The Anthropology of Cultural Performance

by Lewis, J. Lowell

• ISBN13: 9781137343987
• ISBN10: 1137343982
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2013-08-08
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan

Summary

Contemporary life in most large-scale societies is not truly cultural, in the strong sense, but rather merely 'culture-like.' Using a semeiotic phenomenological approach based on the work of philosopher C.S. Peirce, Lewis presents a framework for understanding performative events in any cultural life-world. By revisiting Victor Turner's work on ritual and engaging with those who have built upon his ideas, the book presents a program for making connections between intimate embodied habits and major cultural practices in a given social setting. Beginning with a distinction between special events and everyday life, Lewis examines fundamental event types including play, ritual, work, and carnival.

Author Biography

J. Lowell Lewis is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Performance at the University of Sydney, Australia. Lewis received his PhD in anthropology at the University of Washington, USA. His initial fieldwork in Brazil resulted in the book Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira (1992).

Table of Contents

1. Special Events and Everyday Life
2. Play as Performance
3. Rituals and Ritual-like Genres
4. Performative Processes: Types of P/p relations
5. Embodiment, Emplacement, and Cultural Process
6. Problems in Performance and Cultural Theory