An interdisciplinary perspective that conceives of folklore as artistic communication or
performance and seeks to understand folklore through studies that situate it in social life
and history. Also referred to as the contextual approach, the communication approach,
and performance studies, the performance approach examines a range of aesthetically
marked performances, including verbal art and material culture. It includes all of those
genres, acts, events, and roles in which people assume responsibility for presentation to
an audience. In performance, as Richard Bauman argues, the aesthetic dimension comes
to the fore as performers accept responsibility not only for what they do, but also for how
they do it. The audience of a performance maintains a dual focus, attending to what is
said and done, and how it is accomplished (Bauman [1977] 1984:11) Thus, while
performance clearly involves communication, it is an aesthetic mode of communication
in which aesthetic features are foregrounded (Fine 1984:58–62).
Performances can be distinguished from other types of communication by textual,
stylistic, and contextual features. For example, textual markers such as “Once upon a
time…” or “Have you heard the one about…” signal that a fairy tale or a joke is about to
be told. Distinctive intonations or rhythms, or other stylistic traits, as well as special
contexts, such as a defmed time, place, and audience, also identify performance as
aesthetic communication. Dan Ben-Amos, one of the first to conceive of folklore from a
performance approach, defines it as “social interaction via the art media” that “differs
from other modes of speaking and gesturing” (BenAmos 1972:10–11). Certain
metacommunicative devices, or signals that communicate about the communication,
function to frame a performance and thus distinguish it from other modes of
communication. These devices serve as keys or signals for performance and include,
according to Bauman: (1) special codes, (2) figurative language, (3) parallelism, (4)
special paralinguistic features, (5) special formulas, (6) appeal to tradition, and (7)
disclaimer of performance (“I’m not a very good joke teller, but…”) (Bauman [1977]
1984:16–22).
In addition to approaching folklore as artistic communication, performance scholars
insist on studying folklore in its social context, simultaneously emerging from and
creating a particular social event. Many different and interacting variables influence
performance events. The physical setting, such as season, time of day, and location, may
stimulate expectations for the performance of certain genres, such as fictional stories or
religious narratives. The psychological mood of the setting may further affect the types
and styles of performances that emerge. In addition, the kinds of participants and their
personalities, relationships, and goals influence the kinds of emerging performances (Fine
1984:62). As these factors change, different expectations for verbal-art performances
emerge. These implicit or explicit expectations for performance can be thought of as
“ground rules for performance” (Bauman [1977] 1984:28). Despite the existence of such
rules for a performance event, particular performances often stretch or violate these rules,
creating emergent texts, events, and social structures (Bauman [1977] 1984:40–45). In
addition to its focus on artistic communication situated in and influencing particular
social events, the performance approach emphasizes that folklore is uniquely patterned
within specific cultures and variable across cultures.
Scholars who work with a performance approach can be found in many disciplines,
including communication, linguistics, folklore, anthropology, sociology, and theater. This
multidisciplinary practice reflects the intellectual roots of the performance approach,
which were stimulated by research in each of these fields. The emphasis of
anthropologists such as Edward Sapir on recording vocal style and Bronislaw
Malinowski on recording contextual features, plus the work of linguists of the Prague
School in understanding the importance of individual usages of language, helped pave the
way for folklorists to examine folklore as a performance in a social context (Fine
1984:25–34). For example, E.Ojo Arewa and Alan Dundes drew on Prague-School
theorists Roman Jakobson and Petr Bogatyrev for the conceptual framework of their
groundbreaking work, “Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking Folklore” (Arewa and
Dundes 1964).
The performance approach first emerged as a systematic perspective in folklore
studies in the early 1970s, as part of a larger postmodern intellectual movement that
embraced the concept of performance as a new paradigm. Stimulated by the
interdisciplinary ideas of Kenneth Burke, Erving Goffman, and Gregory Bateson, the
social sciences were radically changed by analogies borrowed from the humanities,
according to Clifford Geertz. Two of the most powerful analogies, based on drama and
game, involved the notion of performance (Geertz 1980:168)
Burke’s dramatistic philosophy stimulated comprehensive analytical approaches that
took into account not only the work or act, but also the agent who creates or performs it,
as well as the agency, the scene, and the purpose. Burke’s performance-oriented ideas
influenced such folklorists as Brian Sutton-Smith, Bruce Rosenberg, Dell Hymes, and
Roger D. Abrahams. Burke also influenced such well-known anthropologists as Victor
Turner, James Peacock, and Clifford Geertz, as well as sociologist Goffman. Their works
further stimulated a performance approach to the analysis of culture (Fine 1984:35).
In addition to the influence of the drama analogy, the game or play analogy
contributed to the new performance paradigm. The most influential applications of the
game analogy to the performance paradigm have come from Bateson and Goffman.
In order to explain how beings distinguish between different orders of messages,
Bateson introduced the concepts of “frame” and “metacommunication” in his essay
“ATheory of Play and Fantasy.” Noticing that both animals and humans use signals about
signals, or metacommunication, to distinguish messages such as “this is play” from what
otherwise might be interpreted as aggression, Bateson argued that such
metacommunication serves as an interpretive frame. Such frames help define different
orders of messages, such as fantasy, play, and dreams (Bateson 1972).
This concept of frame has provided a useful tool for distinguishing artistic verbal
performance from other modes of communication. Much of folklorist Richard Bauman’s
definition of performance draws on Bateson’s notion of frame, as does Barbara
Babcock’s analysis of metanarration in folk stories (Fine 1984:35–36).
Another important stimulus to the study cultural performances has come from
Goffman, who used both dramatistic and game analogies. In The Presentation of Self in
Everyday Life (1959), he showed how everyday work roles could be interpreted as cultural performance. Ideas from this work, as well as from Encounters and Interaction
Ritual influenced such writers as Hymes, Richard Schechner, Barbara
KirshenblattGimblett, and Bauman. Goffman’s Frame Anafysis (1974) has been
especially crucial in shaping Bauman’s definition of verbal art as performance (Fine
1984:35–36).
A major intellectual root of the performance approach comes from an area of linguistic
anthropology known as the ethnography of speaking. During the early 1960s, Hymes
called for an ethnographic study of speaking that would discover the patterns and
functions of speaking within specific cultural contexts. He suggested a methodology for
this study that begins by identifying a “speech community,” or a group of people who
share common language and rules for conduct-ing and interpreting speech activities.
Within the context of a chosen speech community, the ethnographer describes speech
behavior in terms of settings, participants, ends (goals), act sequence, key (tone),
instrumentalities (communication channels), norms of interaction and interpretation, and
genre (Hymes 1972:35–71). Hymes’ work stimulated a number of performance-centered
ethnographies within the fields of folklore, communication, and sociolinguistics.
The term “performance approach” should not suggest any simple formula or method
for analyzing folklore. Rather, performance scholars in the 1990s recognize the
complexity of such terms as text, performance, and context and the dangers of conceiving
of them as static objects (Bauman and Briggs 1990:60). Accordingly, performance
scholars are studying the processes by which performances are detached from one social
situation (decentered or entextualized) and performed in another social situation
(recentered, or recontextualized) (Bauman and Briggs: 1990:72–78). Such studies
necessarily lead beyond the study of a performance in only one time and place to studies
of a performance embedded in history. Thus, a given performance might bear traces of
earlier performances, texts, and contexts. This historical emphasis promises to reveal
additional insights about the relationship of performance to social life and other modes of
communication.
Elizabeth C.Fine
References
Arewa, E.Ojo, and Alan Dundes. 1964. Proverbs and the Ethnography of Speaking Folklore.
American Anthropologist 66(2):70–85.
Bateson, Gregory. 1972. A Theory of Play and Fantasy. In Steps to an Ecology of Mind. New York:
Ballantine, pp. 177–193.
Bauman, Richard. [1977] 1984. Verbal Art as Performance. Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland.
Bauman, Richard, and Charles L.Briggs. 1990. Poetics and Performance as Critical Perspectives on
Language and Social Life. Annual Revietu of Anthropology 19:59–88.
Ben-Amos, Dan. 1972. Toward a Defmition of Folklore in Context. In Toward New Perspectives in
Folklore, ed. Américo Paredes and Richard Bauman. Austin: University ofTexas Press, pp. 3–
15.
Fine, Elizabeth. 1984. The Folklore Text: From Performance to Print. Bloomington: Indiana
University Press.
Fine, Elizabeth, and Jean Haskell Speer, eds. 1993. Performance, Culture, and Identity. Westport,
CT: Praeger.
Geertz, Clifford. 1980. Blurred Genres: The Refiguration of Social Thought. American Scholar 49
(Spring):165–179.
Hymes, Dell. 1972. Models of the Interaction of Language and Social Life. In Directions in
Sociolinguistics, ed. J.J. Gumperz and Dell Hymes. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, pp.
35–71.