Drawing on an anthropological study of the social organisation of the world of Irish writers, this article investigates the literary reading as performance which has become central for the career and promotion of contemporary writers. How is the reading - live as well as recorded - constituted, and how is it experienced from the writer's point of view? The data are derived from participant observation and interviews at literary festivals and conferences, writers' retreats, book launches and more informal situations with writers, as well as from fiction and essays by the writers. For this article, I asked some of the writers to write short texts on the reading. It turned out that the frames of the reading as performance reach beyond the reading event, and also that a reading includes elements of risk, such as not attracting a big enough audience or performing badly. Finally, the article considers the changing role of the ethnographer.
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Literary Readings as Performance
On the Career of Contemporary Writers in the New Ireland
Helena Wulff
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2008
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 98–113
Knitted Naked Suits and Shedding Skins
The Body Politics of Popfeminist Musical Performances in the Twenty-first Century
Maria Stehle
-rock and anti-essentialist purpose. The real site of her attack on heteronormativity, however, is her body—as topic of her songs but also as a tool for her performance. 1 In a role-play between naked alien and red-glittery glamour queen, McGowan takes five
In German Politics and Society
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2017
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 99–116
“That’s Where I First Saw the Water”
Mobilizing Children’s Voices in UK Flood Risk Management
Alison Lloyd Williams, Amanda Bingley, Marion Walker, Maggie Mort, and Virginia Howells
conducted for Lancaster University and Save the Children’s “Children, Young People and Flooding: Recovery and Resilience” (2014–2016) project, to argue that children can mobilize and become mobilized by mobile and performance-based methods, positioning them
Understanding through Performance Black Boston
A City Connects
PJ Carlino
museum studies scholar Richard Sandell, who argues that museums are “key sites for the enactment and viewing of performances by visitors; performances which regularly feature negotiations of cultural difference.” 2 The exhibit communicates best when
Irit Dekel
Is the Holocaust Memorial in Berlin a Jewish space? How are Jews presented there? What are the points of interest about Jews in the memorial from the perspective of the foundation that runs it as well as from various visitors' perspectives? This article focuses on interaction and performance at the memorial, an understudied topic in comparison to what the memorial presents in its installation and the debates that preceded its realisation. I argue that the memorial's form and location create interpretation strategies that are based on the dialectics of representation and non-representation, emotional experience versus knowledge about the Holocaust. This is differently manifested in the action of various groups visiting the memorial. Interpretation strategies rest on Jews being a category of memory. In substantiating this claim, I focus on the experience of German visitors, compared to that of Jewish visitors and claim that whereas Jews' experience of the site is directly linked to sharing intimate knowledge about the Holocaust, Germans tend to talk about the site metaphorically and in emotional terms, confirming the memorial's own ontology.
In Anthropological Journal of European Cultures
- Published (Print):
- 01 Sep 2014
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 71–84
Analytic Approaches and Critical Practices
On What We Can Learn
Laura T. Di Summa
remains: criticism is a practice, a sort of performance, a way of perceiving and experiencing the work from a subjective point of view. This is increasingly true today, and despite the concerns raised on the effects of the web on criticism, critics such
Adrienne Harris
This article examines Jonathan Caouette's Tarnation as a creative enterprise that opens up new ideas about documentary film and insights into working with new media. It considers how the making of this film worked as a prosthetic aspect to the filmmaker's identity and stability. In examining the interplay of sound, image, and written text, I note how Tarnation develops an artistic meditation on a number of important topics: the representation of trauma, the abstract and formal means of expressing the fragility of survival, the damage to memory and to identity that family dys-function causes, the technical demands of creating narratives of broken and contested lives. The material in the film and its mode of composition from the perspective of psychoanalytic studies of mourning, gay performance and identity, gender dysphoria and its relation to loss, and artistic projects as acts of healing are also considered.
Understanding the Zār
An African-Iranian Healing Dance Ritual
William O. Beeman
This article explores the structure and meaning of the Zār ceremony as carried out throughout the Persian Gulf. This ceremony is mirrored by similar ones throughout North and East Africa, suggesting that the Zār may have resulted from cultural diffusion along historical trade routes. The Zār practitioners, the bābā and the māmā, must cultivate extensive skills in musical performance, movement and coordination in order to affect a palliative relief for persons affected by spirit ‘winds’ that inhabit them, causing physical and emotional distress. The Zār ceremony is an important method of non-allopathic treatment for emotional disorders that might elsewhere be treated through psychiatry in clinical settings. Practitioners see it as compatible with Islam, though not a strictly Islamic practice.
In Anthropology of the Middle East
- Published (Print):
- 01 Jun 2018
- Article Type:
- Research Article
- Pages:
- 69–81
Helen A. Robbins and Leigh Kuwanwisiwma
visible and identifiable during the ceremonies and rituals conducted on the village plazas and in the kivas, the Hopi belief system incorporates great complexity in form and content. Through dance, ritual, prayers, kiva speech, and public performance
Roger Karapin
Germany has reduced its emissions of greenhouse gases more than almost any other industrialized democracy and is exceeding its ambitious Kyoto commitment. Hence, it is commonly portrayed as a climate-policy success story, but the situation is actually much more complex. Generalizing Germany's per-capita emissions to all countries or its emissions reductions to all industrialized democracies would still very likely produce more than a two-degree rise in global temperature. Moreover, analyzing the German country-case into eleven subcases shows that it is a mixture of relative successes and failures. This analysis leads to three main conclusions. First, high relative performance and high environmental damage can coexist. Second, we should see national cases in a differentiated way and not only in terms of their aggregate performances. Third, researchers on climate policies should more often begin with outcomes, work backward to policies, and be prepared for some surprises. Ironically, the most effective government interventions may not be explicit climate policies, such as the economic transformation of eastern Germany. Moreover, the lack of policy-making in certain areas may undercut progress made elsewhere, including unregulated increases in car travel, road freight, and electricity consumption. Research on climate and environmental policies should focus on somewhat different areas of government intervention and ask different questions.