Synopses & Reviews
Contemporary life in most large-scale societies is not truly cultural, in the strong sense, but rather merely 'culture-like.' Using a semeiotic phenomenological approach based on the work of philosopher C.S. Peirce, Lewis presents a framework for understanding performative events in any cultural life-world. By revisiting Victor Turner's work on ritual and engaging with those who have built upon his ideas, the book presents a program for making connections between intimate embodied habits and major cultural practices in a given social setting. Beginning with a distinction between special events and everyday life, Lewis examines fundamental event types including play, ritual, work, and carnival.
Review
"Lewis pays tribute to and builds upon [Victor] Turner's sense of social process as he considers the complex enactments of culture . . . The present volume could prove a useful overview for graduate students wishing to gain a grasp of the history, development, and possible futures of performance studies . . . Summing Up: Recommended. Graduate students, faculty." - CHOICE
"A masterful and nuanced expansion of Victor Turner's pioneering work on the ritual process and on culture as a procession of quotidian events and critical performances. Drawing on Peirce's semiotics and on phenomenology, J. Lowell Lewis simultaneously provides an interdisciplinary perspective on performance studies and opens up new theoretical horizons on role-playing, ritual and dramaturgy in social life." - Michael D. Jackson, author of Lifeworlds: Essays in Existential Anthropology
Synopsis
Contemporary life in most nation-states is not truly cultural, but rather "culture-like," especially in large-scale societies. Beginning with a distinction between special events and everyday life, Lewis examines fundamental events including play, ritual, work, and carnival and connects personal embodied habits and large-scale cultural practices.
About the Author
J. Lowell Lewis an Honorary Research Associate in Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He received his PhD in anthropology at the University of Washington, USA. His initial fieldwork in Brazil resulted in the book Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira (1992).
Table of Contents
1. Special Events and Everyday Life
2. Play as Performance
3. Rituals and Ritual-like Genres
4. Performative Processes: Types of P/p relations
5. Embodiment, Emplacement, and Cultural Process
6. Problems in Performance and Cultural Theory