The Anthropology of Cultural Performance

Contemporary life in most nation-states is not truly cultural, but rather "culture-like," especially in large-scale societies. Beginning with a distinction between special events and everyday life, Lewis examines fundamental events including play, ritual, work, and carnival and connects personal embodied habits and large-scale cultural practices.

"Lewis pays tribute to and builds upon [Victor] Turner's sense of social process as he considers the complex enactments of culture . . . The present volume could prove a useful overview for graduate students wishing to gain a grasp of the history, development, and possible futures of performance studies . . . Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty." - CHOICE

"A masterful and nuanced expansion of Victor Turner's pioneering work on the ritual process and on culture as a procession of quotidian events and critical performances. Drawing on Peirce's semiotics and on phenomenology, J. Lowell Lewis simultaneously provides an interdisciplinary perspective on performance studies and opens up new theoretical horizons on role-playing, ritual and dramaturgy in social life." Michael D. Jackson, author of Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology

Autorentext
Lowell Lewis is Senior Lecturer in Anthropology and Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia.

Inhalt

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