Theater and Anthropology, Theatricality and Culture

One: A Confession

I am not a theater-goer. There are years between the plays I occasionally take in because friends take me along. In 1997, during a stay in New York, I did have what was for me a busy season: in Brooklyn, I saw a Peter Brooks play based on Sack's "The Man Who Forgot . . . ." Then I went to a triple header, including a Woody Allen piece, in the Village, and finally there was a Shakespeare play, with free admission, by a group of young actors in the basement of Dean and de Luca's coffee shop. I left after the first act. The actors were unable or unwilling to adjust to the intimacy of the room and made a shouting match of the occasion. It was embarrassing. In fact, embarrassment may be the main reason for my apparent lack of interest. I am embarrassed by most institutionalized theater in my own society as I am embarrassed by church services I must attend for a confirmation, a wedding, or a funeral. In German, I would translate embarrassing as peinlich, a cognate of painful, something that hurts.

A few years ago, I was thrilled to see my seven-year-old daughter share my feelings. Together with her mother they had decided to attend at least one of three lectures I was invited to present in the Jefferson Rotunda at the University of Virginia. She appeared to enjoy the crowd in this strange, solemn environment until I approached the lectern. When I began to speak she tried to hide under her mother's skirts.

I am not going to analyze this response, but I should make my confession more complete and perhaps more intriguing. I have never known this feeling of embarrassment when, as an ethnographer of contemporary African culture in Zaire/Congo, I attended scores of improvised plays performed by a troupe of popular actors; or when I spent countless hours with members of religious movements engaged in teaching, prayer, and ecstatic experiences. The question of why this is so I shall leave unanswered. I remain unconvinced by the obvious explanation: as an anthropologist, I can maintain a kind of distance I do not have from my own culture. Such a response would run against everything I have tried to accomplish in my field.

Two: A Trajectory

It is safe to assume that something that becomes a consuming interest in one's later professional life had its origin in early dreams and experiences. As to dreams, I don't recall ever wanting to be an actor, or even pretending to be one in the games we played as children. I do have vivid memories of a circus show we once put on in an arena built from the rubble that, three years after the bombs had fallen, still covered much of the street where we lived. I had no act, though; I was the impresario and announcer, or rather, one of several who claimed that role.

As to early experiences, my memories of acting and pretending go deeper. They are tied to learning to speak a foreign language. My parents were bilingual but I grew up at first speaking German only. We lived in a region that eventually became a part of Poland, a process that had not yet become a fact when I was eight years old. Within what must have been weeks I spoke Polish. Perhaps I was prepared, having heard from early childhood the sound of another Slavic language, a Moravian dialect spoken by the adults in my family; and there must have been some gradual acquisition of linguistic competence. But my memory tells me nothing about acquiring anything and a lot about joining something; hanging out, playing along in an ongoing piece, pretending that there was nothing strange about mustachioed men kissing ladies' hands and young mothers openly nursing their children. I felt proud and excited about being talked to in Polish and being able...