Frame, Flow and Reflection: Ritual and Drama as Public Liminality

What, at first glance, could be less close, less akin than drama and reflection? Drama demands a stage, actors, a heightened atmosphere, spectators, the smell of the crowd, the roar of the greasepaint. Reflection is at least one of the things one does with one's solitude. But to counter this opposition an anthropologist tends to think in terms not of solitary but of plural reflection, or, much better, plural reflexivity, the ways in which a group or community seeks to portray, understand, and then act on itself. Essentially, public reflexivity takes the form of a performance. The languages through which a group communicates itself to itself are not, of course, confined to talking codes: they include gestures, music, dancing, graphic representation, painting, sculpture, and the fashioning of symbolic objects. They aredramatic, that is literally "doing" codes. Public reflexivity is also concerned with what I have called "liminality." This term, literally "being-on-a-threshold," means a state or process which is betwixt-and-between the normal, daytoday cultural and social states and processes of getting and spending, preserving law and order, and registering structural status. Since liminal time is not controlled by the clock it is a time of enchantment when anything might, even should, happen. Another way of putting it would be to say that the liminal in socio-cultural process is similar to the subjunctive mood in verbs - just as mundane socioReproduced by permission of the author and of the publisher from Performance in postmodern culture (Madison, Wisconsin: Coda Press, Inc., 1977,. The section heads (except for the last) have been added by the editor.