philosophy separating mind and body and privileging mind as the origins
of action. Performance theory, by contrast, starts from the practice of
magic, examining its emotional and embodied sources that result in
performances characterized by actions of a mimetic kind reflecting both
the power of words and the desires of the performer to create results by
efficacious actions. It is quite obvious from Frazer’s own innumerable
examples from around the world that this emotional and imagistic element
is found in accounts of actual magical performances, and that especially in
hostile acts of sorcery also these are motivated by desires for revenge or for
defeating opponents. In synthesizing such accounts, however, Frazer, an
inveterate rationalist, perhaps unconsciously sought to display‘primitive
logics’while at the same time safely pointing hisfinger at them as spurious
science.
In seeking to equate magic with spurious science Frazer was directing
his readers’attention to the putative evolution of true scientific knowledge
out of pseudoscience (alchemy might be a prototype of this). He was both
giving a rationalist twist to magic and at the same time preserving a view of
it as‘irrational’.
What, then did Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown add to or take away
from this Frazerian scheme? Malinowski supplied the emotional and per-
formance-oriented frame to the study of magic by actually observing how
it was deployed by specialists in rituals of canoe-building and garden-
making (Malinowski 1922 , 1935 ). Radcliffe-Brown, for his part, took a
different tack in his study of taboo as a category (Radcliffe-Brown 1952 ),
pointing out that distinctions between magic and religion cannot clearly
be made in cross-cultural analysis and creating a wholly practice-oriented
and performance-centered approach by homing in on the ritual acts and
processes involved in the category of‘taboo’and the correspondence of
ritual actions with changes in the status of the actors.
In both of these cases, however, the essential difference between Frazer’s
expositions and those of both Malinowski and Radcliffe-Brown lies in the
development of the idea of action as performance by these two authors.
From this perspective it can be seen, with more than a touch of irony, that
their work anticipated embodiment theory, which is generally viewed as a
response to, and replacement of, functionalism; which in turn Malinowski
and Radcliffe-Brown are generally and somewhat simplistically represented
as having founded in the context of British social anthropology.
Their work certainly was functionalist, although in quite different ways;
but such an orientation was not a break from Frazer, who himself came to
4 BREAKING THE FRAMES