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
Intimidation, reassurance, and invisibility
Israeli security agents in the Old City of Jerusalem
Erella Grassiani and Lior Volinz
understand the nature of this kind of policing. Our second point of departure is to analyze the policing strategies mentioned above as performances, in which visuality plays a significant role (see Cook and Whowell 2011 ; Diphoorn 2016 ). With this approach
Jens Kreinath and Refika Sariönder
in both its constitutive parts and overall design, ranging from the modes of performance and participation to the intended audiences. As a response to different audiences in the environs of cities like Istanbul, there have been some collective
Envisioning, Evaluating and Co-Enacting Performance in Global Health Interventions
Ethnographic Insights from Senegal
Diane Duclos, Sylvain L. Faye, Tidiane Ndoye, and Loveday Penn-Kekana
act of locating, understood as an approach to capturing epistemologies in the making and to reflecting on the role and responsibilities of anthropology as a community of practice, will be used to understand how ‘performance’ was both studied and co
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
Introduction
Why Q1 Hamlet Matters
Terri Bourus
, a paperback anthology of revenge plays, textbooks designed for college students. Early in 2015, Zachary Lesser wrote a groundbreaking, award-winning history of the effect – on criticism, scholarship and performance – of the rediscovery of Q1. 1
The Many Layers of Moral Outrage
Kurdish Activists and Diaspora Politics
Nerina Weiss
will provide a discussion on moral outrage, in which I particularly draw on literature of political rituals and performances. In doing so, I will highlight the importance of performative and expressive contexts in the study of emotions. It is in the
Never Mind the Ballots
The Edible Ballot Society and the Performance of Citizenship
Matthew Hayes
political parties. According to the EBS website, 1 “voting is not only useless, it actually undermines genuine democracy by legitimizing an inherently undemocratic process.” The EBS protests were, I advance, performances of citizenship that drew on humor
Introduction
Performance, Power, Exclusion, and Expansion in Anthropological Accounts of Protests
Aet Annist
( Youngs 2017 ), we are offering this topical special section to analyze protests through an ethnographic lens. Concentrating on power and performance, the articles consider the matrix within which the protests emerge—the time and space, the historic and
“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
on research 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