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How do performances fuse societies?

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Abstract

This article discusses Jeffrey Alexander’s work on social performances. All societies, says Alexander, need a measure of integration—they need to be “fused”—for a common, properly social, life to be possible. In simple societies, this is achieved by means of rituals; in complex societies, it is achieved by means of the theater. In both cases, performances are understood in analogy with “texts” which are “read.” Although explicit interpretations indeed are crucial for our understanding of a performance, audience members make sense of what they see in more direct, more embodied, ways as well. Cognitive neuroscience can help us understand how performances affect us and thereby how societies are fused.

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Notes

  1. In what follows other versions of cultural sociology will not be discussed. On the implications of a neuro-cognitive perspective for Collins (2004); see, inter alia, Heinskou and Liebst (2016), Liebst (2019), Heider and Warner (2010).

  2. The field is summarized in contributions to McConachie and Hart (2010) and in special issues of the Theatre Journal, 59:4, 2007, and the Journal of Dramatic Theory and Criticism, 25:2, 2011. A leading publisher, Palgrave, has launched a book series on the theme of “cognitive studies in literature and performance," edited by Bruce McConachie and Blakey Vermeule.

  3. Fellow anthropologist Victor Turner makes the same point. Turner (2001), p. 76, Turner and Bruner (1986), and Throop (2003), p. 223.

  4. Geertz (1973a), p. 405. This is also why new-borns still in the 1980s were operated on without anaesthesia. The New York Times (1987).

  5. “Culture is crude and inhuman,” as Eugene Gendlin puts it, “in comparison with what we find directly. The intricacy you are now living vastly exceeds what cultural forms have contributed to you.” Gendlin (2003), pp. 100–115.

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Acknowledgements

Thanks to Naomi Rokotnitz for reading the text with such a critical eye, and to Rhonda Blair, Jason Mast and Lars Svendsen for comments and suggestions. The indefatigable librarians at Internet Archive and Library Genesis were as obliging as always.

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  1. Ibn Haldun University, Ulubatlı Hasan Cad. No. 2, Başakşehir, 34494, Istanbul, Turkey

    Erik Ringmar

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Ringmar, E. How do performances fuse societies?. Am J Cult Sociol 8, 29–44 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1057/s41290-019-00076-9

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