L/ THEORETICAL
GENERA ANTHROPOLOGY
few means to question men’s decisions, and
when they attempt to, they are considered
“rude” or “too proud.”
Although the scenario sounds distressingly
familiar, the Nandi case is unusual because
the Nandi differ from many other groups in
settler-dominated colonial Africa. They never
experienced male labor migration. If men la-
bored, it was as squatters. The whole family
moved and productive relations changed lit-
tle. Those on the reserve began selling cattle,
replacing eleusine with the cash crop, maize,
and growing tea. They emerged after inde-
pendence as an amuent group thanks to dairy
farming and tea planting. They had no land
shortage, and population density was low.
This affluence masks women’s deteriorating
economic position. Oboler found wealthy and
poor households and mentions, but never ana-
lyzes, the developing class structure. Wealth-
ier households employ laborers, and child-
nurses do more child care than mothers. A
time allocation study showed that wives work
longer than husbands in the fields and with
cattle, and poorer women more so than others.
General/TheoreticalAnthropology
Between Theater and Anthropology. Rich-
ard Schechner. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press, 1985.356 pp. $14.95 (pa-
Per).
EDWARD M. BRUNER
University of Illinois
Victor Turner, in the years before his death
in 1983, worked closely with Richard Schech-
ner. In the foreword to this volume, Turner re-
ports that he found Schechner’s ideas to be
“theoretically illuminating,” that he learned
about a new world of performative techniques
and about indigenous theories of non-Western
theater. I, too, found Schechner’s ideas to be
provocative and occasionally exhilarating.
The question for this review becomes, how
does someone like Schechner, a theater direc-
tor and performance theorist, have so much to
say of relevance to anthropology?
To begin with, Schechner is aggressively
cross-cultural. His examples are drawn from
his own field observations of Ramlila and Ka-
thakali in India, from Noh and Kabuki in Ja-
pan, from the Yaqui and the Balinese, from
Disneyland, Plimoth Plantation, a Black
church in Brooklyn, a sadomasochistic theater
in Manhattan, and the San Diego Zoo. His
761
Oboler dispels the myth of the pastoral
Nandi’s conservatism. She also explains the
growing incidence of woman-to-woman mar-
riage and shows that Christianity accentuates
the bias toward male dominance. Nandi wives
can now be denied access to land, and they are
losing their right to certain products, without
gaining influence elsewhere. Some women re-
fuse to marry, using wage labor earnings to es-
tablish themselves, and some women want to
redefine inheritance rights to grant daughters
access to house-property.
In concluding, Oboler emphasizes the use-
fulness of concepts like stratification, power,
autonomy, dominance, and status in studies of
gender relations, among the Nandi and cross-
culturally. This is a brave but inconclusive at-
tempt, unlikely to have any lasting effect on
the use of these concepts in gender studies.
Nevertheless, her work adds detailed insights
into the “decline of women’s position in the
Third World” (p. 319). Too long, repetitive,
and overpriced to be adopted for class use, her
book may make the Nandi into contemporary
ethnographic exotica of interest only to cattle-
buffs and scholars of women’s issues.
genres range from ritual, theater, dance, and
other performing arts to restored villages,
tourist attractions, time machines, theme
parks, and prime time television news.
The key concept in the volume is perfor-
mance and the thesis is that performative be-
havior is restored behavior, or twice-behaved
behavior, meaning that the behavior has been
behaved before. The formulation treats per-
formance behavior as a film director treats a
strip of film, as material to be rearranged or
reconstructed. I t is the direct opposite of
structuralism where the underlying model is
basic and each performance is viewed as
merely a surface manifestation. Nor is it that
we have a fixed text that is “interpreted” dif-
ferently in each performance. For Schechner,
the performance is the thing, and performance
is constitutive. Schechner’s perspective is part
of the growing emphasis in the social sciences
and the humanities on practice, pragmatics,
performance, and experience.
Schechner’s main contribution to anthro-
pology is that he investigates the processes of
production of performances and tells us how
performances are constructed. Rather than
describe and analyzejust a given ritual, for ex-
ample, Schechner suggests that we view the fi-
762 AMERICAN
ANTHROPOLOGIST
nal ritual as part of a sequence that begins
with training, workshop (taking apart), and
rehearsal (building up), and ends with cool-
down and aftermath. His processual orienta-
tion takes the position of the performers and
theater people rather than the orientation of
the audience or the outside anthropologist.
Good ethnographers have always taken a pro-
cessual view, but Schechner conceptualizes it
well.
It might be argued that postmodern theater
directors like Schechner can manipulate texts
but that the field anthropologist has to take
rituals as they occur in natural ethnographic
settings. But no ritual is fixed and timeless and
we have come to realize that our ethnographic
texts are less natural and more constructed
than we had supposed. What “councils of
bishops, master performers, and great sha-
mans” do is to change performance scores,
and this is where we should be directing our
attention-to processes of production and
change. Schechner notes that even the most
traditional Asian forms, such as Noh or Ka-
thakali where the training seems rote or me-
chanical by Euro-American standards, d o
change over time, not from innovations by
young rebels but rather from mature masters
who incorporate improvisations into the cor-
pus.
Schechner’s book makes us rethink such fa-
miliar terms as “text,” “context,” and “per-
formance.” We could say that a text is a
script-what is contained between the pages
of a book-and that the performance is the ac-
tion, the text as enacted. The text is prior to
the performance but the text is inaccessible ex-
cept in performance, even if that be only read-
ing. Schechner distinguishes the dramatic text
from the performance text, i.e., the script from
the enactment. This is fine as far as it goes, but
Schechner writes that there are performances
without texts, such as avant-garde theater
where one may begin with a workshop and
proceed to experiment with new mise-en-
scines. Last year in Bali I observed a legong
dance performed in a ritual temple complex,
in a tourist performance, at a Western beach
hotel, and at an Indonesian government polit-
ical meeting. Previously, I might have said
that the text is the same but that the context
varies, but now I’m not so sure that it is the
“same” text, or that the term “context” is con-
ceptually adequate for the theoretical load it is
asked to carry.
There is much else in Schechner of interest
to anthropologists. Almost 20% of the volume
is devoted to a case study of the Ramlila of
Ramnagar, which comes to the ironic conclu-
sion that the maharaja of Benares, the pro-
[88, 19861
ducer of this Hindu extravaganza, is regarded
by the audience as a god but that the hero of
the epic, Rama, is cheered as a king. Many of
Schechner’s most suggestive passages deal
with environmental theater and the concep-
tualization of space. Schechner also writes
about the unresolved dialectical tension be-
tween the actor and his role, and about how
the ordinary self intrudes into the perfor-
mance. We learn how culture-bound we have
become in accepting recent Euro-American
conventions as natural, such as a narrative
structure based on conflict and resolution, the
authority of the author, and the arrangement
of a center stage before a passive audience
seated in rows.
I do have criticisms of Schechner. At times,
he gets carried away by his diagrams and he is
not sensitive enough to the politics of perfor-
mance. His chapter on the restoration of be-
havior, the main theoretical chapter, is flawed
because his indicative past, number 3 in his
diagram, is not just “highly unstable,” as he
says. It does not exist. But quibbles aside, this
is a major work.
Chayanov, Peasants, and Economic An-
thropology. E. Paul Durraberger, ed. Studies
in Anthropology. Orlando, FL: Academic
Press, 1984. 217 pp. $27.50 (cloth).
MAHIRSAUL
University of Illinois, Urbana
This volume offers a collection of essays de-
veloping Chayanov’s theory in new directions
or providing more conventional empirical ap-
plications. In the introduction the editor pre-
sents a fascinating outline of the development
of agricultural economics in the United States
in contrast to the environment in which Chay-
anov and his colleagues developed their theo-
ries. In a brief article, N. Tannenbaum places
Chayanov in the context of modern anthro-
pology.
Durrenberger (chap. 3) builds an elegant
and original model by assuming a declining
curve of marginal utility of goods and an ex-
ponential curve of marginal disutility of labor
(drudgery) for the household. The intersec-
tion of the two curves gives a target production
for the farm which one can compute, with the
help of the derived formula, on the basis of
consumer/worker ratios and the amount of
consumption required by a consumer. Dur-
renberger compares these computed targets
against the actual production of rice cultiva-
tors in Thailand. One needs to be reminded,