THEA 101: Quiz D

East

Asia and the Indian subcontinent

Sanskrit (India, 200 BC)

Kathakali (India, 17th century)

Xiqu (China, “Chinese Opera)

Noh (Japan, 14-15th century)

Kabuki (Japan, 16-17th century)

West

Europe and the Americas

Greek

Roman

Medieval

Royal

Romantic

Traditions from Central American and West Africa (Rabinal Achí)

past

actual reality of an earlier time; museums, historic preservation, revisitation, photography, scrapbooking, and diaries

history

representation of the past, a researched attempt to capture the past; can only be partial

tradition

refers to the past, is based on the past, but is something done in the present; a present carrying out of something recalling or representing long-standing practices

Cambridge School theory

an influential historiographical and methodological movement in the history of political thought and intellectual history that emerged at the University of Cambridge in the 1950s and 1960s

Historical Contextualism

Rejection of Anachronism and Teleology

Speech-Act Theory

Political Languages and Discourses

historical contextualism

The school insists that political texts and ideas cannot be understood as timeless "perennial" truths. Instead, they must be interpreted within their specific historical, linguistic, social, and political moments

anachronism

judging past thinkers by modern standards

teleology

writing history merely as a linear march toward the present

presentism

mining past texts just to solve current political puzzles

Speech-Act Theory

Drawing on philosophers like R.G. Collingwood and J.L. Austin, figures in the school treat texts as active "speech acts"—interventions or arguments deployed by authors to do specific political work in their own time, rather than abstract system-building

political languages and discourses

Rather than tracking a single, unbroken "history of ideas," scholars examine changing vocabularies, idioms, and "political languages" (such as neo-Roman republicanism or common law constitutionalism)

James George Frazer

(1854-1941) a Scottish social anthropologist and folklorist[2] influential in the early stages of the modern studies of mythology and comparative religion; wrote The Golden Bough

The Golden Bough

first published in 1890, attempted to derive stable archetypes out of all world religions and mythologies

shaman

a person with a special relationship between the material world and the invisible, spirit world; employed to cure the sick, aid the hunter, conjure the rain, and help the crops grow; trance; ecstatic dancing, rapturous chanting, and acrobatic feats

passion plays

Type of medieval European Christian (Catholic) performance in which church members would act out scenes from the life of Jesus Christ

Passion refers specifically to Jesus’ material body and to his arrest and crucifixion

Passion play was a theatrical reenactment of these events from the Bible

Play was done as an act of faith and education for the medieval European masses of people who were typically illiterate and had few other means of studying scripture and theology