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67 Whereas the first part of this book was concerned with the context of the dance, with its organization and practice, in this part I look at the experiential nexus. Here, I develop further the theoretical position I outlined in the introduction and aim to analyze what dancers are doing while they dance and how they experience it. In Chapter 3, I showed that a vigil as a ritual has certain aspects that are open-ended and performative whereas a dance, although it can be seen as a performance, has many heavily ritualized episodes. In general, ritual and performance have been conceptualized as disparate entities but the Concheros’ practices indicate that this distinction need not be made. Here I look at both a dance and a vigil within the same analytical framework. Although these two terms may continue to be reified and used as descriptive categories, such an analysis says little about agency or intention. By employing the terms “ritualization ” and the “performative” (or performativity), a great deal more can be said about the activity observed. ANALYZING RITUAL AND PERFORMANCE Turner was perhaps the first to consider performance seriously. For decades, his work on ritual, which he defined as “formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in mystical beings or powers” with its suggested stages and the dichotomy of structure f o ur Agency and the Dance: Ritualization and the Performative A gency and t h e D ance 68 and anti-structure, dominated the work of many anthropologists. Later Turner explored with Schechner the possible continuities between the rituals that he had observed in Africa and the performances of the theatrical world.1 As an interest in performance grew, it became part of an attempt to look at the unfolding of events of all kinds in a more actor-centered and political mode, a means to assess what gave events life and to offer, as Bell later noted, a “solution to the way in which theory fails to grasp action” (and, I would add, contingency).2 However, to foreground performance at the expense of ritual is often to use the term “performance” in a very wide way. This recent overuse begins to replicate the history of the earlier wide deployment of the term “ritual.”3 For if “beliefs in mystical beings” is excluded from Turner’s definition, we have a term that covers a range of activities that have sometimes been called “secular ritual.” Moore and Myerhoff stake out a continuum for this: at one end they place those practices with a prescribed formality; at the other, those that are more open and spontaneous.4 Nevertheless, any one socalled secular ritual may have a range of activities that lie at different points on the continuum; for some of the activity may be more heavily rule bound than others. As Goody has pointed out, however, the category of secular ritual results in a series of possible actions that is so wide-ranging that it could include—and here he is quoting Bocock—“handshaking, teeth cleaning, [and] taking medicines.”5 It becomes, in effect, a category so broad that it lacks analytical power. An overemphasis on performance leads to similar difficulties, for just about anything can be seen as performance: getting dressed, eating a meal, or travelling on the subway, but so too can teeth cleaning and taking medicine. As Roach has noted, “[w]hat once was an event has become a critical category, now applied to everything from a play to a war to a meal.”6 And, as Bell has indicated, a “focus on the performative aspects of ritual leads easily to the difficulty of being unable to distinguish how ritual is not the same as dramatic theater or spectator sports.”7 As much of the activity in preliterate societies was ritualized (or had ritualized elements to it), it is surprising that ritual as a rigid category, set aside from the activity of everyday life, became as important to anthropology as it did. Tambiah commented that “anthropologists cannot in any absolute way separate ritual from non-ritual in the societies they study” but was talking about form rather than activity per se.8 Gerholm suggested a different perspective . Instead of looking at form, he looked at the activity and at the qualities and/or characteristics manifested by such activity, a mode of analysis that can take account of more fragmented and divided forms.9 Today we are more aware that most enactments...

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