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

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approaches
west, there is no separating music–dance–theater. I am not only referring to
opera or musical comedies, but religious services, parades, festival celebrations,
and even sports. Also, experimental movements in the arts have
emphasized intermedia.
10 Performance is an extremely difficult concept to define. From one point of view
– clearly stated by Erving Goffman in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life
(1959) – performing is a mode of behavior that may characterize any activity.
Thus performance is a “quality” that can occur in any situation rather than a
fenced-off genre. Various kinds of psychotherapy develop both practical and
theoretical consequences from this. Or, as John Cage has argued, simply
framing an activity “as” performance – viewing it as such – makes it into a
performance. Documentary film and the splicing in of documentary footage
into “fiction” films transforms ordinary behavior into performances. So do
shows like Candid Camera. However, in this writing I mean something much
more limited: a performance is an activity done by an individual or group in the
presence of and for another individual or group. I recognize that some activities
legitimately called play, games, sports, and ritual would be excluded from my
definition. My definition is further complicated by the fact that game theory
applies both to performance and non-performance activities. However, in trying
to manage the relationship between a general theory and its possible
applications to various art forms, I thought it best to center my definition of
performance on certain acknowledged qualities of live theater, the most stable
being the audience–performer interaction. Even where audiences do not exist
as such – some happenings, rituals, and play – the function of the audience
persists: part of the performing group watches – is meant to watch – other
parts of the performing group; or, as in some rituals, the implied audience is
God, or some transcendent Other(s).
11 See, for example, Herskovits (1950: 427 ff.), Bohannan (1963: 48 ff.), or Pfeiffer
(1982). The point is that these activities are so ancient and universal that
discussion of origins are metaphysics, not anthropology.
12 Technology is cumulative and in many cases the result of diffusion. Therefore
one can speak of technological evolution. But even here a strictly Darwinian
model does not apply. Cultural evolution – in which the discussion of the
“development of art forms” was a part – flourished in the heyday of social
Darwinism, the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. No one denies
the Darwinian theory as it applies to genetically linked species (no one but
creationists, that is); but, as Claude Lévi-Strauss has said, axes do not beget
axes. There are no genetic links between or within cultures that explain the
diffusion or coincidence of cultural traits. Influences occur and cultural development
follows patterns not yet clearly understood. In artistic matters – where
technology as such is usually not so important – there is no such thing as
accumulation. Artists, when they know the past, pick and choose what
materials they want to use. They often do not build according to generally
agreed-upon rules. The twentieth century has seen in the west an awakened