4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

PREFACE TO THE ROUTLEDGE CLASSICS EDITION
With two exceptions, I wrote the essays in this book between 1966 and
1976. It was a very busy decade. My interests had dramatically shifted
from theater to performance and from aesthetics to the social sciences.
Today I write “performance,” but at the time I wasn’t sure what performance
was. I knew it was more than what was appearing on the
stages of New York, London, or Paris. From the advent of Happenings
in the early 1960s to the vibrant enactment on American streets of
what Victor Turner termed “social drama” – the freedom movement
led by thousands of ordinary people but iconicized in the eloquent
words and enacted testimony of Martin Luther King, Jr. – I discovered
that performance can take place anywhere, under a wide variety of
circumstances, and in the service of an incredibly diverse panoply
of objectives.
My experiences as a civil-rights and anti-Vietnam War activist, and a
sometime participant-creator of Happenings, pointed me toward a
whole new range of research. I “found” social and cultural anthropology
extremely useful because in ethnographies and theoretical treatises
anthropologists treated the actual lived behavior of people performatively.
Taking a cue from Erving Goffman’s 1959 breakthrough book,
The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, I sensed that performances in the broad
sense of that word were coexistent with the human condition. Goffman