Anthropology

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Anthropology
The study of humans and their culture

1. Infrastructure
2. Social Structure
3. Superstructure

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The Umbrella of Culture
Social Structure
Superstructure
Superstructure
Infrastructure
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The Umbrella of Culture

• Infrastructure
• Social Structure
• Superstructure

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The Plague
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War
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Religious Piety
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Deconstruction
not what you think the experience of the
impossible what remains to be thought a logic
of destabilization always already on the move in
things themselves what makes every identity at
once itself and different from itself a logic of
spectrality a theoretical and practical
parasitism or virology what is happening today
in that is called society, politics, diplomacy,
economics, historical reality, and so on the
opening of the future itself.
-Nicolas Royal, 2000
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Play
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Play at Work
The thought is never contemporary to the
signified because the thought comes before the
word it is always anterior by a breath
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Play Goes Medieval on the Bible
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Liminal vs. Liminoid in
the Medieval Christian MythosCharacter
vs.
Actor
Sacrifice Conflict Trials Tribulations

Doctor women that weep so sorrowfully If
you love your lives, Chastise their tongues
Abraham Isaac Noah His Wife
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No Uncertain Terms
Just as in deconstruction and the transformation
or the (re)definition of the object, the liminoid
(through play) becomes the new liminal.
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Social Drama, Rituals and Stage Drama
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Social Drama

• Social drama has 4 characteristics
• Breach of social norm
• Crisis, revealing social tension among
  oppositional groups
• Redress of crisis
• Reintegration of the disturbed social group
• Social dramas are political in nature and
  are, implicitly, competition for scarce ends.

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Social Drama and Rituals

• In order to redress crisis, the leading members
  of social groups organize rituals which act as
  mechanisms that resolve and adjust social
  tension.
• Rituals typically involve sacrifice, literal or
  symbolical, of a victim who acts as the
  scapegoat.
• Rituals encourage reflectivity and reflexivity,
  i.e., they arouse consciousness and
  self-consciousness.
• They construct interpretation in order to give
  sense and order to crisis and chaos. As a result,
  crisis is rendered meaningful. While social
  reality is fluid and indeterminate, rituals give
  form to indeterminacy by fixing its meaning.
• Rituals are cultural performances that are
  transformative, making possible new modes of
  understanding.

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Rituals and Stage Drama

• Stage drama originated in rituals.
• Common to both is a dramatic structure, a plot
  involving conflict and a way of coming to terms
  with the resulting crisis. Both are reflexive
  activities which seek to know meaning and are the
  expressions of the deepest human values.
• They belong to the liminal antistructural phase.
  Through destruction and reconstruction, they have
  the potential to bring about re-ordering.
• They inscribe cultural order and can generate
  change.

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Stage Drama

• Conflicts are essential to stage drama.
• Stage drama acts as a metacommentary on social
  structures and their problems. It analyzes social
  assumptions and acts as mirrors reflecting social
  issues and crises.
• It is intensely reflexive the difficulties and
  conflicts of the moment are articulated and given
  meaning through contextualization within an
  overarching scheme.
• It contains disorder and renders it orderly.
  Stage drama is redressive.

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Relationship between Social Drama and Stage Drama
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Social Drama, Conflict and the Murder of Abel

• The Murder of Abel (The Wakefield Glovers
  Pageant)
• revolves around at least 3 kinds of conflict
• Conflict between duty and inclination
• Conflict between brothers
• Conflict between master and servant
• Questions for discussion
• What metacommentary does the master/ servant
  conflict in the play provide on medieval social
  structure and its problems?
• How does the play contain disorder in
  master-servant relationship and render it
  orderly? Can we say that the play is suggesting
  social change?
• Where do we see elements of antistructure in the
  play? What are the traces of its liminality?

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Liminality the Inscription of Meaning

• Turner says social dramas serve to
• Probe a communitys weaknesses
• Call its leaders into account
• Desacralize its most cherished values and beliefs
• Portray its characteristic conflicts and suggest
  remedies for them
• Take stock of its current situation in the known
  world
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  (Turner, 11)

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In a sense, every type of cultural performance,
including ritual, ceremony, carnival, theatre
and poetry, is explanation and explication of
life itself.Through the performance process
itself, what is normally sealed up, inaccessible
to everyday observation and reasoning, in the
depth of sociocultural life, is drawn forth
(Turner, 14)
It is in it is in bringing past and present into
musical relation that the process of
discovering and establishing meaning consists.
(14)
How did the cycle plays function in medieval
culture to create meaning? How did they work to
bring the past and present into musical
relation ?
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The Cycle Dramas depict the ancient conflicts
between

• Man and God
• Man and man
• Good and evil
• Child and parent
• Duty and inclination

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• From discussion on social conflict, we understand
  the liminal aspect of meaning inscription.
• Liminality is the indeterminate time and space
  between one form of meaning and resulting action
  and another.
• The cycle dramas as rituals can function to help
  fix the meaning of social crises to align with
  traditional ideologies and social structures
• But the plays create meaning and resolution for
  the audience not just on a social level, but on a
  personal level
• Social dramas are trustworthy messages from our
  species depths, humanized life disclosing
  itself. (Turner, 15).
• As expressions of a total human being at grips
  with his environment, perceiving, thinking,
  feeling, desiring... (13), they illuminate
  personal experience and assist with meaning
  construction

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• By this definition of meaning, the cycle plays
  connect crises of biblical figures with issues in
  contemporary medieval lives
• The audience relates to the experience of inner
  chaos in the drama figure, who expresses their
  own similar thoughts, feelings and desires.
• At times this personal connection can work with
  the liminoid or anti-structure aspect of
  plays
• The plays involve purposefully extra-biblical
  characters and scenarios which contribute to
  connecting past to contemporary
• While the end of the biblical stories resolves
  itself, the drama may present the questions
  actually unresolved for the involved characters,
  mirroring medieval human conditions.

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Examples of connections between biblical
character dramas and medieval contemporary
ones

• Noah and His Sons (The Wakefield Pageant),
  depicting strained relationships between husband
  and wives
• Abraham and Isaac (The Brome), connecting to
  parents having to reconcile loss of children
  during Black Death
• The Second Shepherds Play, satirizing biblical
  account to portray conditions of dishonesty and
  robbery, even within the church

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Questions for further discussion

• Which aspects of these plays constitute a
  liminoid feature, functioning outside of
  creating static resolution?
• How do these aspects construct meaning on a
  personal (as opposed to social) level?
• Given the particular staging of the play, which
  aspect is emphasized more, the liminal or
  liminoid? What does that say about the message
  of the play, or how it worked to connect with the
  audience of the time? What does it say about the
  audience of the time?

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Bibliography

• Beckwith, Sarah. "Ritual, Church and Theatre
  Medieval Dramas of the Sacramental Body." Culture
  and History 1350-1600 Essays on English
  Communities, Identities and Writing, ed. by David
  Aers. Detroit, MI Wayne State University Press,
  1992, 65-89.
• Geertz, Clifford. Blurred Genres The
  Refigurations of Social Thought. American
  Scholar, pp. 165-179. 1980.
• Goldstein, Leonard. The Origin of Medieval Drama.
  Madison Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
  2004.
• James, Mervyn. "Ritual, Drama and Social Body in
  the Late Medieval English Town," in his Society,
  Politics and Culture Studies in Early Modern
  England. Cambridge, U.K. Cambridge University
  Press, 1986, pp. 16-47.
• Turner, Victor. From Ritual to Theatre.. New
  York PAJ Publications,1982.
• --. The Forest of Symbols Aspects of Ndembu
  Ritual. Ithaca Cornell University Press, 1967.
• --. The Ritual Process Structure and
  Anti-Structure. Chicago Aldine, 1969.
• --. Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors. Ithaca
  Cornell University Press, 1974.
• Schechener, Richard. Ritual, Play and
  Performance. New York The Seabury Press, 1977.

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