Search Results

This chapter focuses on the white journalists who worked for progressive newspapers and magazines. From the beginning, there was a symbiotic interaction between the social dramas staged by civil rights leaders and the “point men” of the communicative institutions who defined their jobs as interpreting such dramas to the civil sphere. That neither could exist without the other was a recognition, at once simple and profound, a recognition that became increasingly conscious and consequential as the black movement grew in influence and civil force.

The analysis of the major state funerals by which the Third Republic honoured its distinguished citizens shows that the event of the funeral did not simply correspond to the ceremony. The actual rite of passage was the core of the event, but it did not demarcate either its beginning or its end. From a spatial point of view, the event took place not only along the procession route and in the cemetery, but also in other parts of the city, in case of a counter-demonstration, and in other parts of the country where parallel ceremonies were celebrated. The major state funeral belonged to a new type of event that began to appear in France in the last third of the nineteenth century: the media event. These were events such as the Dreyfus affair that owed part of their existence to the appearance of a mass circulating press. Yet media events, which may have appeared ‘monstrous’ and disparate, all progressed through the same stages of what Victor Turner has called a social drama.

This chapter traces the emergence and wider reception of Victor Turner’s ethnography, arguments and dominant ideas, including the social drama, liminality and communitas; and also his remarkable projection of a personal fable, which he called his ‘voyage of discovery’. There is a restlessness in Turner’s life and work that makes any account of his anthropology problematic. What yesterday’s man saw was actually blinkered, as today’s man continually realized, opening his eyes for himself and for the liberation of future generations – or so went Turner’s own tale of novelty and discovery in his intellectual history. A major challenge that this chapter addresses is twofold. On the one hand, it follows the deep continuities in Turner’s vision as a British-trained social anthropologist, a pupil of Gluckman, and a member of the Manchester School. On the other hand, the account discerns certain developments in his remaking, in America, as an influential celebrity. Now it is as if a tide once fashionably in his favour, as it swelled in America in his lifetime, has slipped away, or bubbled up for popular consumption, oddly, as a posthumous caricature. Hence the open question: What can social scientists learn about celebrity and fashion from the fate of Turner’s voyage?

This chapter focuses on “mess,” a local linguistic and cultural metaphor associated with black youth of Hamilton, Alabama. Mess is more than just a novel indigenous term; it also helped to preserve the status quo and to shape adolescents’ emergent identities. As an oppositional culture of overcoming negativity, mess emerged as a means for young people to view their lives. This chapter redefines mess and “messy” in accordance with the meanings assigned to them in Hamilton and specifically by Hamilton’s adolescents. It then explores the reproductive quality of mess by invoking cultural production theory, an outgrowth of the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s work, and its intersection with anthropologist Victor Turner’s stages of social drama to tell the story of the Jay Ellis School’s football team. It concludes that mess is a metaphor that impacts life in Hamilton on a daily basis and is used to explain the nonsense that takes place in the community.

“Building Jerusalem: The General Strike as Social Drama” details how the 1926 General Strike functioned as the watershed event for Labour and union politics in the first half of the twentieth century. Oral history narratives, archival sources, and history texts provide the sources for presenting the events that led up to the strike. This chapter also delineates the structural components--the roles, costumes, dramatic activities, festival license, and special settings--that enabled the volunteers and the media to contextualize the strike as a festive social drama.

Chapter 6 applies social drama—adapted from the anthropology of Victor Turner—to portray media ritual in punishment of an intellectual breach. The transgression occurred when Ward Churchill, a University of Colorado scholar of ethnic studies, hammered out an essay in response to the suicidal/homicidal attacks of September 11, 2001. Churchill plowed through consequences of US involvement in various regions of the globe, dismissing with contempt the notion that Americans could have been surprised by payback. Analysis of the media frenzy uncovers a fractal-like structure, such that ritualistic punishment as a cultural response is anticipated in the first wave of news text. Exposure of the macro-micro constitution, in turn, leads to a discussion as to whether journalism’s performance is best understood as culturally conscripted or opportunistic. The former is the more benign interpretation. In the latter scenario, a predatory press elevates its cultural status at intellect’s expense.

The final empirical chapter addresses the incalculable inefficiency and patterned social dramas emerging inside classrooms. While zooming in on how students get swept up in (or are forced to witness) bouts of disruption and the events that often push less effective teachers over the edge, a central theme is the “natural authority” embodied by the minority of teachers who regularly smooth the way for constructive bodily movements, helpful emotional states, and sustained learning. Largely because it is so difficult to become and remain a seemingly charismatic pedagogue, hoping for more “super teachers” would be wrongheaded. Increasing teachers’ emotional compensation and improving the somatic experience of being on the front line through thoroughly stabilizing the daily interactions of poorly born students—and through helping adolescents manage stress levels that can durably damage their bodies and minds—is the best way to attract and retain significantly greater percentages of (potentially) excellent teachers.

Victor Turner (1920–1983) and his wife Edith Turner (1921– ) did fieldwork together among the Ndembu of what was then Northern Rhodesia. Victor was awarded a PhD from the University of Manchester and became a leading figure in the Manchester School, with its emphasis on extended cases studies and process. Agnostics and Communists as young adults, the Turners found faith and were received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1958. Soon after, they moved to the United States, with the University of Virginia becoming their final institutional home. They emphasized communitas as a more general category that helped them identify what was admirable in religion. They also went on Catholic pilgrimages as a way of combining their own practise of their faith with anthropological research. After Victor’s death, Edith emerged as an influential anthropologist in her own right. She has been a champion of the reality of spirits.

This chapter scrutinizes the city in Fritz Lang's M, which suggests that the city itself is a product of modernity and is somehow responsible for madness, moral evil, and the existence of a monster like Hans Beckert. It explores how M is also a film about a community in the grip of fear and paranoia in a way that subverts a more straightforward social drama. It also describes Lang's kangaroo court that represents a divided social strata that was essentially united only by violence. The chapter suggests that the kind of violence enacted by Beckert is not only the product of a diseased mind, but it is something anyone could be capable of. It analyses M film's production, in which Lang made use of the city of Berlin in a sort of proto-neorealist sense and employed non-professional actors from among the city's criminal class.

Michael John LaChiusa utilizes the musical theater’s two primary song forms, the book and the diegetic song, in his 2006 musical Bernarda Alba. Song and dance are purported to be functional elements that further plot and develop character in a musical. However, recent scholarship challenges this integrated ideal suggesting the inherent repetitions of song structure create a state of suspension pausing the progression of plot. This chapter addresses these conflicting ideas and asserts that song and dance are gestures of active-suspension. Applying the liminal structures of Social Drama and the Liminoid, as defined by Victor Turner, to these numbers within Bernarda Alba we can better understand the differences in the dramatic and performative function of both song types. Within this hermeneutic schema the book song becomes an obligatory action in which a character must engage, while the diegetic is a song one chooses to sing.

Chapter 3 presents the first of the four “events” presented in this book. It outlines the happenings of a “scandal” that was caused by the Comrade’s intervention in a sexual affair between two youngsters in the village. The analysis shows how resolving the scandal required members of Madanpur and Chishti to draw on ties of friendship, kinship, party loyalty, and marriage to counter the vile machinations of the Comrade’s politics. It shows how this process taught them something of the art of politics that required them to put aside differences and learn to accommodate a diversity of opinion in order to create new solidarities. This unprecedented unity sowed the seeds of the emergence of a rival political party in the village, the fruits of which were harvested only a decade later. Victor Turner’s model of the “social drama” is utilized, as is Max Gluckman’s work on “gossip.”

The Riot of the Statues in 387 CE was a decisive moment in the history of Antioch in Syria. After the revolt, tears and public lamentations took over, as the inhabitants awaited imperial punishment. In the course of the crisis the rhetorician Libanius and the preacher John Chrysostom each tried to negotiate a settlement of the dispute between the authorities and the city. Their speeches depict dramatic scenes of collective weeping and lamentation and thus reflect not only emotional states but also the public use of tears. In doing so, they shine light on the theatrical qualities of emotional responses in social interaction. The analysis of the purposes for which both authors exploit the themes of laughing and wailing reveals two contrasting attitudes to urban society and oratory. While both recognise the vital role of laughter and tears in managing social relationships, Libanius’ representation of emotional expressions aims to eulogise the virtues of an imperial officer and maintain the traditional order of society. Chrysostom, by contrast, teaches his audience which emotions are acceptable in a Christian society and which are not. His aim is to implement an emotion management that is oriented towards the heavenly realm.

The Introduction presents an outline of the book, its sources and empirical material, and its theoretical and methodological approach, which rests on the key concept of meaning formation in liminality. Following the social and cultural anthropology of Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner, liminality refers to a period of transition during which the normal limits to thought, self-understanding, and behavior are relaxed, opening the way to novelty and imagination and generating new meanings, ideas, and consciousness. Lived experiences in liminal times generate horizons of expectations, beliefs, and attitudes that transform social and political identities and shape the emergence of a new political order. The anthropological approach advanced here suggests that the constitution of a political subjectivity, at the collective as well at the individual level, occurs mainly through experiences and results in fundamental changes in consciousness.

This chapter examines the process of creating consensus in the Roman Empire. It investigates three social dramas that implicitly or explicitly invoked and expressed the consensus of the provincials and suggest that Rome invoked and sought consensus through means more disparate than communicative actions. It analyzes the use of acclamations to express consensus and the slow trend toward recording and publicizing acclamations and argues that each of these rather different political rituals strongly suggests that the Roman government could achieve consensus, as it defined that concept, only by developing and exploiting sophisticated mechanisms for the distribution of information.

Biblical texts such as 2 Sam 18:1–5, 2 Sam 19:6–9, and 1 Kgs 22:10–12 indicate that ritual actions whose aim is to establish or re-create communitas among the king, the army, and the population in situations of political crisis were performed in the city gate, which was the usual place for public performances, being a liminal place par excellence. These rituals could involve the performance of physical violence (2 Kgs 9:30–37, the killing of Jezebel) or ritualized violence in the form of imitative magic (1 Kgs 22:10–12, execration ritual performed by a prophet) and were sometimes undertaken to avoid inner-societal violence, as in 2 Sam 18:1–5; 19:6–9, where the legitimacy of kingship had become precarious. The investigation of textual, archeological, and iconographic evidence leads to the conclusion that the locus of these ritual performances must be the area before the gate.