Antropology Of Performance ( By Victor Turner)

Turner, Victor (1987). “The Anthropology of Perfomance”,
En Victor Turner (comp.), The Anthropology of Performance,
PAJ Publications, New York.

The Anthropology of Performance

For years, I have dreamed of a liberated anthropology. By "liberated" I mean free from certain prejudices that have become distinctive features of the literary genre known as anthropological works," whether theseare field monographs, comparative studies, or textbooks. Such features have included; a systematic dehumanizing of the human subjects of study, regarding them as the bearers of an impersonal "culture," or wax to be imprinted with "cultural patterns," or as determined by social, cultural or social psychological "forces," "variables," or “pressures" of various kinds, the primacy of which is stillcontested by different schools or coteries of anthropologists. Briefly, the gente apes natural scientific treatises in style and intention-treatises which reflect the thinking of that period of five centuries which in the West is known as the "modern era." The modern is now becoming part of the past. Arnold Toynbee coined the term "postmodern," Ihab Hassan has given it wide prominence, andPerformance in Post modem Culture, edited by the late Michel Benamou and Charles Caramello, attempts to give it greater specificity. I don't like these labels, but it is clear to me that there has been what Richard Palmer, in an article in the Benamou volume, called a "postmodern turn" taken in recent thinking which is having a liberating effect on anthropology, as on many other disciplines. Pre modern,modern, postmodern-these are crude and inelegant terms for the naming of cultural eras of disparate duration. But they may give us a preliminary purchase on the data on performance.
“Premodern” represents a distillation or encapsulation of many world-views and cosmologies before and, later, outside the specific emergence in Western consciousness, about five centuries ago, of the modern perspective.Indeed, the Swiss cultural historian Jean Gebser holds that it was, quite literally, the rise of perspective which, as Palmer writes, is “the key to modernity." He summarizes Gebser's argument as follows: “Perspective spatializes the world; it orients the eye in relation to space in a new way … it represents a rationalization of sight (William M. Ivins)…. Perspective leads to the founding ofmathematical geometry, which is the prerequisite for modern engineering and modern machinery … for steadily increasing naturalism in European pictorial representation (but also for its purely schematic and logical extensions) … both are due to the growth and spread of methods which have provided symbols, repeatable in invariant form, for representation of visual awareness, and a grammar of perspectivewhich made it possible to establish logical relations not only within the system of symbols but between that system and the forms and locations of the objects that it symbolizes … the combination of the abstractedness of numbers as symbols that measure, with perspective, a way of relating those numbers as symbols to the visual world, leads to a sense of space as measured, as extending outward froma given point; ultimately the world is measurable-epitomized in Galileo's maxim, 'to measure everything measurable and to make what is not measurable capable of being measured' [this attitude is still common among anthropologists-thus George Spindler remarks in the book he edited, The Making of Psychological Anthropology, 1978: 197-198, “if it happens you can count it”]. The spatialization ofvision has metaphysical and epistemological implications … the overemphasis on space and extension divides the world into observing subject and alien material objects … words are seen as mere signs for the material objects in the world … time itself is perceived in spatialized terms … it is regarded as measurable, as a linear succession of present moments … the perspectival model makes man the...