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05-Bell-45471.qxd 1/11/2008 3:56 PM Page 115 CHAPTER 5 Performing Culture Theory in Perspective: How Do Cultures Perform? nthropology, sociology, and even psychology in the mid-nineteenth cen- tury took “the study of man” as their central concern. The guiding A method for these new academic areas was positivism, the belief that cov- ering laws of human organization could be discovered through direct observation. This perspective maintains that the universe is orderly, and the job of scientific inquiry is to discover this order and classify it in systematic ways. Charles Darwin’s work on evolution was an important model for researchers in the social sciences who searched for origins in the “evolution” of culture. Theories of the evolution of culture are interwoven with the study of religion. Three schools of theory emerged in the nineteenth century—myth and ritual, soci- ological, and psychological—all asking the question, Did religion originate in myth or ritual? Mircea Eliade was interested in the phenomenology of religious experi- ence and how myths and rituals are expressions of both the sacred and the profane in culture that provide unity for people. The sociological school, led by Emile Durkheim, maintained that religion is a social creation whose function is to pre- serve the welfare of a society. Sigmund Freud anchored the psychological approach: taboos of incest and patricide necessitate rituals that appease repressed desires. Across these approaches, performance was studied for its window into larger cultural structures, like religion, politics, economics, language, and identity (Beeman 1993). When specific performance genres were studied (like rites, rituals, games, contests, dance, and music), performance was often seen as a fixed, static product, evidence of cross-cultural similarities, and indicative of universal needs and expressions.
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