ch 9 Performance and Performativity: Linguistic Anthropology Notes
Analyzing Performance and Performativity
Situations for Analysis
The concepts of performance and performativity can be used to analyze various situations.
Examples:
A mundane conversation between Michael (M) and Lori (L) about Lori's music career, including dysfluencies and repetitions.
The same-sex wedding of Phyllis Lyon and Del Martin in San Francisco on June 16, 2008, officiated by Mayor Gavin Newsom.
The release of "Nuestro Himno," a Spanish-language version of "The Star Spangled Banner," featuring Latin pop stars in 2006, which sparked controversies about language and national identity.
Importance of Performance and Performativity
These concepts provide opportunities to understand how individuals and communities constitute and express themselves.
Linguistically
Socioculturally
Politically
Esthetically
Morally
Three Main Approaches to Performance and Performativity
1. Performance Defined in Opposition to Competence
Chomskyan View:
Distinguishes between "competence" (abstract, unconscious knowledge of language rules) and "performance" (imperfect application of those rules).
Analogy to de Saussure's langue (language system) and parole (actual speech).
Competence is what a hypothetical "ideal speaker-listener" possesses, unaffected by limitations and errors.
Chomsky focuses on "I-language" (internalized language/competence) and dismisses "E-language" (externalized language/performance).
Cook and Newson quote Chomsky's dismissal of E-language as derivative and empirically insignificant.
Linguistic Anthropologists' Responses:
Redefining competence.
Reversing the relationship, prioritizing performance.
Rejecting the competence/performance distinction.
Combining approaches.
Dell Hymes' Communicative Competence:
Expands competence to include "competency for use" – underlying rules for actual performance.
True communicative competence includes grammatical competence and pragmatic/performance-oriented competence.
Emphasizes incorporating sociocultural factors into linguistic analysis.
2. Performativity
Origin: Speech act theory by J.L. Austin and J.R. Searle.
Shifted language conceptualization from abstract system to social action.
Austin's Distinction:
Constatives: Sentences that merely say something, can be true or false (e.g., "It is raining outside today").
Performatives: Utterances that perform an action by being said (e.g., "I promise to study harder").
Initial formulation: Performatives begin with "I" and a performative verb (e.g., "I name," "I pronounce").
Performatives are "felicitous" or "infelicitous" based on context and authority.
E.g., a wedding ceremony performed without proper legal authority is an infelicitous performative.
Austin's Later Realization:
Constatives and performatives cannot be neatly distinguished.
All utterances "do something".
Overlaps with linguistic anthropologists' view of all utterances as social action.
Austin's Three Categories of Utterances:
Locution: Stating something (meaning in the traditional sense).
Illocution: Doing something instantaneously by stating it (conventional force, performative).
Perlocution: Consequences of stating something (effects rather than meaning or force).
Austin acknowledges overlap among these categories.
Every genuine speech act is both locutionary and illocutionary.
Austin's Taxonomy of Illocutionary Utterances:
Verdictives (giving a verdict).
Exercitives (exercising powers).
Commissives (committing to doing something).
Behabitives (social behavior).
Expositives (explanations).
Searle's Five Classes of Illocutionary Acts:
Representatives.
Directives.
Commissives.
Expressives.
Declaratives.
Speech Act Theory's Impact:
Utterances act upon and constitute the social and material world, not just refer to it.
Hall: Austin's argument that all utterances are performative is revolutionary.
Anthropological Criticisms:
Speech act theorists assume universality, but linguistic practices and ideologies vary cross-culturally.
Theories based on intuition rather than empirical data lead to unexamined assumptions and biases.
Rosaldo argues that Searle's theory reflects culture-specific views of language and personhood.
Ilongots' (Philippines) language is embedded in social relations, with directives as the default utterance type.
Ilongots lack the same categories of performatives (expressives, commissives) due to a different concept of the inner self.
Speech act theory displays a limited and overly simplistic notion of context.
McDermott and Tylbor: Speech act theory uses a "soup-in-the-bowl approach to context," assuming utterances exist independently of context.
Utterances and contexts are mutually constituted.
Derrida's Critique:
Challenges the role of individual intentionality in speech act theory.
Meaning is indeterminate and detached from intentions.
Différance: Meaning derives from difference from other words, not singular or permanent, emerges in contexts linked through repetition.
Despite criticism, performativity is popular among Derridean literary critics.
Butler's Contribution:
Broadens and redefines performativity, applying it to gender.
Gender is not essentialist but continuously produced through acts and words.
Gender is something we do repeatedly, not something we have.
Social and linguistic practices constitute the identity they express.
Influential in gender studies, ethnicity, racialization, and identity formation.
Latour's Perspective:
All social aggregates are performative because groups need continuous remaking.
Merging Performance Senses:
Lemon: Analytic senses of performance should run together where conflated in practice.
Butler: Performativity is both linguistic and theatrical, related chiasmically.
Speech act is performed (theatrical) and linguistic (inducing effects through conventions).
3. Performance as a Display of Verbal Artistry
Bauman's Definition:
Assumption of responsibility to an audience for a display of communicative competence.
The presence of an audience is essential.
Audiences are co-performers (Duranti and Brenneis).
Involves heightened attention to how something is said (poetic function of language).
Performance puts speaking on display, open to scrutiny (Bauman and Briggs).
Keying Performances:
Culturally specific ways that genres of performance are indexed.
Openings like "Once upon a time…" alert audience.
Formulaic introductions serve as keys.
Identifiable through seating, venues, language, movements, or rituals.
Common Cross-Cultural Keys:
Special codes (archaic language).
Conventional openings/closings.
Poetic/figurative language.
Formal stylistic devices (rhyme).
Special tempo, stress, pitch.
Appeals to tradition.
Disclaimers of performance.
Performance Frames:
Speech communities use keys to invoke performance "frames" (Goffman).
Determining keys requires ethnographic research.
Identifying performance versus non-performance is culturally specific.
Performance Variation:
Performances vary in intensity cross-culturally.
Training varies: formal, informal, or none.
Schechner: Every performance is concrete, specific, and different.
Linguistic Anthropologists' Interest:
Performance forms are memorable, repeatable, and reflexively accessible.
Studying performances provides insights into social group formation.
Emergence in Performance:
The whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Interplay between resources, competence, and goals within context.
Heightened attention increases emergent outcomes.
Structure is emergent, reinforced, negotiated, or contested.
Performers and audience may interpret differently.
Meanings change over time and across contexts.
Power and Social Relations:
Performances are interwoven with power relations.
Potential to reshape or reinforce hierarchies.
Performers can influence audience members.
Performances can be transformative or strengthen existing hierarchies.
Link to Language and Culture:
Performances link language to cultural practices and social relations.
Contribute to individual and community identity.
Ethnographies of Performance and Performativity
Jones and Shweder's Analysis of Theatrical Magic
Analyzes magician teaching apprentice a handkerchief trick.
Multimodal linguistic practices create illusions.
Narrative about "Splookie" the ghost makes trick successful.
Narrative keys the performance, framing it as paranormal.
Performative speech influences audience's perception of events.
Magician creates a coherent plot and attributes agency to the ghost.
Emphasizes the importance of a compelling narrative.
Connects to framing, emergence, and Austin's performativity.
Words have the power to manipulate vision.
Limon's Study of Mexican American Men's Jokes
Examines aggressive, sexualized jokes among Mexican American men in Texas.
Interactions framed as play ("relajando", "llevandosale").
Aggression becomes open only when signs of playful performance are missed.
Playfully aggressive exchanges build bonding and solidarity.
Multifunctional cultural performances have emergent qualities.
Subversive potential: Mock aggression opposes actual oppression.
Performances can negate the social order.
Performances can Index the men’s own domination within patriarchal community.
Ahearn's Research on Nepal's Tij Festival
Tij festival: Hindu rituals for married women praying for husbands' long lives and atoning for ritual pollution.
Festival includes feasts and songfests.
Paradox: joyful events with melancholy/defiant lyrics.
Explores seeming contradiction of lightheartedly singing and dancing to songs with sad lyrics.
Addresses if should be interpreted as expressions of outright opposition to male oppression to a woman's arranged marriage.
Lyrics of "A Twisted Rope Binds My Waist" analyzed (song sung at an informal song fest in Junigau in August 1990)
Lyrics contain a woman's voice and other voices (narrator, father).
Heteroglossic lyrics build in Interpretive indeterminacy.
Emergent qualities mean every performance contains interpretive indeterminacy.
Text and context influence each other reflexively.
Textual, temporal, sociocultural, and spatial constraints on meaning.
Constrain the range of possible interpretations to search for those that participants might take away from the event.
Practice theory of meaning constraint is used to eliminate unlikely Interpretations.
Spatial Configurations of Songfest:
During 1990's spatial configuration women sat together while men are around the outskirts
Men encircling the women should not be interpreted as mens' exclusion since women were the central of the focus.
The effect is partial physical and linguistic containment of women by men.
The sequencing of dancers thereby becomes a complex choreography that is jointly negotiated by women and men, albeit from unequal social and spatial positions
A practice theory of meaning constraint is applied to note possibilities that would be unlikely to be interpreted.
Analyzes the multiple voices and shifts in footing within the lyrics themselves and social, cultural, historical, and spatial considerations for contextual analysis.
Meanings of performances are co-constructed by communities of language users.
Conclusion
Explored definitions and uses of performance and performativity.
Three main approaches: (1) performance vs. competence, (2) performativity (Austin, Searle, Butler), (3) performance as verbal artistry (Bauman, Briggs).
Linguistic anthropologists build upon these approaches, drawing on concepts like framing, keying, and emergence.
Focus on how communities create social actions and define/redefine themselves.
Themes: Language and gender, race, ethnicity, power, agency, social change.
The note analyzes the concepts of "performance" and "performativity" in linguistic anthropology, exploring how these concepts are used to understand identity construction and social action. It outlines three main approaches: performance as opposed to competence (Chomsky vs. Hymes), performativity (Austin, Searle, Derrida, Butler), and performance as verbal artistry (Bauman, Briggs). The main argument is that linguistic anthropologists build upon these approaches to examine how communities create social actions and define/redefine themselves, focusing on themes such as language, gender, race, ethnicity, power, agency, and social change.
The analysis draws on various theoretical frameworks, including Chomsky's competence/performance distinction, Austin's speech act theory, Butler's work on gender performativity, and Bauman's concept of performance as a display of verbal artistry. It also references ethnographic studies, such as Jones and Shweder's analysis of theatrical magic, Limon's study of Mexican American men's jokes, and Ahearn's research on Nepal's Tij Festival, to illustrate how performance and performativity manifest in real-world contexts and contribute to social meaning-making.