THE ANTHROPOLOGY OF EXPERIENCE

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EDITED BY VICTOR W. TURNER AND EDWARD M. BRUNER

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WITH AN E PILOGUE BY CLI F F O RD GE E RTZ

U N I VERSITY OF I LL I NOIS PRESS

URBANA AND CHICAGO

First paperback edition, 1986

© 1986 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois Manufactured in the United States of America

P109 876

This book is printed on acidlree paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

Main entry under title:

T he anthropology of experience.

Includes index. \. Ethnology-Philosophy-Addresses, essays, lectures.

2. Ethnology-Methodology-Addresses, essays, lectures. 3. Symbolism-Addresses, essays, lectures. 4. Humanities -Methodology-Addresses, essays, lectures. 5. Experience -Addresses, essays, lectures. 1. Turner, Victor Witter. I I . Bruner, Edward M . GN345.A58 1986 306'.01 85- 1200 ISBN 0-252-01249-6

Digitally reprinted from the sixth paperback printing

To Vic and Barbara

-

Contents

INTRODUCTION

1. Experience and I ts Expressions EDWARD M. BRUNER

PART ONE: The Concept of Experience

2. Dewey, Dilthey, and Drama: An Essay in the Anthropology of Experience VICTOR W. TURNER

3 . Ordinary and Extraordinary Experience ROGER D. ABRAHAMS

4. Reflexivity as Evolution in Thoreau's ualden FREDERICK TURNER

PART TWO: Narrative

5. I longot Hunting as Story and Experience RENATO ROSALDO

6. Ethnography as Narrative EDWARD M. BRUNER

PART THREE: I mages

7 . The Argument of Images and the Experience of

3

33

45

73

97

139

Returning to the Whole 159 JAMES w. FERNANDEZ

8. Performance and the Structuring of Meaning and Experience BRUCE KA PFERER

188

--

PART FOUR: Reflexivity

9. Play and the Problem of Knowing in Hamlet: An Excursion into Interpretive Anthropology 207 PHYLLI S GORFAIN

10. Symbols, Sylphs, and Siwa: Allegorical Machineries in the Text of Balinese Culture

JAMES A. BOON

II. "Life Not Death in Venice" : I ts Second Life BARBARA MYERHOFF

PART FIVE: Enactments

12 . Patronage and Control in the Trinidad Carnival JOHN STEWART

13. Modeled Selves: Helen Cordero's "Little People" BARBARA A. BABCOCK

14. Magnitudes of Performance RICHARD SCHECHNER

EPILOGUE

15 . Making Experience, Authoring Selves CLI FFORD GEERTZ

Notes on Contributors

Index

239

261

289

316

344

373

381

385

Introduction

15 Making

Experiences, Authoring Selves

C L I FFORD G E E RTZ

R. P. Blackmur, wrItmg, I think, about Henry James and the charge that James's work was so rarefied because he had not lived enough, remarked that no one, artist or otherwise, is ever really short of experience. We all have very much more of the stuff than we know what to do with, and if we fail to put it into some grasp­able form (not, of course, the case with James in any event) the fault must lie in a lack of means, not of substance. The essays collected in this volume are mainly about people or peoples who quite clearly have such means, or have devised them. It is not that they have had more experience, whatever that could mean, or better. Instead, they have, in Barbara Myerhoff's fine phrase, authored themselves, made themselves someone to whom, in the famous cry of Willy Loman's wife, attention must be paid .

I t is at least one of the jobs of the ethnographer ( to my mind, the most important) to pay such attention, particularly to the means. We cannot live other people's lives, and it is a piece of bad faith to try. We can but listen to what, in words, in images, in actions, they say about their lives. As Victor Turner, the moving force in all these studies and in so much more in recent anthro­pology, argued, it is with expressions-representations, objecti­fications, discourses, performances, whatever-that we traffic: a carnival, a mural , a curing rite, a revitalization movement, a clay figurine, an account of a stay in the woods. Whatever sense we have of how things stand with someone else's inner life, we gain it through their expressions, not through some magical intrusion into their consciousness. I t's all a matter of scratching surfaces.

Even this, however, is trickier than it seems. It is not enough,

373

374 The Anthropology of Experience

as has recently been more and more suggested, to record streams of directly given cultural materials (chants, myths, dialog�es, rites life histories, designs, terminologies) and then, translatmg stric�ly, simply get out of the way so as to let them �hine in their own light-an updated version of that most persIstent ethno­graphic will-'o-the-wisp, brute fact. As Renato Ros�ldo de�­onstrates with his maddening (to us) hunting tales whIch consIst of strings of place-names, lists of animals, and vague references to moving about, this sort of text-positivism simply won't do. If we want a story out of this we need to know how, for an Ilongot, a story can be got out of it, or seen to be in it . And so on for what Barbara Babcock calls the "modeled selves" of Puebloan pottery ("we are all in there, in the clay") ; for James Fernandez, the "ar­gument of images" (parrot's egg, kralled bull) of African cere­monies ' and for Bruce Kapferer, the "continuous present" of ,

. . Sinhalese curing ritual ("deities and demons . . . coexIstent m the . . . flowing motion of music and dance") . The burden of de­scription, saying what it is others are saying, is not so easily shed.

It is here that "experience," the elusive master concept of this collection, one that none of the authors seems altogether happy with and none feels able really to do without, becomes the asses' bridge all must cross. The recent vicissitudes of "experi­ence" in English discourse (or perhaps it is only American)­where individuals no longer learn something or succeed at some­thing but have a learning experience or a success experience, where (as Frederick Turner remarks) "My upbringing tells me one thing but all my experience tells me another" and "Did you read that in a book or was it a real experience?" are taken to be co­herent sentences, and where the announcement of some Smiling Jack that he is about to share an experience with you is enough to make you reach for your wallet-make the prospects for �onest use of the word seem remote. But it is equally true that wIthout it, or something like it, cultural analyses seem to float �everal feet above their human ground . If what James Boon, followmg Alexan­der Pope at the appropriate distance, calls the �achinery of cul­ture is not to spin on in some frictionless paradIse where no one fears or remembers or hopes or imagines, nobody murders or rescues or revolts or consoles, it must engage some sort of felt life, which might as well be called experience. Perpetual

. signification

machines can do no more work than perpetual motton ones ; oc­currence must break in somewhere.

r Geertz: Epilogue 375

This perplexity, getting from cultural forms to lived life and back again in such a fashion that neither disappears and both are explicated, at least somewhat, animates all the essays in this vol­ume. Some (Victor Turner, Roger Abrahams, Richard Schechner) approach the issue generally, the majority through one or another special case. Some ( Frederick Turner, Phyllis Gorfain) address literary texts; some (Barbara Myerhoff, John Stewart) , histor­ical events; some Games Fernandez, Bruce Kapferer) , formular dramas. Edward Bruner is worried about ethnographical stories; Renato Rosaldo, indigenous ones. Barbara Babcock ponders a single sort of object crafted by a particular artist; James Boon, the overall structure of a vast and various cultural order. Dewey and Dilthey, Goffman and Schutz, Levy-Bruhl and Levi-Strauss, all are invoked; and so is the reptilian brain. But the aim is the same throughout: to discover something about how, to use Victor Turner's capacious phrasing, "the hard-won meanings" that in­form "the whole human vital repertoire of thinking, willing, de­siring, and feeling" are "said, painted, danced, dramatized, put into circulation. "

All these ways of putting experience into circulation (and, for that matter-consider Stewart's tracing of the fluctuating presence of Trinidad's dangerous classes in the carnival and Bruner's of the disappearance of the disappearing Indian in ethnography-taking it out) are well represented by the essays in this volume, which seem almost as though they were constructed in counterpoint to one another. Parades of invisibles in California set off processions of sectarians in Africa. "This is play" theatrical paradoxes in Ham­let (acting "mad" and "acting" mad) set off "this is text" socio­logical ones in Bali ("exceptionally everything can mesh . . . inherently everything does not" ) . Autobiographical potteries in Puebloan ceramics set off mechanical gestures in Hindu drama. Murals, campfire tales, steel bands, midnight trances, and Thoreau's hypnotic sand bank: whatever else an anthropology of experience might be, it is clear that it is, like experience as suc� , abundant, multiform, and a bit out-of-hand. Wherever we are, It is not at the gates of paradigm-land.

The anthropologist's way of putting at least some order into these collections of . . . shall we call them expresssions? representa­tions? Darstellungen? signe? symbols? . . . has been, of course, to con­nect them to the life around them-and there are a number of ways of doing that, as illustrated in these pieces, from Boon's

3 76 The Anthropology of Experience

or Rosaldo's social poetics to Kapferer's or V. Turner's social phenomenology. But what joins the pieces together is more the one way they do not do it; they do not match cultural forms, con­ceived as self-contained systems of beliefs and values, as "con­ceptual schemes, " to social structures, conceived as separately organized patterns of collective behavior, as "institutions . " The Durkheimian manner that has been for so long the favored mode of dealing with symbolic materials in anthropology-the

. "see, !t fits!" clanish-thoughts-for-clanish-societies approach to thmgs-Is silently but firmly discarded. . .

In Myerhoff's analysis, for example, those pecuhar, mtrac-table and not unpainful realities-aging, Jewish history, and Southern California-are not set forth as plain texts to which her particular objects of interest, the protest march against "death by invisibility" and the frieze depiction of the passage from ho�e, refer in some isomorphic way, as encoded statements of SOCial facts. Rather, these broader background matters are set forth as part of a somewhat overflowing and not altogether manageable stream of experience stretching back to New York and Poland, of which the narrower, more immediate matters of the march and the frieze are also a part. The "symbolic acts" (are there any other kind?) articulate the "hard-won meanings" of these realities; they make clear to those who enact them, those who witness them, and those who "study" them just what it is to be old and Jewish in a Venice where the canals are boardwalks and the gondolas, bicy­cles. Myerhoff is concerned with examining those meanings, wit� tracing out the mutual implications, some of them barely susceptI­ble of discursive statement, between the large and the little, the persisting and the passing, the existent and th� felt,

.that they �ro­

ject. Nothing here of that tired cryptography m which. everyt�mg

stands for something else and always says the same thmg: SOCIety gets what society needs.

Similarly, Stewart traces the vicissitudes of carni.val acr�ss

time, class, and race in Trinidad, not to show that SOCIal conflict is "reflected" in the changes in the symbolic expressions central to the festival, but to show that those changes in symbolism are part of that conflict-and not the least important part at that. Fan­tasy is not a simple turning of one's �ack on "re�lity'.' but a way, however devious, strange, and explOSive, of commg mto contact with it; indeed, in part constructing it. The effort of the Trinida- if! ;. '.

; j

Geertz: Epilogue 377

dian postcolonial elite to take control of this particular bit of col­lective fantasy, nearly to the point of managing it into a Ministry of Culture limbo, and more recent moves by the imaginatively dis­possessed to resist that effort ( "The time has come to return carni­val to the streets") are directly and literally political, not obliquely and metaphorically so. These clashes of beauty contests and danse macabres don't mirror another struggle in another place about something else: they are the thing itself. As Stewart indicates, this is not unfrightening; but then conflicts in the realm of fancy rarely are.

In Bruner's confrontation of the stories ethnologists used to tell about native American culture change in the 1930s and 1940s with the ones they tell now, it is not some Zeitgeist match between symbolic and sociological matters that is being set up: vanishing I ndians in depression, resurgent ones in inflation. I t is a contrast between schemes of discourse, schemes by means of which an­thropologists, drawing on the more general narrative resources around them, have formulated what little experience of Indian life they manage to have obtained. The feathered Indian as exotic Other, all noble and doomed, fading into an MGM sunset, or the T-shirted I ndian as political victim standing out, angry and in­domitable, against the hegemony of white society, are, as Bruner indicates, not mere tropes floating above what is really going on; they are what is going on at every level from Bureau of Indian Affairs' policy to the summoning to current use of the Pueblo Re­volt . Like murals and carnivals, stories matter. So--and this is the thing for anthropologists to remember, as well as their read­ers--do stories about stories.

If, however, the dualism of "culture pattern" and "social structure" is avoided in these essays as reductive or blinding, two other resonant terms, "text" and "performance," come into the center of attention. They are perceived not as independent reali­ties to be fitted together in the name of mechanical or quasi­mechanical, "such-are-the-facts" explanation; rather, they come as "seeing-as" elucidations of one another, inseparable moments of an interpretive dialectic, in principle endless . Whether seeing text as performance, as F. Turner, Gorfain, Boon, and Babcock largely do, or performance as text, as Fernandez, Kapferer, Rosaldo, and Schechner largely do, the empirical passage back and forth be­tween cultural productions-figurines or exorcisms-and personal

378 The Anthropology of Experience

experiences-remembrance or solitude-is mainly negotiated in terms of a conceptual passage, no less treacherous, between sym­bol as action and action as symbol.

The text-as-performance approach is, of course, most clearly seen in the essays by F. Turner on Uizlden and Gorfain on Hamlet, for they deal with texts in the most literal sense of the term-

.el ite,

canonical, auctorial documents, definitively edited and widely published . Yet neither views their subject as � verbal ��tifact locked away in a language world . Thoreau, settmg out to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look," produced, in Turner's words, "simultaneously a work of self-description and of self-construction. " Shakespeare, setting shows within shows to show "that within which passes show," pro­duced, according to Gorfain, "a jest, a gesture, incomplete, a sign about signs ." Factive or fictive, a weather report from th� �oncord woods or an imaginary tragedy with a real melodrama m It , texts are acts ; "strategies," in Kenneth Burke's famous slogan, "for en-compassing situations ." . .

With Boon and Babcock it is no longer lIterary productIOns but materialized images of one sort or another that are the "texts . " But the way in which experience is thrust onto the social stage-by the operations of Balinese "semantic Machineries" or the affirmations of Cochiti "speaking objects"-remains the focus of analysis. Boon's Machineries, a cascade of titles, go�s, and al­legorical geometries, are d iverse and abundant;

. mhere

.ntI�

paradoxical, irreducibly plural; ungoverned by any smgle pnn.C1-

pIe of organization either internal to themselves or brought m , deus ex natura, from outside. Yet "the institutions and per­formances of Balinese culture"-they give to collective life a collec­tive form. Babcock's (or rather, Helen Cordero's) objects are, in the literal sense anyway, individual creations, but they, too, bring a common sense of life-corn and clay and bread-into the common light of day. An intensely personal text ( " I t's my grand­father . . . . His mouth is open because he's singing") is a consum­mately public performance ( " [giving] life to the people") ; and the one implies the other: "nobody should sing alone. "

The reverse movement of the dialectic, from performance toward text (and because it is a "seeing-as" dialectic, not a "seeing-through" reduction, that is involved, none of these essays proceeds wholly in one direction or the other) , engages the anthro-

Geertz: Epilogue 379

pologist in the glossing of acts and the reading of actions . For Fernandez, the doings to be construed are revitalistic ri tuals; for Kapferer, curing ceremonies; for Schechner, dramaturgical ges­tures; for Rosaldo, as-I-was-a-huntin' storytellings. Behavioral hermeneutics.

In Fernandez, this movement is perhaps the most explicit : the analysis of African attempts, now extremely widespread, to reinvigorate cultures grown somehow " unsatisfactory"--disjoint, spiritless, obsolete-is conceived to rest on what can only be called a tropology of action. Understanding what "revitalization movements" mean to those who participate in them depends, he argues, on seeing how metaphorical images repetitively enacted in new-made rituals set up chains of "continuous and discon­tinuous analogies" (man : tree : forest : society) and create unla­beled "superordinate semantic categories" (dweller-talker-parrot­prophet) so as to reconnect the disconnected and restore the faded. "The performance of a sequence of images ["marching to and fro . . . to drumbeats and bugle call" ; or "kneeling around a deep hole dug into the sand, at the bottom of which a small trace of ocean water has seeped up" ; or " (running) faster and faster in tighter and tighter circles"] revitalizes, in effect and by simple it­eration, a universe of [cultural] domains, an acceptable cosmology of participation, a compelling whole." When texts lose their mean­ing, performances rewrite them; anyway, they try to.

In Kapferer's Sri Lanka the texts have not, so it seems, lost their meaning, at least for the healthy and unpossessed; but it is still performance-"a unity of text and enactment"-that gives them their practical force. In exorcism rituals the reexperiencing of a vital connection to the surrounding society, a connection that the patient, sunk into a solipsistical solitude, has at least tem­porarily been deprived of, is restored by machinery of Boon-like complexity operating with a Fernandez-like immediacy. It is the movement of such rituals from the "vivid present" subjectivity ex­ternalized in music, song and dance, and in an odd way trance, to the "dialogic" intersubjectivity represented in comic drama that cures: patients are rejoined to the common imagination by mea­sured doses of applied art. Schechner's piece, the most speculative in the volume as well as the most free-ranging-a sort of anthro­pological "My Dinner with Andre"-seeks a neuro-psychological foundation for the effectiveness of such art and provides an ex peri-

380 The Anthropology of Experience

mental setting, drums and accordions, chanting and deep breath­ing, in which to examine it. Rosaldo's essay, the most detailed and systematic, seeks to demonstrate how one kind of it-personal narrative-works out in fact, how Philippine hunting stories are made compelling in the recounting of them, how they become "historiable," lisible, form into texts. The passage from what is done toward what is meant, like that from what is meant toward what is done, involves above all a capacity to transcend our deep­grained assumption that signs are one thing and experiences another.

It is, after all, the life of signs in society-text-as-perfor-mance, performance-as-text-that brings about the contrast both V. Turner and Abrahams, the theorists here ( so far as the thing admits of theory) , see as critical to " the anthropology of experi­ence": "mere experience" as against "an experience." " Mere experi­ence," according to Turner, "is simply the passive endurance and acceptance of events. An experience, like a rock in a Zen sand garden, stands out from the evenness of passing hours and years and forms what Dilthey called a 'structure of experience. ' " Abrahams, invoking John Dewey to the same purpose ( "Life is no uniform uninterrupted march or flow. It is a thing of histories, each with its own plots, its own inceptions and movement toward its close . . . " ) , develops the contrast even further into one between "mere experience," "an experience," and "a typical experience"; between an event, its interpretive replay as we recollect it to our­selves or recount it to others, and its assimilation into the standard­ized categories that, however we struggle, outline our lives: "the American Experience, the Jewish Experience, the Sixties Experi­ence, even the Growing-Up or Growing-Old Experience."

Experiences, like tales, fetes, potteries, rites, dramas, images, memoirs, ethnographies, and allegorical machineries, are made; and it is such made things that make them. The "anthropology of experience," like the anthropology of anything else, is a study of the uses of artifice and the endlessness of it. The wrenching ques­tion, sour and disabused, that Lionel Trilling somewhere quotes an eighteenth-century aesthetician as asking-"How Comes I t that we all start out Originals and end u p Copies?"-finds in these essays some beginnings of an answer that is surprisingly reassuring: it is the copying that originates.

Notes on Contributors

ROGER D. ABRAHAMS is a folklorist who has written extensively in the areas of Afro-American and Anglo-American traditions and the theory of expressive acts and events. Presently on the faculty of the folklore depart­ment at the University of Pennsylvania, he has also taught at Scripps and Pitzer colleges, in California, and at the University of Texas at Austin . Recent books include Positively Black and (co-author with John Szwed) After Africa: Extracts from British Travel Accounts and Journals. BARBARA A. BABCOCK is professor of English at the University of Arizona, where she teaches and publishes in folklore, symbolic anthro­pology, narrative theory, and women's studies. Since 1978 she has worked with Pueblo potters and "potteries," and is the author of The Pueblo Story­teller ( in press) . She is currently writing Stories Told in Clay: The Art and Experience of Helen Cordero, of which the essay in this volume is a part.

JAMES A. BOON is professor of anthropology, Asian studies, and com­parative literature at Cornell University. His books include The An­thropological Romance of Bali, 1597-1972 and Other Tribes, Other Scribes. He is currently completing a collection of essays on Bali, I ndonesian studies, and the ironies of ethnology in general.

EDWARD M. BRUNER is professor of anthropology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. He has done field research among native Americans and in I ndonesia. He is co-editor of Art, Ritual, and Society in Indonesia and most recently has edited Text, Play, and Story, proceedings of the 1983 meeting of the American Ethnological Society.

JAMES W. FERNANDEZ is professor of anthropology at Princeton Univer­sity. He has done work among revitalization movements in Africa and the western Mediterranean. He is the author of Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa.

CLIFFORD GEERTZ is Harold F. Linder Professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton, New Jersey. He has done fieldwork in Indonesia and Morocco and most recently has authored Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology.

381

I I i

382 The Anthropology of Experience

PHYLLIS GORFAIN, an associate professor of English at Oberlin College, in Ohio, is at work on a book-length study of play and Hamlet. She teaches courses in Shakespeare and folklore, and has published articles combining these interests as well as articles on folklore and anthropological topics.

BRUCE KAPFJt;RER, currently professor of anthropology at University College, London, has done research in Zambia, Sri Lanka, and Australia. His major interests are the anthropology of symbolic processes and cul­tural transformations in former colonial societies. Recent books include A Celebration oj Demons and The Power oj Ritual.

BARBARA MVERHOFF was professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California and the author of Number Our Days, a book about the elderly Jews of Venice, California. A documentary film based on this work received an Academy Award. She wrote many other books about the experience of ritual , religion, and symbols, including Peyote Hunt, and was central to various anthropological films characterized by compassionate objectivity. She died on January 6, 1985.

RENATO ROSALDO is professor of anthropology at Stanford University. He has written primarily on the Ilongots of northern Luzon, Philippines, where he did field research in 1967-69 and 1974. These writings, particu­larly his book [longot Headhunting, 1883-1974: A Study in Society and History, were awarded the Harry Benda Prize for Southeast Asian Studies. He is currently preparing a book on theory and discourse in ethnography.

RICHARD SCHECHNER is a performance theorist, theater director, and currently professor in the Department of Performance Studies, Tisch School of the Arts, New York University. His latest theater work is Prom­etheus Project; his latest book, Between Theater and Anthropology.

JOHN STEWART is an anthropologist and writer who is affiliated with the English department at Ohio State University. His essay in this volume grew out of several seasons of fieldwork in Trinidad . He has written both anthropological studies and novels, and most recently collected and edited Bessie Jones's For the Ancestors: Autobiographical Memories.

FREDERICK TURNER, professor in the School of Arts and Humanities, University of Texas at Dallas, and a former editor of The Kenyon Review, has contributed to various anthropological symposia. He is the author of five books of poetry, including The Garden and The New UOrld, a novel, and several works ofliterary criticism and aesthetic philosophy. His most recent work, a collection of interdisciplinary essays entitled National Classicism: Essays on Literature and Science, will be published soon.

Contributors 383

VICTOR TURNER was William R. Kenan, Jr., Professor of Anthropology and Religion at the University of Virginia. He did fieldwork in Zambia, Uganda, Mexico, I reland, I taly, France, Japan, Brazil, and I srael, and was the author of many books, including the well-known Ritual Process. He died on December 18, 1983.

; I i I

I ndex

Abhinaya, 350-51 Abstract, of a story, 1 15 Acculturation: Amerindian, 140, 144, 152;

relation to Helen Cordero's pottery, 325 Acting, and everyday behavior, 28-29, 45,

345 Actions, as units of behavior, 49 Active forgetting, 64 Adams, Henry, 53, 86, 94n4 Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain),

53-54 Aesthetics, and experience, 38 Ajanta Cave, India, 361-62 American Dream vs. American Dread, 52 Amerindian culture: disintegration of, 140,

142; Europeanization of, 142; as a model forThoreau, 86-87; narrative structure of, 139

Amerindian potters, 316- 17. See also Pueblo pottery

Annals, and storytelling, 107 Anthropology: fieldwork in, 9, 87-88; or­

thodoxy in, 160; pragmatism and, 89; rise of, 84-89; role of, 375-76

Apostle's Revelation Society, 165-66, 171 Appearance, and reality, 221 -22, 226 Archaeology, use of pottery as text in, 319 Argument of images, 159 Arousal, and ritual, 359 Art: and experience, 34, 38, 50, 317, 321 ; and

ritual, 366 Art As Experience (Dewey ) , 34 Assimilation: Amerindian, 139, 141, 144; for

immigrants, 264 Authenticity: of cultural expressions, 28; and

spontaneity, 65 Authority, traditional, 45, 79 "Au thors of ourselves," 1 2 Autobiography, collective, 40

Balinese: culture, 240, 242-47; religion, 243, 247-52; spatiali ty, 248, 250, 252-57

385

Barthes, Roland, 135n3, 135n5, 139, 146, 241 Bateson, Gregory, 147, 163, 214, 217, 222 Bauman, Richard, 9 Behavior: and acting, 345; and experience,

5; and meaning, 207, 220; vs. model, 145-46

Behavioral hermeneutics, 4 Bellow, Saul, 94n4 Benedict, Ruth, 8 Berger, Peter, 67 Berryman, John, 94n4 Biracial categories, in Trinidad, 292 Bit (parts), 363-64 Blackmur, R. P. , 373 Blake, William, 92 Bloom, Harold, 58-59 Brain, and performance, 357-58 Burke, Kenneth, 268, 378 Bwiti religion, 167, 1 7 l

Calinda, 300-301 Calypso, 289, 302, 305 Canboulay, 300-301 Cannes brulees, 300-301 Carnival, in Trinidad: cannes brulles in, 300;

costumes for, 299-300; criticism of, 309- 10; experience of, 310- 1 1 , 313; mod­ern, 306- 12; objectives of, 291, 297-98; order of celebration in, 303-4; origins of, 298-99; participation in, 290-91, 299, 301, 302, 310; as performance, 289, 312; politici­zation of, 291, 296; preparations for, 290; secession of, 303, 304; social conflict re­flected in, 376-77; social differentiation in, 302-3; spectators to, 3 1 1, 314; steel bands in, 304-5, 306-9

Cassirer, Ernst, 160, 161 Castaneda, Carlos, 86 Cave art, 361-62 Celebration, as "event," 64-65 Celestial Christians, 166, 171 Chronicles, and storytelling, 107

386

Chushingura, 34 Civilization: evolutionary view of, 87; as a

"god term," 47 Cliches, as hindrance to communication, 48 Cochiti pottery, figurative: personal meaning

in, 317; tradition of, 316- 17 Coda, of a story, 120 Cognitive imperative, 364, 365

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 77 Comedy, 200-201 Commanding image, 176 Common experience, 49 Communication: and language, 164; and

play, 218, 222-23, 224; and social interac­tion , 163

Communitas, 178-79, 270 Community, individual in, 50 Competitions, 289 Complicating action, of a story, 1 16 Conflict, in social drama, 40 Consanguinity, 161, 162 Contemplation, as ritual in m.lden, 83 Context, in Hongot storytelling, 104-9,

1 15- 16 Cooley, C. H., 163 Cooper, James Fenimore, 101, 134 Cordero, Fred, 332-33 Cordero, Helen, career of, 321 -25 Cordero, Helen, pottery of: autobiographical

content of, 316, 320-21, 326, 328, 329-30, 333, 338; illustrated, Figs. 1 -3, 5- 10; imi­tation of, 337-38; meaning of, 325-26, 329, 331, 337; Pueblo iconography in, 334-35; storytelling in, 322-23, 325, 328, 329; types of, 321 -23, 328, 334

Coser, Lewis, 40 Covarrubias, Miguel, 242 Cultivation metaphor, of Thoreau, 74 Cultural axioms, 169 Cultural change, 1 2 Cultural continuity, 1 2 , 2 7 Cultural extinction, 140 Cultural transmission, 12 Cultural universals, 348 Culture: as text, 240-41, 253, 258; defined,

159, 239, 240; evolution of, 87; as a "god term," 47; and shared experience, 189

Culture and personality, 8-9 Curative rituals, 41 Custom, active forgetting in, 64

Index

Dana, Richard Henry, 86 d'Aquili, Eugene G . , 352-53, 354-56 Darwin, Charles, 92, 94n3 Data collection, dependency on expectation,

142-43, 146 Deception, vs. play, 216 Deep acting, 347, 363, 367n l Definitional ceremonies, vs. social drama,

40, 266-69, 271 Delayed action, in storytelling, 1 17-18 Democracy, and individualism, 87 de Saussure, Ferdinand, 173, 239 Description, use of in storytelling, 102 Dewey, John, 13, 14, 380; on art and experi-

ence, 34, 37-38, 61, 317; on everyday ex­perience, 59-60

Dialogue, in storytelling, 128-29, 136n8 Dickinson, Emily, 86 Dilthey, Wilhelm: concept of Erlebnis, 3-4,

41, 43; on experience, 1 3 , 35; on history, 261 ; on interpreting expressions, 5; on reality and inner experience, 4-5

Direct speech, use of in storytelling, 101, 105, 1 10, 1 17 , 135n2

Discourse, 145, 152-53, 235 Dividuals, 160 Divination, 41 Documen tary. See Monographic realism Donoghue, Dennis, 47, 53 Double consciousness, 14-15, 51, 52, 80 Douglas, Mary, 20\, 256 Drama: in cave art, 362; in Hongot story-

telling, 1 14-15 Dualism, distortion due to, 320 Dufrenne, M., 193 Dumont, Louis, 159, 247 Dundes, A., 169 Durkheim, Emile, 4, 35, 40, 160, 161, 170

East Indians, in Trinidad, 293-94 Ekman, Paul, 345 Elderly, invisibility of, 263 Eltmtnlargedanken, 169, 1 70 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 58, 77, 86 Emic description, of culture: definition of,

57; vs. etic, 149; need for, 103; in taxonomy, 99

Emotional recall, 346, 347 Emotions: and acting, 345-49; universal

language of, 29, 348

Index

Enactment, 202. See also Performance Epimenides, paradox of, 218 Erlebnis, 3, 41, 43 Ethnic resurgence, Amerindian, 139, 140 Ethnocentrism, 50, 85, 86 Ethnographic realism. See Monographic

realism Ethnography: a priori ideal categories in, 58;

as documentary, 99-100; double con­sciousness in, 14, 51, 53, 54; emic vs. etic description in, 57, 149; factive vs. fictive, 212; as fiction, 1 39; fieldwork in, 147-48, 151 ; hermeneutic circle in, 75; as interpre­tation, 97; mythology of, 87-88; and obser­vation of experiences, 49, 373; role of in for­mant in, 148; shift in emphasis of, 55, 60, 69-70; subject and object of, 149; vitality in, 9

Ethnoscience, and emic analysis: as framework for research, 99, 133; limita­tions of, 16, 97

Etic description, of culture, 57, 143, 149 Europeanization, of Amerindians, 142 Evaluation, of a story, 1 16 Evans-Prichard, E. E. , 97 Event, vs. experience, 55, 57, 61, 68, 317 Evolution: of cultures, 87; and hermeneutic

circles, 78; of language, 91 ; sand bank metaphor for, 90-93

Evolutionary metaphors, 57, 90-91 Existence, and life, 59 Exorcisms, 193-94, 195-202 Expectation, role in data collection, 142-43,

146 Experience: of another's experience, 188;

and art, 34, 37-38, 3 1 7, 321 ; availability of, 373; and behavior, 5; common vs. pri­vate, 49; components of, 4; as deeply coded word, 48; defined, 3 74; and development, 77; distinction between "experience" and "an experience," 6, 7 , 35, 61, 63, 380; dou­ble consciousness of, 14- 15; and drama, 34; etymology of the word, 35; vs. event, 55, 5 7 , 6 1 , 68, 317 ; everyday vs. significant, 58-59, 62; of experience, 60; and experi­ment, 89; Fernandez on, 4-5, 1 1 ; for its own sake, 48, 53, 67; in Hamlet, 207; indi­vidual, 366; meanings of, 73; mutual, 189, 190-91 ; origins of, 359-60; personal, 15; in personal economy, 56; and play, 360; private vs. common, 49; reification of the

387

word, 46, 47, 69; relation to expressions, 6, 10, 28; relation to reality, 6-7, 28; self­referential quality of, 5, 7; shared, 189, 274, 366; Thoreau on, 77, 89; Trilling on, 48; and tropes, 20; and truth, 89; value of, 36

Experiment, as experience, 89 Exploitation, of Amerindians, 139, 140 Expressions: as communication of experi-

ence, 37; definitions of, 5, 9; nonverbal, 27; relation to experience, 6, 10, 28; rela­tion to reality, 6-7, 28; as units of meaning, 9

Feelings: and acting, 350; as part of experi­ence, 49

Fernandez, James: on form of experience, 4-5, 1 1

Fete. See Carnival, i n Trinidad Fiction: and actual worlds, 213; and am­

biguities, 217; custom as, 64; ethnography as, 139; Hamlet as, 2 1 1 - 19; and image, 214; and reflexivity, 210

Fiction, American: double consciousness in, 53-54

Fischer, Roland, 359, Fig. 6 F'olk ideas, 169 Franklin, Benjamin, 94n4 From Ritual to Theatre (V. Turner), 34-35 Functionalism, 253

Gabon, 167 Galaxy of signifiers, fieldwork as, 147 Game metaphors, 57 Geertz, Clifford, 97, 245, 246, 261 Geertz, Hildred, 246 Generalizing Other, 190 Genette, Gerard, 135n2, 135n3, 154 Girard, Alexander, 321 Gluckman, Max, 40 "God terms," 4 7 Godel, Kurt, 75 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 65 Goffman, Erving: on everyday behavior,

356-57; on experience, 69; on "god terms," 47; on "identity kit," 55; on indi­vidual as diety, 46

Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald), 54

Hamartia, 227 Hamlet (Shakespeare): as anthropological

text, 207; experience in, 207; as fiction,

388

21 1 - 19; plot of, 219-34; reflexivity in, 209; as text/performance, 378

Handelman, Don, 224 Harmony, 174 Haugen, Einar, 164 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 86 Hemingway, Ernest, 54 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 150 Hermeneutic anthropology, 4, 94n2 Herrnstein-Smith, Barbara. See Smith, Bar-

bara Herrnstein History, vs. storytelling, 107 Hobart, Mark, 254-57 Hodder, Ian, 319 Hooykaas, C., 243 Hopi pottery, 316 Howells, William Dean, 7 1 n2 Humanism, 65 Hume, David, 77 Hydraulic metaphors, 57 Hymes, Dell, 9

Identity, establishment of, 56, 225 " I dentity kit," 55 Idiosyncracy, of experience, 49, 50 Hongot hunting stories: as annals, 107; com­

memorative, 103, 109-21 ; context of, 103, 104-9, 374; as example of novelistic realism, 98; examples of, 104, 109-14, 124-28; similes in, 1 18, 136n6; spontane­ous, 103, 121 -33

Hongot subsistence, 99, 135n I I mages, fictive, 214 I ndependence, personal, 78 Indians, in Trinidad, 293-94. See also

Amerindian culture Individual: as a diety, 46-47; and dividual,

160; experience, 366; Geertz on, 56-57; self-reliance of, 79: in society, 60, 78; Thoreau's anthropology of, 78-84; and transcendentalism, 86; uniqueness of, 50, 56; in United states, 50

Individuality, radical, 56 Initiatory rites, 41 Institutions, vs. the individual, 79 Interpretive anthropology, 4 I ntrospection, and transcendentalism, 86 Inversion, in storytelling, 1 17

Jakobson, T., 173 James, Henry (the elder) , 86

Index

James, Henry (the younger), 53, 86, 135n2 James, William, 58, 59, 66, 7 1 n2, 86

Jouvet, 302, 303

Kaddish, 271 Kathakali dance-drama, 346, 351 -52, 357 Key words: of authoritative rhetoric, 46; and

everyday talk, 55; and "god terms," 47, 7 1 n l

Labov, William, 1 15- 16, 135n5 Laing, R . D., 188 Language: and communication, 164; defined,

239; of emotions, 348; evolution of, 91 Lannoy, Richard, 361 -62 Lansing, Stephen, 284 Laplace calculator, paradox of, 81 -82 Lee, D., 163 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 89, 136n lO, 141, 159,

161, 169, 172 Levy-Bruhl, Lucien, 160, 161 Life: and art, 61 ; Bruner on, 6; Dilthey on,

8; and existence, 59; as fiction, 46; metaphors for describing, 57; as a whole, 160-61

Life-crisis ceremonies, 41 "Life Not Death in Venice" parade, 269-73,

280-84 Limen, 41 Liminal phase, of ritual, 41 -42 Linton, Ralph, 142 Lowell, Robert, 94n4

Machineries, of culture, 24, 243-45, 258 Maikr, Norman, 94n4 Malinowski, Bronislaw, 88, 99, 163 Mardi Gras, 289, 303 Marx, Karl, 150, 320 Marxism, 202, 253 Materialism: defect of, 320; failure to reduce

machineries to, 253; of pottery studies, 319; Thoreau against, 81 ; vulgar, 180

Mauss, M., 161 Mead, George Herbert, 190 Meaning: and anticipation, 142, 146; an�

behavior, 207, 220; communication of via expressions, 37; deep, 48; discovery of, 375; emic, 99; indigenous, 9, 16; as part of experience, 49; preexisting, I I ; as rela­tional structure, 36; of signs, variable, 76-77; in stories, 140, 142; structure of,

,

Index

144; V. Turner on, 33; unitary, 8; units of, 7, 18; of wholes, 159

Mechanical acting, 346, 349, 350 Melody, 174 Melville, Herman, 83, 86 Mencken, H. L . , 7 1 n2 Metacommentary, 245 Metacommunication, 214, 215 Metamorphosis, 161 Metaphor: defined, 176; and experience, 170;

vs. narrative structure, 153; predictions, 171, 177; as reference to the whole, 159; role

in culture, 184n I Metaphysical philosophy, 58 Metonym, 159, 171 Mirroring, 209, 262 Moby Dick ( Melville), 54 Model, vs. behavior, 145-46 Monographic realism: context in, 108; con­

trast to novelistic realism, 102-3; example of, 99-100; generalization in, 100, 133; limitations of, 16, 97

Monologue, in storytelling, 128, 136n8 Morgan, Lewis Henry, 15, 74, 86 Morris, Charles, 49 Motifemes, 169 Motifs, in folklore, 169 Mural, as text, 273-80 Mysticism, and transcendentalism, 86 Myth: and authority, 79; I Iongot, 121 -33;

storytelling via, 141 ; in /#lIden, 84 M y themes, 169

Narcissus, myth of, 212 Nardo, Anna K., 224 Narratives: and anticipation, 142; cycles of,

145; of personal experience, 1 15; as struc­tures, 144. See also Stories

Narrative structure, of ethnography, 139 Natal, South Africa, 1 68-69 Natanson, M . , 202 Native exegeses, 57

Native informant, Thoreau as, 78 Natural symbols, 256 Nature, 82, 88 Natyasastra, 349-51 Neo-Marxists, 180 Neo-structuralists, 180 New Tadzewu, Ghana, 165-66 Noninvolvement, of the observer, 52 Novelistic realism: contrast to ethnographic

389

realism, 102-3, 134; and ernie analysis, 98; particularism of, 100- 101, 134

Novelty, American obsession with, 50-51

Objectivity, and reali ty, 51 Omoo (Melville), 86 Order of things, 176 Orientation, of a story, 1 15 Origin of /he Species (Darwin), 92, 94n3

Parade, as performance, 269-73 Paradigm, vs. narrative structure, 153 Parts and wholes, 159, 184n I Peirce, Charles Sanders, 89, 94n2, 240 Pepper, S . , 171 Performance: abhinaya, 350-51 ; audience for,

192; and brain, 357-58; carnival as, 289; and cave art, 361-62; consequences, 171, 175; construction of, 24-25; and cultural experience, 50; deep acting, 347; defined, 191 -92; in definitional ceremonies, 268; directionality of, 193; everyday, 357; and expression, 7, I I, 14; imitative actions in, 213; incompetent, 146; media of, 192-93; vs. naturalness, 66; Pueblo Revolt as, 150; and reality, 213; and ritual, 191 ; and self­definition, 261-62; scope of, 344-45; story­telling as, 145; structure of, 194-95; as "structuring of structure," 22; training for, 360-61 ; and transcendence, 191

Performance metaphors, 57 Personal economy, 56 Personal pronouns, 170 Pfeilfer, John, 361 Phenomenology, 21, 188, 202 Pioneers (Cooper) , 101 -2 Pirsig, Robert, 94n4 Place-names, in I longot storytelling, 105-6,

108-9 Plath, Sylvia, 94n4 Play: defined, 218; and experience, 360;jouvet

as, 302; as performance, 213; punning, 226-28; and ritual, 356; rules of, 229; and social reality, 220, special interpretation of, 214-16

Poe, Edgar Allan, 86 Pope, Alexander, 243 Positivism: in medicine, 180; textual, 107,

374; Thoreau's rejection of, 77 Poststructural anthropology, 4 Pottery, as text, 319

390

Power, narratives as units of, 19 Pragmatism, 58, 59, 67, 88-89 Pratt, Mary Louise, 135n5 Pretense, 218 Private experience, 49 Processual anthropology, 4 Progress, as a "god term," 47 Protestantism, and individualism, 87 Proverbs, 1 36n 7 Pueblo pottery, 316- 17, 318- 19, 322-23, 336,

339n 10 Pueblo Revolt, 148, 150 Puritanism, and individualism, 87

Radcliffe-Brown, A. R . , 4 Rank, Balinese, 246-47 Rappaport, Roy, 180-82 Reality: and appearance, 221 -22; difficulty

of knowing, 21 1 ; monographs as, 16, 97; possible oppositions, 66-67; relation to experience and expressions, 6-7, 28; rela­tion to reporting, 51 ; vs. unreal, 65-66

Reflexivity, 22-23, 83, 209, 217 Relatedness, 162-63 Relativism, and transcendentalism, 86 Religion: Amerindian, 143; Apostle's Revela-

tion Society, 165-66, 171 ; Balinese, 247-52; Bwiti, 167; Celestial Christians, 166; Sinhalese Theravada Buddhism, 193; and transcendentalism, 86; Zulu Zionism, 168, 171

Repetition, in storytelling, 1 17 Reporting, relation to reality, 51 Resistance, Amerindian, 139, 143, 144, 152 Resolution, of a story, 1 16 Revitalization movements, 19-20, 159, 162;

meaning of, 379; purpose of, 173; strategy of, 183

Ricouer, Paul, 192, 273 Ri tes of passage, 62 Rituals: animal, 353-54; and authority, 79;

curative, 41 ; defined, 203n2; evolutionary aspects of, 352-53; and myth, 355; musical metaphor for, 173; and performance, 191 ; prophylactic vs. therapeutic, 4 1 ; as wired­in system, 362-63; and theater, 345; uni­versal system of, 348; in Jtalden, 83

Role playing. See Play Root metaphors: and "god terms," 47; vs.

historical experience, 146; of Pueblo cul­ture, 329

Rose, Dan, 55-56 Russell, Bertrand, 188

Sahlins, M., 163

Index

Sand bank metaphor, in Walden, 90-93 San Ildefonso Indians, 142; pottery of, 316 Sapir, Edward, 8 Sanre, J. P. , 163 Schechner, Richard, 88 S chorr, Daniel, 51 Schutz, Alfred, 67, 163, 164, 165 Schwartzman, Helen, 224 Science, and transcendentalism, 86, 94n5 Self-deception, 81 Self-reference, in experience, 5, 60 Self-reliance. See Individual Sensory deprivation, among the elderly, 267 Sign-images, 170, 174-75 Signs: defined, 239; variability of, 75-76 Similes: Balinese, 242-43; in I 1ongot stories,

1 18, 136n6 Simmel, Georg, 40 Singer, Milton, 9 Sinhalese Theravada Buddhism, 193 Siwa, Balinese, 244-52 Slaves, in Trinidad: emancipation of, 293,

300; social status of, 292, 293 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 136n7, 146 Social drama: cultural effects on, 40; defined,

39; vs. definitional ceremonies, 40 Social effervescence, 35 Social invisibility, 263, 266, 272 Social reality: altered by play, 220; and ex­

perience, 74, 76-77 Society: individual as, 81 ; individual in, 60,

78-79 Sophie's Choice (Styron ) , 54 Spatiali ty, Balinese, 248, 250, 252-57 Spontaneity: and authenticity, 65; and cul-

tural formalities, 64-65 Status, Balinese, 245-47 Steiner, George, 261 Stories: defined, 145; and emic analysis, 97-

98; Ilongot, 104, 109- 14, 124-28; meaning in, 140, 142; as personal resource, 56; Platonic ideal form, 145; sharing of, 148, 151 . See also Narratives; Storytelling

Storytelling: commemorative, 103, 109-21 ; context of, 103, 104-9; defined,145; eth­nography as, 139, 147-48; vs. history, 107; via myths, 141 ; pottery in, 338; among

Index

Pueblo Indians, 329; and retelling, 121, 145, 146, 148, lSI -52; spontaneous, 103, 121 -33. See also Stories

Street theater, carnival as, 291, 309 Structuralism: criticism of, 8; and perfor-

mance, 202; rebellion against, 3-4 Sun Also Rises (Hemingway ) , 54 Superordinate semantic categories, 176-77 Swellengrebel, J. L. , 248 Symbolic acts, 376 Symbolic anthropology, 4 Symbolism: and authority, 79; Balinese,

252-57; in culture, 23; strategies for, 180-83; in Jtalden, 83

Symbols: constitutive power of, 160; defined, 240; natural, 256; replication in, 283

Syncretism: of Thoreau, 83; and transcen­dentalism, 86

Tan, Roger Y. D. , 250, 251 Tax, Sol, 147 Techne, 319 lelling, of stories, 145. See also Storytelling Text: culture as, 240-41 , 253; and per-

formance, 377-79; pottery as, 319 Text positivism, 107, 374 Theater: improvisational, 364-65; and new

behavior, 363; as redressive ritual, 40-41, 42; street, 291 , 309

Themes, in folklore, 169 Thoreau, Henry David: and anthropology of

the individual, 78-84; and birth of Ameri­can anthropology, 84-89; cul tivation metaphor of, 74 , 76; on hermeneutic circle, 75-76, 77-78; as minimalist an­thropologist, 15-16; on role of the indi­vidual in society, 78-79; and sand bank metaphor in Jtalden, 90-93

Time: connection between past, present, and future, 141 ; experience of, 8; in I longot hunting stories, 98, 106, 131 -32; and paradox of the Laplace calculator, 81 -82; in performance, 199; in Thoreau's anthro­pology of the individual, 81 -83; zero­degree, 106, 135n3

Totemism, 161 Tradition: ambiguity in, 34; as a construc­

tion, 27; problem of maintaining, 140 Transcendentalism, 58, 85-86 Traps, 221, 236n6

391

Trilling, Lionel, 47, 48, 380 Trinidad: carnival in, 289, 305; cultural iden­

tity in, 305-6; ethnic mix of, 291 -94; na­tional motto of, 296; politics of, 295-96; social structure of, 292-93, 294; tourist trade in, 305-6, 310, 31 1, 314

Tropes, 20, 170, 172-78 Truth: and acting, 348; and experience, 89 Turner, Victor: on communitas, 178-79; as

ethnographer, 97; formulation of an­thropology of experience by, 3; on "god terms," 47; on meaning, 33; and my­thology of ethnographer, 88; and subjunc­tive activities, 62-63; writings on per­formance by, 9, 13-14

Tylor, E. B. , 159 Tjpee (Melville), 86 Typicality, of experience, 60-61

United States of America: American Dream vs. American Dread, 52; double conscious­ness in, 53-54; individualism in, 50, 57; obsession with novelty in, 50-51 ; symbols of, 273-74; value of "experience" in, 48, 63-64

Ute I ndians, 142

Valery, Paul, 64 Value, of experience, 36 Van Gennep, Arnold, 363 Venice, California, study of immigrant Jews

in, 262-63 Voyeurism, and ethnography, 52 Vygotsky, Lev S. , 224

Walden (Thorea u ) : as anthropology, 78-84; sand bank metaphor in, 90-93; as text/ performance, 378

West Indies, problems in, 296-97 White, Hayden, 107, 135n5 White Knife Shoshoni Indians, 142 Whitman, Walt, 86 Wholes: and parts, 159, 184n l ; simple and

complex, 178-80 Williams, Raymond, 47 Witherspoon, G . , 169, 171

Yiddishkeit, 264

Zulu Zionism, 168, 171