through processes, and which does not therefore assume a realm of representation
and a realm of the real. Thus, for example:
anthropologists interested in cultural performance (religious rituals, political
pageants, folk entertainments, living ceremonies, spirit seances, and so on)
have moved increasingly away from studying them as systems of representation
(symbolic transformations, cultural texts) to looking at them as processes
of practice and performance. In part this reflects a growing dissatisfaction with
purely symbolic approaches to understanding material like rituals, which seem
to be curiously robbed of life and power when distanced in discussions
concerned largely with meaning. ‘Performance’ deals with actions more than
text: with habits of the body more than structures of symbols, with illocu-
tionary rather than propositional force, with the social construction of reality
rather than its representation.
(Schieffelin 1998: 195)Of the various usages of the metaphor of performance, four seem particularly
germane: in symbolic interactionism, in sociological accounts, in contemporary
culture theory, and in the performing arts. Although, for reasons of space, this
list omits certain writers – most notably Taussig (1992, 1993, 199 7 ) and his
performative recasting of Benjamin – it hopefully provides the bare bones of an
account.
Symbolic interactionism
The first of these usages, and perhaps the most often cited, is associated with the
work of Goffman and, latterly, the symbolic interactionist school. I will consider
only Goffman’s well-known dramaturgical frame of reference here but it is a frame
of reference which casts a strong shadow over much subsequent work in this area
(Burns 1992; Thrift 1996). Goffman’s turn to a dramaturgical reading of social
behaviour owed much to the work of anthropologists such as Mauss and Turner
on ritual, and Burke’s ‘dramatism’ – which characterized social production
as drama – as well as, perhaps, his own early background in film.^14 Though in
later years Goffman was to distance himself from the elaborated dramaturgical
metaphor he employed in The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life(19 7 1) (with
its first chapter on ‘performances’) his work continued to be based on two
root notions: first, that there has to be an audience to which performances are
addressed – and that the part played by audiences is important – and, second, that
performances of every kind require a ‘back-stage’, the time and space which allows
preparation of ‘procedures, disguises or materials essential to the performance,
or for the concealment of aspects of the performance which might either discredit
it or be somehow discordant with it’ (Burns 1992: 112). The book was much
criticized for giving a sense of human social interactions as based in individual-
istic contrivance, in pretence, even deceit – in other words, for overextending
the dramaturgical metaphor. In later works on the fleeting enactments of ‘talk’
Afterwords 125