Under the Shade Tree

Mortuary Rituals and Aesthetic Expression on the

Anir Islands, New Ireland, Papua New Guinea

Antje Sybille Denner

Ph.D. Thesis

University of East Anglia

School of World Art Studies and Museology

Sainsbury Research Unit for the Arts of Africa, Oceania & the Americas

July 2010

Excerpts from Full Document…

From Chapter 2: Ritual, Performativity and Aesthetic Experience

Performance and performativity

Due to its complexity, ambiguity and broad applicability, performance has become an “umbrella term” (Wirth 2002: 10) that is used across the disciplines for a large variety of phenomena and ideas. Marvin Carlson aptly calls performance “an essentially contested concept”.8 This has to do with the wide range of activities and practices that have been analyzed as performances and the different aspects they bear. Because the performance idea has significantly influenced the manner in which art and ritual are viewed and interpreted today, I want to address the ideas performance and performativity are associated with before I return to the topic of ritual to review how anthropologists contributed to the development of the performance model.

According to Catherine Bell (1997: 73) performance theory “can appear to be a welter of confusing emphases and agendas.” In order to avoid such confusion, I distinguish between three different (but nevertheless interlinked) fields of performance and dimensions of performativity. The first is associated with John Austin’s theory of speech acts, that is, with the realization and efficacy of linguistic utterances. The second refers to theatricality and staging and deals with performance as artistic practice in theatre, dance, music and performance art. The third concerns the performative aspects of cultural actions such as ritual and ceremony, healing, play, sports, popular entertainment, politics and everyday behaviour.

8 Carlson 1996: 1, quoting Strine et al. 1990: 183.

Performativity in a first sense thus refers to the capacity of performances to constitute meaning and shape reality. The use of the term in this sense goes back to Austin’s speech act theory. In How to Do Things with Words (1962) Austin called linguistic utterances through which an action is performed and executed “performative speech acts”. Characteristic of them is that, in the act of speaking, what is being expressed is immediately put it into effect: saying is doing. Performative speech acts generate social facts and identities, rather than representing or describing them. They cannot be true or false, they only can fail or be successful. Since the transfer of Austin’s concept of performativity from linguistic expressions to social acts and everyday behaviour (for example by Goffman 1956 and Tambiah 1985[1979]), it designates their capacity to be executive, self-referential and by, and in, themselves constitute meaning; it thus endorses theories of practice and the active shaping of reality in the social process.

Performativity in its second sense refers to the ‘staging’ of an act or action, that is, to the fact that it is done for and/or to address someone. What becomes important in analyses of performativity in this sense is the investigation of the context and conditions of the enactment of the event in question, of the role and interrelationship of the persons that actively or passively participate in it and of their perception and experience of it. This approach to performance and performativity developed from the study of theatre and dramatics. It found its way into other fields through the application of the drama analogy to social action and through studies that examine similarities and differences between theatrical and other events. What proved to be problematic here is the relation between illusion and reality. In the Western history of ideas there is a prevailing notion that theatre stands in opposition to real life. From this point of view theatre with its staging and role-playing becomes associated with acting in the sense of pretending, or simulating, and thus runs the danger of being identified as inauthentic. The transfer of theatrical metaphors to non-Western cultures and their practices may therefore be fraught with risk. But while some have warned against its dangers (for example Schieffelin 1998), others point to Western traditions that involve a concept of ‘theatre as life’ (for example Hastrup 1998, Prager 2000 discussing Artaud) or they emphasize that many social practices (in the West as well as beyond) entail, and to a certain degree even depend on, staging, and that theatricality always is an integral element of the performative constitution of reality (Fabian 1999, Rao and Köpping 2000).

The third sense of performativity is connected to the second insofar as performing, that is, carrying out an action, always is a process. A closer look at the composition of the verb ‘to perform’ reveals that it consists of a static element – ‘form’, and in extension, Gestalt, figure, image – and the active, process-indicating prefix ‘per’: the focus becomes the process and dynamics of creating form. Performativity in this

sense points to processuality in which the dynamic is stressed vis-à-vis the static. This notion of performativity was largely developed in view of cultural performances.9 It emphasizes that culture and society not simply ‘are’, but ‘happen’ and that they only exist in so far as social agents create them. Here we also find a connection to performativity in the first constitutive sense as it is through performative acts that culture/society is enacted and reality is fashioned.

In summary, studies that draw on a performance model10 are characterized by the following features: firstly, like theories that emphasize practice, they accentuate the event and the active and creative roles that the participants play (for example Parker 2003, Fischer-Lichte et. al 2003). The difference is that they underline the uniqueness and ephemeral nature of the event, that is, the fact that it only exists in the moment of being carried out and, strictly speaking, cannot be repeated. Where the investigation of the conditions of the staging and execution of the performance is central, the concept of

‘framing’, which I already discussed above in the context of ritual, also becomes an issue. A second feature of studies with a performance focus, closely connected to the active imagery of performative events, is the emphasis on physical aspects, that is questions of mediality and embodiment, and sensory experience (for example Fischer-Lichte et al.

2001, Krämer 2004 and below). The third characteristic is the emphasis on efficacy. Many performance-oriented studies not only stress the dynamic character of the event – for example in showing that performative action in rituals or theatrical productions involve transformation – they also ask how this is achieved. The corresponding analyses stress that it is exactly because of their active and process-oriented nature that performances do what they do, and show that, and how, the power of performative events is intricately linked to their physical and sensual qualities (e.g. Schechner 2003[1981], Parkin 1991, cf. Bell 1997: 74-75).

On the basis of this outline I now return to the topic of ritual, that is to the question how anthropological studies of ritual contributed to the development of performance models. The first person to mention here is Victor Turner. His collaboration with the performance director Richard Schechner is famous but occurred relatively late in his life. One of his most important contributions to a performance-oriented approach to ritual long predates his acquaintance with Schechner. It rests on his analysis of rituals as ‘social dramas’ where he used the theatrical metaphor to describe ritual as a cultural agent and

9 Turner (1982), for example, stressed that performativity should be understood in a process-

oriented sense as carrying out, that is, executing and completing an action.

10 The readers edited by Auslander (2003) and Bial (2004) provide a good overview on important classical and recent texts by performance scholars. Hughes-Freeland (1998), and Rao and Köpping

(2000) edited publications that examine the relationship between ritual and performance. For review

articles see Beeman 1993, C. Bell 1998, Grimes 2004, Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004.

means of transformation. Important to note is that Turner encountered the ‘social drama’ in the field. He considered social practices as carrying their own theoretical potential and felt that the analogy almost ‘imposed’ itself upon him during his observations of Ndembu practices (Turner 1974: 23, cf. Grimes 2004: 113, Kapferer 2004: 38).

Turner developed the idea of the social drama already in his first ethnography (1957). Although this early work is functionalist in orientation, the social drama with its four stages of breach, crisis, redress, and reintegration or schism took a process-oriented form.11 When Turner shifted his focus to ritual, he adapted the concept of the social drama to Van Gennep’s three-fold rites of passage scheme. He developed a theory in which rituals appear as important points of transition and transformation and as media through which social groups and/or single persons establish and regenerate themselves (Turner 1967, 1969 as explained above). Emphasizing experience, Turner concentrated on the process of ritual as a generative source of symbols, values and cultural categories, in which constructs of persons and their relations might be created (cf. also Turner

1986). He only later turned to theatre and its relationship to ritual, and quite clearly

associated the term performance with role-playing and staging (Turner and Turner

1982, Turner 1987). According to Grimes (2004: 113), Turner “showed little interest in dramatism, the extended application of the drama analogy, the systematic exposition of either ritual or of non-theatrical life as if they were theatrical.” Showing that much of the power of performative actions rests on their process-oriented form and lies in their generative, transformative and creative force probably was Turner’s most important and lasting contribution to theories of performance.

Stanley Tambiah was the first anthropologist to explicitly call for “A Performative Approach to Ritual” (1985[1979]). His article was a reaction to the opposition of thought versus action in which Tambiah underlined the social rather than the conceptual dimensions of ritual in order to explain their efficacy. Accordingly, he did not describe rituals as performances that resemble drama or theatre, but conceived of them as activities that as such generate effective action. Tambiah (1985[1979]: 185) defined ritual as a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication and added that ritual actions were performative in three ways:

in the Austinian sense (…), wherein saying something is also doing something as a conventional act; in the quite different sense of a staged performance that uses multiple media by which the participants experience the event intensively; and in the sense of indexical values – I derive this concept from Peirce – being attached to and inferred by actors during the performance.

11 It clearly reflects the influence of Max Gluckman and the Manchester School’s emphasis on

the analyis of social processes on the basis on situational and extended case studies.

Taking recourse to Austin and Searle, Tambiah explains how ritual actions, beyond their semantic meaning, may become effective as constitutive and regulative acts. Then he moves on to illustrate that the efficacy of rituals rests on the use of multiple media (verbal formulae, songs, dances, music, paraphernalia and other objects, etc.) and on the formality and redundancy of ritual acts. He also points out that rituals only seemingly consist of unvarying recurrences and that redundancy in many rituals serves “interesting and complex” functions (1985[1979]: 140), for example, stimulating a sense of creative variation or ensuring that important messages are transmitted more than once and over several channels. It is because of their specific (that is, performative) form and organization that rituals function as spheres of institutionalized, heightened social communication and as agents of transformation.

Tambiah’s third observation about ritual’s performativity looks at the way rituals reflect and influence the social hierarchy and power of the actors: rituals involve features and symbols that have an indexical, duplex structure because they simultaneously point in a semantic and a pragmatic direction. The grade of elaborateness and grandiosity, the choice of site and the duration of the ritual, for example, point to meanings that relate to their cosmological content. At the same time, they are indexically related to the participants because in, the course of the ritual, the values attached to grandiosity, site, etc. are existentially linked to the participants, “creating, affirming, or legitimating their social positions and powers” (1985[1979]: 156). Although Tambiah’s article is dated insofar as he assumed that rituals involve unitary sets of messages and therefore help to transcend and overcome situations of distress or social conflict rather than being fraught with risk and transporting polyvalent messages, his “Performative Approach to Ritual” represented a major contribution to the opening up of the field in which the interplay between anthropological/sociological, dramaturgical and linguistic concepts of performance could be explored and developed.

The efficacy of rituals/performances was also of interest to Geertz and Lewis. Geertz, as mentioned earlier, perceived rituals as ‘cultural performances’ and like Tambiah he defined them as spheres of condensed symbolic communication. From this point of view the Balinese cockfight becomes ‘deep play’ in which the community offers a commentary on itself that can, or rather should, be read like a text (Geertz 1972). Although Geertz frequently used expressions like performance, drama, theatre and play to describe and analyze ritual and ceremonial behaviour, he preferred the text analogy to the drama analogy, because he thought that the latter was too closely associated with the danger of downplaying cultural and historical specificities (Geertz 1983: 19-35). The critique that has been raised against Geertz’ notion that culture can be read like a text by the anthropologist ‘over the shoulders’ of his informants is sufficiently known and does

not need to be repeated here (e.g. Capranzano 1986, Rudolph 1992). What is noteworthy with regard to performative approaches to ritual, however, is the fact that Geertz, in a similar way as Turner (and although Geertz criticized Turner for privileging experience over of communication), located the power of ritual in its capacity to simultaneously affect intellect and emotion. This anticipated an insight that became very important in later studies: in the course of performative action, rituals not only discursively unfold agency through the mediation of messages and meaning, but because they express things in directly sensual form, thereby allowing the participants to ‘grasp’, feel and experience them emotionally and aesthetically (e.g. Handelman and Lindquist 2005, Hobart and Kapferer 2005).