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Abrahams, Roger D. 1977. “Toward an Enactment-Centered
Theory of Folklore.” In The Frontiers of Folklore,
William
Bascom, ed., Wash., D.C.: American Anthropological Association Series,
pp. 79-120.
“Toward an Enactment-Centered Theory of
Folklore”
Roger D. Abrahams
[beginning of page 79]
In my most recent writing I have attempted to construct a
theory by
which the materials of folklore and the practices of folklorists are
related
to other features of man’s expressive life. It is surely through
the communication systems that lie at the heart of community life that
cultural meaning is achieved. Folklorists have always been
concerned
with the most vital expressions of culture: folktales and myths,
riddles
and proverbs, festivals and rituals. These expressions of
tradition,
simply because they are overtly formulaic, redundant, predictable, mark
those moments when valued relationships are enacted, participated in,
and
invested with significance. Though folklore is made up of the
most
patently meaningful statements of community and culture, folklorists
have
contributed little to an understanding of how meaning and significance
is achieved. To be sure, in the last decade the discipline has
moved
somewhat from its focus on text to include context, and thus from
cultural
product to process, allowing us now to enter folkloristically into the
philosophic discussions of ontology. However, our pronouncements
on the subject remain essentially programmatic or simple-mindedly
ethnographic;
we either make statements about what we ought to attend to in our
gathering
and reporting of data, or we fill in some social-cultural data
surrounding
our recordings of traditional expressive events, taking note of
practices
without attending to the larger socio-cultural matrices by which these
events come to be and to signify. Such meanings are, of course,
the
very features which bring community members to laugh and cry, to
discuss
deeply, enjoy, become enthralled, even carried away by the [beginning
of page 80] experience. The vitality of expressive man
is,
thus further deadened by folklorist, fixing the transient and
transitional
out of a need for the objective scholar to describe and compare through
the medium of the written word and the printed page. For some
time,
the key terms in the folkloristic synthesis carried by myself and my
colleagues
here, have been process and especially performance;
this
latter concept allowed us to relate the formal features of cultural
expression
to the social dimensions of enactment, as in the relationship between
the
performer and audience, how they develop and fulfill patterns of
expectation,
how license to perform is invoked and used, and so on. My turn to
the larger term enactment arose out of a growing recognition
that
there were a number of events which, I and my colleagues have been
describing
in performance terms, like games, and rituals, which were stretching
the
idea of performance somewhat out of shape. Surely, we talk of the
performance-like features of games or rites, but this is clearly in
analogy
to those events in which we come together to be entertained (and
perhaps
instructed) by a person which are conventionally marked and known as
performance
forms.
My drawing on enactment, then, is my attempt to find a term
which includes
performances, games, rituals, festivities, etc., in short, any cultural
event in which community members come together to participate, employ
the
deepest and most complex multivocal and polyvalent signs and symbols of
their repertoire of expression thus entering into a potentially
significant
experience.
Between Acts and Enactments
Enactments: heightened events experienced in such
anticipated and conventionally
framed ways that participation is both potentiated and
encouraged.
Activities become unreal yet more real at the same time; unreal because
of the felt departure from the ordinary toward the more heightened,
self-conscious
and stylized behaviors of named and framed activities-in-common; more
real
because the events take the motives and scenes of the everyday and
bring
them into some new perspective, allowing us to see them as part of some
larger patterns of [beginning of page 81] existence.
Enactments:
heightened and often self-consciously rendered cultural experiences,
productions
we react to as art or performance, as rituals, festivals, games,
parties,
and any other event in which the coming together is prepared far,
psychologically
and otherwise, and participation is thereby strongly encouraged.
Discussions of the relations between everyday life and these
heightened
occasions has, in the main, been carried out by aestheticians and
critics,
those concerned with the special worlds created out of the stuff of
life
by ever-refining artist representation, the making of significant
objects.
This has been both a boon to us in and a drain upon our observational
energies,
for artistic performance is only one very specialized kind of
enactment.
This point is difficult to understand if one’s critical life is spent
in
contemplation of the artful object. The establish a distance
between
the object and the beholder which demands an intense contemplation upon
the ways in which the artist has created an object which has a life of
its own. Such intensity of focus calls for some consideration
along
the way of how the artist has transformed the objects, scenes, or
motives
of the real world into a significant set-piece. In such a
universe
of discourse we are concerned with matters such as mimesis
(styles
and modalities of representation) and verisimilitude (how the
artificial
maintains its connection to life with regard to believability).
Such
discussion rests on the premise that the relationship between art and
life
is problematic; thus, the eternal discussions of escapism,
frivolousness,
or in high-serious criticism on the distinctiveness of imagination as
opposed
to fancy on the one hand, triviality or decadence on the other.
Taking a larger view of man’s creative engagement with the
social and
natural world around him, his abilities to participate in the
heightened
cultural and social events, in “worlds” as distinct from the everyday
as
art is from life, I propose here a larger potion of socio-cultural
enactment,
one which places artistic performance in a more fully human interactive
context. Michael Polanyi notices just this limitation on
art
criticism, arguing that life is better understood by looking at its
social
and religious [beginning of page 82] congeners, other unusual
events
like “the celebration of festivities,” “feast, pageants and rites of
mourning”:
The mechanisms that serve to arouse us from
our private concerns
and open our minds to follow a work of art are artificial products:
their
power to arouse and isolate our minds lies in their artificiality,
which
sharply contrasts with our day-to-day experience. This is also
true
for feasts and solemn occasions; it is their artificial character that
breaks into our daily lives and arouses our minds to other
thoughts.
This interjection into our daily lives is more direct here than it is
for
the arts; it simply decrees a pause in our regular pursuits and demands
that we put on our best clothes (or some other customary attire) and
take
part in the appropriate rituals. (1)
|
In most cultural situations, these different kinds of heightened and
focussed
occasions are separated by various dimensions of social
situations.
A feast or a rite, a game or a performance take place at specially
set-aside
times and places, and on occasions in which the community regards it as
appropriate to carry on in this way. Not that each kind of
enactment
does not have the same kind of special vocabularies and sensibilities
attached
to them as sophisticated artistic objects; rather, these very
artificial
codes and ways of behaving separate themselves from each other because
of differences in the occasion of their enactment as well as the
vocabularies
and repertoires they employ. Furthermore, there is, in every kind
of enactment a continuity with behavior and attitudes expressible in
everyday
experiences as well. The relationship between real experiences
and
their counterparts in one or another type of enactment is a matter of
discussion,
not only among art critics but folk performers as well. In the
United
States bluesmen have been especially articulate on the subject because
of the identification, by the audience, of the singer and the songs he
composes and sings. Especially if he performs for white
audiences,
he is constantly asked about the relationships between his songs and
his
life. For [beginning of page 83] instance, the noted bluesman
John
Lee Hooker responding to such a question, notes that:
You can hear a certain type of record be
playin’. You
can be feeling very normal, nothin’ on your mind, period. But
it’s
somethin’ on that record hits you. It hits somethin’ that have
happened
in your life, and sometime if you can’t stand to listen to the record
you
take a walk or take a ride or get in your car because you don’t want to
be hurt so deep that it cause heartaches and things. Because
you’d
rather not to hear it than to hear it. Because there’s somethin’
sad in there that give you the blues; somethin’ that reach back in your
life or in some friend’s life of yours, or that make you think of what
have happened today and it is so true, that if it didn’t happen to you,
you still got a strong idea -- you know those things is goin’ on.
So this is very touchable, and that develops into the blues. (2)
|
The artist-performer then finds his place, bringing focussed energies
and
craft into the moment of performance. Through fabricating an
artistic
object, an item of performance, the reception accorded the
performer
relies all-too-obviously on the responses of others on how much
coordinated
response is triggered by the enactment. The response itself will
be determined by how well the performer controls his medium and
successfully
channels his energies; but it also relies on how fully the item
responds
to actual scenes from life -- or as Hooker puts it, how much it “hits
you”
as a human being who is also a member of an audience and a community.
The dialectic between art and life is both between the
artist and his
genres and between the idea of the artist as the voice of tradition or
as one who speaks from personal experience. In nontraditional
communities,
the artist must increasingly demand that the audience wonder how much
he
sings of himself and how much is conventional observation and artistic
fabrication. This demand is part of the mystique of the
artist-performer.
Even artists who perform the works of others beg this question in their
choice of repertoire of [beginning of page 84] which works they
play on which occasion, and by the intensity and stylistic nuance by
which
they are played on that occasion. Again, this is not simply a
problem
confronted by the sophisticated artist who expresses himself
reflexively,
like a Hemingway or a Proust, making of his life a work of art.
Listen
to another blues singer, Henry Thomas, holding forth on just this
subject:
There’s several types of blues -- there’s
blues that connects
you with personal life -- I mean you can tell it to the public as a
song,
in a song. But I mean, they don’t take it seriously which you are
tellin’ the truth about. They don’t always think seriously that
it’s
exactly you that you talkin’ about. At the same time it could be
you, more or less it would be you for you to have the feelin’.
You
express yourself in a song like that. Now this particular thing
reaches
others because they have experienced the same condition in life, so
naturally
they feel what you are sayin’ because it happened to them. It’s
the
sort of thing that you kinda like to hold to yourself, yet you want
somebody
to know it. I don’t know how you say that -- two ways: you like
somebody
to know it, yet you hold it to yourself. Now I’ve had the feelin’
which I have disposed it in a song, but there’s some things that have
happened
to me that I wouldn’t dare tell, not to tell -- but I would sing about
them. Because people in general they take the song as an
explanation
for themselves -- they believe this song is expressing their feelin’s
instead
of the one that singin’ it. They feel that maybe I have just hit
upon somethin’ that’s in their lives, and yet at the same time it was
some
of the things that went wrong with me too. (3)
|
This is not to argue that life follows art, or vice-versa, or that to
sing
the blues you must experience them. Rather, there is a space
between
life and art within which the performer and his audience exchange the
particulars
of aesthetic and moral experience, an exchange held self-consciously.
Enactments, then, stylize and epitomize the [beginning
of page 85]
everyday.
On the other hand, life (especially social life) gravitates again and
again
toward the set-scenes we know best through one or another genre of
enactment,
for the two often share the fictions and sentiments which guide and
color
our actions. How often do we hear someone telling about a
farcical
or tragic set of events which happened recently, or, find ourselves
involved
in a situation more characteristic of a soap opera or a sentimental
song
than what we usually think of as “real life.”
If, on occasion, life seems to model itself on art, we
seldom have trouble
spelling out the differences between the two kinds of experience.
Enactments are more highly focussed, framed, redundant, and stylized
than
other areas of our experience. Art itself is artificial in such a
way that it openly invokes a patterning of motives in those very areas
of everyday life which we otherwise have to investigate at some depth
to
discover system and pattern. Yet we distrust the patterns of art
when applying them to realms of everyday life precisely because the
patterns
are openly stated, obvious, cliched. Furthermore, the motives are
practiced, rehearsed and self-consciously performed, usually by
representatives
of a segment of society we never fully trust: players, performers,
artists.
The growing popular as well as scholarly interest in the
patterned and
symbolic dimensions of expressive culture dramatizes the need for a
critical
methodology which will both enable us to describe the patterns of
behavior
characteristic of the recurrent scenes within one culture and to carry
out some sort of comparison of such system cross-culturally.
Insights
into the patterning of these systems are not easily obtained in
rituals,
festivals, parties, get-togethers, sports, and games -- because such
enactments
are clearly framed and marked, are redundant in both the handling of
materials
and in messages, and involve a coordination of energies which results
in
the centered and often transcendent response. The terms of
analysis
for rituals, performances, and other such high intensity enactments
have
usefully been employed in describing everyday scenes, enabling the
ethnographic
observer to trace the structural relationships between the spontaneous
[beginning
of page 86] side of everyday life and the rehearsed and replayed
scenes
and events. In pursuit of describing such human experience, the
concerns
of the folklorist come together with those of other disciplines:
ethnographers,
sociologists, art historians, and aestheticians. Further, their
findings
have been picked up by the popular press in how-to-interpret books on
interactional
games, on body language, and on various special codes that only those in
on it can understand. In the rational retreat from the
mystical,
we hope to de-mythologize by ripping off the various masks that man
continually
fashions for himself.
To some extent, all observers of human behavior seek a
corner on the
market of reality, for that is our way of managing our
identities.
And this process is far from the sole possession of the academic -- in
fact, the ad man and the pollster seem to have more success -- at least
in selling others on the power of their perspectives. The
underlying
rationale of humanistic disciplines has been to let us recognize and
know
more fully what is real, to distinguish between the real in life from
the
unreal, the sentimental, the fake, the projections of fantasy or
delusion,
the misleading, the mystified and the mythical. Humanists seek to
use this insight into life as a means of themselves living more fully,
experiencing more knowledgeably and more deeply, and of imparting these
techniques and this wisdom to others. But this search is hardly
restricted
to those who employ the received models of the study of socio-cultural
man. The drive to recognize and segregate the real from the
ersatz
obtains in the social relations which characterize ever larger segments
of Americans. How often, in our discussions of agrarian and
post-agrarian
Black culture have we dwelt on what the difference is between the real
thing (whether pimp or preacher, Big or Little Mama) and those who are
constantly running game, or who are saddity, dicty, uppity.
(4) No matter what community we happen to come from, then, we
seem
to find ourselves constantly judging others by how much we can “be
ourselves”
with them -- by which we seem to mean how unguarded we can be in
interactions
with them and remain comfortable.
To so judge others is to draw on values derived from
friendship expectations
and from the [beginning of page 87] relaxation attending
communications
among friends. But obviously regarding someone as sincere or
fakey,
as an original or a show-off, is far from the only basis on which we
judge
experience with others. In fact, using the relative “at homeness”
of someone as the basic criterion of who or what is real and what isn’t
would make life seem very dull. We also search for “the real
thing,”
for the authentic, by how much our basic sense of self is put to a
test,
by how far certain people, situations, or experiences enable us to feel
more deeply, more centered, more tested with regard to the range of
life
possibilities. Thus, there are those who we like to be with
because
they are fun, always in for the new experience, one in which
participation
at ever-growing intensity is central.
Reality itself is only understandable when we contrast it
with other
kinds of experience, perception, and judgment. To William James’
classic formulation of the problem -- “Under what circumstances do we
think
things are real?” -- must be added: What do we tacitly contrast with
the
real
in our ongoing tests for authenticity and sincerity? In some
situations
we distinguish between the fantastic and the real (without necessarily
judging one better than the other, though obviously the question of
appropriateness
does arise). In another range of situations we distinguish
between
real
life and just playing, again not necessarily attaching any
value
to he former unless high seriousness or work is called for by the
occasion.
Furthermore, for those interested in man’s creative and celebrative
potential,
play may in many cases and ways seem infinitely superior to (and in
fact
more real than) everyday reality.
The Real and the Strange, and the Really Strange
“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word
a human
being,” Schiller tells us, “and he is only fully a human being when he
plays.” Yet surely, playing is not man’s most fulfilling
capacity,
for when we just play we exhibit the least compelling of human
traits,
ones relieving us of the need to be serious, sincere, and
authentic.
On the other hand, through playfulness we are our most open and protean
selves. [beginning of page 88] The problem is only semantic to
be
sure, yet it involves more than just word meanings. Looking
closely
at play we can give witness to the virtues of a kind semantic
self-cancellation
operating in such activity.
Schiller says to us that only through the intensive motives
of living-in-common,
motives which become available through cultural processes such as play,
can we feel as well as be human. In play we can
be
as unconscious and creative as our collective wills and abilities
permit;
play socially and culturally situated in this way encourages the
employment
of the fullest range of motives and the experiencing of self and of
community
at high pitch. This capability of raising the level of potential
involvement and self-consciousness is not only found in play, of
course,
but in all cultural enactments: rituals, performances, festivities,
feasts,
celebrations, as well as game-playing, sports, and other
contests.
To measure humanity by any other range of experience is to be accused
of
overlooking man’s highest capacities. Yet, play, festivity, or
performance
are in one important sense not real -- they involve just
playing
or just performing -- experiences we can’t (and mustn’t) take
seriously.
Play is then one of the most encumbered of all
self-cancelling words
-- a word which can mean one thing and its opposite. Play is both
unreal and yet productive of a greater sense of reality than those
experiences
and scenes which are, by common assent, most real (if humdrum).
The
question we hardly need ask is what we say about the meanings, the
understandings,
the interpretations-in-common of an ordinary strip of action from its
ordinariness,
and how much do we need a playful reframing of the strip and with this
translation a critical reexperiencing of the scene. For instance,
how much do we learn from a meal, in the experience of eating-as-usual,
and how much more by observing children playing house in which a meal
is
served, or by having a ‘play meal’ ourselves (as in a topsy-turvy
dinner
in which dessert is served first, and so on). Of course, we learn
more about meals by making them strange in some way; but such
transformation
takes eating out of the range of everyday reality. The problem is
all the more complicated when we [beginning of page 89]
encounter
the very real Thanksgiving dinner, because, like a play meal, it
intensifies
and stylizes everyday dining to the point that we become a little more
self-conscious of the role-taking which goes on every day.
Inverting or stylizing in any manner will transform the
ordinary event
into something both more or less real than its everyday
counterpart.
But in fact is not Jerry Lewis’s question -- “Are you for real?” --
implicit
in all of our interactions with others, and don’t we become more
concerned
with the sincerity, seriousness,or authenticity of a scene the closer
it
actually comes to being called play? Our sense of vitality relies
precisely on such promotion of the ordinary, on the translation of the
everyday into the extraordinary, the strange.
Such making-strange (5) occurs, it would seem,
wherever a firmly
articulated self-conscious frame is placed around a set of behaviors,
and
techniques are devised which continually cue us to the experience of
this
frame. Framing is an operation which occurs on all levels of
interaction,
even the most conversational engagements. However, the feature
which
unites all enactments is that in them marking-cuing and framing is
overt
and self-evident. In our culture, casual conversations provide
our
norm of interaction, interactions in which we can both “be ourselves”
and
yet be considered to be “at our best.” We therefore see
enactments,
whether playful or serious, festive or ceremonial, as unusual, as
strange,
because they call attention to shifts in style and intensity from the
ground-base
of apparent spontaneity which governs our interpretation of ordinary
interactions.
But we must not consider this perception pan-cultural, for many
cultures
do not recognize conversation as the expressive norm; the situation
described
by Ethel Albert among the Burundi may, in fact, be characteristic of
the
way in which many others operate: “The notion of idle talk has little
place
in Burundi conceptions of verbal behavior. ...Visiting is
categorized
according to the visitor’s purpose and is subject to a variety of
formulas
which must be learned.” (6) Yet, our own cultural focus on
friendly
and unceremonious talk does allow us to get at [beginning of page 90]
the different ways of establishing distinctive modes of expression for
different occasions.
There are two obvious of departing from the everyday
expressive codes:
intensification (like ceremonial formalization) or by playful
inversion.
The former stylizes the serious dimension of everyday behaviors; the
latter
selectively up-ends these serious goal-oriented or teleological
patterns.
The serious apparently serves social order, the ludicrous comments upon
society and its orders, and not always very kindly. The ludicrous
could hardly exist without the serious, whose very pattern it inverts,
but as I hope to demonstrate, the serious relies equally strongly on
the
playful. Most important, both moves deepen involvement by
severely
restricting the range of potential behaviors, and both challenge our
abilities
to understand, interpret, and judge.
Understanding is all the more problematic because not only
do we constantly
have to keep check on reality factors, but the various worlds of
enactment
provide us with a metaphoric base by which we can describe the most
ordinary
life-processes. Witness, for instance, the commonsense
philosopher
Hans George Gadamer describing the operation of language in
interactional
situations:
...in the last analysis, language is
not simply a mirror.
What we perceive in it is not merely a “reflection” of our own and all
being; it is the living out of what it is with us -- not only in the
concrete
interrelationships of work and politics, but in all the other
relationships
and dependencies that comprise our world.
Language, then, is not the finally found anonymous
subject of all social-historical
processes and action, which presents the whole of its activities as
objectivizations
to our deserving gaze; rather it is by itself the game of
interpretation
that we all are engaged in everyday. In this game nobody is above
and before all the others; everybody is at the center, is “it” in this
game. Thus it is always his turn to be interpreting. (7)
|
[beginning of page 91] Obviously, here Gadamer is not
arguing that
life is a game of tag. Life is real, tag is not.
But
just as we have to wonder, once we are playing tag, whether being “it”
is desirable or not (we attempt to pass on the role as quickly as we
are
tagged), we also find ourselves checking up on a number of basic
factors
in our ordinary lives: on the suitability and usefulness of our real
roles;
or our worthiness to play such roles; or whether the part in which
we’ve
been cast (or even cast ourselves) conforms to the one we choose to
play.
This is not an abstract philosophic matter; it arises, for instance,
every
time we receive an order from someone and react by wondering if we
should
‘take it.’
We spend a great deal of our waking hours interacting with
others, in
great part on the basis of whether they are sincere or not, whether
real
or spurious motives are involved in the actions of others, whether the
objects they would have us buy are of the quality and usefulness they
are
represented as having, or whether someone is dealing with us seriously
or ‘just playing.’ Even in our attempts to ‘get in touch with
ourselves’
we seek for ways in which we can separate the authentic from the
put-on,
finding ways in which we can ‘be ourselves’ more often and more fully.
Of course, it is hardly my intention to write a “how-to”
manual on demystifying
ourselves and others, on cracking social or psychological symbolic
codes
so that we can learn to read our own and one another’s motives more
effectively.
Rather, my concerns are how we apprehend and find meaning in each
others
behavior, judge it, and use such recognitions as means of opening our
lives
to the experiences of participation through the cultural
enactments.
As I see it, we inherit and develop upon a great number of ways to get
into experiences that are larger than ourselves -- wherein we find
ourselves
participating intensely in events so important that we come to live by
and for them. In discussions of how everyday motives extend
beyond
the everyday, we find ourselves grappling with words that don’t quite
mean
what the experience itself imparts. For we use the same
terms
to describe both what one experiences in the everyday and the ordinary,
and what is going [beginning of page 92] on in the more
intensive
events. Implicitly we note that there is a stream of behavior
from
which we depart in the ‘deeper’ experiences, but to get at the
difference
we must posit what sociological phenomenologists, following Alfred
Schutz,
call a “paramount reality” against which all other realities appear as
finite and circumscribed provinces of meaning. The more
specialized
occasions of licensed departure from paramount reality are perceived as
“enclaves within” that base-condition of registered experience:
“paramount
reality envelops them on all sides, as it were, and consciousness
always
returns to the paramount reality as from an excursion.” (8)
“Paramount reality” as a cognitive style, Schutz argues,
“consists of:
1) A specific tension of consciousness, namely wide-awakedness...; 2)
A...suspension
of doubt; 3) A prevalent form of spontaneity (invention?); 4) A
specific
form of experiencing oneself...; 5) A specific form of sociality [by
which
Schutz must mean, varieties of speaking and acting appropriate to the real
occasion]; and 6) A specific time perspective.” Establishing
boundaries
between the flowing stream of experience which he calls paramount, and
other more finite realms, is difficult. In fact, Schutz must
resort
to what amounts to a descriptive and enumerative defining style:
All these worlds -- the world of dreams, of
imageries and phantasms,
especially the world of art, the world of religious experience, the
world
of scientific contemplation, the play world of the child, and the world
of the insane -- are finite provinces of meaning.
Consistency and compatibility are experiences with
respect to their
peculiar cognitive style subsists merely within the borders of the
particular
province of meaning to which those experiences belong... To the
cognitive
style peculiar to each of these different provinces of meaning belongs,
thus, a specific tension of consciousness and, consequently, also a
specific
epoche, a prevalent form of spontaneity, a specific form of self
experience,
a specific form of sociality, and a specific time perspective...
The world of working in daily life is the archetype [beginning of
page
93] of our experience of reality. All the other provinces of
meaning may be considered as its modifications... [However]
within
a single day, even within a single hour, our consciousness may run
through
most different tensions and adopt most different intentional attitudes
to life... Furthermore there are regions belonging to one
province
of meaning enclosed by another...” (9)
|
Reality’s Situation
Schutz’s attention to the multiplex character of situated
realities
takes into account the dynamic by which we are able to make
transactions
between these realms without much ado. Why he chooses to attach
some
kind of hierarchical primacy to the workaday world begins to seem
strange
because of the growing value placed upon play in its various
manifestations.
Somehow the recognition that we operate within and between the various
realities seems more important than a need to attach primacy to one or
another sphere of patterned behavior. To be sure, we do seem to
recognize
the existence of something like an “everyday reality,” but we still
consistently
return to one or another of the more stylized and finite domains of
expressive
interaction for the terms by which we come to understand and interpret
both these more intensely focussed and finite domains and the cognate
dimensions
of the less stylized and self-conscious stream of life.
Thus, we have described everyday motives and activities for
some time
in performance -- and especially theatrical performance -- terms.
Jacques’ noting that “All the world’s a stage” was already a critical
commonplace
in Shakespeare’s day, traceable in literature at least as far back as
Democritus,
but really implicit in language as soon as mummery and flummery became
cultural resources. There are, however, equally available
analogies
from child’s play, ritual, pageantry, festival, and celebration, as
well
as from numerous realms of performance other than the theater.
The
most recent (perhaps trendy) analogy would compare all of a culture to
a “text,” making the interpretation of behavior a literary-critical
exercise.
Though many semioticians have put this [beginning of page 94]
metaphor
to good use, none has been more provocative and elegant than Clifford
Geertz,
who has noted resoundingly that “the culture of a people is an ensemble
to texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to
read
over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.” Thus,
interpretation becomes an “exercise in close reading” in which “one can
start anywhere in a culture’s repertoire of forms and end up anywhere
else.”
(10)
We might pursue this analogy for a moment, for it enables us
(as does
any root metaphor even “All the world’s a stage,” or “Life’s a dance”)
to better distinguish between performative domains and yet recognize
the
commonsense continuities among them. Each cultural enactment,
whether
a ritual, a game, a performance, or a festive celebration, has both a
life
of its own and yet is tied with aspects of culture that lie outside the
performance. All enactments are drawn, to some degree, from
everyday
life and yet set apart from it, inducing a kind of self-consciousness
of
activity, a reflexivity leading the members of the culture themselves
to
conceive of such intensive events as what Geertz calls “a paradigmatic
human event.” Discussing the strange place of the frenzied
cockfight
among the highly decorous Balinese, he notes that:
Enacted and reenacted, the cockfight enables
the Balinese,
as read and reread, as Macbeth enables us, to see a dimension of his
own
subjectivity. As he watches fight after fight, with active
watching
of an owner and a better...he grows familiar with it and what it has to
say to him, much as the attentive listener to string quartets or the
absorbed
viewer of still life grows slowly more familiar with them in a way
which
opens his subjectivity to himself.
Yet because...that subjectivity does not properly
exist until it is
thus organized, art forms generate and regenerate the very subjectivity
they only pretend to display. Quartets, still lifes, and
cockfights
are not merely reflections of a preexisting sensibility analogically
represented;
they are positive agents in a creation and maintenance of such a
sensibility.
(11)
|
[beginning of page 95] What Geertz says of art forms is
true of
any consciously framed enactment. All participants carry to the
enactment
an accumulation of possible responses appropriate to the form, subject,
and occasion. But each new encounter of this sort adds to one’s
familiarity
with the item being performed and with the genre and allows a
pregressive
opening up with regard to the operation of the sensibilities.
This
very openness sustains the vigor of the genre and the representative
enactment
of it as a fund of potential experience, thus serving to maintain
it.
But this approach leaves unanswered how the scenes and the events of
the
everyday are drawn upon in such a consciously framed context, and are
so
transformed that the performance may achieve an existence of its own,
even
while maintaining crucial connections with the everyday on the level of
reaction and sensibility.
Kenneth Burke’s dictum that “there are no forms of art which
are not
forms of experience outside art,” might, then, usefully be broadened to
include all enactments. (12) Enactments bring these forms of
experience
into dramatic focus. Significance is commonly demonstrated
through
the disruption and reinstatement of these orders when they are so
embodied.
Artistic enactments (or performance) are in this view, a stylization of
the behaviors and recurrent experiences of everyday life, but
commonly
rendered through a depiction of disruption. Even so, such
renderings
of experience are commonly of the same range as those observable in
real
life, and are ones which have socially developed means of eliminating
any
dimension of upset of the experience through some kind of formalized
proceedings.
Why then the need to embody that range of experience in enactments as
well?
Standard psychological and functional theory would apply a “replay” or
catharsis explanation, such as: framing an enactment permits the
controlled
replaying of anxiety-laden experience while embodying a restatement of
cultural norms, teaching and celebrating the group’s sense of order at
the same time. Common sense affirms this approach, for we know we
tell stories out of our own embarrassment, our confusing and even
traumatic
experiences, and each time we tell them we have moved the upset more
toward
some class of experiences-in-common, therefore more under control.
[beginning of page 96] However, this recounting type
of narrative
is far from the only type of highly-framed behavior which is commonly
accounted
for in such catharsis terms. There are numerous other traditions
of enactment (or reenactment) of basic social confusions, like games
and
satiric songs and plays, which are also interpreted as somehow
providing
a means of eliminating the accumulated stress arising from social life
and individual need.
This steam-valve approach is one version of the
“drive-discharge model”
which attempts to account for the social uses of competitive sports,
psychogenic
illnesses, certain kinds of magical systems and even some aspects of
gossip.
However, this model has recently been demonstrated to have little
explanatory
power and to arise from a somewhat outmoded utilitarian set of
presuppositions
that cast little light on culture. (13; see Sahlins for a very
persuasive
discussion of the symbolic vs. utilitarian conceptions of the place of
meaningful objects and expressions in culture). Discoursing in
the
supposed causal relation between war and competitive sports, Richard
Sipes
concludes:
Sports and war manifest no functional
relationship across time.
Cross-culturally, war and combative sports show a direct
relationship...
War and combative type sports therefore do not, as often claimed, act
as
alternative channels for the discharge of accumulable aggressive
tensions.
Rather than being functional alternatives, war and combative sports
activities
in a society appear to be components of a broader culture
pattern.
(14)
|
The same argument might be made with regard to the anti-normative
dimensions
of play, of satiric performance, or of the masquerading dimension of
ritual.
All of these simply to foreground a cultural pattern which is also
observable
in everyday life. To construct a model which will account for
this
relationship of the everyday with the distinctive events of cultural
enactments,
we need both to be able to render the orders and integrities of
recurrent
scenes of quotidian existence, as well as the stylized, self-conscious,
marked enactments.
[beginning of page 97] Each enactment is more than a
rendering,
direct or inverted, of social norms: it is an experience itself.
Each draws upon a community’s concern with clumsiness, embarrassment,
confusion,
and conflict of the everyday; but in forming and stylizing the reported
events, it develops a life of its own. Each performance, for
instance,
draws upon energies and patterns of expectation brought into the
occasion
not only because it embodies some life-situation, but because it
departs
from the everyday to the degree that it is self-consciously and
artfully
performed. It is then the “strangest” kind of communication of
all,
because it departs most fully from the expression of experience on the
casual or everyday level. Again to quote Burke, such enactment
involves
an “arousing and fulfillment of desires,” desires occasioned by the
anticipation
built into the intensive form and experience itself, desires
conditioned
by the promise of fulfillment in which the audience is “gratified by
the
sequence.” (15)
There are, to be sure, formal patterns which give order and
names to
our experience in all realms of life, and shared ways by which we
establish
both the continuities and the discontinuities between the various
realms
of experience. That is, there are recurrent ‘scenes’ in all
realms
of our experience-in-common and that the constituent elements of these
scenes and even their development may be closely related. The
conventions
of everyday scenes correspond to those of intensive enactment in many,
but by no means all, ways. Insofar as each conventional form
carries
its own mode of experiencing, the higher degree of ceremony or ritual
or
performance marks such occasions as sui generis in spite of
whatever
relationship exists between the scenes of real-life and the enacted
situation.
That there is such a relationship is crucial to any
understanding of
the social base of art. But social anthropologists tend to
interpret
the strange rendering of performance or play forms, as well as
fictions,
primarily by the ways in which they embody or reflect the social norms
and ideals of the group. Viewing this problem of description the
other way around, regarding such as the norm (or at least as the
expressed
ideal), it becomes evident that there are something like [beginning
of page 98] genres of interaction -- that is, set patterns of
interaction
with developmental expectations -- in the scenes of the everyday as
much
as there are in self-conscious and rehearsed enactments.
Enactments
are strongly marked with devices that foreground form and movement for
the participants; on the other hand, the scenes of ‘normal’ interaction
have fewer overt marking devices, the participants in fact take pains
to
submerge or ignore the markers. The languages of each type of
enactment
will differ exactly in this dimension -- with regard to the variety of
conventional devices drawn upon, the degree and type of redundancy,
predictability,
regularity, and preparation.
We know that patterned scenes exist in real relationships
for we often
have names for them. In our courtship procedures, for example,
though
there have been considerable modifications of texture and timing, are
still
based on essentially the same monogamistic premises as they have in
Western
Culture for the last two hundred years. Consequently, whether
they
still go by the same terms or not, we continue to designate
approximately
the same stages in the male-female relationship. Such scenes as
“a
date,” “making out,” or “popping the question,” are still a part of our
social repertoires whether we call them by these old-fashioned terms or
not. There is in this pattern of courtship not only the recurrent
‘scenes’ but also a set of values placed upon them and upon their ideal
result -- one man and one woman joined in a stabilized
relationship.
These scenes have a kind of built-in logical progression to them, what
Burke appropriately calls a ‘syllogism’ because the causal development
is so restricted (at least in our expectations). Also, quite
obviously,
these scenes, their values, and their developments are, of necessity,
culture
specific. However, because they are so patterned, our shared
expectations
and responses -- our sensibilities -- are available for reenactment.
Any social-based theory of enactment, in other words, must
take into
consideration the complexity of the relationship between lived
experience
and the rendering of it as intensified or reported. It is not
enough
to say that life must precede art for art to be understood, any more [beginning
of page 99] than to say we can’t comprehend a feast without knowing
everyday eating habits. Too often the line of experience must be
seen to go the other way; someone undergoes an upsetting experience,
and
is provided with a sense of control over the upset because the scene
has
already been encountered in performance contexts. How often do we
define an unusual situation in which we find ourselves directly in
terms
of the genre of enactment that by convention we know embodies that
situation?
How common, for instance, to feel that we are somehow making a soap
opera
out of our lives? A common reaction of people involved in
airplane
hijackings, when asked how they felt and what they did was, “Oh,
everything
was familiar to us; we had seen it in the movies already.”
There is, in other words, no hard-and-fast-distinction to be
made between
the finite representations of enactment and paramount reality; rather,
there are various levels of formality, of scenic wholeness, or
intensity
of frame and of focus of activity. Developing our recognition of
these orders is accomplished by marking the enactment with
self-consciously
stylized devices, or by systematically breaking the rules, thus calling
attention both to the existence of the rules and the formal and
conventional
techniques by which they may be broken. It is this increasing
formality
and this dramatic presentation of non- or anti-formality, that provides
us with major techniques for making performance of performance, play of
play.
Enactments: Types of Events We Look Forward To
(Sometimes
with Dread)
If we live humdrum existences most of the time, our lives
are also marked
by events we look forward to. We have numerous times, places, and
occasions on which we come together to participate, to celebrate, to
entertain
and be entertained, to share in an activity which, because it is both
conventional
and traditional, we know what we are getting into, and what we can (at
least potentially) get out of it. These events are connected to
our
sense of life-passage; they are calendared, if not always
calendrical.
Some of these come about every year, every month, maybe even every [beginning
of page 100] week. This is how and why we can look forward to
them (even if sometimes our anticipation involves fear and
loathing.)
These events then have a sense of wholeness and potential to them; they
invoke special ways of acting, special languages, rules, even
boundaries.
Furthermore, we have no trouble distinguishing the types of
such events
simply because they are named, have boundaries, rules, conventions, and
customary stylized ways of acting (or at least, involving
ourselves).
These are both the most deeply serious and playful events of our lives,
like our seasonal celebrations, our rites of passage, or less major
entertainments
like concerts, parties, even vacation-trips. We anticipate them,
knowing that they involve planning. If we also worry about
attending
them that is because we know how much of our social selves are invested
in them. We risk boredom (if the event is too chained to
convention)
or anxiety (if decorum and rules are not closely enough adhered
to).
We attend them, putting ourselves in the hands of those we trust to
evoke
and focus our energies, but who we also feel may betray our trust.
The argument above has maintained that there is both a
continuity and
a dialectic between everyday activities and these intense events.
In this, I will interrelate, in our own “native” theory, the types of
enactments
which enter our lives. We may confuse these types because
intensive
events tend to accumulate around each other. Thus, say, a wedding
provides the occasion for both a ritual and a celebration, but the two
are carefully boundaried from each other. Both share in
potentiating
participative energies, a potentiating engendered by the occasion; they
thus are strangely related to each other in spirit and each contributes
to the socio-psychological impact of the other. But distinct they
are in our world of apprehending, entering into, and interpreting
experience.
As I see it, in American English we distinguish (in everyday
as opposed
to anthropological or folkloristic talk) between at least four realms
of
intensive events or enactments: play, games, and sports; performances;
rituals; and festivities. Each is discrete because each is situ-
[beginning
of page 101] ated differently -- that is, we have different times,
places. occasion, conventions, roles, role-relationships, codes of
expressivity,
and roles of behavior for each of them. To be sure, there will be
events that challenge the distinction between, say, game-play and
performance.
But in the main, because of the various parameters of situation, we
have
little trouble distinguishing whether a specific happening is a game or
a performance. Moreover, they differ in important
modalities.
Ritual differs from other enactment in being obligatory or compulsory
patterned
behavior attached somehow to the larger movements and processes of
life.
Performances differ in the singling out of individuals to take
aesthetic
responsibility for the enactment. Playing, whether in game or
performance,
is unique in its capacities to rearrange features and factors of
behavior,
to garner license for everyone participating (differing then from
performance
not only in the kind of activities carried on but in the availability
of
the play roles to all involved in playing). What I here (somewhat
uncomfortably) call festivities include all those cultural enactments
which
intensify everyday roles and, in so doing, underline the lineaments and
boundaries
of the basic social units of the society -- especially family and
community.
Here I include festive enactments as far-ranging as parties, picnics,
and
potlucks, perhaps even vacations.
These are not as distinct, phenomenologically, as they seem
in discussing
them with regard to their terminological core-meaning. In fact,
rituals
invoke or include festivities, and festivities have rituals. All
enactments imply and potentially call upon other types under the
umbrella
of license, participation, and intense preparation and
interaction.
It is precisely because one type is often found in conjunction with
another
that we usefully draw upon the terms of one to describe and cast light
on the others. Is there any problem of understanding in calling
attention
to the ritual (or more usefully, the ritualistic)
dimensions
of a game, a performance, or a telling of a myth? However, in the
past, because one has been used to describe the others, two (or more)
have
been regarded not only as symbiotic but synonymous. (Thus, for
instance,
are myth and ritual often equated.)
[beginning of page 102] What we have, then, are a set
of related
and interlocking concepts of enactment, of intensively stylized
behaviors
put into play in a specific time, place, and on a special occasion,
each
type providing a set of terms that are usefully employed to describe
the
others. Further, the enactments themselves, as productive
representative
objects or items, may be distinguished from the interactional process
by
which the enactment is carried out. The failure to distinguish
between
enactments brought about through a combination of process-traits and
the
traits themselves has led to some unavoidable conceptual
murkiness.
Thus, there are numerous dimensions of myth (such as their embodiment
of
values, ideas, archetypical patterns of personal or cosmological
development
or whatever) which have caused commentators to call all such patterns
or
group-held ideals myths. Similarly, there are numerous everyday
scenes
discussed as rituals or performances or games. In each case, the
scenes exhibit some traits of the enactment event. It would be nice if
we could continually distinguish between myth and the mythic, ritual
and
the ritualistic, but those who use these terms insist on substituting
parts
for wholes. In the case of each type of enactment, the ideal of
the
event remains even while the terms arising from the enactment are
employed
to describe less intensive interaction. This is not a weakness,
however,
except for those who like their native theories clean. We are
able
to understand a good deal about the continuities as well as differences
between the everyday scene and the extraordinary event precisely
because
of this looseness and pars pro toto semantic effect.
I will distinguish these ontological realms by talking of pure
performance
or play-proper, pure festivity or ritual-proper,
and
so forth, knowing that such experience of these activities record
themselves
as representative of that class of heightened activities and as a kind
of magnetic force by which other less-focussed activities will be
affected.
I will talk of both a myth and the mythic, a ritual and ritualization,
a performance and performing, recognizing that the pairs are deeply
related
yet in our experience of them hardly identical. The first of each
pair refers to the kind of heightening of participative potential in an
event and its associated products, and ways of [beginning of page
103]
experiencing and judging, the second to the process of heightening and
significance-making which in an experiential sense culminates in the
enactment
of the first. Myth could never exist, obviously, without both
renderings
of specific texts, as well as the process of the myth-texts or the
process
of mythicizing; but all elements are equally obviously not myth (though
many literary and social critics neglect to make this
distinction.)
Similarly, not every activity we want to describe as ritualistic or
ritualized
is a ritual, a rite. The difference between them is a matter of
the
relative “purity” of the events, that is, how much such enactments may
be distinguished from the regular stream of life by the exclusiveness
of
their claims on the attentions and participation of those involved in
the
event. (16)
In the flow of everyday activities, many “things” go on at
the same
time; these pure events coordinate these various things in a tensive
manner,
having them comment on each other through redundancy and reinforcement,
or through calculated clamor and confusion. This is easily seen
when
a strip of everyday action is put on the stage, for there we register
the
everyday-ness of that strip and yet do so by breaking the rules of our
everyday interaction system, by focusing on the scene in and of
itself.
To do this, however, the depicted situation has to be sorted out,
disaggregated
by severely adhering to the one-person-talking,
everyone-else-listening
rule of stagecraft (an intensification of the I-talk-you-listen,
you-talk-I-listen
rule operating in Western talk) or by having a number of characters
talking
at the same time -- thereby focusing on the unruly dimensions of the
activity
on stage. (The same kind of sorting out goes on on-stage with
movement
as well, though here the coordination and focussing is much more
difficult
to describe.)
There are, then, a number of ideal or pure
kinds of focussed
and intensive events each of which comments in some way on the rules
and
the dynamics of other more spontaneous, casual, or chaotic
interaction.
This commentary takes the form of available analogy or metaphor -- that
is, we may (and do) usefully describe the components of the scenes in
the
quotidian realm with terms [beginning of page 104] appropriated
from the languages of the pure types of enactment.
What is more, these metaphoric resources apply to our
descriptions of
other kinds of enactments as well as to the scenes of the
everyday.
We use the concepts of game-play to describe and understand more fully
what is going on in rites, performances, celebrations, and
festivities.
Thus, though each realm of enactment is sui generis, our ways
of
conceiving and talking about them overlap. Dramatic performances
as a matter of course will reflexively call attention to themselves as
significant cultural enactments not only by having plays within plays
or
by referring to life in terms of “the seven stages of man” but also
through
discussions of life as parade or pageant, life as a mummery, life as a
game, a celebration, a dance, or whatever. But what literary
critics
in search of sources as well as resources don’t seem to quite catch is
that these analogies don’t make homologies, and that what, say,
Shakespeare
is doing in his comedies is not writing a new version of a seasonal
ritual
or a festive mumming, but seeing these enactments, because they invoke
the experiences-in-common of the participants (performers and audience
alike) as experiential resources to play with. C. L. Barber’s
marvelously
imaginative study of Shakespeare and mummery, for instance, misses this
point, arguing explicitly that the shaping spirit of the comedies is a
translation if not a direct development from clowning and sporty
seasonal
festivals to stage-plays. To the contrary, Shakespeare recognized
the major generic difference between the stage piece (because it is
performed
on stage) and the festival dancing dialogue (because, among other
characteristics,
it played on the ground). (17)
One of the main impediments in developing a theory of
enactment has
arisen from this overlapping in terminology. Our language
constantly
strains to provide names for our experiences, and especially for the
patterned
vitalities we engage in. Of course, we are going to draw upon the
elements of intensive engagements to help us understand what is taking
place. We will continue, then, to avail ourselves of the language
of child’s play to talk about the most serious of adult ceremonials
because
in doing so we understand and [beginning of page 105]
appreciate
both more fully. But we don’t confuse the two by carrying on this
dialogue. Rather, we create a space between the two activities
through
which we may maneuver heedless of the consequences to either the
fragility
of the play world or its serious counterpart.
A theory of enactment must describe what is unique about
each realm
of man’s capacity to coordinate and intensify his behavior. But
it
also must demonstrate how such an intensification of life provides a
frame
of reference by which the less intensive, the more random and
spontaneous,
may be better understood. To this end, I will discuss
ritual-proper,
pure performance, play-itself, and a range of other intensive events
(like
parties and feasts) that enliven our common existence. With each
I will attempt to describe the characteristics-in-common by contrasting
them in some way with other enactments, and by detailing what realms or
our quotidian lives are drawn upon. As part of this process, I
will
show what the relationship between the ordinary event and the strangely
and deeply intensive enactment is, and thus why we continually discuss
the everyday in terms of the extraordinary and vice-versa.
Performances, Rituals, and other Public Proceedings
Rites evoke the most complex and unpronounceable human
motives as a
means of celebrating man’s capacities for establishing community and
cosmos,
for establishing an environment in which the fullest range of motives,
the most devious and the most commonsensical, may simultaneously be
reenacted
and challenged. But in ritual the individual is subordinated to
the
group while the social act is linked to the culturally transcendent
moment.
In contrast, play (whether in a performance, in a game, or on a festive
occasion) occurs in situations in which continuity is not tied to
enactment
or reenactment or anything whatsoever. A performance, game, or
festivity,
like a ritual, involves a heightening of involvement, but in which
separable
items of the enactment are introduced into the exchange as means
through
which the special relationships between the participants in the
enactment
is established, displayed, and celebrated. Playing draws upon,
comments
upon, even refracts some dimension [beginning of page 106] of
the
social system.
Both ritual officers and players capitalize on the already
existing
languages and occasions, as well as the shared forms, fictions, and
values
of their community, drawing on the dynamic of the occasion to deploy
creative
energies. In doing so, however, they invoke the power of the
margins,
placing themselves into worlds between worlds. All who are
participating
-- whether as initiators of the action, as members of an audience, or
as
spectators -- are involved in this condition of betwixt and
betweenness.
In ritual, the officer simply helps to embody and give a name to a
social
or natural transition already taking place. In play, the
experience
is not so tied down to the moments of transition, though all modes of
play
do, as ritual, reflect and draw upon,experiences in common, as well as
sentiments and values.
I differ from most folklorists and literary critics in
viewing rites
and play as unique types of interactive experience and modes of
experiencing.
They are types of experience in that they both are general
terms
for a range of specific and situated interactional events. They
invoke
unique modes of experiencing, for they involve the active
engagement
of our form-making abilities, the forms suggested by the type of event
as seized upon by the enactors. Each high-intensity occasion
draws
upon “an ideal” of the event, a model of how such events should be
enacted
based on past experiencing of similar events. (18) But each such
event is not an attempt in any total way such a perfection; to the
contrary,
the event, the units of enactment (including items of performance or
games),
the performer, all draw upon not only man’s form-making abilities but
also
his clumsiness. In this dimension, we engage in a tensive
relation
to the very orders of our social and existential lives which the
performance
draws upon in its formal dimension. Enactment, then, involves
both
a courtship and an argument, and often simultaneously. It asks
for
communion, while it invokes personal and socio-cultural threat.
We
love its uncertainty; we give ourselves up to it willingly. The
dangers
may be profound, but are obviously not unmanageable. If these
enactments
make us dizzy, they also propose a sense of abundant life and personal
and social control.
[beginning of page 107] If performance draws upon
other events
in our social lives, it differs from them qualitatively. While
performance-play
is a special kind of interaction, it also provides models for how not
to
act in other types of interaction -- thus giving us the lineaments of
“bad
manners” and embarrassing behavior. This why performance, as
opposed
to ritual, is best thought of in social, rather than cultural
terms.
Both performance and ritual draw on the abrogation of order, but the
former
will most commonly break social rules in some way, while the latter
creates
a more cosmic mess. These very abrogations of order or rules
provide
some of the most exciting ways of relieving social boredom. Thus,
it is through such totally focussed enactments that we may learn how to
selectively invert social norms and practices to advance beyond
boredom.
In such a case, stylized enactments have a feedback effect, providing
alternative
social vocabularies and grammars to be employed in non-performance
situations,
in supposedly less self-conscious everyday scenes. Such an
alternative
propounds an expanding sense of social and expressive openness.
Fortunately
for us, there are always those madmen, fools, and visionaries who won’t
live by the restriction of social norms, who employ the license
attending
public enactment of any kind within the scenes of everyday life.
However, the more we define their “character” by their powers to bring
about an event of cultural enactment, the more we segregate them, for
they
are hard to live with. We must send them to the outskirts of
town,
into Bedlam, or to the Ivory Tower.
Enactments require that action be framed and notably marked
as significant
symbolic behavior and be judged as well as understood, interpreted, and
reacted to. Clearly, using the criteria of self-consciousness
through
drawing on conventions and stylizations, one can point to a continuum
in
levels of self-consciousness, just as there are degrees of aesthetical
judgment. Any given scene or event may be intensified along such
a continuum whenever one or more participants introduce stylization of
action and discrete “quotative” items of interaction into the
proceedings.
(19) Any scene, even the most casual, can be transformed by the
participants,
turned into a performance or a game, a ritual or a festive event.
This usually doesn’t happen because we like to prepare for such eventu-
[beginning
of page 108] alities. On the other hand, preparations cut
into
valued spontaneity, even in our most solemn enactments. Thus, we
operate on the fiction that we can break-through into performance or
game,
even ritual, at any moment in our everyday lives. This, as I see
it, is the motive for those artists who wish to capitalize on the
vitality
inherent in such spontaneous framing and marking, translating the
everyday
into the strange and artificial -- those artists concerned with
“found
art,” with assemblages, happenings, and guerrilla theater. This
reminds
us of Goffman’s useful dictum that all scenes can be distinguished
according
to their purity, that is according to the exclusiveness of their claim
“on participation, active or passive, by all those involved in an
enactment.”
(20) But “claims,” or rights, carry obligations; with enactments
the obligation to behave yourself, to observe everyday manners, is not
fully in force, but ritual, agonistic, aesthetical even celebrative
obligations
(especially in enlisting participative energies) take their
place.
We may, then, refer to the degree of self-consciousness and level of
participation
in events in our social lives in terms of the relative presence of
ritual
or performance or play features without judging every such interaction
as a performance, a game, or a festivity.
My approach to the analysis of the more self-consciously
stylized and
reflexive dimensions of our social lives draws on sociolinguistic and
phenomenological
strategies of description and presentation. In receiving scenes
or
events, we establish our reflexive sense of ‘self,’ and our repertoire
of expressive ways of relating to each other and to the world around
us.
The social system which arises from this reflexive operation develops
scene-
or event-types, framed activities in which communication in its
broadest
sense occurs because those involved carry into the situation patterns
of
expectation or ideals as to how such scenes ought to develop, and
competencies
to act appropriately and to judge others’ actions within the scene as
framed.
Role is defined predominantly by role-relationships, by conventional
interactive
patterns. Role, then, is not a social fact, but is rather a
social
practice or process. (21) Interactions are productive of scenes
and
events, each of which arise from a set of previously internalized
patterns
of expectation. These patterns [beginning of page 109]
(which
I will call schemas and sometimes, pursuing different but
always
literate analogies, scenarios or scripts, agendas,
even recipes) are simply part of our cultural equipment, shared
understandings of the dynamic orders by which we live, which we call
good
manners when noted upon successfully, rudeness or faux pas when
not. (22)
All of us regularly experience insights into the workings of
the system,
of its intricacy, realizing that we learn it so early in our lives that
we take the system and the particulars for granted. Indeed, this
process of taking-for-granted is a major part of our system of social
judgment;
we distrust those who force us to examine our social means and motives,
for they challenge our deepest social-cultural sense of community as
well
as our fiction of spontaneous activity. We have a general idea of
appropriate things to say or do in situations and settings because we
have
already divided the environment into places in which certain kinds of
interactions
may take place, just as we categorize people we encounter by how we
relate
to them. (I do not mean that this process eliminates the sense of
awkwardness in some encounters -- many scenes, in fact, actually
encourage,
even demand awkwardness, as in “first encounters.”) A larger
number
of factors go into the assignment of scene-and-role-type -- including
looks,
dress, age, past interactions -- but we have a finite set of schemas
which
assist us in communication. With this in mind, we enter into
encounters
in which we assume that others have a similar schematic sense. In
such situations we look for cues from others as to which schema (or
schematic
set of alternatives) is being called into play. Even then there
is
in most scenes an initial sense of uneasiness in which we look for
these
cues, attempt to align them with what we take in as well as with our
moods,
and our recognition of our own scene-making or scene-changing
capacities.
This malaise becomes all the more intense the more we have prepared for
the interaction, coming to a head in the deep dread of boredom and
anxiety
of conventional enactments.
Ritual and Play
This argument draws on the vocabulary of play as one way of
understanding
the expressive means of culture as it is put into operation casually,
even
[beginning
of page 110] self-consciously. But common sense tells us
there
is a difference between everyday playfulness and the special kind of
state-of-being
called play when we encounter: set-aside times, places, and
occasions
for the enactment; named role-types for players; traditional items and
genres of artificial expression recognizable by all in the group as
appropriate
to the occasion; participants who understand and expect this special
kind
of high intensity artificial behavior and who are prepared both to
engage
(actively or vicariously) in the event and to judge it on its own
terms.
But all of these features are characteristic of ritual as well;
the difference is that rites take place in sacralized space, an
environment
uniquely set off from all other places because of the sensing of
experience-in-common
of transition (whether it be a sickness, a death, a growing up, or a
change
of state. Further, in ritual there is: a rendering of transition
through an (almost) invariant sequencing of symbolic or “deep” actions,
images, and use of objects; expressed in the most self-consciously
employed
and monitored expressive codes; and ritual “offices” or roles involved
in carrying out that experience.
Enactments are events in which roles are assumed and
intensified, a
reflexive or self referencing sign-system is employed, and license is
given
to focus the energies of the group by drawing on the most powerful
symbols
of the group, and by highlighting and selectively inverting the basic
(or
everyday) orders of the culture. Ritual-proper involves those
enactments
in which there is a “stereotyped sequence of activities,” behaviors
which
are preformulated and precoded, and in which participants are not
deeply
involved in the process of making expressive choice. The keying
of
this preformulation comes not only from the use of the formulaic but
from
reflexive devices which create a mirror-complex within the enactment --
that is, a self-conscious means of acknowledging and reminding each
other
that something special is taking place, and a naming of what that
special
activity is. Play, on the other hand, would concern enactments in
which choice is made and the sequence of action, if not invented on the
spot, is subject to constant revision or recombination by the players,
whether in control of the aesthetic, agonistic, or festive event.
[beginning of page 111] We judge the success of each
type of
enactment in different terms. The dimension of judgment may be
entirely
absent in rituals except with regard to the relative success of the
event;
judgment is based on how well the occasion brings about a meaningful
participation
or coordination of energies. In all types of play, we focus on
both
the orders of the material of the enactment, and how effectively the
energies
of the participants are engaged. (In the case of the
sophisticated
performance arts, aesthetic attention is then divided between the
author,
playwright, or composer on the one hand and virtuoso performers on the
other.) In ritual, there is some question whether this kind of
judgment
is involved; the onlooker-participant (with the exception of folklorist
or anthropologist) is not so much concerned with the effects of the
enactment
as with its efficacy. A rite is liable to be judged only by the
presence
of the approved movements and paraphernalia in the right order.
Though
all types of enactments bring focus and intensive motives of everyday
experience
and therefore permit a build-up of significant meanings and
participative
energies, ritual does so in the service of elan vital itself
while
performances, games, and festivities serve the individual players (and
audience) directly with regard to a heightening of a secular situation.
There are, then, different ways in which we interpret the
place of the
individual as role-player in ritual and play; in the first we regard
him
as a representative of the community. For this reason neither
“role”
nor “player” seem appropriate terms in ritual enactments, though they
may
call for the wearing of masks and a taking on of characteristics
significantly
different from everyday attributes. In performances we focus on
the
abilities of players and the occasion to elicit participation.
This
means that in describing performance or any other kind of play, we must
attend to how much innovation is invited, permitted, or demanded of the
participants, how “fixed” or “free” are the forms, and how sequenced
the
units of activity.
I am not arguing, however, that ritual occasions are totally
closed
simply because they involve a fixed sequence of acts. On the
contrary,
there are certain ritual occasions and events in [beginning of page
112] which some kind of inversion is called for, an inversion that
opens up the very formal restrictions seemingly implied by the fixity
of
the sequencing and role-relationships within the ritual system.
In
fact, in all enactments one dimension we constantly attend to because
of
its intensive character is the commingling of the serious and the ludic
motives, of the fixedly sequential with the willfully inverse, indeed,
perverse. But even when such inversion operates, it is often
carried
out in a fixed and obligatory manner. We come to know the orders of the
world very well even as they are parodied and upended.
Another important contrast between ritual and play relates
to the expected
effect on the participants. As Barth notes of rituals, they are
beyond
rhetoric insofar as they do as well as say
something.
That is, they do not assert or argue, suggest, demand, or entreat;
rather
they do what they say they are doing while the enactment is in
progress.
(23) They thus include such speech acts as “I do” in marriage,
“Bless
this house,” and so on. They do not, then, just communicate
messages,
but enact experiences while commenting upon the enactment. This performative
aspect of rituals (to use J. L. Austin’s term), in fact, is also
focussed
on by Roy Rappoport as a salient feature of the ritual experience:
“...there
is a special relationship between ritual and performativeness, ...the
formal
characteristics of ritual enhance the chances of success of the
performatives
they include... Ritual ensures the correctness of the
performative
enactment; it also makes them... explicit... and it generally makes
them
weighty as well.” (24) The dimension of performativeness
is,
in fact, a useful means of getting at the special character of rites as
enactments, which engineer and give a name to significant social
scenes,
especially those formalizing an act of exchange or
transformation.
Performatives operate effectively within ritualized contexts -- or at
least
within a system which rests on the complex of beliefs most fully
enacted
by rituals, including, of course, the ritualized places in social
relations.
(Austin calls this social dimension illocutionary.)
Is it not precisely this possibility of real social exchange
transformation
that is, because [beginning of page 113] of the function of
license,
absent in play? To be sure, performatives operate in the world of
game-playing (“Tag -- you’re it!”), as well as onstage; but the
players are far from socially transformed by this move. Here the
paradox of acting or “making fun” takes over, for with the creation of
a play world, the participants are, by convention, not held responsible
for their action, nor are the activities fully regarded as real.
Transformation does take place in play; whether onstage or on the
playing
field, indeed metamorphosis becomes almost a necessary condition of
such
activity. But these transformations occur only within these play
worlds. Among other things, this means that the “lesson” of
the transformation comes to be separated from the metamorphosis itself;
any learning, then, is carried on through vicarious means.
Let me reiterate some of these points of comparison:
1)
Play: Optation of involvement (for both player and
audience
for spectators).
Ritual: Obligatory involvement (of both ritual
officers
and community).
2)
Play: Relative openness of form and
interaction.
Ritual: Relative fixity of sequence and
relationship.
3)
Play: Performatives operate only within playing
time and
space; transformations are therefore limited to the playing
situations.
Ritual: Performatives operate in socio-cultural
sphere
outside the confines of ritual time and space; transformations are
registered
socio-culturally.
4)
Play: Role-player is both himself and not himself
while
playing.
Ritual: Officer is either more intensely himself
(ceremonially)
or beyond himself as a representative of the community (even when
masking).
There are a number of factors of play and ritual, then,
which can be
better understood through a comparison relating to the relative
obligatory
and fixed-sequence character of ritual [beginning of page 114]
on
the one hand and the openness and sense of optionally entered into
activities
characterizing play. But there are, as noted, different play
“worlds”
again characterizable not only by the different socio-cultural
situations
(time, place, occasion) but also by the strange vocabularies of motives
and syntax of movement, the underlying generic patterns of expectation
brought to the occasion by the participants, and especially, the raison
d’etre for the events. Thus, not only do we have a few
instances
in which an instance of a play event is not clearly either game-play,
performance-play,
or festive-play. For each involves an intensification of everyday
scenes, and a relative emphasis on life-sustaining motives which
differs
from the others. Performances have a strong aesthetic focus in
which
we agree to attend to dramatic and stylistic matters. Similarly,
in a game, contest, or sporting event we focus primarily on the
agonistic
or contest element; features of style and sentiment are only
secondarily
meaningful. In festivities, in fact, induced dizziness (brought
about
by an excess of drink or food) contrasts with the intensifying of
everyday
roles, giving most of these events a sense of communal
celebration.
Each kind of playing dwells on a limited range of everyday situations,
intensifying them in some dimensions, and selectively and
conventionally
disrupting the expectations of the everyday (through the
licensing-power
of play). Thus each kind of playing seems to demand not only its
own mode of play, but its singular range of confusions, disruptions,
and
attendant embarrassments, its own ways of creating flow (or some other
kind of altered state of consciousness); and when successful, each will
have a unique sense of togetherness in both experience itself and in
the
ways in which we interpret it.
Once having insisted on the significant differences in these
domains
of play and ritual, it seems useful to look at how they are related to
the less intensive scenes and acts of the everyday. When we refer
to something like “interaction ritual,” I think we are focussing on the
sequencing of behavior in specific recurrent scenes, as such behavior
gravitates
toward invariance and predictability. Then we must distinguish
between
overt and covert ritual, for on some social occa- [beginning of
page
115] sions this invariance is a marked feature of the
decorum-system
of the event, while on others (such as conversational scenes) this
marking
is eliminated, bracketed out by convention. Describing such
scenes
in the terms of the larger predictable and socially obligatory events
enables
us to understand more fully how both compulsory and compulsive behavior
and deep habits (like the body rituals of the Nacirema) might also be
described
in ritualistic terms; they too are non-optational as well as fixed in
form
-- though in obviously different ways than social ceremonies or rites
of
passage.
We use performance to describe many of the same features of
everyday
scenes and interactions. But in such cases, we seem to refer to
such
patterning of activity as emanating from individuals, especially ones
pursuing
a “line” or engaging in a “routine.” Thus, in describing everyday
scenes as well as self-consciously stylized ones, “ritual” and
“ritualistic”
refers in the main to the ceremonial and predetermined dimension of the
patterning, while “performance” and “performer” is employed primarily
with
regard to the improvisational factors operating in employing these
routines,
patterned behavior then which is available to those engaged in the task
of managing their own identities. This distinction may simply be
an extension of Victor Turner’s arguments concerning liminal
and
liminoid
experiences -- the former being that state of betweenness attendant
upon
obligatory enactments, and the latter being a threshold experience
entered
into optionally. Liminoid experiences are the in-between states
arising
in play domains after society has already developed a distinction
between
work and play (or leisure).
It is in the everyday acts, I think, that intense enactments
find their
greatest fund of energies and shared values -- in the use of scenes and
expectations from one domain of life as they are reframed, inverted,
and
reenacted within another more self-conscious and openly reflexive
realm.
This domain may be regarded as a “play world” but it shares high
seriousness
with the manners and other systems by which we engage in life.
And
it draws upon these orders, whether in performance or ritual, if only
to
abrogate them, [beginning of page 116] thus creating an energy
source
and a common means of focussing these energies.
The paradox of enactments, then, is that they both epitomize
and transcend
the everyday. Transcendence in ritual involves a social leveling,
for in communitas, the surge of shared energies and the sensing of
values
in the commodity of the experience permits a sensing of alteration to
the
particularized and often stratified social world. Performance
continues
to draw on this leveling and sharing process on the part, at least, of
the audience or the followers. But for the players themselves, an
individual transcendence occurs at times in which something like the
experience,
that, Turner, following Czikszentmihalyi, calls flow: the
holistic
sensation present when we act with total involvement, “...a state in
which
action follows action according to an internal logic which seems to
need
no conscious intervention on our part... We experience it as a
unified
flowing from one moment to the next, in which we feel in control of our
actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and
environment;
between stimulus and response; or between past, present, and future.”
(25)
Whether or not onlookers may undergo a similar (if vicariously induced)
state is problematic -- though transport in response to a specific
virtuoso
performance is often reported. And furthermore, this
transcendence
seems to run counter to the self-consciousness attending enactments by
participants and viewers alike.
Certainly, the introduction of the concepts of the
performative and
the indexical in enactments introduces a critical means by which we may
more usefully understand the ontological differences between high
intensity
enactments and events of the everyday. For the performative
characteristic
of enactments calls attention to the deepest kind of self-conscious (or
reflexive) dimension of the activity, the dimension which demands of
all
of those involved that they observe and react together. Yet this
experience, which makes us more conscious of the experiential “self”
(of
both ourselves and our co-participants) is the very mechanism by which
we are most fully able to go beyond ourselves, indeed to “forget
ourselves,”
to incorporate ourselves to some degree into the universe of the
experience.
However, the heightening of [beginning of page 117]
involvement,
as well the qualities of the worlds we become part of, differ greatly
between
ritual and performance both because the former is obligatory, the
latter
optional, and because the former conveys us into an infinite
cosmologically
significant realm, the latter into domains which are always delimited
simply
because they are regarded as play. We have often confused the
two,
especially in our progressively secularized world; but the aesthetic
response,
though it may in some dimension contribute to the transcendent
experience
of ritual-proper in, say, a church service, is never its primary
modality
for achieving communitas nor its desired end in asserting cosmological
order.
In pursuing such distinctions, we must be reminded of where
we began.
There is a relationship, perilously maintained under constant
surveillance,
between the scenes of everyday interactions and these larger and more
transcendent
enactments. Reality itself, when looked on in this way, appears
to
be layered, made up of different levels of intensity and focus of
interaction
and participation. A very precious commodity is being negotiated
after all, one which is remarkably vital and which, in fact, we might
call
our socio-cultural vitality. For it in these states of ritual or
performance, festive or play enactments, that in many ways we are most
fully ourselves, both as individuals and as members of our
communities.
That’s something to celebrate.
[beginning of page 118]
References
(1) M. Polany and H. Prosch, Meaning
(University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1975), pp. 117-8.
(2) P. Oliver, Conversations with the Blues
(Heinemann,
London, 1965), p. 164.
(3) ibid., pp. 164-5.
(4) R. D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle
(Aldine Publishers,
Chicago, 1970); and Talking Black (Newbury House, 1976).
Also:
Rappin’
and Stylin’ Out, Thomas Kochman, ed., University of Illinois Press,
Champaign, 1972).
(5) The term comes from the Russian formulists’ ostranenyi
and seems to have been coined by Slovskij, who argued that the poetic
image
differed from informative prose by making strange the everyday by
putting
it in an unusual background or context, thus making “a sui generis
semantic shift.”
(6) E. M. Albert, “Culture Patterning of Speech
Behavior in Burundi,”
in Directions in Socio-linguistics: The Ethnography of Communication,
J. Gumpers and D. Hymes, eds. (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, New York,
1972),
p. 79.
(7) H. G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics
(University
of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), p. 32.
(8) D. Berger and T. Luckman, The Social
Construction of Reality
(Doubleday, New York), p. 25.
(9) A. Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social
Relations, H.
R. Wagner, ed. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970), pp.
253-56.
Schutz designates the form and the experience as relating to work,
though in no way makes a necessary or even sufficient condition of
paramount
reality. This distinction therefore seems to arise more from the
Protestant Ethic’s contrast of work and seriousness from play, than
from
any ontological apprehension [beginning of page 119] of
difference.
(10) C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture
(Basic Books,
New York, 1973), pp. 452-3.
(11) ibid., p. 29.
(12) K. Burke, Counterstatement (University of
California
Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 143.
(13) M. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason
(University
of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1976).
(14) R. Sipes, “War, Sports and Aggression; An
Empirical Test
of Two Rival Theories,” American Anthropologist 75
(1973).
(15) Burke, ibid., p. 124.
(16) E. Goffman, Frame Analysis (Harper and
Row, New York,
1974), p. 125.
(17) C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy
(Meridian
Books, Cleveland and New York, 1963).
(18) R. Kellogg, “Oral Literature,” New Literary
History
5 (1973), pp. 55-66.
(19) Here I use “quotative” to refer to any
foregrounded unit
of activity which draws attention to itself as not being the words (or
actions) of the speaker in some dimension. I mean by this not
only
quotations from the speaking of others, present or not, but also
proverbs
and any other traditional gnomic device.
(20) Goffman, ibid.
(21) By emphasizing the processual character of
role-taking --
and, by extension, typing -- I attempt to derive a commonsense
social
structure as an activity. But on an equally commonsense level, we
do have mechanisms, such as stereotyping, by which we ourselves
attempt to stabilize the social structure -- that is, make it
into
an is, a social fact. Thus the formulaic argument that
“Society
[beginning
of page 120] will always stratify, therefore...”
(22) The distinction between the abstracted patterns
of experience
and actual scenes parallels that made by Saussure between langue
(language system) and parole (talk).
(23) F. Barth, Ritual and Knowledge Among the
Baktaman of New
Guinea (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1975), p. 109.
(24) R. Rappaport, “Obvious Aspects of Ritual,” Cambridge
Anthropology
2 (1974), pp. 27-28.
(25) V. W. Turner, “Liminality, Play, Flow and Ritual:
An Essay
in Comparative Symbology,” in The Anthropological Study of Human
Play,
E. Norbeck, ed. (Rice University Studies, Houston) 60, 3 (1974), pp.
53-90.