Celebration: Studies in Festivity and Ritual ed. by Victor Turner (review)

and calls for a political theatre which does not rely on proscenium staging and an urban orientation, but works actively with the people. Throughout the book, he brings up provocative critical points applicable to political theatre anywhere-should actors identify with the suffering people they portray? What about the sensationalism of scenes of torture? One wishes Bharucha had more space to explore some of these theoretical issues further along with his beautifully written, scholarly, and evocative account of contemporary Indian theatre. Alisa Solomon Celebration: Studies in Festivityand Ritual Edited by Victor Turner Smithsonian Institution Press, 320 pp., 118 b&w illus., $25.00 (cloth); $9.95 (paper). In Spring 1982, the Folklife Program of the Smithsonian organized and mounted an exhibit entitled Celebration: A World of Art and Ritual. This extensive project brought together a range of over five hundred ceremonial objects from sixty-two different cultures with the aim of illuminating life-ways, cultural contexts, and the process of celebratory ritual. Victor Turner's anthology is a twin to the exhibit, and a further exploration of this theme. A collection of essays by eighteen noted cultural anthropologists, Celebration opens up varied perspectives on these often astonishingly beautiful objects , on the ceremonies which generated them, and the symbolic systems informing their use. It also embraces a variety of related celebratory events. Topics include: the animate qualities of Puebloan ceramic figurines (Barbara Babcock), meanings of the Torah binder for the Western Ashkenazic (Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett), contrasts between the Ramlila Festival in India and the Union City Passion Play in New Jersey (Richard Schechner), the religious character of the celebratory impulse (Victor and Edith Turner), the play element in political celebration (John MacAloon), and ritual as an agent of social change among Blacks in the southwestern United States (William Wiggins). The writings are informed and detailed, for the most part evincing care and respect for the peoples and cultures surveyed, and are supported by spare, evocative photos. As a result, the distinctive richness of traditional imaginations comes through. This richness points up an absence of shared symbolic life in the United States and Europe which are, comparatively, underrepresented by objects originating in religious ritual. The greater portion of the objects and studies are drawn from Third World cultures: Asia and Africa, the native peoples of North and South America and Oceania. Those that do represent the U.S. and Europe derive primarily from minority and/or immigrant groupsCatholics , Eastern Orthodox Christians, Jews, Muslims, Blacks, Asians135 rather than from the dominant white Anglo-Saxon cultural strain. In the book's Introduction and in their essay, Victor and Edith Turner suggest that the lack of symbolic life in the U.S. may be traced back through the effects of industrialization to early American settlers' rejection of the post-feudal Europe of royalty, nobility and clergy, and of the visually oriented symbolic system associated with it. The Protestant ethic, reinforced by the Enlightenment, produced a rational, naturalistic and individualistic attitude toward worship. This resulted in a separation of church and state, recognition of the individual as the ethical unit of society, and increased valuation of conscience and one's personal experience of and relation to the sacred. These impulses led to public celebrations which emphasized the Word, song, music and movement as opposed to emblems. The opposition between ritual processes emphasizing sacred objects and those focusing on the inner worth of persons emerges as one vital theme of the text. Celebration raises important issues on many aspects of ritual process and readers of varying interests will find selections of value in it. It should be of particular use to those examining the nature and ritual sources of performative activity, or evolving strategies to respond effectively to their own cultural contexts. John Fiscella The Amazing Decade: Women and Performance Art in America 1970-1980 Edited by Moira Roth Astro Artz, 165 pp., $12.50 (paper) Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory Dept. of Performance Studies NYUITSOA, 104 pp., $5.00 (paper) Reading Moira Roth's essay on women and performance art in the seventies , I experienced the pleasure of recognition. Like everyone else who came of age in that decade, I was affected by the women...