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

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magnitudes of performance
participants. In other words, manifold driving techniques accommodate
individual differences in experience and genetic makeup.
However, any complete interpretation of ritual trance also recognizes
the symbolic qualities of human behavior.
(Lex 1979: 144–5)
These differences are not just exercises in the “emic-etic”* pitfalls of
field work. The great big gap between what a performance is to people
inside and what it is to people outside conditions all the thinking about
performance. These differences can be as great within a single culture
as they are across cultural boundaries. In fact, in my own experience,
performers from different cultures are more likely to understand each
other – and be able to exchange techniques, anecdotes, information –
than they can understand, and be understood, by people within their
own culture who have not themselves either been performers or gone
out of their way to understand what performers experience. Performance
experience – unlike eating, housing, speaking/listening, etc. – is
something the outsider has to specifically go out of her/his way to get
from the inside. This curiosity concerning experience prompted
Turner to experiment with “performing ethnography.” 5
The situation of the “professional performer” – a person who reflexively
masters the techniques of performance (whether or not s/he gets
paid for it) – is very different from the “Goffman performer” who is
likely to be unaware of her/his own performance. 6 The theorist in
Goffman’s world is always an outsider because the theorist exposes
precisely what the Goffman performer conceals or is unaware of: the
very fact that s/he is performing. There are actually two kinds of Goffman
performer: the ones who conceal, as conmen do; and the ones
who don’t know they are performing. Of this second type there are two
subdivisions: ordinary people playing their “life roles” as waitresses,
doctors, teachers, street people, etc. And those whose particular actions
have been framed as a performance in documentary film, shows like
Candid Camera, or on the 6 o’clock TV news. The woman whose
children have perished in a fire in Brooklyn pours out her grief and
* Emic and etic are anthropological terms often used together, meaning, respectively,
“to experience a culture from the inside”; “to experience a culture from the outside.”