Empire of Dirt. Wendy Fonarow
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as monologic to interaction as dialogic, from an understanding that is abstract and atemporal to one that is concretely located in time and space (Bakhtin 1981, Jackson 1989, Rosaldo 1989, Theunissen 1984).
The focus on the dialogic nature of interaction has drawn renewed attention to performance theory as an idiom for studying culture. Victor Turner, whose groundbreaking work on ritual pervades performance theory, recognized performance as a process, one that is co-constructed in the relationships between performance, performers, and audience (Turner 1969, 1974, 1986, 1988). The incorporation of performance theory in anthropology has occurred, in large part, because it permits recognition of the agency of social actors (Geertz 1983); the performance paradigm “privileges particular, participatory, dynamic, intimate, precarious, embodied experience grounded in historical process, contingency, and ideology” (Conquergood 1991: 187). In short, a performance paradigm requires cultural productions from the grand and spectacular to the mundane and intimate to be examined in situ (Palmer and Jankowiak 1996). Here, performance theory links with practice theory, which locates culture in the concrete practices of individuals in real circumstances and actual settings (Bourdieu 1977). Both position culture not in abstractions but in situated, co-constructed activity.
Rethinking interaction as mutually constructed, Erving Goffman introduced the notion of a participant framework (Goffman 1974).2 The notion of a participant structure was a way of thinking about speakers and hearers not as discrete, exclusive units but as mutual interlocutors in a co-constructed enterprise. A participant structure is the social recognition of an event and the expected behaviors within it. It provides a frame for the interpretation of activities, a context that allows participants to understand the behavior of other people. The participant structure is shared, and all parties are active in the unfolding of an event. Further, one’s role in a participant structure compels a particular use of the body, whether one is controlled or wild, whether one speaks or is silent. However, this is not to say that a participant structure dictates interaction. Individuals have vested interests. They can and do break codes of conduct, and this can result in innovation and/or a reframing of expectations. However, these actions are interpreted by others according to their shared notions of an event (Auer and di Luzio 1992, Goodwin and Goodwin 1995, Philips 1983). These shared notions are learned over time through actions that embody them, and actions have consequences. Performance theory, practice theory, and the sociolinguistic interactive paradigm all emphasize the importance of examining culture as a set of active and situationally located processes.
Active Bodies
Dance, dance, dance, dance, dance to the radio … Joy Division
Social scientists have recognized the need to address the body and incorporate the sensate dimensions of experience for the past two decades. History, sociology, ethnic studies, communication studies, film theory, and, in particular, feminist studies have all called for the “embodiment” of our understanding of human activities, a notion that incorporates the biological, the psychological, and the cultural. This can be seen clearly in the vast number of anthologies devoted to the topic of embodiment (Csordas 1994, Dunn et al. 1996, Welton 1998, Weiss and Haber 1999, and so on). Paying attention to the body is a way of approaching cultural practices and addressing phenomenology—the sensual, emotional, and physical aspects of experience (Turner 1986, Schechner 1988, Csordas 1993).3 Some of the best work locating the body in practice has been done by linguistic and medical anthropologists. Linguistic anthropologists analyze language as it is actually used, focusing on the unfolding of interaction in time and space. This has necessitated looking at all modes of communication, including the use of the body as a physical instrument in the production of meaning (Hanks 1990). However, the internal, phenomenological, and sensate dimensions of activity are not as interesting to linguistic anthropologists as the interactive, external, and collaborative dimensions of activity. Medical anthropologists, whose research on healing requires an examination of the phenomenology and physiology of the body as well as performance, have produced some of the best material dealing with the cultural body (Csordas and Harwood 1994, Laderman 1995, Strathern 1996, Strathern and Stewart 1999).
Social actors are physical sensate interlocutors. What one does with one’s body can concretely affect the experience of an activity and impact subjective perception (Crapanzano and Garrison 1977, Deren 1953, Greenbaum 1973, Kapferer 1983, LaBarre 1970, Locke and Edward 1985, Turner 1982a, Wasson 1971, Zuesse 2005). For example, in spirit possession rituals, repetitious physical movements accompanied by rhythmic drumming are used to induce altered states of consciousness (Rouget 1985). Such practices are central to our understanding of ritual, in which the body is deployed in specific ways in order to produce particular sentiments and sensations appropriate to the occasion. Not eating, eating “special” foods, dancing all night, not moving, or using pharmacological substances are just a few of the ways sensations are produced in ritual and associated with the cultural relationships that are enacted within ritual events.
Popular music studies are uniquely situated to address these concerns of embodiment because music performance and its communities of practice require an examination of sensate experience and aesthetic ideological systems (Shank 2003). The ethnography of musical performance that follows attends to the body, performance, and interaction in a detailed way. I examine how the body is used and read by participants in situated interaction (Hymes 1972, 1974b, 1975). I also follow Turner’s phenomenological call for embodiment in performance studies by considering the potential psychosomatic consequences of the different uses of the body within the context of musical performance. This ethnography attends to the physical and communicative aspects of interaction with a concern for phenomenology—the sensation, the ideation, the subjectivity of participation in a situated event.
The Audience and Subjectivity
Since the performance paradigm emphasizes the roles of all participants, it requires an examination of how the performance, performers, and audience influence one another. In the social sciences there has been a movement away from the creator, author, or artist as the preeminent analytic focus. Roland Barthes in “The Death of the Author” and Michel Foucault in “What Is an Author?” locate meaning not in the creator of a work but in the work itself in its receptive context (Barthes 1977, Foucault 1986):
It has been understood that the task of criticism is not to reestablish the ties between an author and his work or to reconstitute an author’s thought and experience through his works and further, that criticism should concern itself with the structures of a work, its architectonic forms, which are studied for their intrinsic and internal relationships. Yet, what of a context that questions the concept of a work? (Foucault 1986: 140)
Thus critical theorists have included the audience and context in their consideration of cultural productions such as reading (Derrida 1974), watching a film (Mulvey 1989), being inside a prison (Foucault 1979), or walking through a museum (Wilson 1994). Cultural studies, cognitive film theory, reader response criticism, and other contemporary theoretical movements have come to characterize all media spectators as active (Cho and Cho 1990, Fiske 1992, Iser 1980, Jenson 1992, Jones 1990). Thus, in the theoretical shift from looking to the author as the source of meaning to looking at a dialogic relationship between the work and its audience, receptive subjectivity has become a central concern in cultural studies.
The literature devoted to subjective reception has developed the notion of spectatorship as an analytic category. Spectatorship is a theoretical concept derived from a combination of psychoanalysis, linguistics, and film theory. Following Jacques Lacan’s and Julia Kristeva’s notions of subjectivity, the spectorial position has been characterized as “the inscription of a place for the reading or viewing subject within the signifying chain” (Doane 1987: 34). The subjective reading position creates a relationship between the viewer and the viewed. However, the enunciation of spectorial positionings is not necessarily explicit or obvious. The spectorial subject has been seen in point-of-view (Bellour 1979), voice-over (Metz 1986), and the use of the “generalized male third person singular” in writing (Mulvey 1989). For, example, in an advertisement for an American sitcom, a male character is shown sitting behind a desk in a room looking down at some papers. A conventionally attractive woman wearing a trench coat enters the room. The camera focuses on the woman as she throws open the trench coat to