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

6
SELECTIVE INATTENTION
RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN SOCIAL AND
AESTHETIC DRAMA
Victor Turner (1974) locates four actions as the nubs of social drama:
1) breach, 2) crisis, 3) redressive action, and 4) reintegration. A breach
is a situation that schisms a social unit – family, work group, village,
community, nation, etc. A crisis is a precipitating event that can’t be
overlooked, that must be dealt with. Redressive action is what’s done to
overcome the crisis – the crisis itself having arisen out of the breach.
Reintegration is the elimination of the original breach that mothered
the crisis. Reintegration comes in two ways, either by healing the
breach or by schismogenesis (see Bateson 1958).
Apply Turner’s model to an actual social situation, say the November,
1975 dismissal of cabinet members by President Gerald Ford. The
breach is the fact that Ford as an appointed rather than elected president
carried in his cabinet a number of Nixon people. Thus Ford was
forced to defend policies he might dislike as well as bear the stigma of a
disgraced administration. At the same time Ford wished to seek the
presidency on his own. The crisis came from a severe embarrassment
to the “security community” through revelations of planned assassinations
of foreign heads of state and phone-tapping of Americans as part
of a widespread secret-police apparatus whose operations pinnacled