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A Cultural History of Theatre: A Desideratum

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 August 2016

Tracy C. Davis  and
Christopher B. Balme
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Extract

Theatre is predominantly a social form. Social history, which invites perspectives from “below,” stories of resistance, and awareness of how social organization stratifies, has had a profound effect on theatre studies since the 1970s. A wide scholarly purview on performative forms dates from the later nineteenth century, but social history changed awareness about historical contiguities of categories of community, amateur, and folk performance; tensions and exchanges among court, community, and professional performance constituencies; as well as greater respect for nonliterary traditions and unwritten forms of preservation and lineage. Social history, in short, prompted questions about who made theatre and how it mattered to the people who partook of it, including those who made it as well as others who consumed it, rather than more narrowly determining what constituted theatre (or drama) worthy of posterity. This approach—society as a group with common territory and interactions, enveloping each individual—could not be investigated as theatre history without a commensurate interest in culture. That is to say, not culture as the pinnacle of elites' achievements, but rather any social group's interpretation and use of common beliefs and values patterned by behavior and practices into religion, behavioral protocols, cuisine, and so on, including the arts. Wariness of a narrow elite construal of culture may be what keeps theatre historians from calling our field “cultural history,” for, though we embrace the ambit of social history, cultural history often comes in through the side door of sociological or anthropological theory. Cultural expressions are evident via how a society socializes, interacts, and adapts in ways that make the contours of the society legible to those within it, as well as differentiated from those who are outside it.

Type
Essay: On Cultural History
Information
Theatre Survey , Volume 57 , Issue 3 , September 2016 , pp. 459 - 470
Copyright
Copyright © American Society for Theatre Research 2016 

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References

Endnotes

1. Multicultural Education: Issues and Perspectives, ed. James A. Banks and Cherry A. McGee (Needham Heights, MA: Allyn & Bacon 1989); and Louise Damen, Culture Learning: The Fifth Dimension on the Language Classroom (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1987). On the definition of “culture,” see Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA), “What Is Culture?,” n.d., http://carla.umn.edu/culture/definitions.html, accessed 8 June 2016.

2. Christopher Balme and Tracy C. Davis, “A Cultural History of Theatre: A Prospectus,” Theatre Survey 56:3 (September 2015): 402–21.

3. John Paul Lederach, Preparing for Peace: Conflict Transformation across Cultures (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995).

4. Balme and Davis, 411.

5. Schechner, Richard, “Approaches to Theory/Criticism,” Tulane Drama Review 10.4 (1966): 20–53 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 34.

6. These terms are derived from linguistics and differentiate between an insider's (emic) and outsider's (etic) viewpoint. Marvin Harris adapted the distinction for cultural anthropology. See his The Rise of Anthropological Theory: A History of Theories of Culture, updated ed. (Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press, 2001), 569–71.

7. See, however, Glending Olsen's discussion of the term theatrica proposed by Hugh of Saint Victor in his treatise Didascalicon, which corresponds, in learned discourse at least, to current notions of the “performing arts.” Glending Olsen, “Interpretations,” in A Cultural History of Theatre in the Middle Ages (1000–1400), ed. Jody Enders (London: Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

8. Functional differentiation of knowledge systems is for Luhmann the hallmark of modern as opposed to hierarchical societies. Eva M. Knodt, “Foreword,” in Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz Jr. and Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), ix–xxxvi, at xi.

9. Gunning, Tom, “The Cinema of Attractions: Early Film, Its Spectator and the Avant-Garde,” Wide Angle 8.3-4 (1986): 63–70 Google Scholar.

10. Diana Taylor, The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas (Durham, NC; Duke University Press, 2003).

11. Tiffany Stern, Documents of Performance in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).

12. For the concept of fields see Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, trans. Randal Johnson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1993). For Luhmann's concept of “social systems” see note 8.

13. For an overview, see Victor Turner, “Foreword to the First Edition,” in Ted C. Lewellen, Political Anthropology: An Introduction, 3rd ed. (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), ix–x. Victor W. Turner, Schism and Continuity in an African Society: A Study of Ndembu Village Life (Manchester: Manchester University Press, for the Rhodes–Livingstone Institute, Northern Rhodesia, 1957). For Max Weber's concept of charisma as a form of domination see Max Weber on Charisma and Institution Building: Selected Papers. ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).

14. For Bali see Clifford Geertz, Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980). For the phrase “performance … an epistemology of conquest” see Patricia A. Ybarra, Performing Conquest: Five Centuries of Theater, History, and Identity in Tlaxcala, Mexico (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009), 60.

15. See Christopher B. Balme, The Theatrical Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014).

16. Bronisław Malinowski, Argonauts of the Western Pacific: An Account of Native Enterprise and Adventure in the Archipelagoes of Melanesian New Guinea, “with a Preface by Sir James George Frazer, F.B.A., F.R.S.” (London: Routledge, 1922), 83.

17. August Boeckh, The Public Economy of the Athenians, with Notes and a Copious Index, trans. Anthony Lamb (Boston: Little, 1857), 248 and 302.

18. See Tracy C. Davis, The Economics of the British Stage, 1800–1914 (Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

19. Jen Harvie, Fair Play: Art, Performance and Neoliberalism (Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave, 2013), 62.

20. Davis, 347–9.

21. Clifford, James, “Further Inflections: Toward Ethnographies of the Future,” Cultural Anthropology 9.3 (1994): 302–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 303.

22. Biers, Katherine and Marcus, Sharon, “Introduction: World Literature and Global Performance,” Nineteenth Century Theatre and Film 41.2 (2014): 1–12 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 4.

23. See Günter H. Lenz, “Toward a Politics of American Transcultural Studies: Discourses of Diaspora and Cosmopolitanism,” in Re-Framing the Transnational Turn in American Studies, ed. Winfried Fluck, Donald E. Pease, and John Carlos Rowe (Hanover: Dartmouth College Press, 2011), 391–425, at 398.

24. Shih, Shu-Mei, “World Studies and Relational Comparison,” PMLA 130.2 (2015): 430–8CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 434.

25. Doyle, Laura, “Inter-imperiality and Literary Studies in the Longer Durée ,” PMLA 130.2 (2015): 336–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 343.

26. Leonhardt, Nic, “‘From the Land of the White Elephant through the Gay Cities of Europe and America’: Re-routing the World Tour of the Boosra Mahin Siamese Theatre Troupe,” Theatre Research International 40.2 (2015): 140–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 142.

27. John K. Thornton, A Cultural History of the Atlantic World, 1250–1820 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 349–50.