Culture as performance

The British anthropologist Victor Turner is among the most significant con-tributors to the performative turn within the human sciences, and his ideas of liminality and communitas are still prominent within contemporary ana-lysis of ritual and performance. Turner turns away from the static models of culture inherited from structuralist theories, emphasizing instead the temporal dynamics of sociocultural processes. Turner is especially interested in what he terms “social dramas,” which are social processes that occur in response to an interruption in the everyday life of community, a violation of the social order caused by external forces such as natural disasters or internal clashes of interests. Social dramas, Turner argues, are often modeled on a particular form consisting of four phases. After the initial breach of the regular social order, a crisis occurs, in which factions are divided and antagonisms expressed. The deepening of the crisis leads to the initiation of the redressive phase, in which cultural modes of conflict resolution are applied in order to restore social order.

This leads to the fourth phase, consisting of either a reintegration of the social group or the recognition of a schism.

Social life is pregnant with social dramas, writes Turner (1982, p. 11), and sym-bolic action in ritual and performance is an important means by which groups

cope with these processes, ascribe meaning to them, assess their situation, and adapt themselves to changes. Turner regards social dramas as the prerequisite for the generation of humankind’s many rituals, performative genres, myths, and oral and literary narratives. Such cultural performances, found in all societies and including plays, festivals, ceremonies, and concerts, are events spatially and temporally set apart from the mundane processes of social life in which they occur and which they continue to renew and transform.

Turner emphasizes the reflexive function of such performances. They are instances that allow a group or community “to think about how they think, about the terms in which they conduct their thinking, or to feel about how they feel in daily life” (Turner, 1988, p. 102). This reflexive capacity renders perfor-mance a site for cultural self-knowledge and for expressing and communicating important cultural values. But, Turner argues, cultural performances should not only be seen as expressions of culture. Rather, they “may themselves be active agencies of change, representing the eye by which culture sees itself and the drawing board on which creative actors sketch out what they believe to be more apt or interesting ‘designs for living’” (Turner, 1988, p. 24). Engaging in a dialectical relationship with the everyday social order, cultural performance entails a potential for thematizing, reflecting upon and transforming the rela-tions that constitute the social reality of a given group of people.

4.1.1 Liminality and communitas

The reflexive and transformational potential of performance is connected to Turner’s notion of liminality, a concept he adopts from Arnold van Gennep’s theory of rites of passage and develops in his book The Ritual Process (Turner, 1969). Van Gennep sees in rites of passage a three-part structure: a separation from the everyday life of the group, which places the specified members in some kind of limbo between their old and their new status, before returning them, changed in some way, to the group. Turner focuses upon the second phase in this process, where a person is placed in the margin of the old or on the threshold to the new, a state Turner describes as liminality. Liminal entities and persons, Turner states (1969), “are necessarily ambiguous, since this con-dition and these persons elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space” (p. 95). Therefore, to be in liminality is to be “betwixt and between” two modes of existence, free from the old structures of society and culture, and not yet bounded by the

new; a place of desire, possibility, supposition, and play. For Turner, liminality comes to refer not just to a particular phase in rites of passage, but as a defining characteristic of ritual and performance in general. He writes, “The dominant genres of performance in societies at all levels of scale and complexity tend to be liminal phenomena” (Turner, 1988, p. 25).

Turner connects the liminal condition found in rituals to a special mode of human relatedness that he terms communitas. This mode of existence is “out of place” and “out of time,” and Turner describes it as society’s anti-structure that emerges from the margins of social structure. With reference to the phi-losophy of Martin Buber (1961), Turner (1969) conceives of communitas as the spontaneous, immediate “flowing from I to Thou” (p. 127), with an existential quality as opposed to the cognitive quality found in the norm-governed, insti-tutionalized, and abstract nature of social structure. Turner (1982) states that communitas “has something of a ‘flow’ quality” (p. 58), but whereas flow in Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s (2008) sense describes individual experiences of a loss of ego, complete absorption in a task and the merging of action and awareness, communitas exists “between and among individuals.” As Turner explains, again referring to Buber, communitas can be seen as an “essential We,” a mode of relationships that always arises as “a ‘happening,’ . . . in instant mutuality, when each person fully experiences the being of the other” (Turner, 1969, pp. 136–137).

For Turner, experiences of liminality and communitas are the subjunctive mood of culture. These modes of existence allow participating subjects to experience and explore alternatives to the existing social structure in an abstract cultural domain, in which new forms of communication and action are evoked. As he writes:

Liminality, marginality, and structural inferiority are conditions in which are frequently generated myths, symbols, rituals, philosophical systems, and works of art. These cultural forms provide men [sic] with a set of templates or models which are, at one level, periodical reclassifications of reality and man’s relationship to society, nature, and culture. But they are more than classifications, since they incite men to action as well as to thought. Each of these productions has a multivocal character, having many meanings, and each is capable of moving people at many psycho-biological levels simultane-ously. (Turner, 1969, pp. 128–129)

The in-betweenness, ambiguity, and multivocality inherent in liminal situations hold transformative potential. However, Turner maintains that such experiences often end up affirming the dominant social structure. He continues:

There is a dialectic here, for the immediacy of communitas gives way to the mediacy of structure, while, in rites de passage, men [sic] are released from structure into communitas only to return to structure revitalized by their experience of communitas. What is certain is that no society can function adequately without this dialectic. (Turner, 1969, p. 129)

Turner underscores here how rituals and cultural performances, insofar as these entail experiences of liminality and communitas, function to revitalize and reinscribe social structure through a temporary suspension of social norms and hierarchies. Nonetheless, in his book From Ritual to Theatre (1982), Turner adopts a perspective that emphasizes the transgressive and subversive potential of liminal phenomena. Based on a distinction between tribal and industrialized societies, Turner argues that the notion of liminality and its implied conser-vative function properly belong within analysis of rituals found in relatively simple and small-scale societies, where rituals are connected to work and social obligations. He distinguishes such performances from the ones found within complex, large-scale societies, which are better seen as liminoid phenomena.

These performances occur in connection with leisure activities. While both liminal and liminoid performances involve a temporarily suspended social structure, experimentation, and play, the independent and voluntary character of liminoid activities places them outside central social domains of obligation, and thereby endows these phenomena with a critical potential whereby they may come to function as sources of cultural creativity and social change.

4.1.2 The performative frame and restored behavior

The liminal condition is connected to a central idea in performance studies and anthropological theories of ritual, namely, that ritual and performative events establish a particular communicative frame. According to Turner, a frame can be seen as an “invisible boundary . . . around activity which defines participants, their roles, the ‘sense’ or ‘meaning’ ascribed to those things included within the boundary” (Turner, 1988, p. 54). The concept of frame is developed by Gregory Bateson (2004) in his essay A Theory of Play and Fantasy, originally published in 1954. He suggests that human communication operates on different levels of abstraction and that the metacommunicative level determines how to interpret communication operating on lower levels. Following Bateson, Richard Bauman (1978) argues that performance can be regarded as a particular interpretive frame established through the performer’s “assumption of accountability to an audience for the way in which communication is carried out, above and

beyond its referential content” (p. 11). By putting their performative skills on display, performers subject their actions to evaluation; not only what is com-municated counts, but also how that message is delivered matter. In this way, Bauman suggests, performance “calls forth special attention to and height-ened awareness of the act of expression and gives license to the audience to regard the act of expression and the performer with special intensity” (Bauman, 1978, p. 11). This intensity marks performance as a distinct space, lifted out of the ordinary with a special significance and transformative potential. For Turner, the distinctiveness of the performative frame marks performance as a privileged site for cultural reflexivity. In performance, ordinary meanings are suspended, allowing a group of people to assess the cultural frames in which they conduct their lives. In such processes of “plural reflexivity,” writes Turner, people “strive to see their own reality in new ways and to generate a language, verbal or nonverbal, which enables them to talk about what they normally talk”

(Turner, 1988, p. 103).

The American performance scholar Richard Schechner (1985) further elab-orates on the distinctiveness of performance from everyday action when he states that performance can be understood as restored behavior. Using a strip of film as an analogy, Schechner (1985) describes restored behavior as “strips of behavior” that exist independently from their original sources and therefore can be reconstructed and rearranged in performance (p. 35). Restored behavior highlights the rehearsed nature of performance; it is “twice-behaved behavior“

and, as such, performative actions “exist separate from the performers who ‘do’

these behaviors” (Schechner, 1985, p. 36). In this way, engaging in a performance allows a performer to distance herself from her normal self and behave as

“someone else,” a someone else that could “also be ‘me in another state of feeling/

being,’ as if there were multiple ‘me’s’ in each person” (Schechner, 1985, p. 37).

Therefore, Schechner argues, performance holds significant opportunities for trying out alternative and more desirable ways of being. He writes, “Restored behavior offers to both individuals and groups the chance to rebecome what they once were—or even, and most often, to rebecome what they never were but wish to have been or wish to become” (Schechner, 1985, p. 38). Performance can therefore be said to involve a double consciousness; the separateness of the performer from the act situates performance in a transitional space. In the performance space, Schechner argues (1985), “[e]lements that are ‘not me’

become ‘me’ without losing their ‘not me-ness’” (p. 111). This is an ambiguous and fragile space, in that “it rests not on how things are but on how things are

not; its existence depends on agreements kept among all participants, including the audience” (Schechner, 1985, p. 113). Yet, it is also a highly potent space for processes of transformation, in which performers (and audiences) potentially articulate and experience a new or more desirable sense of the world.

4.1.3 Turner’s ideas as a model for music and social transformation

The ideas of the transformative potential of performance that I here ascribe to Turner and Schechner have also influenced conceptions of musical performance developed within the field of musicology, music education, and musical-social work. Most fundamentally, these ideas seem to inform Small’s (1998) formu-lation of his theory of the social significance of musicking as an exploration, affirmation, and celebration of ideal relationships (see also article 1: “The Community Music Practice as Cultural Performance”). Although Small obviously bases his ideas on anthropological thinking on ritual and performance, he does not explicitly acknowledge the work of Turner or the performance theorists mentioned above. June Boyce-Tillman (2009), on the other hand, openly builds upon Turner’s notions of liminality and communitas in her exploration of the transformative qualities of music making. According to Boyce-Tillman, the transformative capacity of musicking is connected to how it opens a space apart from the everyday, in which “we can imagine new worlds for ourselves and others” (Boyce-Tillman, 2009, p. 197). Turner’s concepts are also applied by Ruud (1998) to explore improvisation in music therapy and the possibilities for generating change through experiences of communitas, a line of thought further developed in the field of community music therapy by Ansdell (2004, 2014). While Ansdell advances his own vision of musical communitas as a mobi-lization of “individual capability and confidence,” as well as “group mutuality and solidarity” (Ansdell, 2014, p. 239), he also warns against overlooking the

“inevitable paradoxes and complexities of musical community” (Ansdell, 2014, p.

243). How such experiences are connected to and influenced by local conditions and politics must be carefully considered when coming to an understanding of how and what kind of transformation might occur. I attend to such paradoxes in the following.

4.2

Transition: From transgressive