities of heartbeat are assembled as a statistical norm for the specialists and as a perceptual regularity for an embodied being. Once such a coherent pattern is recognized, an interpreter can then attend to the irregularities as variations on that pattern. Thus, through a complex synthesis, an interpreter first recognizes a pattern by attending to the similarities implied by the perceived regularities and then attends to the irregularities as variations by holding the similarity of the pattern steady as a background for them. In “reality,” there are sets of non-random impulses that, more or less, recur in similar ways, but the “pattern perceived” is an idealization (thirdness)—a “hyperbolic order” or an “overgeneralization” of a potential regularity. This idealization is in turn based on the necessary possibility of similarity (firstness), without which no ordered pattern would be discernible. In other words, in an important sense, all patterns only exist in potentia. This

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is what Peirce meant when he said that a monadic quality is a “mere may-be” (CP 1.304). The tensions between impulse and pause in heartbeats (and many forms of music)—and also between pattern and variation—constitute a prime example of the oppositions and contrasts exemplified in Peirce’s category of secondness. Patterns struggle to emerge into our consciousness from seemingly chaotic impulses, but once established, they can be maintained in recognition relatively easily until they are broken, either intentionally through human playfulness, or unintentionally through the random effects of chance. The recognition of pattern and variation, then, depends on ordering similarity and difference and thus on the profound mystery of what is called repetition. Repetition is a central aspect of pattern recognition and also underlies the experience of habit and the development of cultural practices. The repeatability of cultural patterns is hinted at in such formulations as Richard Schechner’s ideas of performance as “restored behavior” or “twice-behaved behavior,” for example (Schechner and Appel 1990: 43). One problem with this formulation, however, is that this use of the term behavior obscures the important distinction between automatic or unconscious processes typical of most animal activities and conscious, deliberate, intentional processes more typical of human action. Humans “behave” when they are unaware of what they are doing or are merely reacting, but what makes us distinctive is that we generally have reasons, purposes, or motives behind what we do. Therefore, it is more appropriate to see performance as a mode of social action that involves habits and repeated practices and to distinguish, when possible, this activity from mere behavior. I have already explored some of the complexities of habitual practices, which involve learning, incorporation, repetition, creative adaptation, hierarchical embedding, and meta-awareness. The very concept of a repeated pattern is itself deceptively tricky upon close examination. As Henri Le Febvre has observed, “there is no identical absolute repetition, indefinitely. Whence the relation between repetition and difference. When it concerns the everyday, rites, ceremonies, fetes, rules and laws, there is always something new and unforseen that introduces itself into the repetitive: difference” (LeFebvre in Merrifield 2004: 6). This echoes the ideas of Ricoeur and Peirce above, as well as many others.27 Repetition can never be exact, because it is temporally sequential: each time it occurs anew, in a new setting. My habit is always newly instantiated; cultural practices vary, either more or less, each time they are performed. Exploring the world of the Yoruba of Nigeria, for example, Margaret Drewal gives many wonderful examples of “repetition with revision,” inspired by the work of Henry L. Gates on African American “signifying” practices (e.g., Gates 1988). In these cases, for instance, making fun of European white practices by imitation is deliberate revision or parody, recognizable as repetition but also as a play on

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difference (Drewal 1990: 1–5). These kinds of ironic copying have been widely explored—for instance, by Homi Bhabha (1994) and Michael Taussig (1993). Human beings create patterns by constructing them, but they also have a tendency, through imagination, to project patterns onto phenomena prolifically, in a way that may be unwarranted and deceiving. A simple example might be seeing identifiable shapes in clouds or rocks; a more complex example is the usefulness of inkblot tests for psychological evaluation. We play with patterns compulsively, in language, numbers, and all sorts of theoretical modeling. As a result it is often difficult to tell if a perceived pattern is “really there” or is merely a projection of an overactive imagination. Ultimately, such a decision is a matter for social consensus: we need the confirmation of others to know for sure, and this sometimes involves extensive investigation. Indeed, such consensus can change over time, as humans verify, painfully and gradually, that the earth is spherical and the solar system is heliocentric, for example. Will these be the final formulations, or will new understandings arise to take their place in the future? The central theme of Joas’s book The Creativity of Action (1996) is his attempt to put creativity at the heart of social action theory. This is a needed corrective to earlier theories of rational or normative action, as he takes great pains to demonstrate, but creativity doesn’t provide a very firm ground for theoretical construction. Instead, I would begin with habit—with practice as culturally constituted habit—while noting that habits also require creativity in their acquisition and implementation, especially those that are consciously manipulated. It should not be forgotten, however, that the main use of habit and practice is to create order, pattern, or integration in cultural life-worlds. Thus the ratio of pattern to variation, one might say, heavily favors the former, in most cases. This is especially true of personal habits and cultural practices that are incorporated to the extent that they become unconscious or automatic. Such habits are fundamental to the creation of boundaries, forms, identities, entities, rules, laws, and the like. People rely on the repeatability of action to create coherent social orders, embodied selves, and meaningful universes. This is why I have emphasized isopraxis and orthopraxis as fundamental to cultural creation, instead of heteropraxis, even though the latter is becoming increasingly common, especially in contemporary nation-states. If it is generally true, as many anthropologists have argued, that small-scale societies of the past were strongly pattern preserving, rather more “hidebound in habit” than contemporary societies tend to be, then one might understand the current climate as something of a cultural crisis. Indeed, as I will elaborate in Chapter 6, the problem for globalized societies at present seems to be how to preserve cultural practices in the face of rampant change, hyperindividuality, and constant technological innovation. Thus I believe that the ratio of pattern

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to variation has gradually altered in cultural practices over the last few hundred years, in a kind of cultural climate change—a move away from fidelity to the past, toward slavish adoration of innovation. Nonetheless, in all cases, habit and practice involve a combination of the two impulses: never complete invariance, even in societies that seem to change only slowly; nor complete innovation, even in societies in which many worship fashion and freedom. In the final chapter, I will argue that one can recognize, especially in small-scale societies, more integrated cultural worlds due to their high degree of self-similarity. Since the ritual process of reformation, as described in Chapter 3, is now rare and mostly a thing of the past, it follows that culture in the strong sense, involving iconic relations between micro- and macrocosms, is also mostly a thing of the past. Accordingly, most large-scale nation-states, being more diverse, are relatively heterogeneous and heteropractic, which means that it is problematic to apply the traditional concept of culture to them.

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his book has been an attempt to delineate the framework of a coherent theory of performance as an essential aspect of human cultural organization. In the previous chapters, I have mentioned some shortcomings of contemporary approaches to this project, as well as many areas of agreement, and have suggested revisions to the most useful ideas where appropriate. I want to conclude with a more thorough survey of contemporary approaches to performance theory, summarizing their strong points and limitations and suggesting how the framework I have described provides tools that can help set the direction for future research. In my view, an adequate theory of cultural performance will have to include, at least, (1) a phenomenology—an account of human experience; (2) a semeiotic theory—how that experience is mediated by signs; and (3) a theory of culture itself. The close link between phenomenology and semeiotics provided by Charles Peirce is one reason I have been drawn to his work as a fundamental aspect of my theoretical framework. In the European phenomenological tradition, interest in Husserl’s idea of “reduction” has encouraged many to try to capture experience as “the thing itself,” in his oft-cited phrase (1970a: 127–28). In my view, following Peirce, there can be no unmediated access to things in themselves, because all human experience is mediated by signs.1 However, it is true that some signs, dominated by firstness and secondness, are less mediated, whereas others, dominated by thirdness, are more mediated. In this view, some signs call up primarily emotional and energetic interpretants (instances of interpretive effect), whereas more mediated signs, especially those dependent on language, call forth logical interpretants. It follows that unmediated experience for an embodied human can only ever be approached as a limit and never fully attained. In the last analysis, I agree with Herbert Blau, when he remarked that

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“there is nothing more illusory in performance than the illusion of the unmediated” (1990: 253). As for a theory of culture, it would be the height of hubris for me to argue that I have solved a conundrum that has plagued anthropology for more than 150 years. However, I do want to propose a scenario for how I think human cultural worlds have changed in recent history and argue accordingly for indications of what culture is not. The last part of this chapter will be an examination of these ideas, including the radical suggestion that most humans no longer live in cultural worlds (in the strong sense) at all, but rather struggle in the midst of culture-like formations. But to begin, I will attempt to assemble previous attempts at performance theory into thematic groups, with the intention of capturing some central tendencies. The Omnibus Approach There have been several attempts in recent years to gather together many of the significant precursors to the development of performance studies, either in textbook form or as readers in the history of ideas. The former include the works of Phillip Auslander (2008), Richard Schechner (2002), and Marvin Carlson (1996), and the latter include those of Frank Korom (2013), Henry Bial (2007), and Phillip Auslander (2003), to name some of the most recent examples. In several cases, writers have even argued that there can be no adequate theory of performance other than such a compendium of disparate ideas. Schechner, for instance, argued at one stage for what might be called a serpentine approach: “This area/field/discipline often plays at what it is not, tricking those who want to fix it, alarming some, amusing others, astounding a few as it sidewinds its way across the deserts of academia” (Schechner in Phelan and Lane 1998: 357). Earlier, he had called his undertaking a “broad spectrum approach” (1988), while his colleague Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett called performance studies a “postdiscipline of inclusions” (2007). The latter formulation suggests that the omnibus approach is closely related to the insecurities of post-theory, as I will explore below. Carlson, citing the work of Mary Strine, Beverly Long, and Mary Hopkins (1990), agrees that performance is “an essentially contested concept,” as he goes on to document the many uses and abuses of the term (1996). It should be clear by now that as useful as these various compendia are, what is missing (and what I try to provide here) is a synthetic, unified approach to create a viable discipline. I believe that without a coherent delimitation of what performance studies might be about, there will be no possibility of separating more from less useful ideas and thereby clarifying rather than obfuscating what analysts could be understanding. Lack of such clarification will negatively affect the viability and longevity of this or any such field of study.

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The Post-Theoretical Approach When I first conceived of this project over a decade ago, I thought I would have to write a lengthy section opposing and attempting to refute the claims of this multifaceted and vaguely defined set of approaches to performance theory. However, in the intervening years, this orientation has become less popular, and I now find I can allow the vagaries of academic fashion to do much of the work for me. However, since a few voices are still quite influential in this area, I will discuss one salient example to help usher in the demise of what I believe to be a largely corrosive influence on modern academic thinking. A problem that continues to plague our field derives from attempts to analyze, or at least account for, so-called postmodern performance—especially what has come to be labeled performance art. One characteristic shared by many of these artistic endeavors has been precisely the attempt to efface or confuse the central organizing framework that I argued for in Chapter 1. That is, these artists have been trying to undermine, or put in play, the distinction between special events and everyday life that has been central to cultural performance in the past. This has everything to do with Blau’s “illusion of the unmediated” (1990: 253) and John MacAloon’s exploration of contemporary questions of the “really real” (1984: 269–73). For example, artists have taken ordinary objects and reframed them as art. They have filmed or enacted everyday events and then sold recordings or charged admission to the activities. They have used audiences as performers, and vice versa, and employed countless similar tricks to expose, undermine, or call into question the very framing conventions that in the past have distinguished the special from the everyday. Even in the realm of popular entertainment, the advent and expansion of reality television, which has been adumbrated in countless ways on the Internet, has complicated and often neutralized conventional meanings and understandings that have enabled cultural systems to cohere in the past. This confusion of cultural frameworks has made it extremely difficult for social patterns to become widespread and has contributed to what I am calling the culture-like conditions that most of us endure today. Accordingly, scholars who have tried to explore the various versions of postmodern performance have turned to post-theory as a seemingly obvious fit. Does the theory have to model the data, or does it merely have to account for it? This is an interesting question that I will not try to answer here. In the case of postmodern performance theory, however, I fear that in most cases this turn has merely increased the obfuscation that the artists are trying for, rather than clearing anything up. Perhaps a contemporary academic is merely another verbal artist who has a right to reject any attempt at delimiting or delineating specific interpretations of their writing. I hope not, and am trying to argue

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against it here. If academics are not attempting to clarify ideas, to move from less adequate to more adequate understandings of phenomena, then I think they misunderstand their own project. If our role is to become celebrities of the ever more obscure, then I think the public has the right to cast us out of educational institutions and send us into the marketplace of social fame to sink or swim on the stage or the tube (as some have done). This stance might make me seem out of step to some, but perhaps with the fickle swing of vogue there may be a gradual return to the realm of clarity and coherence, which I believe are necessary for the continuance of academia and perhaps even of human sociality in the long run, if that is not too grandiose a claim. A central problem that has plagued many approaches to performance theory is the fundamental question of representation: in other words, a semeiotic theory. An example of this can be found in the work of Auslander, who has been quite influential in advocating a postmodern approach to performance. At first glance, Auslander might be lumped into my omnibus category if one looks at his major compendium of theorists (2003) and his most recent, problematic textbook (2008). In the latter, he states that “performance studies is always in search of new theories that might open up new ways of seeing and interpreting performance. Performance studies is theory: it is the myriad conceptual tools used to ‘see’ performance” (2008: 1, emphasis in the original). Of course, no discipline has autonomous agency, and therefore it cannot be “in search of ” anything, but the real problem in this case is Auslander’s refusal to choose between alternative theoretical approaches. However, a more interesting and troubling position can be found in his book Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture (Auslander 1999). There he makes a complex and detailed argument that is an attempt to undermine the ontological priority of live events, in contrast to what he calls, following Jean Baudrillard, “mediatized” events. One problem with the argument is that he begins with an initial distinction between the two kinds of events and then proceeds to undermine that distinction. In other words, the argument is circular: if the distinction was not warranted in the first place, why should it be surprising that it doesn’t hold after all? He tries to wriggle out of this dilemma by arguing against any ontology that might privilege liveness, indeed against any ontology at all, since any theory of being is contingent on what he calls, following Jacques Attali or perhaps Pierre Bourdieu, a “cultural economy.” To unpack this critique further, it seems that the semiological model Auslander prefers comes from Baudrillard, relying primarily on the latter’s concept of simulation: “Nothing separates one pole from the other, the initial from the terminal: there is just a sort of contraction into each other, a fantastic telescoping, a collapsing of the two traditional poles into one another: an IMPLOSION” (Baudrillard 1983: 57, emphasis in the original; cited in Auslander

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1999: 39). I have called the sort of language Baudrillard uses here highly metaphoric (Lewis 2006), which is a generous way of saying that it is extremely unclear. What he seems to be arguing for is a Derridean play of signifiers based on a Saussurean model that has been outmoded in linguistics for many decades. Such a putative “free play” of signifiers has been used by post-theorists to deny authenticity of any sort—even the cultural priority anthropologists usually give to native interpreters of their own cultural practices (see Daniel 1984). In contrast, a Peircean model bases more-developed forms of mediation, corresponding to what Baudrillard and Auslander call mediatization, on lessdeveloped forms—that is, ordinary semeiotic mediation already present in the process of sensory perception. This is an evolutionary model that can be used to explain the relation between ape calls and human language, for instance, as well as the development of technological media from earlier live event practices. In his zeal to undermine the latter scenario, Auslander ventures into the absurd, claiming that “the ancient Greek theatre, for example, was not live because there was no possibility of recording it” (1999: 51). This startling contention is simply wrong. There was a possibility of recording Greek drama, but that possibility had not yet been realized. However, I hope the reader is sensitive to the more serious category error here: that concepts and language do not determine the experience, but rather, as phenomenologists argue, experience comes first while concepts and language follow. The lack of a term or a concept for an experience, such as “liveness,” does not mean that such an experience does not occur. An ancient Greek could certainly distinguish the difference between attending a performance and hearing or reading about it afterward! A similar sort of absurdity undermines Jacques Derrida’s idea that writing is a fundamental (ontological?) human category, as I have noted previously. Such a problem is also implicated in theories of culture that force all human sociality into a model that derives from contemporary conditions or even from a recent colonial past. There is nothing wrong with the category of postcolonialism, for instance, as long as investigators admit that different colonial regimes resulted in different situations and that many societies have existed outside of colonial regimes, or prior to them. To return to the case of Auslander, he does document important trends in the development of contemporary events, including the pre-packaging of live events for televisual reproduction and the inclusion of video screens and amplification for live spectators. He is good at revealing contemporary trends but unwarranted in his more sweeping generalizations about how they relate to the human condition. At the heart of Auslander’s argument is a problem with the misunderstanding of semeiotic mediation: “Mediation is thus imbedded within the im-mediate; the relation of mediation and the im-mediate is one of mutual dependence, not precession. Far from being encroached upon, contaminated, or threatened by mediation, live performance

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is always already inscribed with traces of the possibility of technical mediation (i.e., mediatization) that defines it as live” (1999: 53, emphasis in the original). What needs to be clarified here is the relation between mediation and “technical mediation”—and also the possibility of the immediate as related to liveness. My view should be clear: Auslander’s technical mediation is merely an ongoing evolution of semeiotic complexity that is “always already” present in human semiosis—for example, in language. Does Auslander believe that liveness could be immediate, as he implies above (which seems a quixotic thing for him to argue if he wants to undermine liveness itself )? If so, I have already criticized this position as misguided. Analysts like Peirce, Blau, and myself believe that there can be no unmediated experience because all feelings must be “translated” into awareness by complex mechanisms of perception, such as electrochemical impulses. Brian Massumi makes a similar point by highlighting a distinction between perception and sensation, which is now widely employed in cognitive theory (2002: 14ff.). In my view, live events (as they are now called in English) are, at best, somewhat more immediate, whereas the category of mediatization describes events that are somewhat more mediated: ramified by layers of technological reproduction. As I have argued repeatedly, semeiotic relations evolve from less to more complex over time, over both short terms and longer periods. Another important point that should be made here is that so-called mediatization often involves technologies whose effect is to enhance the human sensorium, especially to increase the scope of vision and hearing. These effects are indeed addictive and seem to make live events, or recorded ones, “come alive” even further. The use of technology to explore and enhance human experience is longstanding and ubiquitous and might be understood as a method to increase the phenomenological depth of event frameworks, particularly after such depth has initially been removed. As I argued in Chapter 5, a plenitude of primal depth is fundamental to the scope of experience in lived environments. The need for sensory enhancements is due partly to the large scale of contemporary events. In small-scale societies, live events involved a few score or, at most, a few hundred participants, so everyone could see and hear without much difficulty. When tens or hundreds of thousands of people come together, the problems of perception at live events become acute. Note that some of these media technologies intensify certain aspects of sensory experience at the expense of others. In still other cases, artificial worlds, such as computer or video games, reduce aspects of sensory experience in order to create a simplified, more coherent situation, which is typical of game frameworks in general. In other words, what Baudrillard and Auslander call mediatization is a set of multiplex phenomena that probably should be unpacked into various types and styles rather than appearing as an unproblematic general category.

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Finally, let me mention another strain of contemporary theory that has appeared in the last decade or two. This emerging interest does not seem to fit easily into the post-theory category, being based not so much on a Saussurean model2 but rather on the work of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari (e.g., 1994; 1987). This work is difficult to characterize but has begun to influence approaches to performance, such as those of Brian Massumi (2011; 2002) and Bruce Kapferer (2005). Let me reiterate, as I remarked about post-theory, that as long as such approaches serve to elucidate performance phenomena and are useful in constructing coherent theoretical frameworks, I am sympathetic to them. Insofar as they may further obfuscate those phenomena and serve only to enhance the inaccessibility of arcane intellectualism, I don’t find them useful. Recent Sociological Approaches I now want to turn to a set of more interesting approaches to performance theory, propounded by a group of sociologists under the rubric cultural pragmatics. I will consider the work of two authors, both of whom are represented in a collection called Social Performance: Symbolic Action, Cultural Pragmatics and Ritual (Alexander, Giesen, and Mast 2006). What I like about their approach is that they have attempted what few have had the courage to do: actually create a theoretical synthesis for the field of performance using a coherent body of work. In this, we have much in common. They have made ritual their starting point and have tried to derive contemporary performance genres from ritual theory in a move reminiscent of, and probably inspired by, Victor Turner and also Friedrich Nietzsche (e.g., 2000 [1930]). However, in deriving contemporary performance forms from ritual alone, they ignore the importance of play, whose centrality I explored in Chapter 2. More serious, however, is that they have considered ritual from a somewhat Eurocentric point of view and not taken into consideration the wide variety of ritual types, some of which I suggested in Chapter 3 (see note 5). One of my anthropological colleagues, when presented with a ritual theory, always asked the question, “What sorts of rituals are you familiar with?”3 This query is very much to the point. I hope I have taken his advice sufficiently into account in my attempt to provide criteria toward a ritual theory (see Table 3.1). Jeffrey Alexander’s main argument has to do with what he calls “fusion,” which he claims is a quality of ritual in small-scale societies but is also sometimes found in a more familiar contemporary setting. In contrast, performances in large-scale nation-states are “de-fused,” and in order to be successful at creating social order, they need to be “re-fused.” The first problem with his approach is that he begins with a definition of performance that divides actors from observers: “Cultural performance is the social process by which actors, individually or

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in concert, display for others the meaning of their social situation” (2006: 32). He proposes this even though he later acknowledges that in some kinds of performances, “there may not be an audience in the contemporary sense at all, but only participants observing themselves and their fellow performers . . . though it is a condition much less frequently encountered in the complex societies of the present day” (2006: 35). The reader will note that co-participation is one of the defining characteristics of ritual in my model. Therefore, Alexander’s initial definition seems slightly “theatro-centric” for highlighting the division between actors and others, depending on how one interprets it. A second problem with his definition is the question of “meaning,” which is portrayed as a semantico-referential process by Alexander rather than in a truly pragmatic way, at least from a Peircean perspective.4 As I’ve stated repeatedly, performances have embodied effects on participants and observers (if any), and these effects are themselves meanings, which can evolve into cognitive and linguistic expressions upon reflection. Alexander defines fusion as the sharing of interpretive meaning, in the cognitive and linguistic sense, between performers and observers. It follows from this that his attempt to label performances as successful or failed, effective or ineffective, true or false, based on a degree of social fusion cannot succeed. I agree that, insofar as effects and interpretations are shared between co-participants, a performance is more ritual-like (depending on the other criteria), and insofar as these effects diverge and diversify, they are less ritual-like. However, to argue that the only successful performances are those that serve to encourage social unity is clearly going too far. Remember that rituals can also thematize divisions between social groups and subgroups and highlight tensions within the social fabric. Also, if a postmodern performance artist should create high degrees of ambiguity in an audience, which is what they often intend to do, and if audiences should enjoy this process, there is no justification in arguing that such a performance is not effective or successful, even if it fails to enhance social cohesion. In spite of these differences, our positions are fairly close, since Alexander is moving toward an understanding that cultural coherence is somewhat lacking in contemporary large-scale societies and that performance is clearly implicated in this problem. In another move similar to mine, Alexander argues that many contemporary performances can be ritual-like, and he even notes that some are “more ritual-like” than others (2006: 32). In this respect, his approach is slightly more nuanced than that of Bernhard Giesen, whose interesting synthesis is also found in the volume under consideration. Like Alexander, Giesen is straightforward about the necessity for social coherence in his foundational concepts: “Performance appears as the iterative social construction of order that allows us to frame the extraordinary event and to cope with the challenge of chaos and absurdity” (Giesen 2006: 327). The reader will note that I share with Giesen the

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emphasis on framing the extraordinary. However, the relations between chaos and order can be multiplex and culturally diverse, and often involve negotiation or active engagement with chaotic forces. In addition, Giesen’s category of the extraordinary is associated primarily with experiences of the numinous, the transcendental, and the unspeakable, all of which he tends to lump together under Durkheim’s old rubric, the sacred (e.g., Giesen 2006: 328). I won’t rehearse here the numerous critiques of what many anthropologists consider to be the Eurocentrism of Durkheim’s sacred/profane distinction, except to assert again that, even if redefined as Giesen tries to do, it will still not suffice to capture the diversity of ways that cultural groups have seen their relations to spiritual beings and/or powers greater than themselves. As the reader will recall, in my approach events framed as special sometimes encourage or represent extraordinary experiences, but sometimes they can merely reframe banal experiences or perhaps fail to live up to heightened expectations. Likewise, extraordinary experiences can happen at any time, in any framework more or less marked, and they can occur with a variety of degrees of intensity. Giesen seems to realize this when he notes that “the encounter with the sacred in moments of epiphany is not confined to religious practices. These moments of epiphany may occur also in seemingly secularized spheres such as politics or private life” (2006: 337). This understanding does not seem to have influenced his fundamental model, however, and it would seem to follow that lumping together all types of extraordinary experience under a single rubric like epiphany is problematic and probably misguided. Diverging from Alexander’s approach, Giesen notes that rituals not only function to unify social groups but also serve to divide one group from another (2006: 327). As I already noted, this has been generally understood in anthropology at least since the work of Max Gluckman (1954). As noted earlier, many have pointed out that rituals can also express tensions between kin groups, or between genders, within a social polity. Likewise, rituals can themselves be a form of competition, such as the moka feasts held by “big men” in Melanesia or the potlatch ceremonies of Kwakiutl chiefs in Western Canada. Webb Keane (1997) elaborates on the high degree of ambiguity and tension that characterizes ritualized “representational practices” in Anakalang, Indonesia, emphasizing the hazards of putting oneself forward in public speaking encounters. Although Giesen allows for attempts to contain chaos, as epiphanic experience, in rituals, this does not quite have the scope that Victor Turner suggested with his idea of anti-structure as “a seedbed of cultural creativity” (1982: 28). That is, for Turner, rituals provided a realm of imaginative possibility that served to allow for transformations of social relations over time. In other words, rituals provided groups the means for adaptation to new conditions through social change and not just for the maintenance of continuity.

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In addition, Giesen’s sign theory is problematic—for instance, in trying to distinguish “aesthetic” from “sacred” signs (2006: 361n7) while at the same time trying to link esthetic and sacred forms of extraordinary experience. However, there is much to be admired in his synthesis—for instance, his realization that “iteration” is a fundamental performative process (see Chapter 5), followed by his perspicacious linking of ritual to evocations of the past: “Ritual performances are not just events, but iterations of events. They repeat events that have happened before. Only by this reference to the past can the ritual become visible as a standardized performance” (2006: 338). Likewise, his musings on the relative vivacity of extraordinary experience in relation to a semeiotic of communication are to the point. In my view, extraordinary experiences resist linguistic mediation more insistently than others, requiring constant revisiting in performances that rely primarily on iconic and indexical (proto-symbolic) forms of signification that are themselves somewhat resistant to linguistic classification or characterization. As Talal Asad has noted from a cross-cultural perspective, “it could be argued that ‘translating’ an alien form of life, another culture, is not always done best through the representational discourse of ethnography, that under certain conditions a dramatic performance, the execution of a dance, or the playing of a piece of music might be more apt” (1986: 159). As I will examine below, this is a delicate and fraught approach on the part of ethnographers but is common and unproblematic from the perspective of cultural insiders creating their own performances. Cognitive Approaches The perceptive reader will note the extensive contributions to my understanding of embodiment made by the work of Evan Thompson (2007) and Mark Paterson (2007), both of whom bring cognitive and neurological approaches to human consciousness into line with the European phenomenological tradition in a convincing fashion. I find this area of research quite inspiring and think that it should greatly aid in attempts to link the micro-processes of embodiment to frameworks of performance in cultural life-worlds. One such piece, cited in Chapter 5, was John Sutton’s work on embodiment and thought in cricket (2007). This sort of project is quite tricky, since one needs to master both the scientific literature and the difficult philosophical concepts of European phenomenology in order to make a successful synthesis. A further complication will be the inclusion of the American pragmatistic phenomenology, such as the work of Peirce, which I rely on. Although I have made some tentative moves toward a linkage between the two phenomenological schools, to do so adequately would require another book.5

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There is a growing body of work that has tried to link performance theory with cognitive theory, exemplified in the volume edited by Bruce McConachie and F. Elizabeth Hart (2006). Unfortunately, the synthetic moves in this volume are, in most cases, much less convincing than the two books cited above, although they seem to be moving in a promising direction. Most of the authors in the collection agree that understanding human consciousness involves a theory of embodiment and a critique of Cartesianism. However, as students of literature, they tend to rely on linguistic renderings of embodiment, such as George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s work with metaphor (1999; 1980). This work is fine, as far as it goes, but others have shown how metaphor itself is based on deeper types of embodied relations. For example, Michael Haley (1988) has demonstrated from a Peircean perspective that metaphor is embedded in more fundamental (proto-symbolic) processes of semeiosis, especially those involving combinations of iconic and indexical relations. In Chapter 5 I tried to show how these sorts of relations go deeply into processes of embodied habit. In this view, metaphor is a linguistic attempt to express relations that are more clearly enacted in movement, sound, and visual pattern. Calling phenomena visual or sonic “metaphors,” therefore, is precisely a reversal of theoretical priority. In the collection just cited, Hart also takes issue with the reliance of much contemporary post-theory on the problematic semiology of Ferdinand de Saussure, as I have done (Hart 2006: 30–31). Her discussion of space, however, would benefit from engagement with the phenomenological work of Edward Casey (e.g., 1993) and the critique that I outlined in Chapter 5. More centrally, her use of Lakoff and Johnson’s idea of “image schema” as the basis of metaphor could benefit from Thompson’s critique of the idea of memory as image (Thompson 2007: ch. 10). However, it should be evident that all this work is moving in a similar direction, even if the details are still in dispute. McConachie’s piece in the same volume is more problematic, in that his critique, virtually a dismissal, of psychoanalysis is based on criteria of evidence that come from a positivist framework. The best that can be said here is that the dialogue between phenomenology and cognitive science, which has been advanced so well by Thompson and Paterson, among others, might be extended in a similar way toward psychoanalysis. For some work in this direction, see the work of Peter Ashworth and Man Chung (2006), Bernadette Wegenstein (2006), Daniel Stern (2000), Roger Brooke (2000), and Sonia Mycak (1996). I believe that some version of psychoanalysis is probably necessary to understand the roots of human ambivalence in the resort to violence, for instance, which often seems to confuse hatred of others with hatred of self.

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Problems of Performance Auto-Ethnography As foreshadowed in the earlier quotation by Talal Asad, another strain of performance theory has to do with the critique of ethnography as written representation and the response by some who try to perform ethnographic material instead (or in addition). This was a practice attempted by Victor Turner as an experiment with students in the early days of performance studies, when he would direct them in enacting various aspects of Ndembu ritual. Similar practices have now become something of a celebrated trend, especially in relation to a growing interest in “performance as research” at many universities. One influential proponent of performing ethnography was Dwight Conquergood, who began enacting stories and myths taken from Lao and Hmong peoples he had worked with, primarily for outsider audiences (1985). An initial problem here is that not much consideration has been given to the difference between performing ethnography as a classroom exercise: to engage the interest and perhaps the understanding (though this is more problematic) of students; as opposed to performing it in public as a serious form of cultural representation. It is very difficult for investigators to acquire competence in foreign modes of cultural performance, since at the minimum this requires many years of immersion and practice. The same could be said, to some extent, about ethnography itself, of course, and it has been. The issue of who should write ethnography, how it should be written, and how to evaluate various accounts of the same groups of people is a fraught one, about which much ink has been spilled.6 To use my own work as an example, I felt it was important for me to try to learn how to play Brazilian capoeira to the best of my ability, even though my goal was only a descriptive one. I never came close to any degree of mastery of the game, but I felt, after a few years of practice, that I could understand enough to write about it with some insight. However, when I wanted to present a performance for students, and especially for a general or academic audience, I always tried to employ Brazilian experts whenever possible. Likewise, in the writing of the ethnography, I used many Portuguese terms, providing some definitions but also trying to give a sense of how these categories are used in a different linguistic context and cultural setting. This has been standard practice in the writing of ethnography, although there have now been many other approaches tried, mostly with the intent to give greater voice to those people being written about. In a similar way, Conquergood noted that his goal was to work toward a kind of “dialogical performance,” but he also did quite a nice job of laying out the most common problems encountered in trying to achieve this (1985: 5). Essentially the same problems of competence and representation arise in performing ethnography as are found in writing it: Who is doing the presentation? What is their position in that cultural world? How competent are

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they to present the material? What are their intentions and biases? Who is the audience, and what are their expectations? 7 None of these questions have a categorical answer, so they all must be answered on a case-by-case basis. The presentation of an ethnographic account is more of an art than a science, although modes of objectivity and observer distance can be quite important. One of the most insightful discussions of these issues can be found in the work of Roy Wagner in his classic book, The Invention of Culture (1981), which ought to be standard reading for all would-be ethnographers. For Wagner, culture is invented or co-created through the clash of human experiences of the strange and the foreign—for instance, when an anthropologist feels the culture shock of being in a different life-world and when the life-world of the group he has entered is changed due to his presence. Through this clash, a hybrid set of assumptions and beliefs is created on both sides, which, from the anthropologist’s point of view, is called the “culture” of the group being studied. However, as noted, this encounter also alters the understanding of one’s own society when the researcher returns home. In this scenario, both foreign culture and one’s own culture are “invented,” in a sense, through the same process, but the invention is not a free-form imagination; rather, it is constrained by the harsh realities of other people’s actions and beliefs. It follows from this that the more dissonant the encounter, the more strange the clash, the more fruitful and interesting the subsequent account. In other words, this model implies difficulties with people studying the familiar, since they may feel no clash of difference, and therefore much that happens will remain invisible to them because it is taken for granted. This, in a nutshell, is my problem with so-called auto-ethnography, a term that I view quite simply as an oxymoron. The things least visible to us as human beings are our own patterns of activity—our own naturalized habits. At times we may become aware of these habits, primarily because of other people’s actions or comments but also because of the constraints of the world on our lives, such as accidents we may suffer or objective modes of measurement we may employ. So I may experience myself as perfectly fit until someone calls me “fatty” or I begin breathing hard and having palpitations when I climb stairs. I may think I am not gaining weight until I step onto a scale. Even then, however, I may misread the number it displays and perpetuate my self-deception. If an ethnography is an account of a strange or unfamiliar group, then there can be no auto-ethnography. Instead there is autobiography, a well-established but somewhat different genre. It follows that descriptions of one’s own cultural world are best done by those who have traveled widely, lived elsewhere, or originated in a different social milieu. This is tricky, of course, because anthropologists have relied on native informants for understandings and interpretations of what they observe. But as many have pointed out, informants quickly

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become “culture brokers” who, in dialogue with the stranger, begin to see formerly familiar things from a different point of view. In other words, the best informants are those who are no longer merely native but have become partial outsiders on their own cultural scene. Therefore, there is a sense in which one knows oneself and one’s own lifeworld better than anyone else, but there is another sense in which it is the thing one has the most difficulty getting perspective on. This, in my view, has been a major justification for the anthropological project, and it continues to be valid on the contemporary scene. Perhaps it is even more essential right now, since the global forces of homogenization seem to be strengthening with the development of technology and communication media. These are in conflict with the forces of “heterogenization,” as Arjun Appadurai has pointed out (1990a; see also Feld 1996a), but the latter seem much weaker by comparison. As I have argued, cultural continuity—and, along with it, cultural diversity—is at risk and everywhere endangered. Accordingly, ethnography in the strong sense argued for here has never been more necessary or desirable. As mentioned above, Conquergood was, by and large, sensitive to these sorts problems with performance ethnography, but others who have followed his approach have not always been so perspicacious. One example is the work of Norman Denzin (e.g., 2003), whose enthusiasm seems to blind him to most forms of critical engagement, even though he uses the term critical repeatedly. Instead, his work seems to me to embody a form of the “omnibus” approach in which distinctions between various theories become all but lost. Denzin wants to be all things to all people, from postmodernist to feminist to Marxist, seemingly without realizing or noticing the contradictions between such positions. Early on in the cited book, he attempts to define key terms, but I, for one, ended up more confused than enlightened: he only requires three pages to “define” nine major categories. He begins with a definition of performance that is clearly theatrical: “A performance is an interpretive event involving actors, purposes, scripts, stories, stages, and interactions” (2003: 8, emphasis in the original). In addition to introducing a welter of terms that also need definition, this assertion clearly derives the more general term performance from the more specific genre theater; in other words, the reasoning is backward as well as ethnocentric. Aside from the many problems of theoretical confusion, Denzin’s project is troubling because it seems to justify a methodology whereby it is not only acceptable but also praiseworthy for students to “study” their own artistic products. The practice of giving students academic degrees for creating and analyzing their own performances is a troubling trend that seems to me to be misguided. Aside from the caveats about the opacity of self-understanding mentioned earlier, it also seems important to maintain that the standards for evaluating artistic

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production and those for evaluating academic production are substantially different. I will concede that, in the long run, a community of investigators will decide, in both cases, which works have more value and which have less, but the criteria for academic evaluation are much clearer, and consensus is therefore more easily and quickly reached, than in the case of art. In any event, even an analysis of art created within a Western academic context will tell us very little about cultural patterns in the wider sphere. What little might be gleaned would be more revealing if analyzed by others: those who did not create the performances and therefore had more critical distance from the productions. Patterns of Culture8 I want to begin with a very simple point but one that I think has profound consequences for the anthropological understanding of culture, without doubt our most important and contested concept. I will argue that there is not one final answer to what culture is or how the word should be understood, as seems implicit in so many of the anguished discussions about definition. In the many self-critical evaluations of how past anthropologists have gotten it wrong, authors often fail to account for how things have been changing in the world. Even though this change is also a constant preoccupation for many, scholars sometimes seem to forget that changing conditions require changing concepts. In other words, what culture may have been for Edward Tylor,9 Bronislaw Malinowski, or Edward Evans-Pritchard is not necessarily what it is now, at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This is not just because anthropologists have gotten ever more theoretically sophisticated, though that is probably the case, but also because world conditions have been changing, and dramatically changing, since the second half of the nineteenth century, when the concept of culture was anthropologically formulated. The historical changes in the world are more important than the historical changes in the discipline, of course, and some sense of this former history has to be built into the culture concept to add further to the kinds of dynamism already argued for. As I noted earlier, one common demon of past misunderstanding has been the notion that groups should ever have been understood as “clearly bounded cultural isolates” (Herzfeld 2001: 50). That the world was, or is, divided up into territorially discrete, linguistically separate cultural groups is now widely taken as a fiction, perpetrated by early anthropologists, sometimes in league with imperial governments intent on political domination and economic exploitation. This putatively imaginary and nostalgic scenario is said to hide the many ways in which migration, miscegenation, mixing, and hybridity were always, supposedly, part of the human condition (e.g., Bhabha 1994; Clifford 1988).

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There are many threads here that have been exhaustively unpacked, and my ironic tone is intended, not to deny that there is a certain truth to this critique, but rather to assert that it seems overdrawn. That is, the short-sightedness and prejudice of earlier anthropologists notwithstanding, I believe it is reasonable to argue that the world before European imperialism, indeed even before any imperialism whatsoever—that is, before the development of nations and empires (and hopefully contemporaries can still imagine that such a world existed)— was characterized much more by such “cultural isolates” than the contemporary world is. In other words, those earlier scholars were not completely wrong but might be recuperated somewhat by the positing of a contour of history in which there has been a change from more to less isolated, from more clearly to less clearly bounded, and from more discrete to more hybrid societies. To be sure, many of the early ethnographers erred, especially in imputing a kind of homeostasis to the small-scale groups they were studying (see Fabian 1983), but this was at least partly because they were comparing them implicitly with the rapidly changing social and technological conditions in the societies they had come from. Instead, many academics currently seem to fall prey to a kind of “contempo-centrism” in which, since the present world seems to be so radically hybrid and chaotic, they imagine that the world must always have been so. I will agree, then, that many early anthropologists exaggerated the extent to which the groups they studied were autonomous and unchanging and that this was partly the fault of the cultural orientation, both commonsensical and theoretical, they brought with them to fieldwork. But it does not follow from this that they were completely mistaken about what they reported nor that the perceived dramatic differences between Euro-American societies and those supposedly “primitive” ones were entirely fictive. In other words, I want to preserve a scenario of human history and prehistory that allows for certain trends in cultural development to be part of our human self-understanding. The reason the objectification of culture seemed like a good idea to past generations of researchers, to the point where they tried to map the world into “culture areas,” was partly that early human developments did coalesce, during the long foraging era (at least 50–100 thousand years10), into relatively stable territorial and linguistic contours. I believe there is good evidence to support the contention that early foraging and even later horticultural and pastoral societies did change relatively slowly, were more conservative of cultural patterns, and were more isolated from each other than any groups around on the planet today. From this perspective, the development of domestication and widespread sedentism that resulted in civilizations can still be seen as a major revolution: a fundamental change in the human pattern of social organization. This (r)evolution was not necessarily a positive thing, nor necessarily negative, but it did result in a radical increase in communication of all sorts between previously more isolated groups and

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a rapid development of technology. Clearly humans are still dealing with the legacy of these changes, which have been accelerating ever since, especially due to the quantum leaps in communication media in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. From the position of contemporary life, it is very difficult to imagine what it might have been like to live in a world of continuity and predictability, which makes it all the more essential that the work of early ethnographers not be forgotten or dismissed as irredeemably flawed. Some would argue, as I indicated, that this historical scenario is a fiction, invented by romantic anthropologists who were dissatisfied with the conditions of modernizing societies (cf. Stocking 1989). I would ask doubters to examine the evidence carefully and to note that early fieldworkers did not go out looking to find noble savages, at least in many cases. Indeed, the early evolutionist paradigm that dominated the field toward the end of the nineteenth century might rather suggest that fieldworkers would find savages and barbarians, little removed from brute, animal-like ways of life. The fact that, again and again, they encountered people who had much to teach and were much to be admired might seem surprising to those who argue that anthropologists were trapped in their own cultural prejudices. Of course, some of those prejudices were romantic ones, both exotic and patronizing, but was this ever the whole story? Because Malinowski, for instance, largely ignored the effects of missionaries in his accounts of Trobriand culture (e.g., 1961 [1922]), does this mean he didn’t get a glimpse of what it must have been like before they arrived? We can’t know for sure what it was like before he and they arrived, and even less can we know for certain what the world was like before civilizations and imperialism, but it is important that we try to imagine it, based on the best evidence available. This evidence comes from early (and event fairly recent) ethnography and archeology. From the latter, we have learned of mass migrations in prehistory and of wide-ranging trade networks, even between foraging groups, all indications that former societies were never isolates and that the map was never clearly bounded; but there are also pottery motifs and architectural styles that can be used to identify and date cultural formations quite accurately. Another important indicator is human linguistic diversity itself. How did the thousands of distinct languages ever develop in the first place if not due to relative isolation, and why are they disappearing so rapidly today in the face of globalization? Language loss is clearly a sign of the reduction of cultural diversity so evident in the contemporary world (Errington 2003; Crystal 2000), and I believe it signals a new phase in how theorists should define the concept of culture. Let me remind the reader that one change has already been suggested in this book, which is in agreement with the critique of past anthropological formulations up to a point—namely, that culture should be seen not as a “structure” or even as a “system” but rather as a set of shared practices or performances that

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serve as embodied patterns to unify a determinate social group. Early ethnographers glimpsed a passing world, one changing before their eyes, in which cultural patterns were closely shared among replicating (self-similar) groups of people over a long period of time. These groups were characterized by a high degree of consensus in practices, including linguistic codes, within a fairly coherent territorial range, with a remarkable degree of continuity between generations. This was a world that was already passing out of existence, and one whose coherence was probably exaggerated by the reporters, but nonetheless one that was profoundly different from how most humans are living today. Such experiences caused some researchers to rigidify a slow rate of change into stasis and a degree of territorial integrity into clearly definable boundaries, but these errors of degree should not cast doubt on the principal insight. Humans evolved culture as a way of creating a life-world (a habitat) out of a biological umwelt (environment)—as way of adapting conditions to themselves, within ecologies that were otherwise changing only very slowly without cultural intervention. Humans moved into new places and, while adapting to them, also slowly developed ways of modifying them to become more habitable. Therefore, the cultural patterns they created had to be flexible enough to change with changing conditions and yet provide a sense of coherence and continuity. In a world of mostly natural culture, all change was gradual, and patterns were replicated with a high degree of continuity. In a world of late cultural nature, we are creating and changing environments so rapidly that coherence and continuity have become major problems. Contemporary Societies as “Culture-Like” Phenomena Therefore, the argument is that the classical culture concept should be understood as describing human life-worlds primarily of the past, in which practices were widely shared among small-scale groups of people (isopraxis), those practices changing almost imperceptibly (in most cases) from generation to generation. This scenario applies best to a world of small-scale foraging groups, which we know characterized human life on the planet for 90 percent of human (pre) history. After the domestication of plants and animals and the rise of sedentism and urbanization, small-scale societies began to give way to large-scale civilizations that encompassed a variety of groups not sharing similar practices: language, dress, ritual, and the like. The situation of heteropraxis found in such societies gradually increased, along with the increasing scale of empires and states, and in concert with rapidly developing technology. This old story from the anthropological canon, told in a slightly new way here, should not be discarded without a good alternative, one that does not take it for granted that human life conditions have always been the same as they are now.

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Accordingly, I want to argue that contemporary human life-worlds might be better understood as culture-like rather than truly cultural in the strong sense just outlined. That is, large-scale groups today tend to share very few practices, since most contemporary societies are made up of unruly conglomerates of heteropractic communities. These communities are often imaginal, to modify slightly the famous phrase of Benedict Anderson (1983).11 That is, they are imaginatively co-constituted through highly mediated virtual processes rather than directly through face-to-face events. I use the term imaginal, from my previous discussion, to contrast with imagined, since the reality of nation-states in the world today is taken for granted by most citizens. The reader will remember that, in this usage, imaginal phenomena constitute the largely unexamined realities of everyday life, whereas “imaginaries” are special frameworks that are consensually recognized (in common sense) as mere fictions. Thus nation-states are imaginal phenomena that are undeniably “real” in their effects at times (such as when one is imprisoned or deported), whereas “Never-Never Land” or Hamlet’s Denmark are cultural imaginaries (even though they also can have real effects— for instance, on audiences or readers—since imaginaries can influence realities). This distinction captures quite well the sort of phenomenological ontology I am arguing for—one in which imagination plays a strong part but is also constrained by objective resistance and social consensus. The complexity of reality is conveniently ignored by many analysts who bandy about the word imagined in current discourse, and I challenge those who use such terms to provide a counterpoint theory of reality to balance their claims. It is useful to propose that many people today are living in culture-like social worlds, partly because of evidence that they often wish for greater orthopraxis, for greater consensus and coherence.12 For instance, in his book on Sydney hiphop, Ian Maxwell describes a rap challenge he witnessed between two “rhymers” as an “intense desire to have a ritual in order to have a culture” (2003: 21). These B-boys used the words culture and even nation to describe the putative coherence of their shared practices of rapping, “writing” (graffiti), and breakdancing. Such skills were seen to unify them into a group, in contrast with the alienating social world of the city. In a similar way, many other so-called subcultural formations coalesce around shared patterns of dress, music, dance, and language.13 Such culture-like groupings, or “quasi-groups,” as Adrian Mayer called them (1966), usually change rapidly and often fall apart under the pressures of individuality, consumerism, and similar kinds of narrow self-interest. In a much less voluntary way, national governments also try to impose a certain degree of orthopraxis on their citizens, through legislation and through the creation of cultural events such as independence and memorial days. This degree of national iso- and orthopraxis is therefore also superficial in most cases, and the

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attempts to embrace “multiculturalism” (now a common term) are often more successful in dividing groups against each other than in unifying a nation (see Hage 1998). For example, some Aboriginal people in Australia have tried to redesignate Australia Day as “Invasion Day,” and they of course have a very different way of commemorating it. If humans are now creating life-worlds that are not truly cultural but merely culture-like, how can theorists understand this difference? Culture-like formations are usually institutional or voluntary associations of mutual affinity rather than matters of heredity or kinship. Thus they involve shared practices that are less deeply rooted in human development and are therefore easier to change. If one gets tired of the hip-hop scene, there are many other choices available in contemporary Sydney: “hardcore” punk, Goth, raver, biker, and so forth. Many of these groupings are even less coherently formulated in terms of practice than the hip-hop “nation” is (or was). Such practices tend to have a shallow history (according Maxwell, the founding moment for Sydney hip-hop was 1983 [2003: 51]) as opposed to an archaic past and do not usually constitute a total lifeworld orientation. For instance, what would be the appropriate spiritual beliefs for hip-hoppers? Political beliefs are a bit more clearly formulated (against “the system”)—but not to the degree of party affiliation (if any) or attitudes toward substantive issues, except relative to the formative practices mentioned earlier (e.g., that graffiti shouldn’t be illegal). The current widespread use of the word culture in popular discourse, associated with such superficial things as business practices, political cronyism, bureaucratic departments, and the like, can thus be reconfigured as further evidence for the ubiquity of culture-like formations. These all involve relatively transient shared practices that loosely define social groupings, in contradistinction to similar groups, all of which form and re-form rapidly and constantly. One anthropological commonplace—that the same people can identify with various distinct kin or ethnic categories of inclusion, depending on circumstance and point of view—is even more true of culture-like categories, since they proliferate widely and are much more malleable. That is, the groups themselves change membership rapidly, as do their designations and practices. Today it would not be uncommon for urban denizens in most nation-states to be able to name dozens of culture-like groupings with which they have been affiliated, more or less, at one time or another. A more serious problem is what the anthropologist Arjun Appadurai has called the “uncertainty” of many ethnic and culture-like labels, some of which have been created by institutional actors in nation-states in order to try to impose bureaucratic order on a populace (1998). In the worst cases, this sort of uncertainty has contributed to ethnic and religious violence between supposed members of such groupings. In his disturbing analysis, taken from several

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different regions and times, he points out that patterns of violence are reproduced on the bodies of ethnic others in ways that are far from random but seem to be suggestive of group-specific fears of treachery and secrecy. These are enemies that are hard to detect without what he calls “vivisection,” because they are adversaries from both outside and inside designated categorical groupings.14 This is a dark side of iso- and orthopraxis, alluded to earlier, which in my view is another source of evidence for the confusion of practices and categories in the contemporary world. Contemporary ethnocide might seem to be a perversion of past cultural practices, but even this is unclear, since systematic and even ritual violence have of course been around for as long as humanity itself has. Anthropological studies of witchcraft in Africa, for instance, have demonstrated that such violence was not always directed only at outsiders but also toward the enemy within.15 Evidence of the desire for greater cultural cohesion, which corresponds to a presumptive lack of same, can be seen in the various religious revivalist or fundamentalist groups proliferating in many contemporary societies. Most of the world’s major religions have examples of such groups, who try to enforce isopraxis in order to create an enhanced sense of cultural unity and continuity with the past. Likewise, the so-called New-Age groups of various sorts can be seen as manifestations of a similar desire for cultural continuity, since many of their practices hearken back to a shared past, even if largely imaginary.16 One might argue that these diverse manifestations represent the various ways contemporary people are trying to cope with the shallowness and uncertainty of culture-like groupings, hoping to recreate the depth of a past in which human sociality was more clearly a matter of cultural continuity and integrity. There may be elements of nostalgia operating here, of course, figurations of a past more integrated than it actually was, as has been common in many eras. Nonetheless, nostalgia may also be for a real past, or for a partially real tradition, and the question is surely an empirical one. Attempts to create or recreate ritual events, from religious practice to community theater, are concrete manifestations of this desire for social cohesion through the performance of a (re)constructive orthopraxis. The widely cited idea of the “invention of tradition” (Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983) should not blind theorists to the fact that such traditions, as cultural continuities, have indeed existed in many places and times to one degree or another. The fact that these performances are always subject to re-creation does not falsify this past condition; it merely relativizes it somewhat, serving as a corrective to overly rigid ideas of cultural uniformity. The extent to which traditions are reinvented today, because that continuity is seen as having been broken, should not constitute evidence that traditions always were merely invented anew each time. Indeed, such cultural labor would be highly inefficient, since

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it is so much easier to simply preserve what has gone before than to recreate it again from whole cloth. Therefore, I am arguing that societies in the recent and distant past were indeed characterized by a high degree of continuity (selfreplication) over time and that this pattern of replication counts as real, noninvented tradition, even if the degree of continuity is sometimes exaggerated, not least by the participants themselves. Rituals of reformation, as described in Chapter 3, still exist in some social worlds, although they are becoming increasingly rare and endangered. The Circulation of Practice and Habit I have argued that it is useful to recognize a distinction between cultural practices, as dynamic patterns that are publicly available for replication or modification, as opposed to personal habits that are idiosyncratic and individually distinctive. Of course, as I noted in Chapter 5, there is a fluid boundary between these domains, and indeed this permeable boundary, or mode of overlap, is at the heart of the importance of performance for cultural theory. That is, personal habits can become cultural practices, and shared practices inform personal habits in quite intimate ways. For evidence of the first sort of process, one can notice the proliferation of named genres in contemporary art and popular culture discourse. Genres and styles are commonly reducible to personal names in this arena: theater of the absurd can be specified as Pinteresque, modern dancers often study the Graham technique, soul music might be broken down to the James Brown sound, and so on. In this way, important innovators or exemplars of cultural style become available for imitation and further innovation. Such people, and patterns in their work, clearly occupy an intermediate position, both as exemplars of a cultural genre and as particular, idiosyncratic versions of that genre. They are partly patterned by the generic practice, and they partly re-form it in their own distinctive manner. Young practitioners may start by attempting strict imitations of their cultural heroes (playing that James Brown riff or practicing that Graham move) before they go on to develop their own “take” on them. Genre terms, then, are collections of individual and group works (events and event types) that are seen to conform, more or less, to a recognizable style. Each exemplar of that style both conforms to the pattern to some extent, and differs from it in a particular, distinctive way. Returning to the idea of group experience developed previously, it should now be more apparent exactly how performative events can be intended to promote intercorporeality. A performative event often involves shared or complimentary practices developed especially for that genre. Heightened, intensified, or exaggerated movement styles; archaic, elaborated, or poetic speech; unusual and especially ornate costumes; and important and

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virtuosic (or silly) music all can potentially play a part in the creation of such events. These special practices are derived from more ordinary, unmarked habits and in turn can influence or change them. In participating in special events, people often have a heightened awareness of themselves as culture bearers—as exemplars or representatives of something “larger than” or “other than” themselves, in some sense. At the same time, they may paradoxically feel more like their “true” selves, living for and through that moment of vivid enactment that makes the tedium of ordinary life seem pale by comparison. These generalizations, of course, are relative to particular sorts of performances in particular societies, as always, and are meant to be indicative rather than definitive. To be more specific, performances involve the creation of complex semeiotic patterns: cultural practices, which specific persons can embody. When people embody these patterns, their beings “conform” to, accommodate, or adapt to them in a process of aligning personal habits with group practices. This alignment creates an iconic harmony between habit and practice—between person and group—such that both are co-implicated and a con-subjectivity or intercorporeality is created. Such experiences can often be exhilarating, because they enact the latent union between self and group that is always already the basis of being human. Equally, they can be deeply disappointing, because they may fail to achieve such expectations for a given actor at a certain time. The fact that people are disappointed by or bored with certain kinds of performative events does not usually mean that they never wish to participate in special events again. Instead, it usually leads people to innovate—to seek out different sorts of performances—in order to fulfill this deeply felt potential. A Plea for an Ecological Approach If all experience is partly personal, partly consensual, it is still the case that some events are more social—are designed to foster shared experience—while others encourage privacy and individuality. Victor Turner’s well-known idea of “communitas” was intended to capture the group solidarity of (some kinds of ) ritual experience (e.g., 1982: 44–52), as was Durkheim’s earlier formulation of social “effervescence” (1965 [1915]: 49–50). Some kinds of ritual are ideally suited for the creation of (primarily) group experience, and this is one reason some contemporary artists are especially attracted to the idea of ritual enactment (see Lewis and Dowsey-Magog 1993). On the other hand, film and television, although enjoyable in groups and based on semeiotic processes that are (in part) consensual, can be seen to promote (primarily) individual experience. It does not seem strange, nor is it uncommon, to watch television alone, whereas theater with an audience of one, although possible, is not really viable. Likewise, many sporting events “come alive” when there are large crowds of spectators,

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and they languish when the fans stop coming. Just being in a group does not guarantee group experiences, of course, but it is an indication of cultural solidarity, of orthopraxis, just as solitary viewing is a sign of a certain tendency toward isolability and individuality. If it is true that most contemporary performative events only foster culturelike formations and that people (some, at least) long for something deeper, one might ask if there is any way to alter this situation: to design events and social settings in which things are more cohesive, coherent, and integrated. I was taught as a social theorist that my job was to observe and analyze, not to try to interfere or prescribe. Employing a pragmatistic and phenomenological approach, however, it is clear that observation involves co-constitution: that all experience is in the interaction between selves and worlds. If it is true that there is no position from which to view phenomena from the outside, it seems to me that the only possible course is to add one’s voice to the process of cultural world creation that humans, for better or worse, must engage in. Accordingly, the suggestion that new forms of violence between humans may be on the rise, mentioned earlier (Appadurai 1998), should probably be situated in the context of violence toward our environment in general. The abuse and slaughter of humans by humans has been accompanied by an equal, if not greater, slaughter of plants and animals, of whole ecosystems, by us as well. This has happened to such an extent that the very survival of humans as a species is clearly under threat. The reader will remember that according to an “enactive” biological theory, outlined in Chapter 5, in which organism and environment co-determine each other, the concept of evolution should probably be changed to refer, not to genetic change in populations, but instead to an evaluation of the viability of developmental systems (Thompson 2007: ch. 7). Furthermore, Thompson argues that homologous processes occur at all levels of these biomes, such that “it makes no sense to try to divide the traits of organisms into the separate categories of nature and culture” (2007: 193). As noted previously, a similar approach was invoked by Edward Casey, following Merleau-Ponty, and by Brian Massumi. If we are always already both cultural and natural beings, then both violence toward other humans and violence toward other species are ultimately forms of self-destruction, calling into question our coexistence with the planet. Given this situation, I think it is imperative that we try to find alternative cultural practices in order to ensure the continuing viability of our human life-worlds, embedded within the greater biosphere. In view of this situation, many new performative modes have already been proposed and tried, of course, and I want use my analysis of performance to add to these hopeful developments. Although I criticized some details of the theories of Alexander and Giesen earlier, (Alexander, Giesen, and Mast 2006), I share with them the belief that some aspects of ritual, if they can be reclaimed

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and reinforced, might be helpful in this process of re-creation. If ritual was most efficacious in small-scale societies, as has been suggested, perhaps something can be done to reduce the scale of human sociality in the future. Calls of this sort have been around for many years, such as the groundbreaking economic text by Ernst Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful (1973). Since the nineteenth century at least, there have been many recipes for regaining local community in the face of an urbanizing and globalizing world: attempts at the creation of communes, utopian visions, forms of cooperative organization, new tribalism, and indigenous revival. Many such trends have appeared and reappeared, with varying degrees of success. The spontaneous generation of subcultural groups within nation-states, already explored briefly, further indicates that the desire among many people for face-to-face interaction and isopraxis is strong, but so far these forces of nucleation seem rather weak as compared with the massive increase in urbanization and globalization. Perhaps it will be possible to regain local organization without giving up global communication, as some have suggested, but the way toward this goal still seems unclear. Another aspect of ritual that could point the way is the criterion of encompassment, also suggested in Chapter 3. If humans could agree on some way to envision and communicate with powers or forces that encompass and constrain our social worlds, this could help put us in our place, perhaps, and diminish our intellectual and moral hubris. It is here that ecological thinking has been useful, in a vision of ourselves as situated within a precarious organic matrix that we don’t fully understand and cannot control. Indeed, the idea of control itself is probably part of this hubris, as many have pointed out, and probably needs to be replaced by ideas like cohabitation, co-evolution, and sustainability. Some are happy to personify the planet as a being, as in Gaia theory (Lovelock 1988), or to envision the cosmos itself as a being, in many versions of spiritual belief. If others cannot adopt these moves, they may still accept the fact of encompassment merely as the material envelope of “nature” (or some equivalent concept), within which we must have our being. Organizing special events that celebrate our encompassment in greater organic processes, celebrated in various ways within small-scale groups, would surely be a positive move toward self-perpetuation, and many such experiments are already under way. Reviving rituals of reformation, wherein social habitats mirror wider biospheres, might help to facilitate forms of group experience argued for previously, such that we could acknowledge explicitly the aspects of ourselves that are always already social and, by extension, cosmological. There is much to be learned from indigenous groups that already have such rituals in place—an argument for the need to preserve this cultural diversity at all costs. Since the ritual criterion of encompassment is closely linked to that of importance, it follows that our link to the ecosphere needs to become an

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ultimate concern for most people, in order for these new forms of performance to be realized. What I am advocating is in sympathy with the Deep Ecology Movement, exemplified in the writings of Thomas Berry (2009), Arne Naess (2008), Shirley Nicholson and Brenda Rosen (1992), and many others. My suggestions about intercorporeality in Chapter 5, combined with the implications of “primal depth” in emplacement, point to a view of humanity as an interactive phenomenon: self-creating and world-creating while also being constrained and co-created by forces and powers beyond our control. Accordingly, we have the ability to invent cultural practices that make this interactive dynamic a harmonious one or a self-destructive one. Unfortunately, if we destroy ourselves we will also destroy the viability of a great many other ecological systems and species, so it is in our interest to create performances and practices designed to ensure the long-term survival of dynamic life on the planet. This means preserving not only biological but also cultural diversity, since the two go hand in hand. This is another reason cultural performances need to be revived and preserved from the many indigenous societies still struggling to survive. The homogenization of the global culture industry needs to be remodeled to include the preservation of heterogeneous art forms as well (see, for example, Feld 1996a), by providing incentives to maintain cultural continuity with the past and by finding limits or constraints on the promotion of innovation. In the current process of the co-creation of cultural life-worlds, one problem acknowledged by many is how to integrate new forms of technological communication into a long-term, sustainable, ecological approach to human social organization. This is the problem Auslander highlighted with Baudrillard’s concept of mediatization, extended by some into the idea of a “network society” (e.g., Castells 1997). Clearly, another imaginary “space” has been created in the virtual world of computer monitors, a world that also collapses or plays havoc with previous regimes of time. These developments seem, at first glance, to be problems for small-scale, embodied, and locally emplaced modes of cultural performance. How can we reconcile global networks of communication with “site-specific,”17 “community-based” or “neoliminal” kinds of performance practice? Are these two trends inevitably opposed, or can they be adapted to harmonize with each other in new ways? As I suggested, insofar as media are used to enhance perceptual aspects of live events, they may be able to add to their force without distracting from their vivacity. As computers become smaller and more mobile, people are bringing them along to live events,18 so they don’t have to remain isolated so often in darkened rooms, in front of glowing screens—for me, an image of a Neo-Platonic hell. A final point, bolstered by the ritual criteria, is a turn toward the past, or the creation of alternative temporal experiences. As noted, one clear priority is

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that the remnants of indigenous societies struggling for cultural survival need to be supported, funded, and embraced by people and governments in the lands where they reside. The preservation of cultural variation requires a fidelity to past practices that still excite and enliven people now. The sense that one is part of something larger is only enhanced when one can feel the weight of past generations in the performance of a ritual or other traditional event. This is partly why revival movements in the world’s major religions, and also many smaller ones, are so compelling for some of those who participate. Even the understanding of an anthropological view of the scope of human evolution and adaptation, such as I have tried to provide here, may prove helpful in changing the attitudes of those enamored only with innovation and fashionable new trends. These few modest suggestions toward a viable future in which special performative events regain some of their vitality and efficacy depend for their development on new understandings of what humanity has been and could become. I hope that at least some of the ideas put forward in this book can be useful for performance analysts and performance makers working toward these goals in the future. Whether or not this happens, I trust that some of the positive trends toward human survival, mentioned here, will take hold and help us to discover a new cultural or metacultural approach to performance and social life. The hope is that such developments will allow for the long-term viability of humans and our companion species on this fragile planet.

Notes Chapter 1 1. I recently became aware of a volume by the same name published by Wiley this year (2013). It seems to be a collection of essays by different people using distinct approaches and therefore is not similar to this project. 2. Some exceptions to this are the works of Alexander, Giesen, and Mast (2006), McConachie and Hart (2006), Hobart and Kapferer (2005), and Handelman and Lindquist (2004). I will discuss their work in detail below and in subsequent chapters. Another approach is the extended case study in which some have claimed that theory can be “encompassed” by practice, as in the work of the Manchester School (Evens and Handelman 2006: 4). This claim is seems to me to be overly ambitious. Summarizing the work of the past, a theme that I call the “omnibus approach” will be taken up again in Chapter 6. 3. Since Peirce is still not well known to many in the humanities and social sciences, a brief introduction to him and his work is probably appropriate. Charles Sanders Peirce (1839–1914) was a scientist, philosopher, and polymath who, due to his own problems and the enmity of others, only had a brief academic career (at Johns Hopkins University). As a result, his work has remained underappreciated, though it seems to be having a renaissance in recent decades. Often called the father of American pragmatism, he had an early influence on such thinkers as William James, John Dewey, and George H. Mead. I was introduced to his work by E. Valentine Daniel, who was an early advocate of his approach in anthropology, along with Milton Singer, Michael Silverstein, and Richard Parmentier, among many others. I find his approach especially important because it is grounded in a phenomenology (which he called “phaneroscopy”) that is directly linked to a semeiotic theory. His phenomenology is based on the categories firstness, secondness, and thirdness, all of which must be present for an experience to register in human embodied awareness. The following table summarizes some ways in which these three categories are related. (Note that some of these triads come directly from Peirce and some are my interpretations or revisions.) The last row indicates how Peirce’s semeiotic theory is related to the phenomenological categories, wherein the interpretant (the third) is an instance of interpretive activity. Once again, this “atomic structure” of the sign (my phrase) needs all three nodes to function, but some signs, like those in prehuman nature, may be “degenerate.” Relations between signs (S), objects (O), and interpretants (I) can

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Second

Third

monad

dyad

triad

“may be”

“could be”

“would be”

potential

virtual

general

quality

opposition

mediation

past

present

future

tone

token

type

sign

object

interpretant

be understood from three perspectives depending on which term is intermediate. S-O-I implies that objects mediate between signs and their interpretations; in other words, the world is not just how we imagine or conceive it to be, but “brute facts” intervene to modify, falsify, or verify our ideas. This is an antidote to some forms of Derridean poststructuralism in which the “free play” of signification has no external checks and balances. I-S-O implies that signs always mediate our experiences of the world—that is, consciousness is only through signs, and there can be no unmediated awareness. Finally, S-I-O implies that the world can only be experienced through our interpretations—the appearances; we cannot know it except through the human process of observing and understanding. This is the essential phenomenological position, seconded by thinkers in the European tradition such as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. Finally, I often make use of Peirce’s most well-known semeiotic triad—the ways in which signs are taken to represent their objects. The first is through iconicity: a relation of likeness, similarity, or isomorphism—the sharing of any quality (e.g., a circle can stand for the moon or anything round). The second is through indexicality: contiguity, co-occurrence, or juxtaposition (e.g., smoke can stand for fire; symptoms indicate disease). The third is symbolic: based on rule, law, habit, or convention (e.g., most language; in English, the letters d-o-g stand for a fourfooted canine). Note that Peirce’s use of the term “symbol,” unlike that of many other theorists, is not a reference to signification in general, but only to a certain type of semeiotic relation. In what follows, I will sometimes refer to visual, sonic, and kinesthetic patterns as proto-symbolic, since they mainly employ iconic and indexical relations. Although I don’t consider myself to be an expert on Peircean scholarship, I have tried in places to link his system (and I do see it as such) to various thinkers in the continental school of phenomenology, as the reader will discover. This is an ongoing interest among many contemporary thinkers, and I hope it will be extremely fruitful for future research and understanding. 4. References to Peirce have conventionally been to his Collected Papers (henceforth CP), by volume and paragraph number—in this case, CP 5.311–5.316; 5.408– 5.430, and 7.336. A new chronological edition of his work is now in progress under

Notes

5. 6. 7. 8.

9. 10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

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the auspices of the Peirce Edition Project at Indiana University Press, eight volumes of which are now available, but I have not cited them here. I am thinking here, for instance, of Derrida’s concept of différance (1976). Note that this formulation is only necessary within his semiological model. From a Peircean perspective, Derrida’s formulation fails the “critical commonsensism” test (see Peirce in Buchler 1955: 290–301). The term frame, in this sense, was popularized by the sociologist Erving Goffman (e.g., 1974). This definition therefore provides the answer for those who argue that an equivalent to the term performance doesn’t exist in their language. The argument is that all cultural language-worlds contain a distinction between special events and ordinary ones, however conceived and expressed. As the word is commonly understood in English discourse. The term experience is a fundamental concept in phenomenological theory. Handelman might argue with this view, given his theory of public events as autonomous (or semi-autonomous) from social order, the former understandable as kinds of “meta-designs” (1998: xiv). He develops this idea further in his recent work on the autonomy of ritual (Handelman and Lindquist 2004). I will deal with these ideas later. I am aware that the term performativity has been defined in a number of different ways. One influential version is that of Judith Butler, for instance: “Gender reality is performative which means, quite simply, that it is real only to the extent that it is performed” (1990: 278). Any definition that is based on a concept of reality cannot, I fear be “simple,” however. Her approach is heavily influenced by Derrida and Lacan, among others, but in some respects it resonates with my model, such as when she argues that performance involves a “stylized repetition of acts” (1999: 179). For an overview of how this term has been developed, see Loxley (2007). Hominin (pl. hominini) is an updated version of the older term hominid, which is now used as a category to distinguish our ancestors from those of closely related primates like chimps and gorillas. I propose the terms trialogue, trialogical, and trialectical as alternative formulations that capture the mediation of opposites—the underlying triad—in any supposedly dyadic relation (see note 14 and Chapter 2, note 11). For example, Hegel’s dialectic was conceived as a triadic process that is usually translated as thesis, antithesis, and synthesis (e.g., O’Neill 1996). Refer to note 3 and to Table 2.1. For Peirce, this kind of mediation underlies all seemingly binary oppositions, which is why all semeiosis involves “a genuine triadic relation” (CP 2.274). For a nice exposition of the differences between a Saussurean binary semiology and Peirce’s triadic semeiotics, see Sheriff (1994; 1989). Edward Casey has a similar solution to the anthropological conundrum of nature versus culture, calling the relation between the two concepts coadunative, a term designed to express the belief that “everything is cultural in us” while, at the same time, “everything is natural in us” (1996: 36). In this, he is following MerleauPonty. A similar take on this problem is proposed by Brian Massumi: “Nature and culture are in mutual movement into and through each other. Their continuum

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17.

18. 19.

20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25.

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is a dynamic unity of reciprocal variation” (2002: 11). I return to this theme in Chapters 5 and 6. See the anthropological critique of cultural studies by Terence Turner, for instance (1993). Again, I don’t want to deny the usefulness of all work labeled cultural studies, since textual analysis can be illuminating to some extent. Also, some cultural studies analysts do undertake fieldwork projects. Kapferer (2005: 48) notes that G. Deleuze and F. Guattari (1994) take a somewhat similar approach, arguing that ordinary lived processes have a chaotic dimension (“chaosmos”). See the references to culture theory already cited (in paragraph two above) for an introduction to some key issues. The main strain of this theory in sociology might be seen to run from Max Weber (1978 [1922]) to Talcott Parsons (e.g., 1937) and his colleagues, through to the contemporary work of Hans Joas (1996). Joas also makes extensive use of similar work in a parallel stream of symbolic interactionism (see Meltzer, Petras, and Reynolds 1975), especially the work of George Mead, who was influenced (apparently indirectly, through the pragmatist school) by Peirce. A similar argument is put forth by David Parkin, Lionel Caplan, and Humphrey Fisher (1996), based on the work of Abner Cohen, and my critique applies to that work as well as to many similar approaches to meaning when it is seen merely as a semantic, as opposed to a pragmatic, process. After some years of waffling, I have returned to the Peircean spelling of semeiotic in order to distinguish clearly between his approach and that of Saussure or others. Peirce also believed that present experience depended integrally on the immanence of the past and future. For instance, he argued that the use of many general terms, especially abstract qualities, constituted an action of the future upon the present, since they represent predictions that present conditions will conform to these generalities (CP 1.26; 1.343). For instance, if what I feel now I think of as love for some person, that feeling is influenced by a general idea of love (a future consensus), to which my present feelings presumably would conform. I will revisit this discussion in Chapter 5. For these references, I am indebted to Jadran Mimica. Personal communication, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Sydney. For a good summary, see Joas (1993: ch. 9). Mead manuscript, cited in Joas 1996: 183.

Chapter 2 1. According to Stuart Grant (2007), there are at least four sorts of reduction: psychological, eidetic, transcendental, and intersubjective. For my general purposes, these distinctions are not crucial. However, in attempting to standardize a method for reductive practice, they need to be taken into account, as Grant attempts to do. 2. Many texts on anthropological fieldwork cover these methods (e.g., Malden and Sluka 2012; Briggs 1986). 3. As I will explore in this chapter, at least one other major metagenre seems relevant to special events in the contemporary world: that of work. Since work, as opposed

Notes

4. 5. 6. 7. 8.

9.

10.

11.

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to leisure activities, is more usually seen as the province of everyday life, this is one reason I have not concentrated on it here. The main reason, however, is that it seems to me of more recent vintage than the others. See the section on work at the end of the chapter. See Chapter 3 for an in-depth discussion. See also Lewis (2008). Here I am implying that there may well be more than one kind of flow; the category may need to be reconstructed. See Chapter 1, note 3. There is a link here to Daniel’s disturbing comments on violence as a “counterpart” to culture (1996), as something apart that threatens social order itself. Specifically, the set of events or signs is marked by one or more “metacommunicative cues” at the beginning and the end of a sequence. These cues serve to set apart what comes between them from what precedes or follows the marked sequence. See, for example, Gumperz (1982) and Goffman (1974). A good example of this process is found in a piece by John Collins (2007); he demonstrates the way citizens of a poor neighborhood in Salvador negotiate their daily lives using songs and rhythms of Carnival. Don Handelman describes a similar process in regard to micro-processes of interaction relative to ritual enactment. For example, he says, “Important again is the double movement—of an everyday encounter emerging into phenomenal form, curving towards self-closure, to some degree of self-organization, however momentary, however transient, separating itself temporarily from the social field, existing in its own right, then ending, twisting back, torquing into broader social fields, dissipating, its character influencing encounters to come” (2005: 13). What he describes here at the micro-level of encounters I am arguing for at the macro-level of generic frameworks of interaction. However, there is clearly a similarity between micro- and macro-level processes, as he implies. For me, many of these frameworks for interaction are rather distinctly marked or framed, while others, especially more ordinary encounters, can be covertly marked, thus “torquing or twisting” out from and back into the social nexus. Handelman’s emphasis on autonomy or self-organization is sometimes overdrawn, in my view, because it takes active interpreters to constitute encounters and to organize generic frameworks, and the more organized the frameworks, the more self-conscious or self-reflective social actors are about them. As mentioned in Chapter 1, notes 13 and 14, with this term I want to suggest a possible revision to the commonplace “dialogic” model of understanding human social relations, although I can’t develop the idea fully here. The point is that a dialogue, as commonly understood, derived from scenarios of speech interaction, is actually a three-part relation between two speakers, mediated by language. The medium of communication, as an always-present third term, does not necessarily have to be linguistic, but there always has to be some medium (or more than one: spoken language is, of course, itself a product of sound pattern, which in turn is a product of the movement of breath and the speech organs). In dance or other forms of patterned movement, bodily relations are the medium, whereas in musical “trialogues,” the primary medium is sound. Visual artists can communicate by borrowing motifs or styles, imitating them, or being influenced by them; thus their

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interaction is mediated by visual patterns. It is important, in my view, not to ignore but rather to highlight the media of communication in analysis, even if my suggestion of the term trialogism is not taken up. 12. Some, such as Robert Fagen (1981), have argued otherwise. Note that his idea of a game is from the observer’s point of view, since for the animals themselves it is presumably not a game in our sense. Although the animal encounters may seem to operate as if there were rules, these must necessarily be implicit rules, of course. Implicit rules are derivable from kinds of habitual action but are not usually articulated and in this case are not even articulable, except by the observers. However, his examples are useful in providing insights into how animal play developed from what might be called “proto-games” into human game playing proper. 13. James argued that “every mental representation of a movement awakens to some degree the actual movement which is its object” (Blakemore and Frith 2005: 261). I am indebted to Greg Downey for this reference. 14. One fairly well-known example is the work of Alan Lomax, especially in the films of the choreometric project he co-produced with Forrestine Paulay, for example Step Style and Palm Play (1980). In these pioneering attempts, they go rather too far, perhaps, in attempting to draw direct parallels between dance and cultural practices in a large number of societies. Nonetheless, it is an important example of the sort of work that should be done more carefully and in greater detail.

Chapter 3 1. For instance, he begins with a truly bizarre example from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes involving the scooping of peanut butter from a jar (2004: 1–2). As the reader will note, this example fails most of the criteria I develop in this chapter for what should be called ritual. Surely this is an example of personal habit only? Handelman gives several other examples of what he calls rituals in this introduction, and I will use this opportunity to examine them briefly so as to demonstrate the usefulness of my criteria. In addition to the Calvin and Hobbes example, which fails all of the criteria except repeatability, the examples are as follows: the transformation of Maria Antonia into Marie Antoinette with her marriage to Louis XVI; an instance of spontaneous dancing by a military regiment in eighteenth-century Geneva (observed by Rousseau); and a ceremonial pig slaughter (Furez) in Slovenia. In the case of Marie Antoinette, although the events may have had importance for the aristocracy of France and Germany, they probably were unknown and presumably were of marginal interest to the general populace; thus they were not based on a broad social consensus. Also, due to the circumstances, it isn’t clear that they had ever been done before or were ever repeated, at least in that form. Because it is weak in two or three of the criteria, the example is, at best, somewhat ritual-like. The military dance was something of a unique event, apparently, and certainly wouldn’t rank high in importance, even for the participants. The form the dance took, which seems to be Handelman’s main interest, probably relates to the type of folk dancing common to those troops, whose origin is not clearly identified. The event was not very ritual-like in my terms.

Notes

2. 3. 4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11.

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Finally, the Slovene Furez would seem to be the most ritual-like, by my criteria, although Handelman doesn’t locate it clearly in time or place. From the description, it would seem to be a traditional practice common throughout that particular area, which is practiced widely and is part of a seasonal round that confers ethnic identity on those groups who participate. Everyone has an active role in the activities. This would constitute the best case of ritual since it is the only one of his examples that satisfies all the criteria I have proposed. Or such interpretations may be secret, for senior initiates only, and therefore not revealed to foreign investigators. See Chapter 6 for a fuller account of Giesen’s approach. The distinction between syntagm and paradigm was developed by early linguists like Ferdinand de Saussure (1966 [1907]) and Louis Hjelmslev (1961 [1943]) to differentiate grammatical processes that influence meaning in language. In this usage, syntagm relates to the way words (and also smaller units like phonemes) combine in sequences such that the order of units in the string affects its meaning. On the other hand, paradigm, in this sense, refers to the selection of units, like words, from a glossary of possible alternatives and how this selection can alter meaning. Roman Jakobson (1960) took up this distinction in his examination of poetic tropes, associating syntagm with metonymy and paradigm with metaphor. In this case, I refer to the sequence of events in a performance and how that influences its meaning and impact. I will not attempt here to propose a comprehensive list of types of rituals, which would get me into even deeper water than I am already in. However, some of the main types that have been suggested are the following: rites of intensification (seasonal and other recurring types that the entire group celebrates together); rites of affliction (healing and cursing rituals that are intended to ward off types of disease, both for individuals and for the group, or to inflict them); and rites of divination (ascertaining the state of things, both present and future). If some or all of these types (and others) can be distinguished from rites of passage, as I think they can, then it follows that they might well have different event sequences as compared with those of Van Gennep. See, for instance, MacAloon’s attempt to analyze the contemporary Olympic Games in this way (1984: 252–53). However, he does note the different points of view of the athletes as opposed to the spectators. In my view, the games are similar to rites of passage for the athletes but more like rites of intensification for the spectators. Frits Staal (1990), in an idiosyncratic approach, argues that they (the singular is mantram) are not. I believe that they are a form of language, but of an unusual type that serves to reinforce the idea of speech as action on and in the world. As the reader will discover, I have numbered the criteria to emphasize the links between numbers 1 and 5, which I believe to be the most closely related. A good example of such a complex situation can be found in the work of Webb Keane (1997). Those undergoing initiation. Orthopraxis refers to distinct but complimentary types of action, contributing to the creation of an event (see Chapter 5).

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12. For example, Steven Feld (1991) has identified several musical and dance forms among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea that are performed sometimes as appendages to more important rituals and other times as stand-alone practices in themselves. In a similar way, a requiem in the European setting once formed part of a Catholic funeral mass, with texts often set to music. Such pieces later became separated from the ritual framework and are now enjoyable by people of all persuasions at concert halls.

Chapter 4 1. For Peirce, precission was a useful practice, involving the imaginative separation of categories that are fused in phenomena so as to explicate how they must have come into being in order to interact as they do in practice. In other words, what were the necessary conditions required—what must have occurred—for phenomena to appear as they do? He used this sort of “mental experimentation” to derive many of his triadic relations. 2. “Reasons of the heart” is a reference to Blaise Pascal and to Gregory Bateson (1972: 134), whose reference to Pascal I have borrowed. 3. See Table 4.1 for a summary of P/p relations. 4. Handelman tries to capture the complex interdependence between what he calls modelling events and ordinary life with his idea of the imaginative “moebius model” (1998: xxii). This difficult idea, which is presented in a kind of abstract reification that I find problematic, is nevertheless insightful for pointing out the links between imaginative potentials and actual events in human activity. In one formulation, he notes that “the exterior reality creates an interior reality that encompasses the exterior” (xxviii), which suggests the kind of complex embedding I argued for in the case of ritual. Later, in a new introduction, he associates his moebius model with what Kapferer (1997) called “virtuality,” a term the latter used to describe the ability of certain Sri Lankan rituals to encompass imaginal aspects of the cosmic order. See my discussion of encompassment in Chapter 3. In a more recent work, Handelman evokes similar ideas, such as “recursion” or the “torquing back” of ritual into social order. He says, “The outcome of ritual returns to its surround as that surround” (2005: 29, emphasis in original). This strong sort of relation is found most clearly in what I am calling “reformation” rituals but, in general, there are always reciprocal P/p relations of one kind or another. I want to establish this set of relational types and genre categories, because not all special events are so important for, or influential on, everyday social processes as those that Handelman describes. 5. Note the resonance here with Leenhart’s idea of “cosmomorphism,” mentioned in Chapter 1. 6. Even though I argued against this Durkheimian distinction as a universal generalization, I believe it is appropriate in the case of these monotheistic, Semitic religions. However, it is clearly inadequate to describe spiritual relations in many small-scale religions of the sort for which “reformation” (Handelman’s “modelling”) is a better category.

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7. With this category, I want to maintain the insights Handelman developed through his idea of “modelling,” but I believe my own term is clearer, especially as it contrasts with the process of transformation. The idea is to try to distinguish rituals situated in two fundamentally different types of cosmological systems. It could be that more types, and processes, will need to be added in future. 8. One classic case, well known in the anthropological literature, is that of the Dogon of Mali, as described by Marcel Griaule (1975). Among the many possible others, one with which I have had first-hand experience is that of the Andean Qollahuaya people (see Bastien 1978). 9. Proto-symbolic is a term I have coined to distinguish primarily symbolic relations (linguistic, conceptual) from primarily iconic/indexical relations (foregrounded in such genre types as dance, music, and visual art), according to a Peircean semeiotic (see Chapter 1, note 3). 10. There is a substantial literature on Brazilian Carnaval, but not all of it looks closely at embodied practice. For two exceptions, see Barbara Browning (1995) and Alma Guillermoprieto (1990). Much less work has been done on the Sydney events, but see Jonathon Bollen (1996) and Kym Seebohm (1990). 11. Recently (in 2010), the after party was moved to the following night. 12. Here I am relying on the general tendency for darker-skinned Afro-Brazilians to be poorer while the lighter-skinned Euro-Brazilians are richer. This is only a statistical tendency, of course, with many exceptions, and the actual situation varies considerably from region to region. For my purposes here, I don’t want to get into the incredibly fraught arguments about race in Brazil. For some insights, see Edward Telles (2004), Pierre-Michel Fontaine (1985), and Thomas Skidmore (1974). 13. The Maria da Penha law was named after a woman who was turned into a paraplegic after several attacks by her husband. 14. “Latin American Women and Abortion.” Hivos. November 4, 2008. 15. An exception that proves the rule is Recife, where a few groups parade on Wednesday and Thursday, showing that even this common boundary is negotiable in some circumstances. However, even in Recife, many fewer people came out on Wednesday when I was there in 1983, most choosing to honor the traditional end to festivities. 16. These lyrics are from the song “Deus e o diabo” on the album Caetano . . . muitos carnavais (Philips 1977). 17. One example of this loosening is the fight against AIDS, as the government has allied itself with prostitutes to promote the use of condoms. Although this is against Church policy, the establishment has refrained, for the most part, from condemning the practice, perhaps since it has been so effective in helping to stem the tide of new infections. However, a counterexample is the case of abortion, as mentioned earlier. Indeed, in 2009, a Catholic archbishop in Recife excommunicated two doctors and the mother of a nine-year-old girl who received a legal abortion after she was raped by her stepfather. 18. Mediatized is a term coined by Jean Baudrillard and employed extensively by Philip Auslander (1999). See Chapter 6.

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Chapter 5 1. Some have argued that life itself depends on a dynamic system in which an autonomous being constitutes and maintains itself by simultaneously defining and influencing an environment in which it can exist. See, for example, work on the “enactive” approach to the evolution of dynamic processes, called “developmental systems theory” (e.g., Thompson 2007: 188ff.). A similar approach is known under the rubric of co-evolution. 2. The phenomenological concept of intentionality has to do with how objects of experience become present to consciousness. It is a mode of transitive consciousness or object directedness at the lowest level, which translates into a kind of general openness to the world. Leder calls this the “from-to” dynamic of attention to the world, which he refigures as an “ecstatic” mode of being (1990: 11–35). In contrast, an intransitive or passive intentionality involves a subliminal sense of self, which can be intensified through self-reflection. 3. Thompson called the latter situation the “body-body” problem, a phenomenological reformulation of the Cartesian dilemma (2007: 235–37). 4. The category of pre-reflexive self-awareness might be seen as an intermediary between these two degrees of organization. 5. Presumably, “the body” is not all of a human being, so it must be accompanied by “the mind” (or an equivalent), hence an implicit or explicit Cartesianism. The ethnomusicologist John Blacking was one of the first to decry this usage, and, like him, I try to avoid this form of wording (Blacking 1973). 6. This process is what Schechner was exploring in his analysis of performing as “not me” and as “not not me,” as cited earlier (1985). 7. Anthroposemeiosis refers to the fully developed use of signs in humans, as opposed to zoösemeiosis, which refers to the more rudimentary signification systems of animals (see Deely 1994). 8. It follows that damage to the emplacement of persons also results in damage to temporal consciousness, and vice versa. See E. Valentine Daniel’s disturbing account of Tamil displacement in Sri Lanka, for instance (1996). 9. Some attempts have been made to extend these limits, of course, such as the addition of devices for touch in computer simulations, but these experiments are themselves revealing. The effort involved in the subtraction and then the re-addition of possible sensations would seem to be wasteful, when complete embodied experience of live environments is already there to be had without technological effort. 10. See references to the “culture and personality” school of anthropology in Chapter 1. This approach was especially popular in the early- to mid-twentieth century and has now become known as psychological or psychoanalytic anthropology. 11. In a nutshell, versions of this theory argue that evolutionary processes acted on primate populations (especially) in order to preserve fetal and infant characteristics into the adult form of an organism. This delaying tactic—the preserving of the characteristics of youth (also called paedomorphism, foetalization, or juvenalization)—is evidenced in humans by such characteristics as hairlessness, small teeth, and even large brains. This theory was first proposed by Louis Bolk in the nineteenth century.

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12. Stern’s stages are as follows: emergent self, core self, subjective self, and verbal self (2000: 11). Notice the typical Anglo-European preoccupation with “self ” over any idea of group or social nexus, although the latter categories are a concern of Stern’s. 13. There is considerable literature on the distinction between affect and emotion that, for the sake of simplicity, I do not discuss here (see, for example, Gregg and Sedgworth 2010; Clough and Halley 2007; Ahmed 2004). I believe that the general consensus is that affect should stand for precursor states, more inchoate and difficult or impossible to articulate, whereas emotion is culturally inflected feeling, named and classified, brought into intersubjective discourse. For the purpose of this discussion, I have not elaborated on the distinction, but the implicit movement from inchoate to cognized sensation has been preserved and should be easily recognized by now as a key theme of this book. 14. Iconic propagation is a phrase I coined in my book on capoeira (1992). It denotes similar patterns, reiterated at different times and places and at different scales or degrees of organization. Another example, also derived from Peirce, is Feld’s description of an “iconicity of style” among the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea (Feld 1994). As noted in Chapter 3, the ritual process of reformation involves a similar sort of iconic relation. 15. According to Mark Paterson, Aristotle argued that vision was at the top of the hierarchy of the senses, but he admitted that touch was primary—most widely shared among species—and prior to the others (Paterson 2007: 17). 16. This experience has been portrayed, for instance, in some of the poems of John Donne, among many other poets of the English language. For Donne, this carnal love was a species of the divine love, a notion shocking to many in his era. A similar link between the carnal and the divine can be found in many examples of Sanskrit poetry and accompanying dance. 17. Mark Patterson (2007) and Constance Classen (2005) provide many examples of metaphors related to touch. 18. This point reiterates my earlier discussion on the work of Casey on imagination and memory in connection with time consciousness. 19. Feld argued that his term combined both aspects—reception and production— which I believe is often the case. However, there are also cases in which it is useful to distinguish the two processes. Co-production almost always involves reception, but shared reception does not always involve co-production, as in the case of audiences at many kinds of musical concerts. 20. “Hear oneself hearing” is a reference to Husserl’s idea of the nullpunkt of sensation outlined earlier. 21. I use the phrase, cultural habitats in the sense developed by Ulf Hannerz (1996) from the work of Richard Bauman (1992), among others. I will return to this idea in Chapter 6. 22. This form of Butoh originated with the practitioner Min Tanaka, one of the early pioneers of the movement. 23. Thanks for the invitation are due to John MacAloon, whose work on the Olympics has been cited repeatedly. 24. See Chapter 2, note 11.

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25. There are many exemplary ethnographies that have attempted this with greater or lesser success, but there is a need for much more of this sort of work, linking the microprocesses of human embodiment to the major patterns of cultural understanding and practice. Some works that I have relied on for inspiration are those of Greg Downey (2002), Phillip Zarilli (1998), Webb Keane (1997), Sally Ness (1992), Steven Feld (1990), Michael Jackson (1989), E. Valentine Daniel (1984), and Edward Schieffelin (1976), to name just a few. 26. See Chapter 1, note 3. 27. Margaret Drewal, for instance, cites Antonin Artaud (1958), Roy Wagner (1972), and Clifford Geertz (1986), among others, to make a similar point about the paradox of repetition (Drewal 1990: 1).

Chapter 6 1. See Chapter 1, note 3. 2. One version of the history of ideas here is the movement from structuralism, largely championed by Claude Levi-Strauss (and based on the linguistics of Saussure) to post-structuralism, exemplified primarily by thinkers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. The latter relied also, especially Derrida, on a Saussurean framework. 3. Jadran Mimica, personal communication, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Sydney. 4. Note that Peirce is often called the father of American pragmatism. 5. For some other strivings in this direction, see the work of Tom Rockmore (2007) and E. Valentine Daniel (1996). 6. Some celebrated cases are the debates between Oscar Lewis and George Foster (see O. Lewis 1969) and between Marshall Sahlins (1995) and Ganath Obeyesekere (1992) and the critiques of Margaret Mead by Derek Freeman (1983). In addition, there is a large body of literature on the problems of ethnographic authorship (e.g., Clifford and Marcus 1986) and of giving people a voice in their own ethnographies (e.g., Tedlock and Mannheim 1995). 7. Many of these issues are considered by Jean-Paul Dumont (1986) in his discussion of “anthropography,” which involves a meditation on the process of writing ethnography and the limitations of reflexivity and dialogism in that process. 8. Anthropologists will recognize here a nod to Ruth Benedict (1934), although, unlike her, I do not attempt a taxonomy of pattern types. Instead I merely note that, whatever form they may take, recognized patterns or styles are essential to the constitution of culture. 9. An early section of this chapter was also a nod to Tylor (1874), whose influential early theory of culture was often called the “omnibus” theory, because it was basically a list of many disparate aspects. 10. This era was considerably longer if one includes the spread of Homo erectus after their initial diaspora from Africa, in which case the figure becomes more like a million years. Exactly when early homonini became culturally ‘human’ is still very much in dispute. 11. The title of his book was “Imangined Communities” (1983).

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12. Lest it be thought that this model is overly ordered and optimistic, note that some sorts of violence can also be seen as orthopractic—for instance, the frequent lynching of black people in the post-Civil War South of the United States or the periodic bombings during the former troubles in Northern Ireland. Such repeated practices, usually on the part of some subgroups, can promote chaos and the fragmentation of societies rather than social order (see Appadurai 1998; Daniel 1996; Feldman 1991). 13. Much has been written about the contentious issue of subculture, since the term was coined in the 1970s (Hebdige 1979; Willis 1978; Hall and Jefferson 1976). I hope the case is convincing that these are culture-like formations and not cultures in the strong sense. 14. He uses examples from Central Africa in the 1970s, the Republic of China in the late 1960s, North India in the early 1980s, and Central Europe in the late 1980s and 90s, also making suggestive links to Northern Ireland, Soviet Russia, and Nazi Germany. 15. Appadurai cites the work of Gieschere (1997), which provides a look at how a contemporary version of this sort of practice has been influenced by globalization. As I already suggested, it would be difficult to understand how such violence comes about without recourse to some sort of psychoanalytic theory. 16. Here it becomes apparent that the distinction between imaginal and imaginary depends very much on whether the point of view is of an insider or an outsider on a cultural world. 17. In line with arguments in Chapter 5, I would ask practitioners to consider modifying this phrase in favor of something like “emplaced performance” or “placeenlivening” events. 18. For instance, people in many countries have used mobile phones to document and organize civil protests or to organize “flash mobs.”

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Zarilli, Phillip. 2008. Psychophysical Acting: An Intercultural Approach after Stanislavski. London: Routledge. ———. 2002. Acting (Re)Considered: A Theoretical and Practical Guide. London: Routledge. ———. 1998. When the Body Becomes All Eyes: Paradigms, Discourses and Practices of Power in Kalarippayattu, a South Indian Martial Art. Delhi: Oxford University Press.

Index Abrahams, Roger, 5, 7 affective resonance, 109, 114 agon, 25–26, 81 Ahmed, Sara, 161n13 alea, 26–27 Alexander, Jeffrey C., 1, 51, 129–31, 146, 151n1 Anderson, Benedict, 141 Anthropology of Performance, The (Turner), 1 anti-structure, 7, 67–68, 131 Anzac Day, 46, 69 Appadurai, Arjun, 29, 98, 136, 142, 146, 163n12, 163n16 Armstrong, Karen, 73 Artaud, Antonin, 162n27 Asad, Talal, 12, 132, 134 Ashworth, Peter, 133 Auslander, Phillip, 1, 124, 126–28, 148, 159n18 Austin, J. L., 53, 55 auto-ethnography, 134–37 Babcock, B., 1 Bailey, F. G., 35 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 67–69 Bastien, Joseph, 159n8 Bateson, Gregory, 15, 23, 28, 48, 71, 158n2 Baudrillard, Jean, 126–28, 148, 159n18 Bauman, Richard, 1, 3, 161n21 Bauman, Zygmunt, 3, 11 Behnke, Elizabeth, 36 Bell, Catherine, 44, 51 Bellah, Robert, 46 Benedict, Ruth, 18, 108, 162n8 Bergson, Henri, 101

Berry, Thomas, 148 Bhabha, Homi, 120, 137 Bial, Henry, 124 Blacking, John, 160n5 Blakemore, S., 156n13 Blau, Herbert, 123–25, 128 Bloch, Maurice, 43 Bollen, Jonathan, 159n10 Boon, James A., 74 Boorstin, Daniel, 6 Bourdieu, Pierre, 11, 14–15, 117, 126 Bray, Alan, 83 Briggs, Charles, 3, 11, 54, 154n2 Brooke, Roger, 133 Brown, James, 144 Browne, K., 72, 80 Browning, Barbara, 62, 159n10 Butler, Judith, 98–99, 153n11 Caillois, Roger, 25–26, 81 Calvin and Hobbes, 156n1 Campbell, C., 118 Campen, Cretien van, 115 Carbery, Graham, 79 Carlson, Marvin, 1, 124 Carnival, 26, 33, 41, 59, 61, 69–70, 72, 77–82, 84–90, 108, 155n9 carnivals, 76–81, 85, 87, 91 Case, S., 82 Casey, Edward, 16, 68, 94, 101–2, 133, 146, 153n15, 161n18 Castells, Manuel, 148 Chapple, E., 50 Charlesworth, M., 75 Chavez-Silverman, S., 82 Chomsky, Noam, 11, 54 Classen, Constance, 111, 161n17

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Clifford, James, 137, 162n6 Clough, P., 161n13 Colapietro, Vincent, 100 Collins, John, 155n9 communitas, 71, 145 Conquergood, Dwight, 134, 136 consciousness, 14–15, 25, 28, 36, 49, 89, 94–97, 101–2, 115, 117, 119, 132–33, 152 con-vocality, 112 Corbin, Henry, 16 cosmomorphism, 18, 158n5 Coutu, W., 17 Creativity of Action, The (Joas), 120 critical internationalism, 21 Crvencovic, Teresa, xi, 109 Crystal, David, 139 Csikszentmihalyi, Mihaly, 24 cultural process, 19, 29, 35, 104–5 culture patterns of, 137–40 performance as, 11–14 culture-like formations, 124–25, 140–44 culture shock, 22, 135 Dailey, Sheron, 1 Dalton, Vicki, 30 Da Matta, Roberto, 68, 78 Daniel, E. Valentine, 16, 29, 98, 127, 151n3, 155n7, 160n8, 162n5, 163n12 Davies, P., 102 de Certeau, Michel, 11 Deely, John, 100, 160n7 Deep Ecology Movement, 148 deep role play, 17–20 Deleuze, Gilles, 49, 129, 154n17 Denzin, Norman, 136 Derrida, Jacques, 2–3, 54, 127, 153n5–6, 153n11, 162n2 différance, 153n5 dividual self, 98 Donald, Merlin, 105 Downey, Greg, 36, 112, 156n13, 162n25 Dowsey-Magog, P., 6

Drewal, Margaret, 50, 62, 72, 119–20, 162n27 Dreyfus, Hubert, 95 Dumont, Jean-Paul, 162n7 Durkheim, Emile, 47, 68, 131, 145, 158n6 effervescence, 145 Eliade, Mircea, 57 Elias, Norbert, 36 embodied performance basic cultural patterns, 116–21 emplacement, temporality, and consciousness, 101–3 intersubjectivity as intercorporeality, 106–16 overview, 93–100 selfhood in development, 103–6 See also embodiment; performance embodiment, 2, 15, 18, 27, 37, 49, 57, 70, 89, 132–33 See also embodied performance emotional contagion, 109 emplacement, 94, 101–3, 148, 160n8 encompassment, 53, 58–59, 147, 158n4 Errington, Joseph, 139 Evens, T., 7, 151n2 Fabian, Johannes, 1, 11, 138 Fagen, Robert, 156n12 Falassi, Alessandro, 61 Farr, Marcia, 11 Feld, Steven, 110–12, 115, 136, 148, 158n12, 161n14, 161n19 Feldman, Allen, 163n12–13 festivity, 78, 87–89 See also carnivals final interpretant, 70–71 firstness, 17, 94, 100, 118, 123, 151n3 Fitzpatrick, Tim, 1 Flanigan, C. Clifford, 67 flow, 11, 24–25, 27, 30, 34, 57, 101 Fontaine, Pierre-Michel, 159n12 Foucault, Michel, 12, 162n2 frameworks, 5, 9, 16, 25–27, 58–63, 75– 77, 116–17, 128–33, 141

Index Freeman, Derek, 162n6 Freeman, Walter, 105 from-to dynamic, 160n2 Fuchs, Stephan, 1 fusion, 129–30 Gadamer, Hans, 24–25 Gaia theory, 48, 147 Gallagher, Shaun, 98 Gallop, Jane, 104 Gardner, Robert, 28 Gaster, Theodor, 72 Gates, Henry L., 119 Geertz, Clifford, 12–13, 45, 47, 72, 162n27 Geertz, Hildred, 74 gender play, 82–85 genres, 3–4, 19, 21–23, 26, 33–40, 43– 50, 60–63, 75–76, 78, 90, 108–9, 129, 135–36, 144 Gerhart, J., 96 Giesen, Bernhard, 1, 47, 49, 129–32, 146, 151n2, 157n3 Gluckman, Max, 7, 56, 131 Goffman, Erving, 9, 21, 153n7, 155n8 Goody, Jack, 3, 43 Grant, Stuart, 114, 154n1 Grathoff, Richard, 9 Green, James, 82, 84 Gregg, M., 161n13 Grenander, Ulf, 117 Griaule, Marcel, 159n8 Grimes, Ronald, 44, 48 Grosz, Elizabeth, 98 Guillermoprieto, Alma, 89–90, 159n10 Gumperz, John, 155n8 Gutman, Matthew, 83 Guttman, Alan, 52 habit change, 16 formation, 15 hierarchy, 16 implementation, 15–16 practice and, 14–17 habituation, 32, 34–35, 89

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habitus, 14–15 Hage, Ghassan, 142 Haley, Michael C., 133 Hall, Edward, 108 Hall, S., 163n14 Halley, J., 161n13 Handelman, Don, 1, 5–7, 44, 61–62, 68–69, 71, 74, 151n2, 153n10, 155n10, 156n1, 158n4, 159n7 Hannerz, Ulf, 1, 161n21 Hart, F. Elizabeth, 133 Hebdige, Dick, 163n14 Herdt, Gilbert, 83 Herzfeld, Michael, 1, 137 heteropraxis, 120, 140 Hjelmslev, Louis, 157n4 Hobart, Angela, 1, 5, 10, 46, 66, 151n2 Hobsbawm, E., 143 Homans, George, 53 homosexuality, 72, 79–80, 86–88 Honneth, Axel, 117 Hospital, Clifford, 74 Howes, David, 111 Hsu, Francis, 18 Hughes-Freeland, Felicia, 44 Huizinga, Johan, 23, 25, 28, 81 Husserl, Edmund, 16, 22, 94, 96–97, 101, 107, 123, 152, 161n20 Hymes, Dell, 11, 54 iconicity, 27, 115–16, 152, 161n14 iconic propagation, 106, 115–16, 161n14 ilinx, 26–27 imaginal, 16–17, 90, 111, 115, 141, 163n17 Ingold, Tim, 19 interaudition, 111–12 intercorporeality, 97, 106–16, 144–45, 148 intergustation, 110 interhapticity, 107–10, 113 interolfation, 110 interpretants, 123, 151n3 intersubjectivity, 97–100, 106–16 intertactility, 107–8, 110

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intervisuality, 113 intervocality, 111–12, 114 Invention of Culture, The (Wagner), 135 inversion, 68–72, 75–76, 82–85, 89, 91 involuntary affective influence, 94 Ireland, Roland, 56 isolability, 98, 100, 146 isopraxis, 105–6, 109, 120, 140, 143, 147 Jackson, Michael, 14, 22, 30, 107, 162n25 Jakobson, Roman, 157 James, William, 36, 102, 151n3, 156n13 Jay, Martin, 113 Joas, Hans, 17, 93, 96, 99, 107, 120, 154n19 joint attention scenarios, 105 Julian, D., 118 Kapferer, Bruce, 1, 5, 10, 46, 49, 57, 66, 69, 129, 151n2, 154n17, 158n4 Keane, Webb, 131, 157n9, 162n25 Kertzer, David, 46 kinship, 38, 56, 76, 107, 142 Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara, 124 Kitazawa, M., 48 Koepke, Bruce, 59 Korom, Frank, 124 Kulick, Don, 82, 84 La Barre, Weston, 104 Lakoff, George, 133 Lancaster, Roger, 83 Leder, Drew, 25, 93, 96–98, 160n2 Lee, Ben, 21 Leenhardt, Maurice, 18, 158n5 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 35, 162n2 Lewis, J. Lowell, 3, 11, 17, 25, 48, 51, 57, 59, 67, 86, 93, 97, 101, 105, 108, 127, 145 Lewis, Oscar, 162n6 liminality, 44, 48, 50–51, 66–67 linguistics, 9, 11, 14, 54–55, 66, 71, 75–76, 95, 100, 111, 127, 130, 132–34, 137–40

Lomax, Alan, 156n14 Lovelock, James, 48, 147 Loxley, James, 153n11 ludus, 25 MacAloon, John, 1, 21, 35, 43, 47–48, 53, 55, 57, 61, 125, 157n6, 161n23 macrogenres, 21 Malden, A., 154n2 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 5, 137, 139 Marcus, George, 162n6 Marriott, McKim, 98 Massumi, Brian, 1, 128–29, 146, 153n15 Maxwell, Ian, 141–42 Mayer, Adrian, 141 Mays, Willie, 39 McCallum, Cecilia, 102 McConachie, Bruce, 1, 133, 151n2 Mead, George Herbert, 17–20, 99, 107, 151n3, 154n19 Mead, Margaret, 18, 108, 162n6 mediation, 27, 31–34, 65, 77, 91, 94, 98–100, 115, 127–28, 132, 153n13 mediatization, 90, 103, 126–28, 148, 159n18 Meltzer, B., 154n19 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 14, 17, 27, 95–97, 102–3, 107, 109, 119, 146, 153n19 Merrifield, Andy, 119 metagenre, 21–22, 34–35, 37–38, 43– 44, 63, 154n3 mimesis, 26–27 Montagu, Ashley, 104, 107 Moore, S., 46 Mosko, M., 117 motor intentionality, 27, 95 multiculturalism, 142 Murchie, Guy, 104 Mycak, Sonia, 133 Naess, Arne, 148 naturalization, 10, 15, 135 Ndembu ritual, 8, 23, 52, 134 negative flow, 24 neoteny, 104

Index Ness, Sally, 162n25 neutralization, 71–73, 75, 76, 83–87, 89, 91, 125 Nicholson, Shirley, 148 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 129 nullpunkt, 96, 161n20 Obeyesekere, Gannath, 19, 162n6 O Globo, 89 Olympic Games, 5–6, 35, 39, 47, 52, 76, 114, 157n6, 161n23 O’Malley, Joseph, 90 O’Neill, John, 98, 153n13 Ong, Walter, 3 Ortner, Sherry, 1, 12–13 Os Anos Rebeldes, 89 paidia, 25 paradigmatic, 65 Parker, Richard, 78, 82, 86 Parson, Talcott, 154n19 Paterson, Mark, 97, 107, 110, 132–33, 161n15 Pavel, Monique, 117 Peirce, Charles, 2, 4, 12, 14, 16–17, 26– 27, 31, 51, 54, 65–66, 70, 77, 94, 99–101, 103, 116–19, 123, 127– 28, 130, 132–33, 151–54, 158–59, 161–62 performance carnivals in social settings, 77–82 culture as, 11–14 as mediated distinction, 4–6 neutralization, transformation and reformation, 71–77 overt and tacit effects of, 89–91 politics in festivity, 87–89 reinforcement and inversion, 68–71 religious differences, 85–87 sex and gender play, 82–85 types of P/p relations, 65–68 See also carnivals; embodied performance; play, performance as; theory of performance performativity defined, 7

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gender and, 83, 99 habituation and, 89 human experience and, 27 as potential, 6–10, 32 Persson, Asha, 54, 101 Phelan, Peggy, 1, 124 play, performance as centrality of play, 23–31 games and sports, 35–37 mediating P/p relations, 31–35 overview, 21–23 special events vs. everyday life, 32 work, 37–41 See also performance Polanyi, Michael, 27 Pollock, Donald, 19 post-theory, 2, 124–25, 129, 133 potential, performativity as, 6–9 P/p relations, 26 mediating, 31–35 types, 65–68 See also performance practice, habit and, 14–17 pragmatic maxim, 12, 26 Pravaz, Natasha, 85 preobjective, 17 presentation, 68–69 primal depth, 102–3, 128, 148 protention, 16, 101 proto-symbolic, 75, 132, 152, 159n9 quasi-groups, 141 Radcliffe-Brown, A. R., 56, 68 Rappaport, Roy, 45, 47–49, 53, 57 recognition, 26, 117–19 Redmond, Anthony, 74 reduction, 22, 66, 70–71, 103, 123, 139, 154n1 reformation, 74–76, 121, 144, 147, 158n4 Reinelt, J., 1 reinforcement, 68–71, 75–76, 82–85, 89 religion, 29, 37, 46–47, 56, 60–61, 73, 76, 85–88, 90, 131, 142–43, 149 repetition, 44, 53, 57, 67, 117–19 retention, 101–2

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Ricoeur, Paul, 117–19 ritualization, 44, 52, 60–61, 131 See also rituals rituals criteria toward definition of, 55–59 efficacy and obligation, 53–55 from liminoid to ritual-like, 51–53 overview, 43–47 play vs., 62–63 problems with liminality, 50–51 reformulating, 47–50 ritual-like genres, 60–61 See also ritualization Rockmore, Tom, 162n5 Roscoe, Will, 83 Sahlins, Marshall, 19, 162n6 Saussure, Ferdinand de, 127, 129, 133, 153n14, 154n21, 157n4, 162n2 Schechner, Richard, 1–2, 4, 6–7, 57, 72, 119, 124, 160n6 Scheper-Hughes, N., 18, 69, 98 Schieffelin, Edward, 110, 162n25 Schilder, Paul, 97 Schiller, Friedrich, 23, 31 Schumacher, Ernst, 147 Schutz, Alfred, 105 Searle, J., 53 Sebeok, Thomas, 31 secondness, 26, 94, 100, 117–19, 123, 151n3 Seebohm, Kym, 159n10 selfhood, 15–18, 93, 96–100, 103–6, 116 semantico-referential meaning, 14, 66, 130 sex, 82–89, 107, 114 Shariat, Ali, 16 Sheriff, John, 153n14 Sheriff, Robin, 81 Sherzer, Joel, 11 Silverstein, Michael, 14, 151n3 Small Is Beautiful (Schumacher), 147 Smith, Bruce R., 83 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 72 Snow, Peter, 113 Sobel, Dava, 101 social settings, 18, 77–81, 146

special events, 4–11, 21–23, 27, 29, 31– 35, 37–38, 41, 44–46, 48–49, 52, 55, 60–61, 63, 66, 68–69, 75–77, 79, 83, 87, 89–91, 99, 102, 108–9, 116, 125, 145, 147 spontaneous vs. planned events, 10–11 Staal, Frits, 43, 55, 157n7 Stern, Daniel, 17, 104, 133, 161n12 St. John, Graham, 50 Stocking, George, 139 Stonewall Riots, 79 Strine, Mary, 124 subgenre, 21, 33 Sutton, John, 95, 132 Sutton-Smith, Brian, 26, 31 Swain, Tony, 75 Sylvan, Robin, 50 syntagmatic, 50–51, 65, 157n4 tacit knowledge, 27 Taussig, Michael, 120 Tedlock, D., 162 telenovelas, 89 Tellas, Edward, 159n12 temporality, 101–2, 105, 119, 148 theory of performance circulation of practice and habit, 144–45 cognitive approaches, 132–33 contemporary societies as culture-like phenomena, 140–44 omnibus approach, 124–29 overview, 123–24 patterns of culture, 137–40 plea for ecological approach, 145–49 post-theoretical approach, 125–26 problems of performance autoethnography, 134–37 recent sociological approaches, 129–32 See also embodied performance; performance Thompson, Evan, 17, 36, 94, 105, 109, 132–33, 146, 160n3 Thorpe, Jim, 39 transformation, 19, 23, 26, 53, 57–58, 73–76, 84, 87, 90–91, 131, 156n1, 159n7

Index trialogue, 116, 153n13, 155n11 Turner, Bryan, 98 Turner, Terence, 154n16 Turner, Victor, 1–2, 4, 7–8, 10–11, 22– 23, 25–26, 31, 44, 47–48, 50–53, 55, 57, 59, 66–69, 71, 89–90, 129, 131, 134, 145 Tylor, Edward, 137, 162n9 Urban, Greg, 1 Van Gennep, Arnold, 48, 50–52, 65, 67, 157n5 Vedic ritual, 54–55, 74, 76

Wafer, Jim, 19 Wagner, Roy, 22, 135, 162n27 Weber, Max, 5, 12, 154n19 Wegenstein, Bernadette, 133 Weiss, Gail, 107 Wikan, Unni, 110 Wilde, Charles, 38 Williams, Walter, 83 Williamson, Kenneth, 81 Willis, Paul, 163n14 Yeats, William Butler, 31 Zarilli, Phillip, 16, 162n25

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