Ritual Liminality and Frame: What Did Barbosa See When He Saw the Theyyam?

An anecdotal account of a ritual from the south of India by a Portuguese adventurer from the early sixteenth century serves as pretext for a brief description of the cult of the theyyams from north Kerala in southwest India and raises questions on how we look at ritual performances. Liminality and frame, and associated notions, including flow and experience, as used by Victor Turner, provide clues for understanding an "anthropology of performance," but Turner did not give operative tools for implementation of his manifesto.

Could some practical notions proposed by Grotowski be useful to the ethnography of the performance? Growtowski's concepts are applied to observations made during field research on theyyam. Findings are more outlined than concluded, but point toward some outcomes.