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

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magnitudes of performance
and move is codified. There is an extreme difference between the way each of
these genres looks, but is there a corresponding interior difference? That is,
were kathakali and kabuki actors portraying their stylized, codified displays of
emotion tested, would their ANS show any, or as much, reaction as the actors
Ekman tested? Or would the kathakali performers’ responses differ from the
kabuki performers’? That is, is it only “natural emotional displays” that yield
ANS reactions, or will culturally composed displays do the same? My guess is
that the culturally composed displays will affect the ANS.
12 For a discussion of the Method and other American variations of Stanislavsky’s
system of actor training, see two special issues of TDR, The Drama Review
devoted to “Stanislavsky in America,” 9 (1) and (2) (1964), and Christine
Edwards’ The Stanislavsky Heritage (1965).
13 Ekman told me that he had repeated the experiment without mirrors and
obtained the same results. This, he says, shows that the subjects were
not responding to seeing their own faces, but only to the muscle-by-muscle
“making” of the faces.
14 Eliot in his essay on Hamlet states: “The only way of expressing emotion in the
form of art is by finding an ‘objective correlative’; in other words, a set of
objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular
emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory
experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (1951: 145). This is
precisely Stanislavsky’s “emotion memory” exercise.
15 For detailed descriptions and analyses of the training techniques in kathakali as
practiced at the Kathakali Kalamandalam, India’s première kathakali school,
see Schechner (1985: 213–60) and Zarrilli (1984).
16 See Geertz (1973: 412–53).
17 The Russian emigrés – Richard Boleslavsky, Maria Ouspenskaya, Michael
Chekhov – who first taught Stanislavsky’s system in America spoke with a heavy
accent. When they said “bit” their students heard “beat.” “Beat” seemed an
appropriate musical metaphor, and so the new pronunciation stuck. But Stanislavsky
meant “bit,” a term familiar to vaudeville entertainers as well as to actors
on the legitimate stage.
18 A classic example of this in the anthropological literature is Lévi-Strauss’s
(1963: 167–85) account of Quesalid, the Kwakiutl who set out to expose the
fakery of shamanism but ended up as a renowned shaman in his own right,
believing in the very techniques he had intended to debunk. See chapter 7.
19 Jerome Rothenberg used the term “ethnopoetics” at least as early as 1975 when
he and his co-editor Dennis Tedlock put out the first issue of Alcheringa Ethnopoetics.
In 1983, starting his “Pre-Face” to Symposium of the Whole: A Range of
Discourse Toward an Ethnopoetics, Rothenberg said:
The word “ethnopoetics” suggested itself, almost too easily, on the basis
of such earlier terms as ethnohistory, ethnomusicology, ethnolinguistics,
ethnopharmacology, and so on. As such it refers to a redefinition of poetry
in terms of culture specifics, with an emphasis on those alternative