Rethinking History

Vol. 9, No. 1, March 2005, pp. 35 52

Performing History: The

Importance of Occasions
Peter Burke

This article identifies what it calls a performative turn in historical studies,

as in the humanities more generally. It traces the rise of the notion of
performance out of the dramaturgical model of the 1940s and 1950s
(associated with Kenneth Burke, Erving Goffman and Victor Turner),
linking the new idea (developed by John Austin, for instance, and Pierre
Bourdieu) to the rise of postmodernity. Turning to historical studies, the
article analyses the role played by the concept of performance in recent
studies of ritual, festivals, identity, gender, and even emotions, architecture
and knowledge, noting the shift from the assumption of social or cultural
fixity to that of fluidity, from scripts to improvisations, from mentalities to
the habitus. The new approach has generated problems, notably the overreaction against the idea of social constraints, the danger of circularity and
the over-extension of the central notion of performance. A stronger and a
weaker sense of performance need to be distinguished. Despite these
problems, the performative approach has foregrounded important and
neglected issues, notably that of differences between cultural or social
domains. The article concludes by considering the methodological consequences of the approach, in particular its implications for source criticism
and historical explanation.
Keywords: Occasion; Performance; Situation; Historical method; Drama
analogy; Theatre model
Today, we are witnessing what might be called a performative turn in
historical studies, as in cultural studiesalongside so many other turns,
linguistic, cultural, visual and so on. To be more exact, the idea of culture
as performance developed out of an older idea of society as theatre, but has
gradually diverged from it. This article will trace the history of the
ISSN 1364-2529 (print)/ISSN 1470-1154 (online) 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/1364252042000329241

36 P. Burke
performative turn, link it to a quiet revolution in the practice of some
historians and social scientists, and comment on its strengths and
weaknesses.
Most obvious in linguistics, sociology, anthropology, the trend has
become visible in one domain or discipline after another (Barwise and
Perry 1983; Meyrowitz 1985, pp. 23 34; Mitchell 1987). However, as often
happens in the history of knowledge, scholars who have been pioneering in
one field are often unaware of parallel innovations elsewhere. Hence the
revolution does not seem to have received the general discussion it surely
deserves. It does not even have a name.
The obvious term, situationism, has already been employed in a very
different context, that of the Situationist International. Contextualism,
another possibility, has the disadvantage of suggesting a focus on the
interpretation of texts rather than of actions. Hence to christen this trend I
propose to adopt and adapt a philosophical term that was originally used
by Kant to refer to followers of Descartes: occasionalism. The basic point
is that on different occasions (moments, locales) or in different situations
(in the presence of different people) the same person behaves in different
ways. The point may appear banal but its implications have not yet been
explored by historians in the detail that they deserve.
The Dramaturgical Model
In the humanities and social sciences, the dramaturgical model has been in
regular use for more than half a century. In the 1940s the literary scholar
Kenneth Burke was already expounding what he called the dramatistic
approach (Burke 1945). In the 1950s, the French anthropologist Michel
Leiris discussed theatrical aspects of possession by spirits, the Englishman
Victor Turner launched his idea of social drama, and the American Erving
Goffman presented his dramaturgical approach to everyday life (Goffman
1959; Leiris 1958; Turner 1957). It was also at this time, in his Oxford
lectures, that the English philosopher John Austin put forward his idea of
performative utterances, words which make things happen, from
launching ships to declaring independence. Since Austins day a number
of philosophers have refined and developed this idea (Butler 1997).
The dramaturgical model has spread to many intellectual fields or
disciplines. Politics, for example, is viewed increasingly as a form of
symbolic action, as spectacle or as the performance of power (Edelman
1971; Soeffner and Tanzler 2002). Linguists as well as philosophers use the
vocabulary of speech acts to emphasize that language createsor
destroysclass or ethnic or gender identities (Le Page and Tabouret-

Rethinking History 37
Keller 1985; Butler 1997). In anthropology, Clifford Geertz, who has
acknowledged his debt to Burke, first discussed the Balinese cockfight as
drama, and then turned to what he called the theatre state (Geertz 1973,
1980).
Intellectual historians have found the dramaturgical model appealing.
Hayden White introduced the concept of emplotment into historiography, suggesting thatconsciously or unconsciouslyleading nineteenthcentury historians were thinking of their narratives as dramas, whether
tragic or comic (White 1973). Quentin Skinner, following Austin and the
American philosopher John Searle, began to view the history of political
thought as the study of speech acts (Skinner 1978).
Historians of culture and society moved in the same direction. Michel de
Certeau, for instance, wrote of the possession of the nuns of Loudun by
devils as spectacle, le theatre des possedees (Certeau 1970, pp. 9, 129
160). In similar fashion, Michel Foucault wrote of executions as a theatre
of terror (Foucault 1975, pp. 9 72, at p. 53). Across the Channel, Douglas
Hay, developing Edward Thompsons notion of the theatre of Tyburn,
wrote of managing hangings, arranging backstage the precise moment of
the emotional climax (Hay 1975, p. 52). Riots too were analysed in this
way, from the rites of violence in the French religious wars to a lynching in
the American South described as a drama or moral scenario (Davis 1975;
Wyatt Brown 1982). Historians of art, especially students of portraits, have
found the ideas of Goffman on self-presentation to be of use in their work
(Smith 1986; Burke 1987).
However, in the past thirty years or so (so far as anthropology is
concerned) or the past twenty (in the case of history), a gradual, subtle,
collective shift has occurred in the use of the dramaturgical model. One of
the most obvious signs of the shift is the increasing popularity of the term
performance.
From Drama to Performance
Although Austins concern with performative utterances goes back to the
1950s, a collective interdisciplinary turn only became visible in the 1970s,
when a few anthropologists and folklorists began using the term
performance in their analyses of gossip and ritual, in some cases inspired
by Austins work (Abrahams 1970; Ray 1973).
The broad range of meaning of the term performance encouraged its
spread across the disciplines. For linguists such as Noam Chomsky, who
replaced Ferdinand de Saussures distinction between langue and parole
with one between linguistic competence and performance, as for music

38 P. Burke
critics and psychologists studying learning processes, the term is linked to
evaluation. Their notion is not far removed from that of the economists
who attempt to measure the performance of certain industries or even that
of the engineers who test the performance of ships, cars or aircraft.
On the other hand, the members of the departments of Performance
Studies in American universities that burgeoned in the 1980s were
interested in performance in a more theatrical sense. They attempted to
break down traditional distinctions between art and life, for example, by
discussing the demonstrations of Argentine mothers on the Plaza de Mayo,
or even the Dirty War of 1976 to 83 as a kind of drama (Taylor 1994). In
this respect their concerns run parallel to those of historians and
anthropologists (notably Victor Turner, who had a strong interest in the
theatre).
It would of course be a mistake to present the interdisciplinary
breakthrough into performance as if the aims of all its practitioners were
identical. Folklorists and musicologists, for instance, wish to shift their
emphasis from texts to communicative events, their context and their
reception (Hymes 1971, 1975; Fulcher 2000). Historians of political
thought, on the other hand, are attracted by the vision of their texts as
themselves a kind of action (Skinner 1971, 1978). The turn to performance
is perceived in each academic discipline as a solution to its own internal
problems.
All the same, there are common concerns, a convergence revealed by
some of the definitions offered by participants in the movement. Dell
Hymes, whose interests straddle anthropology, folklore and linguistics,
defines performance as cultural behaviour for which a person assumes
responsibility to an audience (Hymes 1975, p. 18). Diana Taylor, who
works on theatre, insists that performance is not opposed to reality but
rather suggests a carrying through, actualizing, making something happen
(Taylor 1994, p. 276).
The performance movement is also unified by the common use of a few
key texts. As a participant from the 1970s onwards, I can testify to the
impact on my own thinking of the work of Goffman, Geertz, Turner, and
also that of Pierre Bourdieu (who will be discussed below). Future
historians will need to ask why texts such as these (or those of John Austin
and Kenneth Burke) had such an appeal across the disciplines in the late
twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The cultural context for the
performative turn is surely the rise of postmodernity.
The term postmodernity is used here to refer not to a philosophical or
literary movement (better described as postmodernism), but to a more
diffuse sense of fragility or fluidity (liquid modernity, in the vivid phrase

Rethinking History 39
of Zygmunt Bauman). This sense of fluidity goes with a sense of freedom
from social determinism or even social constraints, expressed in academic
language as the invention of traditions, the construction of culture or the
politics of identity. In everyday language, this sense of freedom takes the
form of a new emphasis on doing (from doing drugs to doing lunch).
History as Performance
As so often in the history of history, the changing problems of the present
are encouraging historians to try out new approaches to the past.
The obvious question at this point is, What is supposed to be performed?
Historians have been studying the performance of rituals, gender, nobility,
memory and knowledge. Political historians have examined the performance of liberalism (Joyce 2003). Historians of science have analysed
experiments, debates and lectures as so many kinds of performance
(Biagioli 1993; Rauch 2003).
Historicizing Austin, scholars have studied certain kinds of performative
utterance in considerable detail, notably insults, words that wound. The rise
of a considerable secondary literature on insults, which would once have
been dismissed as unworthy of historical attention, reveals a turn towards
an interest in performance as well as in everyday life in general. Some
studies interpret these ritualized aggressive gestures as demonstrations of
masculinity as well as attempts to destroy the honour of the victim (Burke
1987c; Cohen 1992). Others discuss female performances in this domain
(Gowing 1996). The social history of language has also been extended to
courtroom performances (St George 2000).
The study of rituals and festivals has boomed, partly as a result of the
performative turn. Some of these events have been interpreted as
performances of consensus, as in the case of the coronation of Queen
Elizabeth II, others as performances of national loyalty, as in a study of the
festive state in Venezuela, or as performances of memory, in the case of
Orange Order parades in Northern Ireland (Guss 2000; Jarman 1997, pp.
1 21; McIntosh 1999, pp. 103 143). A study of processions in eighteenthcentury Montpellier emphasizes what might be called the performance of
hierarchy (Darnton 1984, pp. 107 144).
The notion of performance anxiety has been introduced into a
discussion of a Renaissance court (Cashman 2002). A recurrent and
revealing new phrase in studies of ritualized behaviour is the performance
of metaphor (Fernandez 1977). The enactment of metaphors of purity,
from ethnic cleansing to political purges, makes an obvious and all-toofamiliar example.

40 P. Burke
However, the concept of performance has been extended well beyond
these obvious examples. The history of identities in particular has been
studied in this way. A study of thirteenth-century Iceland, for instance,
discusses honour as something to be performed (Bauman 1986, pp. 131
150). A study of literature in early modern Europe focuses on the
performance of nobility (Posner 1999). In similar fashion, recent sociological and historical studies have spoken of the performance of ethnicity,
paying particular attention to the negotiation of identity and to attempts at
passing (Sollors 1989; Lesser 1999; Sanchez and Schlossberg 2001).
It is in this context that we should place some recent studies of impostors
such as George Psalmanazar and William Morrell, who have become an
object of interest today essentially because their unusual careers reveal
something of the rules of performance that were dominant in certain places
and times (Swiderski 1991; Hug 2003).
Other studies treat gender as something to be performed (Butler 1990;
Ditz 1994). An ethnography of a village in Crete makes the point with
unusual clarity, not to say drama, describing the local coffeehouse as a stage
for the daily performance of masculinity through ritualized aggression
(Herzfeld 1985). Again, the wearing of veils by Muslim women used to be
interpreted by Western anthropologists as the following of a fixed rule, but
it is now seen by some as both voluntary and situational (Abu-Lughod
1986, p. 159).
Emotions too are viewed increasingly as being performed. Theatrical
metaphors pervade recent discussions of emotions; the emotional
repertoire, for instance, the emotional scripts available in a given culture,
and the emotional scenarios, in other words associations between
particular situations and particular emotions. Drawing on the work of
Austin and on anthropologists inspired by him, the language of emotions
has recently been discussed in terms of performance by a number of
scholars (Wierzbicka 1999; Bound 2000; Reddy 2001, pp. 51, 59, 96 111).
A declaration of love, for instance, has been interpreted not as an
expression of a feeling but rather as a strategy to encourage, amplify or even
transform the feelings of the beloved.
The term performance has even been applied to architecture,
developing an older idea of buildings or squares as stages. In the time of
Pope Alexander VII, who commissioned the construction of St Peters
Square in Rome, the square was described as a theatre. The idea of
performance seems more appropriate here than in the case of painting or
sculpture because architecture is a collective art in which the design is a
script that allows for improvisation on the part of the craftsmen
(Krautheimer 1985, pp. 4 6; Heuer 2004).

Rethinking History 41
In short, we see an increasing emphasis on the performance of culture, or
a view of culture as a series of performances.
From Fixity to Fluidity
What is the significance of the rise of the concept of performance? It reveals
a re-interpretation of the old dramaturgical model. Instead of drawing
analogies between society and the theatre, the new approach dissolves the
boundaries between them. Views of the nature of drama have changed. The
notion of a fixed cultural script is on its way out, to be replaced by the idea
of improvisation or, better, semi-improvisation. No wonder then that
dance history, once left to the musicologists, is now taken seriously by
historians as well (Braun and Gugerli 1993; Tardif 2002), as is the history of
conversation (Burke 1993).
One of the chief initiators of the change in approachalthough he rarely
if ever used the term performancewas the late Pierre Bourdieu. Trained
in philosophy, Bourdieu was one of the first Frenchmen to take seriously
the ideas of Austin on performative utterances, to which he gave a
sociological twist in a little book on the symbolic power of language
(Bourdieu 1993; for a critique, see Butler 1999). His notion of symbolic
violence is also linked to the idea of performance. Still more important,
Bourdieu introduced his central concept of the habitus, the principle of
regulated improvisation, in a reaction against the structuralist notion of
culture as a system of rules, a notion he had come to regard as too rigid
(Bourdieu 1972).
Ritual and festivals are now being approached in a more open way. Older
studies of rituals and festivals often assumed that they followed scripts,
literally as well as metaphorically (descriptions of festivals were often
published at the time of the event, whether they were intended as
programmes or as souvenirs). By contrast, recent anthropological studies of
ritual emphasize that performance is never mere enactment or expression,
but has an active role to play (Kapferer 1983, p. 7; cf. Geertz 1980, p. 104).
We see a shift from the study of ritual as a separate category of human
action to the examination of all human behaviour as more or less
ritualized (Bell 1992; Humphrey and Laidlaw 1994).
Scholars increasingly prefer to stress the multiplicity and even the
conflict of the meanings of a given festival, a religious feast, in South
America, for instance, that may evoke Catholic associations for some
participants but traditional African religious associations for others (Guss
2000, p. 7). What used to be treated as the same ritual is now regarded as
varying significantly on each new occasion of performance.

42 P. Burke
Hence the increasing emphasis on the part of historians on what went
wrong, what misfired, as Austin used to say. Of course, if meanings are
unstable and contested, if there is no correct interpretation, terms such as
wrong, misfire or even misunderstand become inappropriate. However,
they can be reformulated in terms of divergences from tradition, from the
official point of view, from the intentions of the organizers of a particular
ritual and so on. The strategy of studying the gap between script and
practice remains a valuable one.
A vivid example of the trend comes from a study of executions that
criticizes both Foucault and Hay for their emphasis on judicial
dramaturgy, the view from above. In contrast, the author focuses on the
reactions of the crowd and the unexpected turns which produced a
theatre of far greater fluidity (Laqueur 1989, p. 309). In similar fashion,
some studies of processions have noted how people might come to blows
on the most solemn occasions because they held incompatible views of their
place in the community, each one claiming that he or she had precedence
over the other (Kettering 1978, esp. ch. 1).
In the case of performance in everyday life, one focus of attention has
been the expression of attitudes which the performer does not really hold or
feel. Thus displays of submission to masters by slaves and to the English
middle class by members of the working class have been interpreted as
performances, as exaggeration, as putting on (Genovese 1974, pp. 609
612; Bailey 1978). As for the masters, If subordination requires a credible
performance of humility and deference, so domination seems to require a
credible performance of haughtiness and mastery (Scott 1990, p. 11).
Problems Arising
The shock value of the performative turn, at least in some instances,
deserves to be stressed. The idea of deference as performance is both
disturbing and perceptive. The idea of emotions as theatre is scandalous
and penetrating at the same time. The idea of violence as performance is
even more shocking, since real blood flows, but it is surely illuminating
nevertheless, in the case of the terrorism of our time as much asor even
more thanin earlier riots or pogroms.
Problems remain, and it may be useful to point to at least three of them.
In the first place, the postmodern reaction against social determinism is
in danger of going too far and denying the cultural or institutional
constraints on effective performances. After all, some people have been
unsuccessful in their attempts to pass for noble, white, male or whatever.
The construction of individual or collective identities is not the work of

Rethinking History 43
insiders alone, performing the persons they wish to be, but of other social
groups as well, including hostile ones. For example, anti-Semites have
contributed to the formation of Jewish identity (Gilman 1986).
Bourdieu was well aware of the importance of social constraints. For
example, he stressed the need for collective recognition to make
performative utterances work. Some discussions of invention and
performance, by contrast, appear to take their efficacy for granted.
Ironically enough, this is to deny the importance of occasions, which may
be unfavourable to different types of performance, or produce consequences that the performers never intended.
In the second place, there is the danger of over-extending the idea of
performance. A recent important book on the rituals of the Russian tsars
constantly uses the term scenario, distinguishing the scenarios of
domesticity, dynasty, enlightenment, friendship, happiness, reform and so
on, all of them viewed as the individual modes of performance of the
imperial myth (Wortman 1995, p. 6 and passim). It is surely necessary to
ask what in social life does not count as a scenario or a performance. The
problem is analogous to that of the concept culture. So much is now
described as culture that the term is in danger of losing its meaning
altogether.
In the third place, there is a danger of circularity and of taking
stereotypes for reality. Primed by Goffman, despite the fact that his theory
is ahistorical, a number of historians of the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries in particular have been impressed by the many metaphors of
theatricality to be found in their sources. The idea of the world as a stage
was a commonplace in the work of Renaissance playwrights from
Shakespeare to Vondel. The fit between sources and concepts is a good
one but it may actually be too good, in the sense that it encourages
historians to accept uncritically the views of themselves that were expressed
by contemporaries.
A way to avoid these problems may be to distinguish two senses of
performance, even if they are two ends of a spectrum rather than two
distinct categories. In the stronger sense of the term, performance refers to
formal rituals and festivals, framed events that are deliberately set apart
from everyday life. When it is employed to refer to the informal scenarios of
everyday life, on the other hand, the concept is being used in a weaker
sense. The contrast between the two kinds of performance is partly
disguised by the ambiguity of the recurrent term actor to refer to the
protagonist of either an action or a play.
Again, distinctions need to be made between the different uses and
meanings of terms such as script or scenario in different types of

44 P. Burke
situationa ritual, a display of emotion, and so on. We surely need to
recognize variations between different genres of performance (Kapchan
1995), whether or not the differences were recognized by participants (an
important matter for empirical investigation in each case).
The Rise of Occasionalism
Despite these problems, the concept of performance has the advantage of
raising important issues that historians have not yet discussed often
enough. The main point to emphasize is the fact that the same people
behave in different ways, whether consciously or unconsciously, according
to the occasion, situation or, as linguists often say, the domain in which
they find themselvespublic or private, religious or secular, formal or
informal. Examples from five domains may be sufficient to develop and
illustrate this point: language, art, writing, time and religion.
1.

2.

3.

Sociolinguists have long been concerned with what they call codeswitching and diglossia, in other words, sudden shifts between one
language or one variety of language and another (Ferguson 1959).
More recently, historians of language have begun to do the same
(Burke 1987b, pp. 6 8). A recent study of the social history of Catalan
rejects the traditional argument that Catalonia was simply castilianized in the early modern period. Complicating the conventional
story, the author speaks of the diglossia of Catalans who were
bilingual, and who used Castilian on certain occasions and for certain
purposes (Marfany 2001).
Art historians have been coming to think of style in relation to
occasions as well as periods or individuals. As one of them has
remarked, artists used different languages in different situations
(Marias 1989). Students of the Renaissance, for instance, have noted
shifts from Gothic to classicaland backin the work of sculptors
such as Veit Stoss or Tilman Riemenschneider, according to the
demands of either the genre or the patron (Kaufmann 1995). Again, in
a pioneering study of baroque art, the late Francis Haskell pointed out
that a seventeenth-century Sicilian patron, Antonio Ruffo of Messina,
asked both Rembrandt and Guercino to paint works in their early
styles (Haskell 1963, pp. 209 210). Where their predecessors saw
stylistic evolution as part of personal development (le style, cest
lhomme), art historians now see code-switching.
Writing is often associated with particular situations or occasions.
Today, we tend to think of handwriting as the expression of the

Rethinking History 45

4.

5.

individual personality or the culture of a social group. However, it has

been argued that in sixteenth-century France, for instance, the
handwriting of the same person varied in style according to the
occasion (Michaud 1967, p. 308). Styles of handwritingcourt hand,
secretary hand, merchant hand and so onwere associated with
particular functions such as keeping accounts or writing letters to
friends. Whether the ability to write ones name was used at all also
depends on the occasion, as a recent study of literacy in early modern
Hungary has demonstrated. Some men who were able to sign their
names made a cross in the marriage register, probably in order not to
embarrass their brides, who were illiterate (Toth 2000, pp. 61, 69, 106).
The social history of time is currently being reinterpreted along similar
lines. Where earlier scholars had noted that the perception and
experience of time varies in different cultures or in different social
groups (peasants, merchants and so on), a few historians, anthropologists and sociologists have recently turned to describing different
temporalities in an individual life, in different domains such as work
and leisure. Thus a recent study of Trinidad distinguishes multiple
routines for different activities such as work, school, the home and so
on, and redefines punctuality to mean arriving at an appropriate
moment for a given activity. Each time has its own form of
punctuality (Birth 1999, p. 141; cf. Burke 2004).
The last domain to be discussed here is that of religion. A generation
ago, Clifford Geertz argued that individuals move more or less easily
and very frequently between radically contrasting ways of looking at
the world (Geertz 1973, p. 120). At the time the idea seemed
disturbing, but now it is widely accepted. Since then, historians of
religion, particularly historians of missions, have gradually abandoned the idea that missionaries simply converted people from one
religion to another. Some historians now speak in terms of
syncretism or hybridity, while others place more emphasis on
pluralism, in other words the practice of worshipping different gods
on different occasions, such as the Brazilians who go to Mass on one
day and to candomble on another, who honour the Virgin Mary and
also her African equivalent, Iemenja. In similar fashion, historians of
medicine have noted the pragmatic pluralism of sick people who seek
a cure from different kinds of healer professing different systems of
medicine.

Certain kinds of locale encourage or at least facilitate switching between

different roles and performances. The city is an obvious instance. In his

46 P. Burke
book Soft City, the writer Jonathan Raban has described the way in which
the Kray twins, confidence tricksters, took advantage of the London
environment to appear in different roles to different audiences. He went
on to suggest that this plasticity, or softness, is a feature of life in the large
city, because anonymity allows the individual to pass for what he or she is
not by moving from one locale to another (Raban 1974).
Urban historians have begun to pay attention to this topic, notably for
the nineteenth century, discussing, for instance, women who dressed as
men in order to walk the streets of the city, among them George Sand and
Flora Tristan (Nord 1995, pp. 117 120). However, much remains to be
done. In the case of early modern Spain, for instance, the rise of the
picaresque novel, in which urban settings predominate and the rogue hero
or anti-hero adopts many roles in the course of the story, suggests that
some contemporaries at least were already aware of the softness of the city. I
discuss the linked questions of anonymity and performance in the early
modern city in a forthcoming article.
Prolonged cultural encounters, such as the encounters between
Europeans and the inhabitants of other continents in the past five
centuries, also encourage this kind of switching. The Japanese, for instance,
sometimes use the phrase the double life to describe the way in which they
have managed to participate, since the mid-nineteenth century, in Western
culture while maintaining their own traditions in food, clothes, housing,
reading and so on, often segregating the two cultures rather than mixing
them (Witte 1928; Seidensticker 1983, pp. 90, 109).
In short, former assumptions of cultural fixity have been replaced by
assumptions of individual and group flexibility. Hence the growing
popularity of the term negotiation among scholars with very different
interests, from translation to religion and from politics to science. Recent
discussions include the negotiation of fatherhood, sanctity, national
identity and the language of chemistry. This emphasis on flexibility is
obviously related to the rise of micro-history, in particular to the variety of
micro-history practised by Giovanni Levi. Levi defines micro-history more
precisely, indeed more narrowly than most practitioners, in terms of the
capacity for ordinary individuals to find or make spaces for themselves in
the interstices of social systems, spaces that are visible only under the
historical microscope (Levi 1991).
Consequences
In one field after another, the occasionalist turn has provided new
interpretations of familiar material. It remains to ask, first, whether there

Rethinking History 47
are any general methodological consequences of this turn, and second,
whether occasionalism, like so many solutions to intellectual problems, has
produced new problems itself.
At least four points about historical method need to be made. The
principal moral of the story told here is obvious enough. The concrete
examples discussed in the last few pages provide a good deal of ammunition
for attacks on simple linear accounts of social or cultural change, whether
they are couched in terms of the modernizing, the Westernizing or the
civilizing process. Thus the Japanese did not so much shift from indigenous
tradition to Western modernity as add modernity to their repertoire, while
conserving tradition as an alternative available for use on particular
occasions (especially private occasions in what Goffman calls the back
regions).
In the second place, the performative turn implies that attention may
fruitfully be given to the study of the history of objects or activities that
were long dismissed as trivial, including clothes, everyday language,
dancing and gesturing. Clothes, for example, may be viewed, as they are by
Daniel Roche, as accessories or properties that enhance particular
performances of identity (Roche 1989). Speech, gesture and dance are
forms of performance that reveal a great deal about the culture of the
performers (Bremmer and Roodenburg 1991; Braun and Gugerli 1993).
In the third place, it is worth emphasizing that the concepts
performance and occasion undermine, or at least have the potential to
undermine, traditional forms of historical explanation. In the past, it was
common to assume consistency in the behaviour of individuals. Historians
used to explain many actions in the form of the statement A did B because
he or she was a C (a bourgeois, a Puritan, a Balinese, or whatever). A
performance-centred approach, on the other hand, encourages us to offer
explanations of the form A did B because he or she was in a situation
which required C (confrontation, say, or compromise).
Fourth and finally, the occasionalist turn has serious implications for
source criticism. Many historical sources might be described as snapshots,
taken from a certain viewpoint at a certain moment. Even if they record
accurately what was visible in that situation, which is not always the case,
generalizing to other situations in the same culture is fraught with
difficulties. This point deserves to be borne in mind not only in the case of
photographs (or more generally, of visual representations), but in that of
literary sources as well.
Take the case of foreign travellers, for instance, their eyes sharpened by
the exotic setting but at the same time innocent in the sense that visitors are
generally unfamiliar with the cultural conventions and unaware of what is

48 P. Burke
happening back stage. For example, in the mid-nineteenth century a
Frenchman in Brazil observed an upper-class child dressed as an adult. A
historian using this source drew conclusions about the brevity of childhood
in that milieu, without asking whether the same child might have worn
different clothes in the house and in the street, on weekdays and Sundays,
and so on. A fluid situation has been presented as if it were frozen (Freyre,
1936, pp. 68 69, 92; cf. Arie`s 1960, passim).
There can be little doubt that the occasionalist approach has revealed
problems that were not taken seriously enough before. There is a good case
for saying that the approach has also solved some problems. Has it also
produced new problems of its own? It may be argued that the last question
is premature, an attempt to go beyond a particular approach before that
approach has been fully developed or theorized. On the other hand, it is
never too early to be self-critical, and some of the examples cited above
certainly raise problems.
One of these examples is the so-called double life of the Japanese. It is
necessary to ask who lived this life, a minority or a majority of the
population. What is more, a historical answer to the question would have
to stress the change between the late nineteenth century, when a minority
participated in Western culture as well as their own, and our own time,
when traditional Japanese culture has become the concern of a minority.
There has been a shift from Japanese houses with a Western room to
Western apartments with a Japanese room. Only for a brief moment does
the cultural life of some Japanese appear to have been genuinely double.
More generally, we might ask whether historians or sociologists should
treat all occasions and situations as equal, or whether their relative
importance for individuals and groups should be one of the problems to
investigate. As in the case of performances, we might distinguish different
kinds of occasion: ordinary, formal (requiring choices from the special
repertoire of best behaviour), and extraordinary (events such as wars,
revolutions or disasters demanding responses that are not in the
repertoire).
Questions that might be asked, and surely will be asked in the near
future, concern possible compatibilities and incompatibilities between the
behaviour expected in different situations; definitions of the situation,
whether or not they are contested; and frontiers between locales, the relative
ease or difficulty of cultural segregation. After all, in many places and in
many periods there is abundant evidence of cultural mixing as well as
cultural apartheid.
The purpose of this article is not to present occasionalism as a panacea,
but simply to note some convergences between research in different

Rethinking History 49
domains and to attempt to draw out some of the implications of the
performative turn. It should be read as an invitation to further discussions
and debates.
Acknowledgements
The ideas presented here have been offered to the public on a number of
occasions, most recently in 2003 at the University of Aarhus, at a seminar
on Time organized by Miri Rubin at the Institute of Historical Research
and in a lecture to the Mansfield College History Society at the invitation of
James Raven. My thanks to Miri and James and also to members of all these
audiences for their constructive reactions. I should also like to thank the
authors of dissertations who have encouraged me to mention their
unpublished work.
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