performancetouching and knowing the image with one’s eyes. In this process of per-
ception, the viewer is not the initiator of the perceptual interaction
because the act of seeing the divine image presupposes that the deity
gives itself to be seen. By making itself visible, the transcendent deity
condescends to descent to the threshold of human experience to allow
humans to visualize it.Further reading: Eck (1981); Gonda (1969); Morgan (2005)PERFORMANCE
A concept derived from two Latin terms: per meaning through and forme
meaning form. The concept implies role-playing before an audience and
achieving something. Among the multiple connotations of the concept of
performance, one refers to ritual that is enacted and performed. Within
the context of ritual, an emphasis on performance attempts to overcome
the theoretical bifurcation between thought and action.
The emphasis on performance is rooted in the linguistic philosophy of
J. L. Austin and his investigation of performative utterance, which repre-
sents a close connection between the uttering of a word, phrase, or sen-
tence and the occurrence of something. If a minister or priest says to a
couple, for example, in a wedding ceremony: “I now pronounce you
husband and wife.” The saying of the words makes the man and woman
a married couple. Austin’s short book How to Do Things with Words
proves to be influential beyond the realm of philosophy of language, as
it affected anthropologists, such as Victor Turner, Stanley Tambiah, and
Clifford Geertz.
Turner views ritual as a processual form of social drama that expresses
cultural ideas and dispositions, whereas Tambiah views performance as
a way to overcome the devaluation of action, common when it is com-
pared to thought. Geertz argues that in order for an interpretation of ritual
to be valuable it should be viewed as a game, a drama, or an ensemble of
texts.
Reflecting on the works of these anthropologists, the ritual theorist
Catherine Bell criticizes the performative turn in ritual theory because it
does not offer a definitive interpretation of a set of ritual actions. Bell
also contends that performative ritual theory gives ontological and ana-
lytic priority to actions. Using metaphors of performance, Bell does
admit that such ritual theorists do offer something new by their holistic