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Print Publication Date: Nov 2016 Subject: Religion, Ritual and Performance, Art
Online Publication Date: Jun 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198729570.013.21
Chapter Summary
• Ritual has a great deal in common with various kinds of linguistic and theatrical
performance.
• Performative approaches to social and cultural phenomena tend to emphasize
embodiment over cognition, situated communication over linguistic structure, and
contextual meaning over propositional content.
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Introduction
The terms ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ have been used to denote a number of
different approaches to language, gender, and sociocultural phenomena generally, as well
as to religion and ritual in particular. Although they differ significantly in their theoretical
assumptions and methodological implications, they all tend to emphasize embodiment
over cognition, situated communication over linguistic structure, and contextual meaning
over propositional content. A performative approach to religion thus emphasizes (p. 305)
the embodied ‘doing’ of religion in particular contexts, and gives rather less attention to
religious belief, doctrine, and history. It also downplays traditional mind/body and
thought/action dichotomies. Performative acts in religions are therefore mostly staged,
mediatized (scripted, liturgical), embodied, and public events. Questions about whether
ritual action is a subcategory of performance or vice versa, and whether the two,
performance and ritual, are distinguishable or not are still being actively debated.
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By contrast, Austin and his colleagues focused on the ‘doing’ of language, rather than its
propositional content. To analyze the sentence “I promise you that I will come tomorrow”
in terms of its propositional content is not only illogical, it also fails to notice what is
arguably the most important aspect of the sentence: namely, that it is what Austin called
a ‘speech-act’; in this case, a promise. Austin introduced a threefold division of speech-
acts: illocutionary acts (the semantic force of the utterance, its intended meaning),
locutionary acts (the utterance itself), and perlocutionary acts (the actual effect, whether
intended or not). The theory applies most obviously to overt performative utterances: a
judge sentencing a prisoner, a chairperson opening a meeting, an official christening a
ship, and so on. For all such utterances, it makes little sense to ask the question, “Is it
true?” The more appropriate question is, “Was it effective?”: i.e. was the accused person
really sentenced, the meeting actually opened, the ship effectively christened? Efficacy
therefore has become a crucial notion in the analysis of performances and rituals (Quack/
Sax/Weinhold 2010). Austin argued, however, that performativity applied to all forms of
speech. Even to say “It is raining” makes no sense if one does so in an inappropriate
context.
Austin coined the term ‘performative,’ which he found to be more adequate than
‘performatory’: “Formerly I used ‘performatory’: but ‘performative’ is to be preferred as
shorter, less ugly more tractable, and more traditional in formation” (Austin 1962, 6 fn.
3). In addition, he introduced the term ‘felicity’ to denote the effectiveness or non-
effectiveness of such performative speech-acts (and to distinguish his approach from that
of the logical positivists, who were interested in ‘truth’), and it has often been noticed
that judgments of felicity point to antecedent social conditions. The judge must make his
utterance at a particular time and place, and be acting in his official capacity, a quorum
must be present in the room where the meeting is opened, and the person holding the
champagne bottle must be authorized to name the ship, before their respective (p. 306)
speech-acts can be judged to be felicitous. Many such ‘performative speech-acts’
resemble rituals, or have ritual-like properties, which is why speech-act theory later came
to be so important in the development of performative approaches to religion and ritual
(see the following section). More broadly, speech-act theory consistently emphasized the
social and contextual preconditions for the generation of linguistic meaning, and the
performance of language in particular contexts. Generally speaking, performative
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however, difficult for those working with historical sources to incorporate the
performative turn, since it relies very heavily on observation and visual documentation
(Buc 2001; Boute/Småberg 2012).
Also important was Richard Bauman’s (1975) attempt to revitalize the study of folklore by
shifting attention away from the then-dominant identification and classification of motifs,
toward context-based performance. In an influential article that should be read against
the background of Chomsky’s then-emerging paradigm of linguistic competence
(something that Chomsky and his followers think of as a structural feature of the human
brain), Bauman defined ‘performance’ as “the assumption of responsibility to an audience
for a display of communicative competence” (1984, 11), thus contributing to an
understanding of ‘performance’ as particular and context-based, rather than universal
and abstract.
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(p. 308)This view has been extended by theatre studies scholar Erika Fischer-Lichte
(2004) in her theory of the aesthetics of the performative. In her view, artistic and ritual
performances share certain features like script, improvisation, the constitution of a
reality, entertainment, the involvement and exchange of roles of actors and audience, and
a weak framework. But ritual differs from theatre because of the transformations evoked
by threshold experiences and the collapse of the distinction between art and reality.
According to her, although both rituals and theatre involve repetition, they are
nevertheless unique events, even though staged dramatizations often become items in a
repertoire that are performed many times. Gavin Brown points out that there is “a
significant unscripted dimension in all performances,” since they are “susceptible to
contingency and indeterminacy” (2003, 6). Embodiment, spatiality, materiality, and
acousticality are expressed performatively (Fischer-Lichte 2004, 18), and all these
components are ephemeral, existing only in the moment of the performance. No script
can determine such dimensions of performance, because they only come into existence
during the event itself. For Fischer-Lichte, the aesthetic experience of participation in a
performance is thus similar to the experience in a transformative rite de passage.
As Schieffelin (1996, 80) has noted, both rituals and other kinds of performance are
therefore inherently risky, since the factors leading to their success or failure (varying
competencies of the performers, the attitude of the audience, as well as contingency and
blind luck) cannot be controlled. But the failure of performances and rituals is often
masked as a kind of radical change: Balzani attempts to reveal “the whole drama of ritual
and change in a form of writing that masks change and silences disputes and which often
records events, however new they may actually be, as though they formed part of a long
tradition” (2003, 27; cf. Hüsken 2007).
Performance and ritual thus have much in common, including formality and repetition,
which are important components of both. Formality may be defined as action based on
repetitive rules, which are laid down and transmitted by means of rule-governed
structures, and often codified in ritual handbooks. Repetition lives from imitation and
mimesis, and is an essential part of any ritual performance. Ritual formality even
encompasses emotions and other forms of bodily expressions, such as weeping (Michaels
2012), dancing, and music. In both ritual and performance (e.g. theatre, opera, ballet,
television, film), performers tend to suppress or control their emotions or other internal
feelings since these might interfere with the ritual order, script, or choreography. Both
performers and audience are in a sense reduced to the rules prescribed for them by the
ritual or the performative format, and to the “purpose and theory embedded in it. If a
ritual allows spontaneity and chaos, it does so ‘in prescribed times and places’, manners
and styles” (Platvoet 1995, 29). In short, and as Humphrey and Laidlaw have pointed out
(1994; cf. Sax 2006), participants in most forms of ritual transfer their individual agency
to the ritual itself.
However, the variability of ritual and performance manifests in the performative aspects
of ritual because—pace Humphrey and Laidlaw—the ritual specialists and participants do
not entirely renounce their individual agency. Instead, because of conflicts of interests of
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the performers and participants, different interpretations of ritual (p. 309) elements and
their sequences, variant exegeses of texts, or the malleability of memory of the rules,
there remains a certain vagueness in the ritual performance. Thus, even though ritual
performances include a great deal of formality, they are nevertheless contingent. Even
failed or disordered performances, which often cause amusement and jokes among the
participants, do not inevitably invalidate the ritual as a whole (Hüsken 2007).
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Schechner’s sometime-collaborator Victor Turner also wrote a great deal about the
relationship between ritual and theatre. Turner’s writings on ritual, and on ‘social
dramas,’ were very positively received, not only in anthropology but also theology,
religious studies, history, and related disciplines, making him one of the most influential
anthropologists of the late twentieth century. Throughout his career, Turner maintained a
strong interest in the study of ritual, seeing it as a powerful instrument of personal and
social transformation. His early works, which mostly drew on his ethnographic research
amongst the Ndembu of Zambia, focused on the ritual healing of both persons and
(p. 310) societies (Turner 1969a) and on how rituals with their symbolic forms mediated
certain kinds of human experience, for example in initiation rituals (Turner 1969b). He
went on to develop the concept of ‘social drama,’ a self-consciously theatrical metaphor
suggesting that when social groups are faced with conflicts that might result in schism,
they tend to pass through a series of steps following a drama-like sequence: breach,
crisis, and redress, where the third stage resulted either in resolution or formal
separation (1974). Although this model had been prefigured in some of Turner’s earliest
work (1957), it was only later that he went on to apply it to social phenomena—
predominantly religious and ritual forms—throughout the world, and some of his most
influential essays deal with religions like Islam (1973) and Christianity (1978).
Recently, Grimes (2014, 223–230) has proposed using ‘action’ as a parent term and a
distinctive verb for what is done in rituals: “When speaking strictly, I prefer to say that
ritualists ‘enact’ rituals, whereas actors ‘perform’ plays” (2014, 228). He thus hopes that
distinctions between ritual and performance are not occluded.
Clearly, both religion and ritual have important performative elements, and that is why
there is such considerable overlap between ritual displays and various forms of drama.
Extensive evidence is provided by hundreds of ethnographic descriptions from virtually
every known culture area in the world, where cosmological truths and moral precepts
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have typically been conveyed by means of dramatic performances. But such performances
are hardly limited to non-literate cultures: the Christian Eucharist also has important
performative aspects, with the blessing and transformation of the host taking on a
dramatic form; the performance of gender exemplified by the priest’s elevated position;
the relationship between priest, host, and congregation performatively enacted through
practices of standing, sitting, kneeling; and so on. The performative dimensions of
Muharram processions of Shi’a Muslims have often been noted, and it has even been
argued that the Taziyeh displays associated with them led directly to the Islamic
revolution in Iran (Chelkowski 1979; 1980).
Most of the theorists discussed so far argue that the ideational and theological aspects of
religion have been overemphasized, and seek to correct this by focusing on embodiment.
But such a focus can lead to ignoring cognition altogether. Still newer approaches to
performance reintegrate it by also including emotional aspects. The question therefore
arises how performativity and emotions are linked (cf. Michaels/Wulf 2012). The most
prominent theory in this regard stems from Harvey Whitehouse, who—perhaps too
simplistically—differentiates between doctrinal and imagistic modes of religiosity:
Semantic memory consists of ‘general knowledge’ about the world (e.g. how to
behave in restaurants, or what is the capital city of France, etc.). We can seldom
recall how or when we acquired this sort of knowledge. By contrast, episodic
memory consists of specific events in our life experience (e.g. our first kiss, the
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death of a beloved relative, the day war broke out, etc.). These types of memory
are activated very differently in doctrinal and imagistic modes of religiosity.
Victor Turner also paid attention to the fact that some (ritual) performances include
‘liminality,’ i.e. non-ordinary, ludic, paradoxical, ambiguous, sometimes hilarious and
playful moments. Whitehouse suggests that:
some religious practices are very intense emotionally; they may be rarely
performed and highly stimulating (e.g. involving altered states of consciousness or
terrible ordeals and tortures); they tend to trigger a lasting sense of revelation,
and to produce powerful bonds between small groups of ritual participants.
Whereas, by contrast, certain other forms of religious activity tend to be much less
stimulating: they may be highly repetitive or ‘routinized,’ conducted in a relatively
calm and sober atmosphere; such practices are often accompanied by the
transmission of complex theology and doctrine; and these practices tend to mark
out large religious communities—composed of people who cannot possibly all
know each other (certainly not in any intimate way).
Conclusion
Performative approaches to social and cultural phenomena generally, and to religion and
ritual in particular, emphasize embodied communication and participation rather than
formal structure or propositional content. They see social action as emergent, contingent,
creative, dynamic, and embodied rather than specifiable in terms of rules or propositional
content. Just as Austinian ‘felicity’ implies antecedent (p. 312) social conditions, so
performativity in religion implies collective forms, and the presence of an audience. It
also implies shared aesthetics for appreciating any given performance.
But there is a more profound point that is consistently made by studies of religion as
performance, which is that religious ‘belief’ is not necessarily primary, as is often
assumed, that it might indeed be generated and perpetuated by embodied action. What
the study of religion and performance shows us is that religious faith, attitudes, and even
‘beliefs’ are not necessarily the direct results of teaching, doctrinal inculcation, or some
other cognitive process, but can instead be understood as things that are achieved by
means of embodied action, especially ritual. In this sense, one can regard prayer as a
kind of performance, not simply in the sense that one performs it in order to please god,
or to come closer to him, but rather in the sense already identified by Clifford Geertz,
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who argued that rituals were ‘plastic dramas’ in which “men attain their faith as they
portray it” (1973, 114).
In sum, performative approaches to human language and social life see them as involving
emergent, contingent, creative, dynamic, embodied, open-ended, and above all context-
dependent strategies for achieving human ends, rather than as processes that can
predominantly be specified in terms of rules, propositional content, or determining
structures.
Glossary
Felicitous
a speech-act is felicitous when it achieves its object.
Līlā
“divine play,” dramatization of mythological narratives in India.
Performance
generally the execution of an action, more specifically the enactment and staging of a
(scripted or liturgical) play or event.
Performative
according to Austin who coined this term, a quality of certain kinds of actions that are
done with words. Later, any kind of ritualized or staged action.
Performativity
a term deduced from ‘the performative’ (q.v.).
Ritual
variously defined, and influentially as “the performance of more or less invariant
sequences of formal acts and utterances not entirely encoded by the
performers” (Rappaport 1999, 24).
Speech-act theory
the theory according to which the meaning of linguistic expressions can be explained
in terms of the rules governing their performative use.
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Further Reading
Austin 1962 [This is the locus classicus for Austin’s theory of performativity in language.
The book has had a tremendous influence on the philosophy of language as well as ritual
studies.]
Bell 1992 [Drawing upon the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, Bell
develops a theory of ‘ritual mastery’ that finds its paradigmatic expression in the
performance of ritual.]
Fischer-Lichte 2004 [In this book, Erika Fischer-Lichte traces the emergence of
performance as ‘an art event’ in its own right. In setting performance art on an equal
footing with the traditional art object, she heralds a new aesthetics.]
Michaels 2012 [This article discusses the difference between ‘natural’ emotions and ritual
or staged emotions, especially weeping.]
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Michaels 2016 [This book deals with various Hindu rituals and Hindu ritual theory, as
exemplified in the Purvamimamsa theory, the only elaborate non-Western theory of
ritual.]
Sax 1995 [A brief summary of the Indian concept of ‘lila,’ which denotes ‘play’ in both
senses of the English term: theatre as well as playful activity. In India, dramatic lilas often
take a highly ritualized form.]
Sax 2002 [Analyzes a popular ritual performance that takes the form of a dramatization of
India’s great epic Mahabharata.]
Tambiah 1979 [Perhaps the most sophisticated—and certainly the most influential—
attempt to apply ‘performance theory’ to rituals.]
Turner 1974 [A very accessible collection of mid-career essays from Turner, in several of
which he develops his theory of ‘ritual drama.’]
Whitehouse 2004 [In this book, Harvey Whitehouse presents a testable theory of how
religions are created, passed on, and changed. At the center of his theory are two
divergent ‘modes of religiosity’: the imagistic and the doctrinal.]
Axel Michaels
William S. Sax
William S. Sax is Professor and Head of the Department of Anthropology, South Asia
Institute, Heidelberg University, Germany. He is Principal Investigator and co-leader
of a number of research projects in the areas of Ethnography of India/Western
Himalayas, Anthropology of Religion, and Medical Anthropology.
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