Theater, Anthropology and

Abstract

Theater has been a focus of systematic investigation in anthropology since the 1970s. Because of its cross‐cultural nature, theater has been of interdisciplinary interest to scholars employing ethnographic methods to analyze cultural meanings present in texts and embodied in rituals and in the social exchange of symbols between performers and audiences. Following the “affective turn” of the 1990s and under the influence of postcolonial critique, performance scholars and social scientists have begun to look at theater practices as processes of meaning making, political negotiation, and collaboration. Acknowledging theater's immediacy in concentrating on what lies at the core of what specific societies want to communicate about themselves, anthropologists have also used performances to communicate their fieldwork data in the form of ethnodramas. More recently, social research that has wished to privilege reflexivity and intersubjectivity has engaged with the actual practice of theater making, to engage participants in active and ethical processes of knowledge production.

Knowing‐through‐Performing

“…Theater anthropology has its origins in the work of Jerzy Grotowski's Polish Laboratory Theatre, which incorporated diverse cultural perspectives, and Eugenio Barba's International Theatre of Anthropology, which sought to find common principles of performance regardless of acting traditions (D'Onofrio 2018, 3). Peter Brook's International Centre for Theatre Research toured the globe drawing upon anthropological materials, such as Colin Turnbull's account of the Ik in The Mountain People , while director‐performer Phillip Zarilli's approach builds on Richard Schechner and Victor Turner, and he trains “actors in psycho‐physical processes through Asian martial arts” (D'Onofrio 2018, 3). Since these pioneering efforts, contemporary theater has continued to refine and change its emphasis around acting processes and its integration of theoretical approaches.…”