Between Theater and Anthropology

Foreword

For an anthropologist (working in several cultures, "posttribal," "peasant," and "urban-industrial"), it was both theoretically illuminating and personally rewarding to meet Richard Schechner, whose life has been dedicated to organizing and understanding performances. My own field experience had forced me to pay special attention not only to institutionalized performances, such as rituals and ceremonies, but also to what Erving Goffman calls the (dramatic) "presentation of self in everyday life." My own self was now presented with an experimentalist in performing. I learned from him that all performance is "restored behavior," that the fire of meaning breaks out from rubbing together the hard and soft firesticks of the past (usually embodied in traditional images, forms, and meanings) and present of social and individual experience. Anthropologists usually see and hear but try not to interfere with the life they immerse themselves in among initially "alien" cultural milieus. Inevitably, like all scientists, their modes of observation do set up disturbing ripples in the "fields" of social relations they "observe," but on the whole they try to be discreet. A director like Schechner is committed by his role to "interference." If he happens also to be fascinated by theory, he tries to infer from the results of his interference in all the components and relations of theater certain conclusions about the nature and structure of the whole theatrical process, indeed about the whole cultural performative process, of which his professional speciality is an outstanding species. A theatrical impresario, versed in and open toward sociological and psychological theories, clearly has available to him, as does any social scientist with complementary interests, a laboratory of performative experiments normally inaccessible to field anthropologists, who can look and stare but seldom change or experiment with the cultural performances they encounter. Almost by chance, though we had read snatches of each other's publications, Schechner and I met a few hours before Clifford Geertz's 1977 TrillingLecture F O R E W O R D xn (for which I was a commentator) in New York, poured out our ideas on and to one another, and began a relationship that has had me performing ethnographic texts of rituals and "social dramas" with drama as well as anthropology students in New York, and Schechner giving lectures on Indian folk and Japanese traditional theater to anthropological and other "academic" audiences in the United States and elsewhere. Schechner opened up for my study a new world of performative techniques . Anthropologists, by their training, are not qualified to investigate the training of actors in ritual, ritualized theatre, and more secular types of cultural performance—how they prepare for the public events, how they transmit performative knowledge, how they dress, mask, and apply cosmetics, their personal "shtick," that is, attention-getting devices unique to each performer. Anthropologists are more concerned with stasis than with dynamis, with texts, institutions, types, protocols, "wiring," custom, and so on than with the how of performance, the shifting, evanescent, yet sometimes utterly memorable relationships that develop unpredictably among actors, audience, text, and the other situational variables discussed by Schechner in this book. Schechner also brought to my attention the indigenous theorizings of non-Western theater, themselves rooted in religious and ethical world views unfamiliar to the tradition deriving from Athens-Rome-Jerusalem, which encompasses our Euro-American outlooks and articulates the texts, scenarios, mise-en-scenes, training, and symbolic codes of our familiar cultural performances from film, telescreen, to stage. In this book he goes into great detail, in inter- and cross-cultural terms, as to how ritual and theatrical traditions become enfleshed in performance and in their dynamic incarnation act as a reflexive metacommentary on the life of their times, feeding on it and assigning meaning to its decisive public and cumulative private events. I hope that anthropologists will not turn away from Schechner's fundamental contribution to the understanding of performance because he writes in a vivid style, with many allusions to his personal experiences. What he is offering is a prodigious gift to those of us who have so often been afraid to dip our toes in the waters of life—for fear of contamination by what seems to be a polluted stream. Schechner is a practiced diver, and he brings up for us many treasures as well as dead men's bones. He might just be the catalyst anthropologists need to get them thinking about what Dilthey called "livedthrough experience." This is not to deny the venerable past and the founding ancestors but to bring...