Midterm

Ritual Facts

ritual is where theater and anthropology overlap. It is the art of performance mobilized in the service of a social or religious imperative Rituals are realized only through performance

Functions of Rituals

rituals to mark the passage of time (harvest festivals, birthday parties), to transform our social status (weddings, graduations), or to ensure good fortune (blessings, certain prayers). In this way, rituals provide us with a sense of control over our uncertain existence.

Performance Def

tangible event that involves the presentation of rehearsed artistic actions. Examples of performance in a traditional sense include: a play, a dance show, or a symphony concert.

Secular rituals

those associated with state ceremonies, everyday life, sports, and any other activity not specifically religious in character. Secular public life is full of rituals. Inaugurations of buildings, funerals of leaders or royalties, coronations, the observance of holidays such as Thanksgiving, Memorial Day, Labor Day, etc.

3 Types of Rituals

those which are calendrical, those which address misfortune, and rites of passage.

Abakwetha

traditional coming of age ritual in South Africa among the Xhosa people. Xhosa is one of South Africa's official languages spoken by 18% of the country's population. Traditional Xhosa initiation rites use ritual circumcision as an integral part of a rite of passage that marks the transition from boyhood into manhood.

Liminod rituals

transportation performances. They transport people to a different state of mind and then return them to ordinary life, unchanged. Actors, musicians, dancers, and persons in trance experience liminod rituals. The activity entails acting a role and returning to their everyday life unchanged.

anti-structure- Turner

undifferentiated, equalitarian relationship between participants. Turner argues that anti-structure is experienced during the liminal ritual phase. While in a liminal state, he explains, people are freed from the demands of daily life. They feel at one with their comrades; personal and social differences are set aside providing the experience of equalitarian relationships. People are uplifted, elevated, transformed, or taken over by opening up a space and time for anti-structure, a setting aside of restraints, a suspension of social rules or the temporary adherence to an alternative set of rules.

Arnold Van Gennep: life is a succession of passages marked by ritual

Birth Social Puberty Marriage Parenthood Social Advancement Job specialization Retirement Death

Performance Studies DEF

Performance Studies is an emerging field that was born in the United States in the 1960s-70s by the common effort of scholars in the fields of theater and anthropology. Performance Studies function is to study the meaning and repercussion of performance. To help us define what Performance Studies is, I will discuss some of the landmarks of this innovative field of study.

Performing Art Def

Performing Arts refers to art forms in which artists use their bodies or voices to convey artistic expression. These are 'living' arts in which performances developing in time and space are presented to a live audience. The term embraces disciplines such as music, theater, and dance. The visual arts are not included in this definition

Post- Liminal Phase

Re-aggregation or reincorporation rite of passage is consummated. The subject now has new rights and obligations and is expected to behave in accordance to the new norms

Characteristics of Rituals

Repetition Structure Order External Authority

Richard Schechner

Richard Schechner is University Professor and Professor of Performance Studies at New York University. He is the author of many books, including Between Theater and Anthropology (1985), and The Future of Ritual (1993). Schechner went on to become one of the founders of the Performance Studies department of the Tisch School of the Arts, New York University.

Pre-liminal Phase

Seperation comprises symbolic behavior signifying the detachment of the individual or group from an earlier status in the social structure or a set of cultural conditions

Liminal Phase

Marginal Space "betwixt and between" A person is not here nor there a social place of identity, a transformation takes place Three things accomplished 1. become identity-less and powerless showing passive and humble behavior 2. participants inscribed with their new identitites and initiated into their new powers 3. symbolic actions, words, and objects are used to radiate significance

Functions of Rituals

Mark the Passage of Time Transform our social status Ensure good fortune

Kinaalda

A Navajo girl, upon reaching the age of 13 and experiencing her first menstrual period, becomes initiated into womanhood by a beautiful four-day ritual ceremony called a Kinaalda, which is part of the Navajo Blessing Way Ceremony. The word Kinaalda is used interchangeable with both, the girl and the ceremony. The onset of menstruation is regarded by the Navajo people as a time for rejoicing. The fact is announced to the whole community in a dramatic four-night ceremony as the girl becomes a tribal symbol of fecundity.

Richard Schechner identifies the following overlapping, 7 functions of performance:

To entertain To make something beautiful To mark or change identity To mark or foster community To heal To teach, persuade, or convince To deal with the sacred and/or the demonic

Social Contract

To perform a ritual is to conform to the order of that ritual Acceptance is a social, public act that entails obligation Ritual embodies a social contract. If acceptance entail obligation, it follows that ritual are tied to morality, for breach of obligation is always regarded as immoral. In summary, ritual embodies a social contract, and as such, are the fundamental social act upon which human society is founded.

Victor Turner

Victor Turner (1917-83) was a Scottish-born anthropologist. His major works include the Ritual Process (1969), Dramas, Fields, and Metaphor (1974), and From Ritual to Theater (1982). Turner was in influential cultural anthropologist best known for his work on symbols, rituals and rites of passage.

Who created performance studies

Victor Turner and Richard Schechner. Today, they are considered the "Founding Fathers"

liminality coined by victor turner

denotinates a marginal time-space of ambiguous and transitional attributes

Arnold Van Gennep

ethnographer and folklorist who studied rites of passage. His book "The Rites of Passage" (1909) was very influential to the study of rites which result in a change of status for an individual or a community.He found that all rites of passage had a three-part structure comprised of a pre-liminal, liminal, and post-liminal phase.

Religious or sacred rituals

express or enact belief, connecting the participants to a spiritual power.

Performance Def 3

generally as any activity that involves the presentation of rehearsed sequences of words or actions. Richard Schechner calls this restored behavior

Performance Art Def

genre of art, traditionally interdisciplinary, in which performers or collaborators present a "live" or "media-based" performance to an audience. The genre allows for performances to be scripted or unscripted, spontaneous or carefully planned, with or without audience participation. It can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body, or presence in a medium, and a relationship between performer and audience. Performance art can happen anywhere, in any type of venue or setting and for any length of time.

Rites of Passage Def

naming ceremonies, baptisms, funerals, confirmations, bar mitzvahs, marriage, graduation ceremonies, initiation rites, etc. These are rituals that allow an individual to become something or someone that they were not before. The passage denotes a process of initiation to a new social responsibility, a new community, or a different realm of existence.

Performance Def 2

other events that involve a performer (someone doing something) and a spectator (someone observing something). Examples of that include: lecturing, a clergy performing a religious service, an athlete performing a game, a politician performing a rally or debate, a surgeon performing a surgery

Initiate def

"initiate" derives from the Latin initiare and means "to begin or to originate." The two most frequent usages of the word are to admit new members into a society or club and to teach fundamentals of something to someone. The word "initiation" usually means to admit someone into something. Initiation is thus often used synonymously with rite of initiation.

Erving Goffman

(1922-82) was a Canadian anthropologist and sociologiest. Author of The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (1959), Behavior in Public Places (1963), and Interaction Ritual (1967). nalyzed everyday interactions as strategic encounters in which one is attempting to create a particular image, and accordingly, a particular definition of the situation. The basic idea of self-presentation is that our actions in the social world are "acts," and that when we act, we put on a front in order to project a certain image of ourselves.

Rites of initiation three different categories:

1. rites that are connected to the passing from childhood to adolescence. Also known as puberty rites and termed "life crises rites" by Victor Turner, these rites are always in the form of rites of passage. 2. brings the candidate into a secret (or closed) society. Usually the candidates cannot apply for membership of a secret society but are instead invited to join by the society itself. There are various ways of determining whether a person is qualified to join a secret society. For instance, the right to become a member of a Dancing Society, a North American secret society, is hereditary. 3. is that of the Heroic and Shamanic Initiations. The principal characteristic of this group of rites is the experience of a state of ecstasy or trance that must be achieved by the candidate in order to be recognized as a shaman.

Shaman recognized after having two kinds of instruction

1.ecstatic (e.g., dreams, visions, trances); 2. traditional (e.g., shamanic techniques, names and functions of the spirits, mythology and genealogy of the clan, secret language, etc.).

Shamantic Initiation Three ways of becoming a shaman

1.spontaneous vocation (the "call" or "election"); 2. hereditary transmission of the shamanic profession 3.personal "quest," or, more rarely, by the will of the clan.

Three Concepts of Performance

1996 article, "What is Performance," Marvin Carlson identifies at least three levels of analysis for the term performance: one that entail skills, the other entails the performance of culturally patterned behavior, and the last one the success of an activity in light of some standard of achievement. 1.Demonstration of skill 2.Displaying of an action or culturally patterned behavior regardless of the level of skill 3.The success of an activity in light of some standard of achievement

Performance Studies is:

An open field, all inclusive, that studies a broad spectrum of human behavior ranging from ritual, play, sports, popular entertainment, the performing arts (dance, film, music, theater) and everyday life actions to the enactment of social, professional, gender, race, class roles, healing, the media, to Internet. Multidisciplinary field more than a definite field in its own. Performance Studies draws approaches from a variety of disciplines: social sciences, feminist studies, gender studies, history, psychoanalysis, semiotics, ethnology, cybernetics, media and technology, and popular culture studies. Explores a plethora of subjects and utilizes multiple methodologies to analyze the way in which performance pervades our lives at every level, and in this way, may allow us to understand the world as it develops before our eyes. An organizing concept for the study of a wide range of human behavior.

Victor Turner

His major works include The Ritual Process (1969), Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors (1974), and From Ritual to Theate (1982). Turner further explored the concept of liminality postulated by Arnold Van Gennep. His research produced another ground-breaking work titled "The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure" in 1969. The concept o liminality began to wander away from its narrow application in rites of passage to encompass other ritual-like human experiences. Turner was one of the first scholars to bridge rituals and theater. Being taken by a character or acting as another person, he argues, is a liminal stage that takes the individual to a time and space outside normal modes of social action. Turner explains that ritual is where theater and anthropology overlap

Naerim Kut

The Naerim Kut is a Korean shamanic initiation rite. Shamanism is a deeply rooted tradition in Korea. Young girls experience a mysterious spiritual illness known as Sinbyŏng in which they experience eating disorders, profound depression, hearing voices, and other discomforts. These symptoms are interpreted as a spiritual call and the girl is urged to find a shaman mentor and undergo an elaborate and dangerous ritual to become a shaman or mudang. A Korean shaman is perceived to be a mediator between the spiritual and the human world. And becoming a shaman demands moral, psychological, and physical strengths, such as experiencing trance, or walking on sharp blades.

Restored Behavior

any behavior consciously separated from the person doing it. Restored behavior is 'twice-behaved behavior.' Performing actions that people train for and rehearse. Schechner explains that art making involves training and rehearsing. For example, we utilize restored behavior when we act on a play, or when we play the violin. But he also adds that restored behavior is intrinsic to everyday life

Liminal rituals

are transformation performances, they change who people are permanently. When we get married, we graduate, or are initiated into a new social status or community, we are changing our role in society through the ritual process.