Abrahams, Roger D.  1977.  “Toward an Enactment-Centered Theory of Folklore.”  In The Frontiers of Folklore, William Bascom, ed., Wash., D.C.: American Anthropological Association Series, pp. 79-120.
 
 

“Toward an Enactment-Centered Theory of Folklore”
Roger D. Abrahams

[beginning of page 79]

In my most recent writing I have attempted to construct a theory by which the materials of folklore and the practices of folklorists are related to other features of man’s expressive life.  It is surely through the communication systems that lie at the heart of community life that cultural meaning is achieved.  Folklorists have always been concerned with the most vital expressions of culture: folktales and myths, riddles and proverbs, festivals and rituals.  These expressions of tradition, simply because they are overtly formulaic, redundant, predictable, mark those moments when valued relationships are enacted, participated in, and invested with significance.  Though folklore is made up of the most patently meaningful statements of community and culture, folklorists have contributed little to an understanding of how meaning and significance is achieved.  To be sure, in the last decade the discipline has moved somewhat from its focus on text to include context, and thus from cultural product to process, allowing us now to enter folkloristically into the philosophic discussions of ontology.  However, our pronouncements on the subject remain essentially programmatic or simple-mindedly ethnographic; we either make statements about what we ought to attend to in our gathering and reporting of data, or we fill in some social-cultural data surrounding our recordings of traditional expressive events, taking note of practices without attending to the larger socio-cultural matrices by which these events come to be and to signify.  Such meanings are, of course, the very features which bring community members to laugh and cry, to discuss deeply, enjoy, become enthralled, even carried away by the [beginning of page 80] experience.  The vitality of expressive man is,  thus further deadened by folklorist, fixing the transient and transitional out of a need for the objective scholar to describe and compare through the medium of the written word and the printed page.  For some time, the key terms in the folkloristic synthesis carried by myself and my colleagues here, have been process and especially performance; this latter concept allowed us to relate the formal features of cultural expression to the social dimensions of enactment, as in the relationship between the performer and audience, how they develop and fulfill patterns of expectation, how license to perform is invoked and used, and so on.  My turn to the larger term enactment arose out of a growing recognition that there were a number of events which, I and my colleagues have been describing in performance terms, like games, and rituals, which were stretching the idea of performance somewhat out of shape.  Surely, we talk of the performance-like features of games or rites, but this is clearly in analogy to those events in which we come together to be entertained (and perhaps instructed) by a person which are conventionally marked and known as performance forms. 

My drawing on enactment, then, is my attempt to find a term which includes performances, games, rituals, festivities, etc., in short, any cultural event in which community members come together to participate, employ the deepest and most complex multivocal and polyvalent signs and symbols of their repertoire of expression thus entering into a potentially significant experience.
 

Between Acts and Enactments

Enactments: heightened events experienced in such anticipated and conventionally framed ways that participation is both potentiated and encouraged.  Activities become unreal yet more real at the same time; unreal because of the felt departure from the ordinary toward the more heightened, self-conscious and stylized behaviors of named and framed activities-in-common; more real because the events take the motives and scenes of the everyday and bring them into some new perspective, allowing us to see them as part of some larger patterns of [beginning of page 81] existence.  Enactments: heightened and often self-consciously rendered cultural experiences, productions we react to as art or performance, as rituals, festivals, games, parties, and any other event in which the coming together is prepared far, psychologically and otherwise, and participation is thereby strongly encouraged.

Discussions of the relations between everyday life and these heightened occasions has, in the main, been carried out by aestheticians and critics, those concerned with the special worlds created out of the stuff of life by ever-refining artist representation, the making of significant objects.  This has been both a boon to us in and a drain upon our observational energies, for artistic performance is only one very specialized kind of enactment.  This point is difficult to understand if one’s critical life is spent in contemplation of the artful object.  The establish a distance between the object and the beholder which demands an intense contemplation upon the ways in which the artist has created an object which has a life of its own.  Such intensity of focus calls for some consideration along the way of how the artist has transformed the objects, scenes, or motives of the real world into a significant set-piece.  In such a universe of discourse we are concerned with matters such as mimesis (styles and modalities of representation) and verisimilitude (how the artificial maintains its connection to life with regard to believability).  Such discussion rests on the premise that the relationship between art and life is problematic; thus, the eternal discussions of escapism, frivolousness, or in high-serious criticism on the distinctiveness of imagination as opposed to fancy on the one hand, triviality or decadence on the other.

Taking a larger view of man’s creative engagement with the social and natural world around him, his abilities to participate in the heightened cultural and social events, in “worlds” as distinct from the everyday as art is from life, I propose here a larger potion of socio-cultural enactment, one which places artistic performance in a more fully human interactive context.  Michael Polanyi notices just this limitation on  art criticism, arguing that life is better understood by looking at its social and religious [beginning of page 82] congeners, other unusual events like “the celebration of festivities,” “feast, pageants and rites of mourning”: 
 

The mechanisms that serve to arouse us from our private concerns and open our minds to follow a work of art are artificial products: their power to arouse and isolate our minds lies in their artificiality, which sharply contrasts with our day-to-day experience.  This is also true for feasts and solemn occasions; it is their artificial character that breaks into our daily lives and arouses our minds to other thoughts.  This interjection into our daily lives is more direct here than it is for the arts; it simply decrees a pause in our regular pursuits and demands that we put on our best clothes (or some other customary attire) and take part in the appropriate rituals. (1)

In most cultural situations, these different kinds of heightened and focussed occasions are separated by various dimensions of social situations.  A feast or a rite, a game or a performance take place at specially set-aside times and places, and on occasions in which the community regards it as appropriate to carry on in this way.  Not that each kind of enactment does not have the same kind of special vocabularies and sensibilities attached to them as sophisticated artistic objects; rather, these very artificial codes and ways of behaving separate themselves from each other because of differences in the occasion of their enactment as well as the vocabularies and repertoires they employ.  Furthermore, there is, in every kind of enactment a continuity with behavior and attitudes expressible in everyday experiences as well.  The relationship between real experiences and their counterparts in one or another type of enactment is a matter of discussion, not only among art critics but folk performers as well.  In the United States bluesmen have been especially articulate on the subject because of the identification, by the audience, of the singer and the songs he composes and sings.  Especially if he performs for white audiences, he is constantly asked about the relationships between his songs and his life.  For [beginning of page 83] instance, the noted bluesman John Lee Hooker responding to such a question, notes that:
 

You can hear a certain type of record be playin’.  You can be feeling very normal, nothin’ on your mind, period.  But it’s somethin’ on that record hits you.  It hits somethin’ that have happened in your life, and sometime if you can’t stand to listen to the record you take a walk or take a ride or get in your car because you don’t want to be hurt so deep that it cause heartaches and things.  Because you’d rather not to hear it than to hear it.  Because there’s somethin’ sad in there that give you the blues; somethin’ that reach back in your life or in some friend’s life of yours, or that make you think of what have happened today and it is so true, that if it didn’t happen to you, you still got a strong idea -- you know those things is goin’ on.  So this is very touchable, and that develops into the blues. (2)

The artist-performer then finds his place, bringing focussed energies and craft into the moment of performance.  Through fabricating an artistic object, an item of performance, the reception accorded the performer relies all-too-obviously on the responses of others on how much coordinated response is triggered by the enactment.  The response itself will be determined by how well the performer controls his medium and successfully channels his energies; but it also relies on how fully the item responds to actual scenes from life -- or as Hooker puts it, how much it “hits you” as a human being who is also a member of an audience and a community.

The dialectic between art and life is both between the artist and his genres and between the idea of the artist as the voice of tradition or as one who speaks from personal experience.  In nontraditional communities, the artist must increasingly demand that the audience wonder how much he sings of himself and how much is conventional observation and artistic fabrication.  This demand is part of the mystique of the artist-performer.  Even artists who perform the works of others beg this question in their choice of repertoire of [beginning of page 84] which works they play on which occasion, and by the intensity and stylistic nuance by which they are played on that occasion.  Again, this is not simply a problem confronted by the sophisticated artist who expresses himself reflexively, like a Hemingway or a Proust, making of his life a work of art.  Listen to another blues singer, Henry Thomas, holding forth on just this subject:
 

There’s several types of blues -- there’s blues that connects you with personal life -- I mean you can tell it to the public as a song, in a song.  But I mean, they don’t take it seriously which you are tellin’ the truth about.  They don’t always think seriously that it’s exactly you that you talkin’ about.  At the same time it could be you, more or less it would be you for you to have the feelin’.  You express yourself in a song like that.  Now this particular thing reaches others because they have experienced the same condition in life, so naturally they feel what you are sayin’ because it happened to them.  It’s the sort of thing that you kinda like to hold to yourself, yet you want somebody to know it.  I don’t know how you say that -- two ways: you like somebody to know it, yet you hold it to yourself.  Now I’ve had the feelin’ which I have disposed it in a song, but there’s some things that have happened to me that I wouldn’t dare tell, not to tell -- but I would sing about them.  Because people in general they take the song as an explanation for themselves -- they believe this song is expressing their feelin’s instead of the one that singin’ it.  They feel that maybe I have just hit upon somethin’ that’s in their lives, and yet at the same time it was some of the things that went wrong with me too. (3)

This is not to argue that life follows art, or vice-versa, or that to sing the blues you must experience them.  Rather, there is a space between life and art within which the performer and his audience exchange the particulars of aesthetic and moral experience, an exchange held self-consciously.

Enactments, then, stylize and epitomize the [beginning of page 85] everyday.  On the other hand, life (especially social life) gravitates again and again toward the set-scenes we know best through one or another genre of enactment, for the two often share the fictions and sentiments which guide and color our actions.  How often do we hear someone telling about a farcical or tragic set of events which happened recently, or, find ourselves involved in a situation more characteristic of a soap opera or a sentimental song than what we usually think of as “real life.” 

If, on occasion, life seems to model itself on art, we seldom have trouble spelling out the differences between the two kinds of experience.  Enactments are more highly focussed, framed, redundant, and stylized than other areas of our experience.  Art itself is artificial in such a way that it openly invokes a patterning of motives in those very areas of everyday life which we otherwise have to investigate at some depth to discover system and pattern.  Yet we distrust the patterns of art when applying them to realms of everyday life precisely because the patterns are openly stated, obvious, cliched.  Furthermore, the motives are practiced, rehearsed and self-consciously performed, usually by representatives of a segment of society we never fully trust: players, performers, artists.

The growing popular as well as scholarly interest in the patterned and symbolic dimensions of expressive culture dramatizes the need for a critical methodology which will both enable us to describe the patterns of behavior characteristic of the recurrent scenes within one culture and to carry out some sort of comparison of such system cross-culturally.  Insights into the patterning of these systems are not easily obtained in rituals, festivals, parties, get-togethers, sports, and games -- because such enactments are clearly framed and marked, are redundant in both the handling of materials and in messages, and involve a coordination of energies which results in the centered and often transcendent response.  The terms of analysis for rituals, performances, and other such high intensity enactments have usefully been employed in describing everyday scenes, enabling the ethnographic observer to trace the structural relationships between the spontaneous [beginning of page 86] side of everyday life and the rehearsed and replayed scenes and events.  In pursuit of describing such human experience, the concerns of the folklorist come together with those of other disciplines: ethnographers, sociologists, art historians, and aestheticians.  Further, their findings have been picked up by the popular press in how-to-interpret books on interactional games, on body language, and on various special codes that only those in on it can understand.  In the rational retreat from the mystical, we hope to de-mythologize by ripping off the various masks that man continually fashions for himself.

To some extent, all observers of human behavior seek a corner on the market of reality, for that is our way of managing our identities.  And this process is far from the sole possession of the academic -- in fact, the ad man and the pollster seem to have more success -- at least in selling others on the power of their perspectives.  The underlying rationale of humanistic disciplines has been to let us recognize and know more fully what is real, to distinguish between the real in life from the unreal, the sentimental, the fake, the projections of fantasy or delusion, the misleading, the mystified and the mythical.  Humanists seek to use this insight into life as a means of themselves living more fully, experiencing more knowledgeably and more deeply, and of imparting these techniques and this wisdom to others.  But this search is hardly restricted to those who employ the received models of the study of socio-cultural man.  The drive to recognize and segregate the real from the ersatz obtains in the social relations which characterize ever larger segments of Americans.  How often, in our discussions of agrarian and post-agrarian Black culture have we dwelt on what the difference is between the real thing (whether pimp or preacher, Big or Little Mama) and those who are constantly running game, or who are saddity, dicty, uppity. (4)  No matter what community we happen to come from, then, we seem to find ourselves constantly judging others by how much we can “be ourselves” with them -- by which we seem to mean how unguarded we can be in interactions with them and remain comfortable.

To so judge others is to draw on values derived from friendship expectations and from the [beginning of page 87] relaxation attending communications among friends.  But obviously regarding someone as sincere or fakey, as an original or a show-off, is far from the only basis on which we judge experience with others.  In fact, using the relative “at homeness” of someone as the basic criterion of who or what is real and what isn’t would make life seem very dull.  We also search for “the real thing,” for the authentic, by how much our basic sense of self is put to a test, by how far certain people, situations, or experiences enable us to feel more deeply, more centered, more tested with regard to the range of life possibilities.  Thus, there are those who we like to be with because they are fun, always in for the new experience, one in which participation at ever-growing intensity is central.

Reality itself is only understandable when we contrast it with other kinds of experience, perception, and judgment.  To William James’ classic formulation of the problem -- “Under what circumstances do we think things are real?” -- must be added: What do we tacitly contrast with the real in our ongoing tests for authenticity and sincerity?  In some situations we distinguish between the fantastic and the real (without necessarily judging one better than the other, though obviously the question of appropriateness does arise).  In another range of situations we distinguish between real life and just playing, again not necessarily attaching any value to he former unless high seriousness or work is called for by the occasion.  Furthermore, for those interested in man’s creative and celebrative potential, play may in many cases and ways seem infinitely superior to (and in fact more real than) everyday reality. 
 

The Real and the Strange, and the Really Strange

“Man only plays when he is in the fullest sense of the word a human being,” Schiller tells us, “and he is only fully a human being when he plays.”  Yet surely, playing is not man’s most fulfilling capacity, for when we just play we exhibit the least compelling of human traits, ones relieving us of the need to be serious, sincere, and authentic.  On the other hand, through playfulness we are our most open and protean selves. [beginning of page 88] The problem is only semantic to be sure, yet it involves more than just word meanings.  Looking closely at play we can give witness to the virtues of a kind semantic self-cancellation operating in such activity.

Schiller says to us that only through the intensive motives of living-in-common, motives which become available through cultural processes such as play, can we feel as well as be human.  In play we can be as unconscious and creative as our collective wills and abilities permit; play socially and culturally situated in this way encourages the employment of the fullest range of motives and the experiencing of self and of community at high pitch.  This capability of raising the level of potential involvement and self-consciousness is not only found in play, of course, but in all cultural enactments: rituals, performances, festivities, feasts, celebrations, as well as game-playing, sports, and other contests.  To measure humanity by any other range of experience is to be accused of overlooking man’s highest capacities.  Yet, play, festivity, or performance are in one important sense not real -- they involve just playing or just performing -- experiences we can’t (and mustn’t) take seriously. 

Play is then one of the most encumbered of all self-cancelling words -- a word which can mean one thing and its opposite.  Play is both unreal and yet productive of a greater sense of reality than those experiences and scenes which are, by common assent, most real (if humdrum).  The question we hardly need ask is what we say about the meanings, the understandings, the interpretations-in-common of an ordinary strip of action from its ordinariness, and how much do we need a playful reframing of the strip and with this translation a critical reexperiencing of the scene.  For instance, how much do we learn from a meal, in the experience of eating-as-usual, and how much more by observing children playing house in which a meal is served, or by having a ‘play meal’ ourselves (as in a topsy-turvy dinner in which dessert is served first, and so on).  Of course, we learn more about meals by making them strange in some way; but such transformation takes eating out of the range of everyday reality.  The problem is all the more complicated when we [beginning of page 89] encounter the very real Thanksgiving dinner, because, like a play meal, it intensifies and stylizes everyday dining to the point that we become a little more self-conscious of the role-taking which goes on every day.

Inverting or stylizing in any manner will transform the ordinary event into something both more or less real than its everyday counterpart.  But in fact is not Jerry Lewis’s question -- “Are you for real?” -- implicit in all of our interactions with others, and don’t we become more concerned with the sincerity, seriousness,or authenticity of a scene the closer it actually comes to being called play?  Our sense of vitality relies precisely on such promotion of the ordinary, on the translation of the everyday into the extraordinary, the strange.

Such making-strange (5) occurs, it would seem, wherever a firmly articulated self-conscious frame is placed around a set of behaviors, and techniques are devised which continually cue us to the experience of this frame.  Framing is an operation which occurs on all levels of interaction, even the most conversational engagements.  However, the feature which unites all enactments is that in them marking-cuing and framing is overt and self-evident.  In our culture, casual conversations provide our norm of interaction, interactions in which we can both “be ourselves” and yet be considered to be “at our best.”  We therefore see enactments, whether playful or serious, festive or ceremonial, as unusual, as strange, because they call attention to shifts in style and intensity from the ground-base of apparent spontaneity which governs our interpretation of ordinary interactions.  But we must not consider this perception pan-cultural, for many cultures do not recognize conversation as the expressive norm; the situation described by Ethel Albert among the Burundi may, in fact, be characteristic of the way in which many others operate: “The notion of idle talk has little place in Burundi conceptions of verbal behavior.  ...Visiting is categorized according to the visitor’s purpose and is subject to a variety of formulas which must be learned.” (6)  Yet, our own cultural focus on friendly and unceremonious talk does allow us to get at [beginning of page 90] the different ways of establishing distinctive modes of expression for different occasions.

There are two obvious of departing from the everyday expressive codes: intensification (like ceremonial formalization) or by playful inversion.  The former stylizes the serious dimension of everyday behaviors; the latter selectively up-ends these serious goal-oriented or teleological patterns.  The serious apparently serves social order, the ludicrous comments upon society and its orders, and not always very kindly.  The ludicrous could hardly exist without the serious, whose very pattern it inverts, but as I hope to demonstrate, the serious relies equally strongly on the playful.  Most important, both moves deepen involvement by severely restricting the range of potential behaviors, and both challenge our abilities to understand, interpret, and judge.

Understanding is all the more problematic because not only do we constantly have to keep check on reality factors, but the various worlds of enactment provide us with a metaphoric base by which we can describe the most ordinary life-processes.  Witness, for instance, the commonsense philosopher Hans George Gadamer describing the operation of language in interactional situations:
 

...in the last analysis, language is not  simply a mirror.  What we perceive in it is not merely a “reflection” of our own and all being; it is the living out of what it is with us -- not only in the concrete interrelationships of work and politics, but in all the other relationships and dependencies that comprise our world.  Language, then, is not the finally found anonymous subject of all social-historical processes and action, which presents the whole of its activities as objectivizations to our deserving gaze; rather it is by itself the game of interpretation that we all are engaged in everyday.  In this game nobody is above and before all the others; everybody is at the center, is “it” in this game.  Thus it is always his turn to be interpreting. (7)

[beginning of page 91] Obviously, here Gadamer is not arguing that life is a game of tag.  Life is real, tag is not.  But just as we have to wonder, once we are playing tag, whether being “it” is desirable or not (we attempt to pass on the role as quickly as we are tagged), we also find ourselves checking up on a number of basic factors in our ordinary lives: on the suitability and usefulness of our real roles; or our worthiness to play such roles; or whether the part in which we’ve been cast (or even cast ourselves) conforms to the one we choose to play.  This is not an abstract philosophic matter; it arises, for instance, every time we receive an order from someone and react by wondering if we should ‘take it.’

We spend a great deal of our waking hours interacting with others, in great part on the basis of whether they are sincere or not, whether real or spurious motives are involved in the actions of others, whether the objects they would have us buy are of the quality and usefulness they are represented as having, or whether someone is dealing with us seriously or ‘just playing.’  Even in our attempts to ‘get in touch with ourselves’ we seek for ways in which we can separate the authentic from the put-on, finding ways in which we can ‘be ourselves’ more often and more fully.

Of course, it is hardly my intention to write a “how-to” manual on demystifying ourselves and others, on cracking social or psychological symbolic codes so that we can learn to read our own and one another’s motives more effectively.  Rather, my concerns are how we apprehend and find meaning in each others behavior, judge it, and use such recognitions as means of opening our lives to the experiences of participation through the cultural enactments.  As I see it, we inherit and develop upon a great number of ways to get into experiences that are larger than ourselves -- wherein we find ourselves participating intensely in events so important that we come to live by and for them.  In discussions of how everyday motives extend beyond the everyday, we find ourselves grappling with words that don’t quite mean what the experience itself imparts.   For we use the same terms to describe both what one experiences in the everyday and the ordinary, and what is going [beginning of page 92] on in the more intensive events.  Implicitly we note that there is a stream of behavior from which we depart in the ‘deeper’ experiences, but to get at the difference we must posit what sociological phenomenologists, following Alfred Schutz, call a “paramount reality” against which all other realities appear as finite and circumscribed provinces of meaning.  The more specialized occasions of licensed departure from paramount reality are perceived as “enclaves within” that base-condition of registered experience: “paramount reality envelops them on all sides, as it were, and consciousness always returns to the paramount reality as from an excursion.” (8)

“Paramount reality” as a cognitive style, Schutz argues, “consists of: 1) A specific tension of consciousness, namely wide-awakedness...; 2) A...suspension of doubt; 3) A prevalent form of spontaneity (invention?); 4) A specific form of experiencing oneself...; 5) A specific form of sociality [by which Schutz must mean, varieties of speaking and acting appropriate to the real occasion]; and 6) A specific time perspective.”  Establishing boundaries between the flowing stream of experience which he calls paramount, and other more finite realms, is difficult.  In fact, Schutz must resort to what amounts to a descriptive and enumerative defining style:
 

All these worlds -- the world of dreams, of imageries and phantasms, especially the world of art, the world of religious experience, the world of scientific contemplation, the play world of the child, and the world of the insane -- are finite provinces of meaning.  Consistency and compatibility are experiences with respect to their peculiar cognitive style subsists merely within the borders of the particular province of meaning to which those experiences belong...  To the cognitive style peculiar to each of these different provinces of meaning belongs, thus, a specific tension of consciousness and, consequently, also a specific epoche, a prevalent form of spontaneity, a specific form of self experience, a specific form of sociality, and a specific time perspective...  The world of working in daily life is the archetype [beginning of page 93] of our experience of reality.  All the other provinces of meaning may be considered as its modifications...  [However] within a single day, even within a single hour, our consciousness may run through most different tensions and adopt most different intentional attitudes to life...  Furthermore there are regions belonging to one province of meaning enclosed by another...” (9)

Reality’s Situation

Schutz’s attention to the multiplex character of situated realities takes into account the dynamic by which we are able to make transactions between these realms without much ado.  Why he chooses to attach some kind of hierarchical primacy to the workaday world begins to seem strange because of the growing value placed upon play in its various manifestations.  Somehow the recognition that we operate within and between the various realities seems more important than a need to attach primacy to one or another sphere of patterned behavior.  To be sure, we do seem to recognize the existence of something like an “everyday reality,” but we still consistently return to one or another of the more stylized and finite domains of expressive interaction for the terms by which we come to understand and interpret both these more intensely focussed and finite domains and the cognate dimensions of the less stylized and self-conscious stream of life.

Thus, we have described everyday motives and activities for some time in performance -- and especially theatrical performance -- terms.  Jacques’ noting that “All the world’s a stage” was already a critical commonplace in Shakespeare’s day, traceable in literature at least as far back as Democritus, but really implicit in language as soon as mummery and flummery became cultural resources.  There are, however, equally available analogies from child’s play, ritual, pageantry, festival, and celebration, as well as from numerous realms of performance other than the theater.  The most recent (perhaps trendy) analogy would compare all of a culture to a “text,” making the interpretation of behavior a literary-critical exercise.  Though many semioticians have put this [beginning of page 94] metaphor to good use, none has been more provocative and elegant than Clifford Geertz, who has noted resoundingly that “the culture of a people is an ensemble to texts, themselves ensembles, which the anthropologist strains to read over the shoulders of those to whom they properly belong.”  Thus, interpretation becomes an “exercise in close reading” in which “one can start anywhere in a culture’s repertoire of forms and end up anywhere else.” (10) 

We might pursue this analogy for a moment, for it enables us (as does any root metaphor even “All the world’s a stage,” or “Life’s a dance”) to better distinguish between performative domains and yet recognize the commonsense continuities among them.  Each cultural enactment, whether a ritual, a game, a performance, or a festive celebration, has both a life of its own and yet is tied with aspects of culture that lie outside the performance.  All enactments are drawn, to some degree, from everyday life and yet set apart from it, inducing a kind of self-consciousness of activity, a reflexivity leading the members of the culture themselves to conceive of such intensive events as what Geertz calls “a paradigmatic human event.”  Discussing the strange place of the frenzied cockfight among the highly decorous Balinese, he notes that:
 

Enacted and reenacted, the cockfight enables the Balinese, as read and reread, as Macbeth enables us, to see a dimension of his own subjectivity.  As he watches fight after fight, with active watching of an owner and a better...he grows familiar with it and what it has to say to him, much as the attentive listener to string quartets or the absorbed viewer of still life grows slowly more familiar with them in a way which opens his subjectivity to himself. Yet because...that subjectivity does not properly exist until it is thus organized, art forms generate and regenerate the very subjectivity they only pretend to display.  Quartets, still lifes, and cockfights are not merely reflections of a preexisting sensibility analogically represented; they are positive agents in a creation and maintenance of such a sensibility. (11)

[beginning of page 95] What Geertz says of art forms is true of any consciously framed enactment. All participants carry to the enactment an accumulation of possible responses appropriate to the form, subject, and occasion.  But each new encounter of this sort adds to one’s familiarity with the item being performed and with the genre and allows a pregressive opening up with regard to the operation of the sensibilities.  This very openness sustains the vigor of the genre and the representative enactment of it as a fund of potential experience, thus serving to maintain it.  But this approach leaves unanswered how the scenes and the events of the everyday are drawn upon in such a consciously framed context, and are so transformed that the performance may achieve an existence of its own, even while maintaining crucial connections with the everyday on the level of reaction and sensibility. 

Kenneth Burke’s dictum that “there are no forms of art which are not forms of experience outside art,” might, then, usefully be broadened to include all enactments. (12)  Enactments bring these forms of experience into dramatic focus.  Significance is commonly demonstrated through the disruption and reinstatement of these orders when they are so embodied.  Artistic enactments (or performance) are in this view, a stylization of the behaviors and recurrent experiences of everyday  life, but commonly rendered through a depiction of disruption.  Even so, such renderings of experience are commonly of the same range as those observable in real life, and are ones which have socially developed means of eliminating any dimension of upset of the experience through some kind of formalized proceedings.  Why then the need to embody that range of experience in enactments as well?  Standard psychological and functional theory would apply a “replay” or catharsis explanation, such as: framing an enactment permits the controlled replaying of anxiety-laden experience while embodying a restatement of cultural norms, teaching and celebrating the group’s sense of order at the same time.  Common sense affirms this approach, for we know we tell stories out of our own embarrassment, our confusing and even traumatic experiences, and each time we tell them we have moved the upset more toward some class of experiences-in-common, therefore more under control.

[beginning of page 96] However, this recounting type of narrative is far from the only type of highly-framed behavior which is commonly accounted for in such catharsis terms.  There are numerous other traditions of enactment (or reenactment) of basic social confusions, like games and satiric songs and plays, which are also interpreted as somehow providing a means of eliminating the accumulated stress arising from social life and individual need.

This steam-valve approach is one version of the “drive-discharge model” which attempts to account for the social uses of competitive sports, psychogenic illnesses, certain kinds of magical systems and even some aspects of gossip. However, this model has recently been demonstrated to have little explanatory power and to arise from a somewhat outmoded utilitarian set of presuppositions that cast little light on culture. (13; see Sahlins for a very persuasive discussion of the symbolic vs. utilitarian conceptions of the place of meaningful objects and expressions in culture).  Discoursing in the supposed causal relation between war and competitive sports, Richard Sipes concludes:
 

Sports and war manifest no functional relationship across time.  Cross-culturally, war and combative sports show a direct relationship...  War and combative type sports therefore do not, as often claimed, act as alternative channels for the discharge of accumulable aggressive tensions.  Rather than being functional alternatives, war and combative sports activities in a society appear to be  components of a broader culture pattern. (14)

The same argument might be made with regard to the anti-normative dimensions of play, of satiric performance, or of the masquerading dimension of ritual.  All of these simply to foreground a cultural pattern which is also observable in everyday life.  To construct a model which will account for this relationship of the everyday with the distinctive events of cultural enactments, we need both to be able to render the orders and integrities of recurrent scenes of quotidian existence, as well as the stylized, self-conscious, marked enactments. 

[beginning of page 97] Each enactment is more than a rendering, direct or inverted, of social norms: it is an experience itself.  Each draws upon a community’s concern with clumsiness, embarrassment, confusion, and conflict of the everyday; but in forming and stylizing the reported events, it develops a life of its own.  Each performance, for instance, draws upon energies and patterns of expectation brought into the occasion not only because it embodies some life-situation, but because it departs from the everyday to the degree that it is self-consciously and artfully performed.  It is then the “strangest” kind of communication of all, because it departs most fully from the expression of experience on the casual or everyday level.  Again to quote Burke, such enactment involves an “arousing and fulfillment of desires,” desires occasioned by the anticipation built into the intensive form and experience itself, desires conditioned by the promise of fulfillment in which the audience is “gratified by the sequence.” (15)

There are, to be sure, formal patterns which give order and names to our experience in all realms of life, and shared ways by which we establish both the continuities and the discontinuities between the various realms of experience.  That is, there are recurrent ‘scenes’ in all realms of our experience-in-common and that the constituent elements of these scenes and even their development may be closely related.  The conventions of everyday scenes correspond to those of intensive enactment in many, but by no means all, ways.  Insofar as each conventional form carries its own mode of experiencing, the higher degree of ceremony or ritual or performance marks such occasions as sui generis in spite of whatever relationship exists between the scenes of real-life and the enacted situation.

That there is such a relationship is crucial to any understanding of the social base of art.  But social anthropologists tend to interpret the strange rendering of performance or play forms, as well as fictions, primarily by the ways in which they embody or reflect the social norms and ideals of the group.  Viewing this problem of description the other way around, regarding such as the norm (or at least as the expressed ideal), it becomes evident that there are something like [beginning of page 98] genres of interaction -- that is, set patterns of interaction with developmental expectations -- in the scenes of the everyday as much as there are in self-conscious and rehearsed enactments.  Enactments are strongly marked with devices that foreground form and movement for the participants; on the other hand, the scenes of ‘normal’ interaction have fewer overt marking devices, the participants in fact take pains to submerge or ignore the markers.  The languages of each type of enactment will differ exactly in this dimension -- with regard to the variety of conventional devices drawn upon, the degree and type of redundancy, predictability, regularity, and preparation.

We know that patterned scenes exist in real relationships for we often have names for them.  In our courtship procedures, for example, though there have been considerable modifications of texture and timing, are still based on essentially the same monogamistic premises as they have in Western Culture for the last two hundred years.  Consequently, whether they still go by the same terms or not, we continue to designate approximately the same stages in the male-female relationship.  Such scenes as “a date,” “making out,” or “popping the question,” are still a part of our social repertoires whether we call them by these old-fashioned terms or not.  There is in this pattern of courtship not only the recurrent ‘scenes’ but also a set of values placed upon them and upon their ideal result -- one man and one woman joined in a stabilized relationship.  These scenes have a kind of built-in logical progression to them, what Burke appropriately calls a ‘syllogism’ because the causal development is so restricted (at least in our expectations).  Also, quite obviously, these scenes, their values, and their developments are, of necessity, culture specific. However, because they are so patterned, our shared expectations and responses -- our sensibilities -- are available for reenactment.

Any social-based theory of enactment, in other words, must take into consideration the complexity of the relationship between lived experience and the rendering of it as intensified or reported.  It is not enough to say that life must precede art for art to be understood, any more [beginning of page 99] than to say we can’t comprehend a feast without knowing everyday eating habits.  Too often the line of experience must be seen to go the other way; someone undergoes an upsetting experience, and is provided with a sense of control over the upset because the scene has already been encountered in performance contexts.  How often do we define an unusual situation in which we find ourselves directly in terms of the genre of enactment that by convention we know embodies that situation?  How common, for instance, to feel that we are somehow making a soap opera out of our lives?  A common reaction of people involved in airplane hijackings, when asked how they felt and what they did was, “Oh, everything was familiar to us; we had seen it in the movies already.” 

There is, in other words, no hard-and-fast-distinction to be made between the finite representations of enactment and paramount reality; rather, there are various levels of formality, of scenic wholeness, or intensity of frame and of focus of activity.  Developing our recognition of these orders is accomplished by marking the enactment with self-consciously stylized devices, or by systematically breaking the rules, thus calling attention both to the existence of the rules and the formal and conventional techniques by which they may be broken.  It is this increasing formality and this dramatic presentation of non- or anti-formality, that provides us with major techniques for making performance of performance, play of play.
 

Enactments:  Types of Events We Look Forward To (Sometimes with Dread) 

If we live humdrum existences most of the time, our lives are also marked by events we look forward to.  We have numerous times, places, and occasions on which we come together to participate, to celebrate, to entertain and be entertained, to share in an activity which, because it is both conventional and traditional, we know what we are getting into, and what we can (at least potentially) get out of it.  These events are connected to our sense of life-passage; they are calendared, if not always calendrical.  Some of these come about every year, every month, maybe even every [beginning of page 100] week.  This is how and why we can look forward to them (even if sometimes our anticipation involves fear and loathing.)  These events then have a sense of wholeness and potential to them; they invoke special ways of acting, special languages, rules, even boundaries.

Furthermore, we have no trouble distinguishing the types of such events simply because they are named, have boundaries, rules, conventions, and customary stylized ways of acting (or at least, involving ourselves).  These are both the most deeply serious and playful events of our lives, like our seasonal celebrations, our rites of passage, or less major entertainments like concerts, parties, even vacation-trips.  We anticipate them, knowing that they involve planning.  If we also worry about attending them that is because we know how much of our social selves are invested in them.  We risk boredom (if the event is too chained to convention) or anxiety (if decorum and rules are not closely enough adhered to).  We attend them, putting ourselves in the hands of those we trust to evoke and focus our energies, but who we also feel may betray our trust.

The argument above has maintained that there is both a continuity and a dialectic between everyday activities and these intense events.  In this, I will interrelate, in our own “native” theory, the types of enactments which enter our lives.  We may confuse these types because intensive events tend to accumulate around each other.  Thus, say, a wedding provides the occasion for both a ritual and a celebration, but the two are carefully boundaried from each other.  Both share in potentiating participative energies, a potentiating engendered by the occasion; they thus are strangely related to each other in spirit and each contributes to the socio-psychological impact of the other.  But distinct they are in our world of apprehending, entering into, and interpreting experience.

As I see it, in American English we distinguish (in everyday as opposed to anthropological or folkloristic talk) between at least four realms of intensive events or enactments: play, games, and sports; performances; rituals; and festivities.  Each is discrete because each is situ- [beginning of page 101] ated differently -- that is, we have different times, places. occasion, conventions, roles, role-relationships, codes of expressivity, and roles of behavior for each of them.  To be sure, there will be events that challenge the distinction between, say, game-play and performance.  But in the main, because of the various parameters of situation, we have little trouble distinguishing whether a specific happening is a game or a performance.  Moreover, they differ in important modalities.  Ritual differs from other enactment in being obligatory or compulsory patterned behavior attached somehow to the larger movements and processes of life.  Performances differ in the singling out of individuals to take aesthetic responsibility for the enactment.  Playing, whether in game or performance, is unique in its capacities to rearrange features and factors of behavior, to garner license for everyone participating (differing then from performance not only in the kind of activities carried on but in the availability of the play roles to all involved in playing).  What I here (somewhat uncomfortably) call festivities include all those cultural enactments which intensify everyday roles and, in so doing, underline the lineaments and boundaries of the basic social units of the society -- especially family and community.  Here I include festive enactments as far-ranging as parties, picnics, and potlucks, perhaps even vacations. 

These are not as distinct, phenomenologically, as they seem in discussing them with regard to their terminological core-meaning.  In fact, rituals invoke or include festivities, and festivities have rituals.  All enactments imply and potentially call upon other types under the umbrella of license, participation, and intense preparation and interaction.  It is precisely because one type is often found in conjunction with another that we usefully draw upon the terms of one to describe and cast light on the others.  Is there any problem of understanding in calling attention to the ritual (or more usefully, the ritualistic) dimensions of a game, a performance, or a telling of a myth?  However, in the past, because one has been used to describe the others, two (or more) have been regarded not only as symbiotic but synonymous.  (Thus, for instance, are myth and ritual often equated.)

[beginning of page 102] What we have, then, are a set of related and interlocking concepts of enactment, of intensively stylized behaviors put into play in a specific time, place, and on a special occasion, each type providing a set of terms that are usefully employed to describe the others.  Further, the enactments themselves, as productive representative objects or items, may be distinguished from the interactional process by which the enactment is carried out.  The failure to distinguish between enactments brought about through a combination of process-traits and the traits themselves has led to some unavoidable conceptual murkiness.  Thus, there are numerous dimensions of myth (such as their embodiment of values, ideas, archetypical patterns of personal or cosmological development or whatever) which have caused commentators to call all such patterns or group-held ideals myths.  Similarly, there are numerous everyday scenes discussed as rituals or performances or games.  In each case, the scenes exhibit some traits of the enactment event. It would be nice if we could continually distinguish between myth and the mythic, ritual and the ritualistic, but those who use these terms insist on substituting parts for wholes.  In the case of each type of enactment, the ideal of the event remains even while the terms arising from the enactment are employed to describe less intensive interaction.  This is not a weakness, however, except for those who like their native theories clean.  We are able to understand a good deal about the continuities as well as differences between the everyday scene and the extraordinary event precisely because of this looseness and pars pro toto semantic effect.

I will distinguish these ontological realms by talking of pure performance or play-proper, pure festivity or ritual-proper, and so forth, knowing that such experience of these activities record themselves as representative of that class of heightened activities and as a kind of magnetic force by which other less-focussed activities will be affected.  I will talk of both a myth and the mythic, a ritual and ritualization, a performance and performing, recognizing that the pairs are deeply related yet in our experience of them hardly identical.  The first of each pair refers to the kind of heightening of participative potential in an event and its associated products, and ways of [beginning of page 103] experiencing and judging, the second to the process of heightening and significance-making which in an experiential sense culminates in the enactment of the first.  Myth could never exist, obviously, without both renderings of specific texts, as well as the process of the myth-texts or the process of mythicizing; but all elements are equally obviously not myth (though many literary and social critics neglect to make this distinction.)  Similarly, not every activity we want to describe as ritualistic or ritualized is a ritual, a rite.  The difference between them is a matter of the relative “purity” of the events, that is, how much such enactments may be distinguished from the regular stream of life by the exclusiveness of their claims on the attentions and participation of those involved in the event. (16)

In the flow of everyday activities, many “things” go on at the same time; these pure events coordinate these various things in a tensive manner, having them comment on each other through redundancy and reinforcement, or through calculated clamor and confusion.  This is easily seen when a strip of everyday action is put on the stage, for there we register the everyday-ness of that strip and yet do so by breaking the rules of our everyday interaction system, by focusing on the scene in and of itself.  To do this, however, the depicted situation has to be sorted out, disaggregated by severely adhering to the one-person-talking, everyone-else-listening rule of stagecraft (an intensification of the I-talk-you-listen, you-talk-I-listen rule operating in Western talk) or by having a number of characters talking at the same time -- thereby focusing on the unruly dimensions of the activity on stage.  (The same kind of sorting out goes on on-stage with movement as well, though here the coordination and focussing is much more difficult to describe.)

There are, then, a number of ideal or pure kinds of focussed and intensive events each of which comments in some way on the rules and the dynamics of other more spontaneous, casual, or chaotic interaction.  This commentary takes the form of available analogy or metaphor -- that is, we may (and do) usefully describe the components of the scenes in the quotidian realm with terms [beginning of page 104] appropriated from the languages of the pure types of enactment.

What is more, these metaphoric resources apply to our descriptions of other kinds of enactments as well as to the scenes of the everyday.  We use the concepts of game-play to describe and understand more fully what is going on in rites, performances, celebrations, and festivities.  Thus, though each realm of enactment is sui generis, our ways of conceiving and talking about them overlap.  Dramatic performances as a matter of course will reflexively call attention to themselves as significant cultural enactments not only by having plays within plays or by referring to life in terms of “the seven stages of man” but also through discussions of life as parade or pageant, life as a mummery, life as a game, a celebration, a dance, or whatever.  But what literary critics in search of sources as well as resources don’t seem to quite catch is that these analogies don’t make homologies, and that what, say, Shakespeare is doing in his comedies is not writing a new version of a seasonal ritual or a festive mumming, but seeing these enactments, because they invoke the experiences-in-common of the participants (performers and audience alike) as experiential resources to play with.  C. L. Barber’s marvelously imaginative study of Shakespeare and mummery, for instance, misses this point, arguing explicitly that the shaping spirit of the comedies is a translation if not a direct development from clowning and sporty seasonal festivals to stage-plays.  To the contrary, Shakespeare recognized the major generic difference between the stage piece (because it is performed on stage) and the festival dancing dialogue (because, among other characteristics, it played on the ground). (17)

One of the main impediments in developing a theory of enactment has arisen from this overlapping in terminology.  Our language constantly strains to provide names for our experiences, and especially for the patterned vitalities we engage in.  Of course, we are going to draw upon the elements of intensive engagements to help us understand what is taking place.  We will continue, then, to avail ourselves of the language of child’s play to talk about the most serious of adult ceremonials because in doing so we understand and [beginning of page 105] appreciate both more fully.  But we don’t confuse the two by carrying on this dialogue.  Rather, we create a space between the two activities through which we may maneuver heedless of the consequences to either the fragility of the play world or its serious counterpart.

A theory of enactment must describe what is unique about each realm of man’s capacity to coordinate and intensify his behavior.  But it also must demonstrate how such an intensification of life provides a frame of reference by which the less intensive, the more random and spontaneous, may be better understood.  To this end, I will discuss ritual-proper, pure performance, play-itself, and a range of other intensive events (like parties and feasts) that enliven our common existence.  With each I will attempt to describe the characteristics-in-common by contrasting them in some way with other enactments, and by detailing what realms or our quotidian lives are drawn upon.  As part of this process, I will show what the relationship between the ordinary event and the strangely and deeply intensive enactment is, and thus why we continually discuss the everyday in terms of the extraordinary and vice-versa.
 

Performances, Rituals, and other Public Proceedings

Rites evoke the most complex and unpronounceable human motives as a means of celebrating man’s capacities for establishing community and cosmos, for establishing an environment in which the fullest range of motives, the most devious and the most commonsensical, may simultaneously be reenacted and challenged.  But in ritual the individual is subordinated to the group while the social act is linked to the culturally transcendent moment.  In contrast, play (whether in a performance, in a game, or on a festive occasion) occurs in situations in which continuity is not tied to enactment or reenactment or anything whatsoever.  A performance, game, or festivity, like a ritual, involves a heightening of involvement, but in which separable items of the enactment are introduced into the exchange as means through which the special relationships between the participants in the enactment is established, displayed, and celebrated.  Playing draws upon, comments upon, even refracts some dimension [beginning of page 106] of the social system.

Both ritual officers and players capitalize on the already existing languages and occasions, as well as the shared forms, fictions, and values of their community, drawing on the dynamic of the occasion to deploy creative energies.  In doing so, however, they invoke the power of the margins, placing themselves into worlds between worlds.  All who are participating -- whether as initiators of the action, as members of an audience, or as spectators -- are involved in this condition of betwixt and betweenness.  In ritual, the officer simply helps to embody and give a name to a social or natural transition already taking place.  In play, the experience is not so tied down to the moments of transition, though all modes of play do, as ritual, reflect and draw upon,experiences in common, as well as sentiments and values.

I differ from most folklorists and literary critics in viewing rites and play as unique types of interactive experience and modes of experiencing.  They are types of experience in that they both are general terms for a range of specific and situated interactional events.  They invoke unique modes of experiencing, for they involve the active engagement of our form-making abilities, the forms suggested by the type of event as seized upon by the enactors.  Each high-intensity occasion draws upon “an ideal” of the event, a model of how such events should be enacted based on past experiencing of similar events. (18)  But each such event is not an attempt in any total way such a perfection; to the contrary, the event, the units of enactment (including items of performance or games), the performer, all draw upon not only man’s form-making abilities but also his clumsiness.  In this dimension, we engage in a tensive relation to the very orders of our social and existential lives which the performance draws upon in its formal dimension.  Enactment, then, involves both a courtship and an argument, and often simultaneously.  It asks for communion, while it invokes personal and socio-cultural threat.  We love its uncertainty; we give ourselves up to it willingly.  The dangers may be profound, but are obviously not unmanageable.  If these enactments make us dizzy, they also propose a sense of abundant life and personal and social control.

[beginning of page 107] If performance draws upon other events in our social lives, it differs from them qualitatively.  While performance-play is a special kind of interaction, it also provides models for how not to act in other types of interaction -- thus giving us the lineaments of “bad manners” and embarrassing behavior.  This why performance, as opposed to ritual, is best thought of in social, rather than cultural terms.  Both performance and ritual draw on the abrogation of order, but the former will most commonly break social rules in some way, while the latter creates a more cosmic mess.  These very abrogations of order or rules provide some of the most exciting ways of relieving social boredom.  Thus, it is through such totally focussed enactments that we may learn how to selectively invert social norms and practices to advance beyond boredom.  In such a case, stylized enactments have a feedback effect, providing alternative social vocabularies and grammars to be employed in non-performance situations, in supposedly less self-conscious everyday scenes.  Such an alternative propounds an expanding sense of social and expressive openness.  Fortunately for us, there are always those madmen, fools, and visionaries who won’t live by the restriction of social norms, who employ the license attending public enactment of any kind within the scenes of everyday life.  However, the more we define their “character” by their powers to bring about an event of cultural enactment, the more we segregate them, for they are hard to live with.  We must send them to the outskirts of town, into Bedlam, or to the Ivory Tower.

Enactments require that action be framed and notably marked as significant symbolic behavior and be judged as well as understood, interpreted, and reacted to.  Clearly, using the criteria of self-consciousness through drawing on conventions and stylizations, one can point to a continuum in levels of self-consciousness, just as there are degrees of aesthetical judgment.  Any given scene or event may be intensified along such a continuum whenever one or more participants introduce stylization of action and discrete “quotative” items of interaction into the proceedings. (19)  Any scene, even the most casual, can be transformed by the participants, turned into a performance or a game, a ritual or a festive event.  This usually doesn’t happen because we like to prepare for such eventu- [beginning of page 108] alities.  On the other hand, preparations cut into valued spontaneity, even in our most solemn enactments.  Thus, we operate on the fiction that we can break-through into performance or game, even ritual, at any moment in our everyday lives.  This, as I see it, is the motive for those artists who wish to capitalize on the vitality inherent in such spontaneous framing and marking, translating the everyday into the strange and artificial -- those artists concerned  with “found art,” with assemblages, happenings, and guerrilla theater.  This reminds us of Goffman’s useful dictum that all scenes can be distinguished according to their purity, that is according to the exclusiveness of their claim “on participation, active or passive, by all those involved in an enactment.” (20)  But “claims,” or rights, carry obligations; with enactments the obligation to behave yourself, to observe everyday manners, is not fully in force, but ritual, agonistic, aesthetical even celebrative obligations (especially in enlisting participative energies) take their place.  We may, then, refer to the degree of self-consciousness and level of participation in events in our social lives in terms of the relative presence of ritual or performance or play features without judging every such interaction as a performance, a game, or a festivity. 

My approach to the analysis of the more self-consciously stylized and reflexive dimensions of our social lives draws on sociolinguistic and phenomenological strategies of description and presentation.  In receiving scenes or events, we establish our reflexive sense of ‘self,’ and our repertoire of expressive ways of relating to each other and to the world around us.  The social system which arises from this reflexive operation develops scene- or event-types, framed activities in which communication in its broadest sense occurs because those involved carry into the situation patterns of expectation or ideals as to how such scenes ought to develop, and competencies to act appropriately and to judge others’ actions within the scene as framed.  Role is defined predominantly by role-relationships, by conventional interactive patterns.  Role, then, is not a social fact, but is rather a social practice or process. (21)  Interactions are productive of scenes and events, each of which arise from a set of previously internalized patterns of expectation.  These patterns [beginning of page 109] (which I will call schemas and sometimes, pursuing different but always literate analogies, scenarios or scripts, agendas, even recipes) are simply part of our cultural equipment, shared understandings of the dynamic orders by which we live, which we call good manners when noted upon successfully, rudeness or faux pas when not. (22)

All of us regularly experience insights into the workings of the system, of its intricacy, realizing that we learn it so early in our lives that we take the system and the particulars for granted.  Indeed, this process of taking-for-granted is a major part of our system of social judgment; we distrust those who force us to examine our social means and motives, for they challenge our deepest social-cultural sense of community as well as our fiction of spontaneous activity.  We have a general idea of appropriate things to say or do in situations and settings because we have already divided the environment into places in which certain kinds of interactions may take place, just as we categorize people we encounter by how we relate to them.  (I do not mean that this process eliminates the sense of awkwardness in some encounters -- many scenes, in fact, actually encourage, even demand awkwardness, as in “first encounters.”)  A larger number of factors go into the assignment of scene-and-role-type -- including looks, dress, age, past interactions -- but we have a finite set of schemas which assist us in communication.  With this in mind, we enter into encounters in which we assume that others have a similar schematic sense.  In such situations we look for cues from others as to which schema (or schematic set of alternatives) is being called into play.  Even then there is in most scenes an initial sense of uneasiness in which we look for these cues, attempt to align them with what we take in as well as with our moods, and our recognition of our own scene-making or scene-changing capacities.  This malaise becomes all the more intense the more we have prepared for the interaction, coming to a head in the deep dread of boredom and anxiety of conventional enactments.
 

Ritual and Play

This argument draws on the vocabulary of play as one way of understanding the expressive means of culture as it is put into operation casually, even [beginning of page 110] self-consciously.  But common sense tells us there is a difference between everyday playfulness and the special kind of state-of-being called play when we encounter: set-aside times, places, and occasions for the enactment; named role-types for players; traditional items and genres of artificial expression recognizable by all in the group as appropriate to the occasion; participants who understand and expect this special kind of high intensity artificial behavior and who are prepared both to engage (actively or vicariously) in the event and to judge it on its own terms.  But all of these features are characteristic of ritual as well; the difference is that rites take place in sacralized space, an environment uniquely set off from all other places because of the sensing of experience-in-common of transition (whether it be a sickness, a death, a growing up, or a change of state.  Further, in ritual there is: a rendering of transition through an (almost) invariant sequencing of symbolic or “deep” actions, images, and use of objects; expressed in the most self-consciously employed and monitored expressive codes; and ritual “offices” or roles involved in carrying out that experience.

Enactments are events in which roles are assumed and intensified, a reflexive or self referencing sign-system is employed, and license is given to focus the energies of the group by drawing on the most powerful symbols of the group, and by highlighting and selectively inverting the basic (or everyday) orders of the culture.  Ritual-proper involves those enactments in which there is a “stereotyped sequence of activities,” behaviors which are preformulated and precoded, and in which participants are not deeply involved in the process of making expressive choice.  The keying of this preformulation comes not only from the use of the formulaic but from reflexive devices which create a mirror-complex within the enactment -- that is, a self-conscious means of acknowledging and reminding each other that something special is taking place, and a naming of what that special activity is.  Play, on the other hand, would concern enactments in which choice is made and the sequence of action, if not invented on the spot, is subject to constant revision or recombination by the players, whether in control of the aesthetic, agonistic, or festive event.

[beginning of page 111] We judge the success of each type of enactment in different terms.  The dimension of judgment may be entirely absent in rituals except with regard to the relative success of the event; judgment is based on how well the occasion brings about a meaningful participation or coordination of energies.  In all types of play, we focus on both the orders of the material of the enactment, and how effectively the energies of the participants are engaged.  (In the case of the sophisticated performance arts, aesthetic attention is then divided between the author, playwright, or composer on the one hand and virtuoso performers on the other.)  In ritual, there is some question whether this kind of judgment is involved; the onlooker-participant (with the exception of folklorist or anthropologist) is not so much concerned with the effects of the enactment as with its efficacy.  A rite is liable to be judged only by the presence of the approved movements and paraphernalia in the right order.  Though all types of enactments bring focus and intensive motives of everyday experience and therefore permit a build-up of significant meanings and participative energies, ritual does so in the service of elan vital itself while performances, games, and festivities serve the individual players (and audience) directly with regard to a heightening of a secular situation.

There are, then, different ways in which we interpret the place of the individual as role-player in ritual and play; in the first we regard him as a representative of the community.  For this reason neither “role” nor “player” seem appropriate terms in ritual enactments, though they may call for the wearing of masks and a taking on of characteristics significantly different from everyday attributes.  In performances we focus on the abilities of players and the occasion to elicit participation.  This means that in describing performance or any other kind of play, we must attend to how much innovation is invited, permitted, or demanded of the participants, how “fixed” or “free” are the forms, and how sequenced the units of activity.

I am not arguing, however, that ritual occasions are totally closed simply because they involve a fixed sequence of acts.  On the contrary, there are certain ritual occasions and events in [beginning of page 112] which some kind of inversion is called for, an inversion that opens up the very formal restrictions seemingly implied by the fixity of the sequencing and role-relationships within the ritual system.  In fact, in all enactments one dimension we constantly attend to because of its intensive character is the commingling of the serious and the ludic motives, of the fixedly sequential with the willfully inverse, indeed, perverse.  But even when such inversion operates, it is often carried out in a fixed and obligatory manner. We come to know the orders of the world very well even as they are parodied and upended.

Another important contrast between ritual and play relates to the expected effect on the participants.  As Barth notes of rituals, they are beyond rhetoric insofar as they do as well as say something.  That is, they do not assert or argue, suggest, demand, or entreat; rather they do what they say they are doing while the enactment is in progress. (23)  They thus include such speech acts as “I do” in marriage, “Bless this house,” and so on.  They do not, then, just communicate messages, but enact experiences while commenting upon the enactment.  This performative aspect of rituals (to use J. L. Austin’s term), in fact, is also focussed on by Roy Rappoport as a salient feature of the ritual experience: “...there is a special relationship between ritual and performativeness, ...the formal characteristics of ritual enhance the chances of success of the performatives they include...  Ritual ensures the correctness of the performative enactment; it also makes them... explicit... and it generally makes them weighty as well.” (24)   The dimension of performativeness is, in fact, a useful means of getting at the special character of rites as enactments, which engineer and give a name to significant social scenes, especially those formalizing an act of exchange or transformation.  Performatives operate effectively within ritualized contexts -- or at least within a system which rests on the complex of beliefs most fully enacted by rituals, including, of course, the ritualized places in social relations.  (Austin calls this social dimension illocutionary.)

Is it not precisely this possibility of real social exchange transformation that is, because [beginning of page 113] of the function of license, absent in play?  To be sure, performatives operate in the world of game-playing (“Tag -- you’re it!”), as well as onstage; but the players are far from socially transformed by this move.  Here the paradox of acting or “making fun” takes over, for with the creation of a play world, the participants are, by convention, not held responsible for their action, nor are the activities fully regarded as real.  Transformation does take place in play; whether onstage or on the playing field, indeed metamorphosis becomes almost a necessary condition of such activity.  But these transformations occur only within these play worlds.  Among other things, this means that the “lesson”  of the transformation comes to be separated from the metamorphosis itself; any learning, then, is carried on through vicarious means.

Let me reiterate some of these points of comparison:

1)
Play:  Optation of involvement (for both player and audience for spectators).
Ritual:  Obligatory involvement (of both ritual officers and community).

2)
Play:  Relative openness of form and interaction. 
Ritual:  Relative fixity of sequence and relationship.

3)
Play:  Performatives operate only within playing time and space; transformations are therefore limited to the playing situations. 
Ritual:  Performatives operate in socio-cultural sphere outside the confines of ritual time and space; transformations are registered socio-culturally. 

4)
Play:  Role-player is both himself and not himself while playing. 
Ritual:  Officer is either more intensely himself (ceremonially) or beyond himself as a representative of the community (even when masking).
 

There are a number of factors of play and ritual, then, which can be better understood through a comparison relating to the relative obligatory and fixed-sequence character of ritual [beginning of page 114] on the one hand and the openness and sense of optionally entered into activities characterizing play.  But there are, as noted, different play “worlds” again characterizable not only by the different socio-cultural situations (time, place, occasion) but also by the strange vocabularies of motives and syntax of movement, the underlying generic patterns of expectation brought to the occasion by the participants, and especially, the raison d’etre for the events.  Thus, not only do we have a few instances in which an instance of a play event is not clearly either game-play, performance-play, or festive-play.  For each involves an intensification of everyday scenes, and a relative emphasis on life-sustaining motives which differs from the others.  Performances have a strong aesthetic focus in which we agree to attend to dramatic and stylistic matters.  Similarly, in a game, contest, or sporting event we focus primarily on the agonistic or contest element; features of style and sentiment are only secondarily meaningful.  In festivities, in fact, induced dizziness (brought about by an excess of drink or food) contrasts with the intensifying of everyday roles, giving most of these events a sense of communal celebration.  Each kind of playing dwells on a limited range of everyday situations, intensifying them in some dimensions, and selectively and conventionally disrupting the expectations of the everyday (through the licensing-power of play).  Thus each kind of playing seems to demand not only its own mode of play, but its singular range of confusions, disruptions, and attendant embarrassments, its own ways of creating flow (or some other kind of altered state of consciousness); and when successful, each will have a unique sense of togetherness in both experience itself and in the ways in which we interpret it.

Once having insisted on the significant differences in these domains of play and ritual, it seems useful to look at how they are related to the less intensive scenes and acts of the everyday.  When we refer to something like “interaction ritual,” I think we are focussing on the sequencing of behavior in specific recurrent scenes, as such behavior gravitates toward invariance and predictability.  Then we must distinguish between overt and covert ritual, for on some social occa- [beginning of page 115] sions this invariance is a marked feature of the decorum-system of the event, while on others (such as conversational scenes) this marking is eliminated, bracketed out by convention.  Describing such scenes in the terms of the larger predictable and socially obligatory events enables us to understand more fully how both compulsory and compulsive behavior and deep habits (like the body rituals of the Nacirema) might also be described in ritualistic terms; they too are non-optational as well as fixed in form -- though in obviously different ways than social ceremonies or rites of passage.

We use performance to describe many of the same features of everyday scenes and interactions.  But in such cases, we seem to refer to such patterning of activity as emanating from individuals, especially ones pursuing a “line” or engaging in a “routine.”  Thus, in describing everyday scenes as well as self-consciously stylized ones, “ritual” and “ritualistic” refers in the main to the ceremonial and predetermined dimension of the patterning, while “performance” and “performer” is employed primarily with regard to the improvisational factors operating in employing these routines, patterned behavior then which is available to those engaged in the task of managing their own identities.  This distinction may simply be an extension of Victor Turner’s arguments concerning liminal and liminoid experiences -- the former being that state of betweenness attendant upon obligatory enactments, and the latter being a threshold experience entered into optionally.  Liminoid experiences are the in-between states arising in play domains after society has already developed a distinction between work and play (or leisure).

It is in the everyday acts, I think, that intense enactments find their greatest fund of energies and shared values -- in the use of scenes and expectations from one domain of life as they are reframed, inverted, and reenacted within another more self-conscious and openly reflexive realm.  This domain may be regarded as a “play world” but it shares high seriousness with the manners and other systems by which we engage in life.  And it draws upon these orders, whether in performance or ritual, if only to abrogate them, [beginning of page 116] thus creating an energy source and a common means of focussing these energies. 

The paradox of enactments, then, is that they both epitomize and transcend the everyday.  Transcendence in ritual involves a social leveling, for in communitas, the surge of shared energies and the sensing of values in the commodity of the experience permits a sensing of alteration to the particularized and often stratified social world.  Performance continues to draw on this leveling and sharing process on the part, at least, of the audience or the followers.  But for the players themselves, an individual transcendence occurs at times in which something like the experience, that, Turner, following Czikszentmihalyi, calls flow: the holistic sensation present when we act with total involvement, “...a state in which action follows action according to an internal logic which seems to need no conscious intervention on our part...  We experience it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which we feel in control of our actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment; between stimulus and response; or between past, present, and future.” (25)  Whether or not onlookers may undergo a similar (if vicariously induced) state is problematic -- though transport in response to a specific virtuoso performance is often reported.  And furthermore, this transcendence seems to run counter to the self-consciousness attending enactments by participants and viewers alike.

Certainly, the introduction of the concepts of the performative and the indexical in enactments introduces a critical means by which we may more usefully understand the ontological differences between high intensity enactments and events of the everyday.  For the performative characteristic of enactments calls attention to the deepest kind of self-conscious (or reflexive) dimension of the activity, the dimension which demands of all of those involved that they observe and react together.  Yet this experience, which makes us more conscious of the experiential “self” (of both ourselves and our co-participants) is the very mechanism by which we are most fully able to go beyond ourselves, indeed to “forget ourselves,” to incorporate ourselves to some degree into the universe of the experience.  However, the heightening of [beginning of page 117] involvement, as well the qualities of the worlds we become part of, differ greatly between ritual and performance both because the former is obligatory, the latter optional, and because the former conveys us into an infinite cosmologically significant realm, the latter into domains which are always delimited simply because they are regarded as play.  We have often confused the two, especially in our progressively secularized world; but the aesthetic response, though it may in some dimension contribute to the transcendent experience of ritual-proper in, say, a church service, is never its primary modality for achieving communitas nor its desired end in asserting cosmological order.

In pursuing such distinctions, we must be reminded of where we began.  There is a relationship, perilously maintained under constant surveillance, between the scenes of everyday interactions and these larger and more transcendent enactments.  Reality itself, when looked on in this way, appears to be layered, made up of different levels of intensity and focus of interaction and participation.  A very precious commodity is being negotiated after all, one which is remarkably vital and which, in fact, we might call our socio-cultural vitality.  For it in these states of ritual or performance, festive or play enactments, that in many ways we are most fully ourselves, both as individuals and as members of our communities.  That’s something to celebrate.

[beginning of page 118]
 

References

(1)  M. Polany and H. Prosch, Meaning (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1975), pp. 117-8. 

(2)  P. Oliver, Conversations with the Blues (Heinemann, London, 1965), p. 164.

(3)  ibid., pp. 164-5. 

(4)  R. D. Abrahams, Deep Down in the Jungle (Aldine Publishers, Chicago, 1970); and Talking Black (Newbury House, 1976).  Also: Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out, Thomas Kochman, ed., University of Illinois Press, Champaign, 1972). 

(5)  The term comes from the Russian formulists’ ostranenyi and seems to have been coined by Slovskij, who argued that the poetic image differed from informative prose by making strange the everyday by putting it in an unusual background or context, thus making “a sui generis semantic shift.” 

(6)  E. M. Albert, “Culture Patterning of Speech Behavior in Burundi,” in Directions in Socio-linguistics: The Ethnography of Communication, J. Gumpers and D. Hymes, eds. (Holt, Rinehart, Winston, New York, 1972), p. 79. 

(7)  H. G. Gadamer, Philosophical Hermeneutics (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1976), p. 32. 

(8)  D. Berger and T. Luckman, The Social Construction of Reality  (Doubleday, New York), p. 25. 

(9)  A. Schutz, On Phenomenology and Social Relations, H. R. Wagner, ed. (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1970), pp. 253-56.
Schutz designates the form and the experience as relating to work, though in no way makes a necessary or even sufficient condition of paramount reality.  This distinction therefore seems to arise more from the Protestant Ethic’s contrast of work and seriousness from play, than from any ontological apprehension [beginning of page 119] of difference. 

(10)  C. Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture (Basic Books, New York, 1973), pp. 452-3.

(11)  ibid., p. 29. 

(12)  K. Burke, Counterstatement (University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1968), p. 143. 

(13)  M. Sahlins, Culture and Practical Reason (University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1976). 

(14)  R. Sipes, “War, Sports and Aggression; An Empirical Test of Two Rival Theories,” American Anthropologist 75 (1973). 

(15)  Burke, ibid., p. 124. 

(16)  E. Goffman, Frame Analysis (Harper and Row, New York, 1974), p. 125. 

(17)  C. L. Barber, Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy (Meridian Books, Cleveland and New York, 1963). 

(18)  R. Kellogg, “Oral Literature,” New Literary History 5 (1973), pp. 55-66. 

(19)  Here I use “quotative” to refer to any foregrounded unit of activity which draws attention to itself as not being the words (or actions) of the speaker in some dimension.  I mean by this not only quotations from the speaking of others, present or not, but also proverbs and any other traditional gnomic device. 

(20) Goffman, ibid. 

(21)  By emphasizing the processual character of role-taking -- and, by extension, typing -- I attempt to derive a commonsense social structure as an activity.  But on an equally commonsense level, we do have mechanisms, such as stereotyping, by which we ourselves attempt to stabilize the social structure --  that is, make it into an is, a social fact.  Thus the formulaic argument that “Society [beginning of page 120] will always stratify, therefore...” 

(22)  The distinction between the abstracted patterns of experience and actual scenes parallels that made by Saussure between langue (language system) and parole (talk). 

(23)  F. Barth, Ritual and Knowledge Among the Baktaman of New Guinea (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1975), p. 109. 

(24)  R. Rappaport, “Obvious Aspects of Ritual,” Cambridge Anthropology 2 (1974), pp. 27-28. 

(25)  V. W. Turner, “Liminality, Play, Flow and Ritual: An Essay in Comparative Symbology,” in The Anthropological Study of Human Play, E. Norbeck, ed. (Rice University Studies, Houston) 60, 3 (1974), pp. 53-90.