The Anthropology of Cultural Performance

Contemporary life in most large-scale societies is not truly cultural, in the strong sense, but rather merely 'culture-like.' Using a semeiotic phenomenological approach base on the work of philosopher C.S. Peirce, Lewis presents a framework for understanding performative events in any cultural life-world. By revisiting Victor Turner's work on ritual and engaging with those who have built upon his ideas, the book presents a program for making connections between intimate embodied habits and major cultural practices in a given social setting. Beginning with a distinction between special events and everyday life, Lewis examines fundamental event types including play, ritual, work, and carnival.

J. Lowell Lewis an Honorary Research Associate in Performance Studies at the University of Sydney, Australia. He received his PhD in anthropology at the University of Washington, USA. His initial fieldwork in Brazil resulted in the book Ring of Liberation: Deceptive Discourse in Brazilian Capoeira (1992).