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Performance

Oxford Handbooks Online


Performance  
Axel Michaels and William S. Sax
The Oxford Handbook of the Study of Religion
Edited by Michael Stausberg and Steven Engler

Print Publication Date: Nov 2016 Subject: Religion, Ritual and Performance, Art
Online Publication Date: Jun 2017 DOI: 10.1093/oxfordhb/9780198729570.013.21

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter reviews prominent theories of ‘performance’ and ‘performativity’ and


compares them to theories of ritual. It begins with important theories of performativity in
language, and moves on to discussions of the relation between performativity in theatre
and in ritual. This chapter argues shows how a focus on performativity in religion and
ritual emphasizes embodiment over cognition, situated communication over linguistic
structure, and contextual meaning over propositional content. This chapter considers the
example of Indian popular theatre and its relation to Indian theology. It also reviews
important theories of performativity associated with Austin, Goffman, Schechner,
Tambiah, and Turner, arguing that a performative approach to religion and ritual sees
them as emergent, contingent, creative, dynamic, embodied, open-ended, and above all
context-dependent.

Keywords: drama, performance, performativity, ritual, theatre

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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Performance

• Austin’s theory of ‘performativity’ in speech has been influential, as have pragmatic


approaches to language—emphasizing meaning and communication over grammatical
and syntactical structures.
• Formality and repetition are important components of both performance and ritual.
• Most forms of Indian popular theatre take a ritual form, and major strands of Indian
theology are based on a theatrical ontology.
• Ritual performance is not simply based on ‘belief.’ Rather, the performance of ritual
often leads to certain ‘beliefs.’

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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Performance

The Roots of Performance Theory


Modern performance theory might be said to have begun with J. L. Austin (1911–1960),
one of the ‘ordinary language philosophers’ at Oxford who, in the 1950s, mounted a
challenge to logical positivist views of language according to which a sentence expresses
a ‘proposition’ analyzable in terms of its truth-conditions. In classical Aristotelian logic, a
proposition affirms or denies the predicate of a subject, so that in the sentence “Aristotle
is a man” a predicate (“is a man”) is affirmed of a subject (“Aristotle”).

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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Performance

approaches to language stress its communicative and transformative potential, as


opposed to its grammatical and syntactical structures.

Speech-act theory thus resembles pragmatic approaches to language in general, and


differs radically from other well-known linguistic paradigms that seek to discover the
formal (grammatical, syntactical) characteristics of all language, as for example
exemplified by Noam Chomsky’s ‘generative grammar’ (1988 [1965]). Such approaches
often claim to have discovered universal logical or cognitive structures, and are scarcely
concerned with how language is used to communicate, which would require attention to
specific contexts. On the other hand are pragmatic approaches to language, beginning
with the American philosopher Charles Saunders Peirce (1839–1914), and continuing
through the Chicago linguist Edward Sapir (1884–1939), his student Benjamin Lee Whorf
(1897–1941), and more recently Michael Silverstein and his students, also from the
University of Chicago (Manning 2003; Silverstein 2000; 2009; forthcoming). All of these
linguists, philosophers, and anthropologists stress not only the grounding of the linguistic
production of meaning in particular historical and cultural contexts, but also its
communicative and transformative potential (as opposed to its grammatical and
syntactical structure). This potential is consistently and dramatically illustrated by
religious and ritual uses of language to bless, curse, sanctify, vow, swear, transform,
exorcize, excommunicate, dedicate, baptize, marry, and many other uses as well.

Performance and Ritual


Many prominent scholars (e.g. Asad 1993; Kapferer 1983; Smith 1964) have argued that
the emphasis on religious ‘belief’ characteristic of modern theology and religious studies
is a late, Protestant development, and that a more adequate understanding of religion
requires greater attention to religious practices, especially ritual (see also Bivins,
“Belief,” this volume). Performative approaches to language have been especially fruitful
for the analysis of religious rituals and other public events, because they directed
scholars’ attention away from an exclusive focus on beliefs and religious dogma and in
the direction of embodied and mostly public performance. Performative approaches to
religion and ritual have been even more directly informed by Performance Studies, a term
that refers to a set of heterogeneous academic approaches that often compare
conventional genres of performance like theatre, dance, and opera with neighboring
genres like news, sports, and of course ritual and religion. One of the earliest theorists to
write in this vein was Erving Goffman (1967; 1969) who analyzed ‘the presentation of self
in everyday life’ (p. 307) as a kind of performance. Milton Singer extended the term
‘cultural performance’ to denote not only theatrical events like plays or concerts, but also
“prayers, ritual readings and recitations, rites and ceremonies, festivals, and all those
things we usually class under religion and ritual rather than with the cultural and
artistic” (1972, 71). Dell Hymes (1975, 11) even argued that such a notion of performance
was a ‘breakthrough’ that might reintegrate the humanities and social sciences. It was,

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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.

Another influential figure in Performance Theory was Richard Schechner (1934–), an


avant-garde theatre director from New York who wrote a series of influential books and
articles on the topic, many of them based on his collaboration with the anthropologist
Victor Turner (1920–1983), who had developed a theory of ritual as ‘social drama.’
Schechner used his long-term editorship of The Drama Review to advance a Performance
Studies agenda within theatre circles, and established a degree program in Performance
Studies at New York University, of which he was the first chair holder.

Schechner argued that modern theatre is characterized by a radical distinction between


performer and audience (the so-called ‘fourth wall’), and by a focus on commercial
entertainment. Members of the audience rarely expect to be directly involved in the
action on stage, nor do they think that they (or their society) will be transformed by the
play. They simply pay their money and expect to be entertained. Schechner argues that
many traditional forms of drama (for example European passion plays, North Indian
Ramlilas, the Noh theatre of Japan) are, by contrast, highly ritualized, or even
indistinguishable from ritual. Such traditional dramatic performances do not involve a
radical distinction between performers and audience: members of the audience
frequently join in the work of dramatic representation, while those on stage may join the
audience for periods of varying length. Moreover, the performances themselves are
meant to accomplish something: bring a successful harvest or a victory in war, initiate
young people into the next stage of their lives, please the god or the sovereign and thus
obtain his/her benevolence and mercy (Schechner 1985). Schechner noted, however, that
this distinction was far from constant, and that even ‘Western’ theatre had oscillated
between the ‘ritualized’ and the ‘secular’ poles of this spectrum many times in the course
of its history. Indeed, with the benefit of hindsight it can be argued that the period in
which Schechner wrote his influential essays was the beginning of a ‘turn’ in Western
theatre back in the direction of more ritualized forms; a turn to which he himself
contributed.

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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).

Several of these themes were summed up in Stanley Tambiah’s “A Performative Approach


to Ritual,” first published in 1979 as the Radcliffe-Brown lecture in social anthropology
and subsequently republished in Tambiah (1985). In this very influential essay, Tambiah
seeks to integrate the analysis of rituals as formal, rule-bound events on the one hand,
and as contextually embedded on the other. His method for doing so is the ‘performative
approach,’ and he distinguishes between three different senses in which ritual is
performative: in the Austinian sense of a performative speech-act, in the sense of
dramatic or theatrical performance, and in the sense of its ‘duplex’ structure, whereby it
“symbolically and/or iconically represents the cosmos and at the same time indexically
legitimates and realizes social hierarchies” (Tambiah 1979, 153) by performatively
representing them.

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Ritual and Theatre


In the 1970s and 1980s, Schechner collaborated with Linda Hess and others on a series
of publications based on the Ramlila of Ramnagar, arguably the largest and best-known
dramatic performance in India of the great epic Ramayana. Along with India’s second
great epic Mahabharata, it has been ‘exported’ to nearly all parts of Asia, where both
have been transformed and ‘indigenized,’ resulting in new forms of religious dance,
drama, puppetry, and much more (Brandon 1993; Cadet 1971; Flueckiger/Sears 1991;
Phalgunadi 1990; 1994; 2000; Raghavan 1980). The literature on religious (and
sometimes politicized) drama in India is vast indeed, and it has been argued that nearly
all forms of Indian popular theatre take a ritual form (Sax 2009). Major strands of Indian
theology are based on a theatrical ontology (Haberman 1988; Gnoli 1985; Wulff 1986).
Perhaps the most fundamental term here is the Sanskrit word līlā, which means “God’s
play: it refers not only to the supreme being’s playful actions but also to the dramatic
‘plays’ staged by human beings in memory of those actions” (Sax 1995, 33).

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).

Mind, Body, and Performance


Performative approaches to religion and ritual focus on physical participation and
embodiment. For example, most people would probably say that Christians kneel in
church in order to demonstrate (or ‘perform’) their subordination to God. But as
Catherine Bell (1952–2008) points out, it might just as well be argued (bearing in mind
that children are socialized into such forms of embodied action long before they have
developed much of an awareness of religious doctrine), that Christians feel themselves to
be subordinate to God because they engage in practices like kneeling (Bell 1992, 100). In
a similar way, Connerton (1989) has argued that although traditional hermeneutics
privileges text over embodiment, the embodied practices of ritual have a greater power
than texts in creating and maintaining collective memories—primarily by means of ritual.
Rituals and performances indeed draw, to a large extent, on implicit procedural (p. 311)
knowledge, which can only be made conscious up to a point. This ‘background
knowledge’ is important for the performances but it also seems that—spontaneously,
accidentally, emotionally, atmospherically—something more than the participants’
intentions is imparted through them.

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.

(Whitehouse 2004, 65)

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).

(Whitehouse 2004, 63)

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.

References
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Christianity and Islam. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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Balzani, Marzia. 2003. Modern Indian Kingship: Tradition, Legitimacy & Power in
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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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Performance

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.]

Michaels/Wulf 2012 [This volume contains a number of articles focusing on emotions in


rituals and festivals, private and public performances, and fine and performing arts.]

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.]

Schechner 1985 [A collection in which Schechner explicitly addresses the relationship


between ritual and performance.]

Schechner 2003 [A collection of Schechner’s earliest essays, several of which relate


performance to ritual.]

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

Axel Michaels is Professor of Classical Indology, South Asia Institute, University of


Heidelberg, Germany. His publications include Homo Ritualis: Hindu Ritual and Its
Significance for Ritual Theory (2016); Exploring the Senses (2014, co-edited with
Christoph Wulff); Emotions in Rituals in Performances (2012, co-edited with
Christoph Wulff).

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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