Performance Studies as New Anthropology of Events

Abstract

The question of relations between performance studies and new anthropology of events within the open cultural field directly points to the internal interventionist practice of performance and event as the agent of generative and constitutive roles in terms of initiating social processes and situations. An analysis of Turner’s dramaturgical patterns in the development and solution of social crisis, as well as Goffman’s social roles, in direct relation with performance studies, indicate that there is an original connection of these two theoretical platforms and point to their integral importance in terms of actualization and critical thinking related to current social situations. The basic theoretical and social transformations, connected to globalism and interculturalism, led to a redefinition of the aims and range of anthropological knowledge. Global anthropology of the contemporary in current, mediatized society is connected to the question of event, i.e. the event as performance, including different aspects of presence and behavior in a wide spectrum of human activities, along with their consequences.