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Performativity (Anthropology)

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  1. Introduction
  2.  
  3. Performativity is the power of language to effect change in the world: language does not simply describe the world but may instead (or also) function as a form of social action. The concept of performative language was first described by the philosopher John L. Austin who posited that there was a difference between constative language, which describes the world and can be evaluated as true or false, and performative language, which does something in the world. For Austin, performative language included speech acts such as promising, swearing, betting, and performing a marriage ceremony. For instance, the utterance, “I do”—said under the right circumstances by the right speakers with the right intentions—transforms the utterer from being unmarried to being married. Austin posited a number of felicity conditions that must be met in order for such utterances to function performatively. Other scholars have taken up these basic insights to explore the various ways in which language can do things in the world. Most notably, Judith Butler developed the concept of performativity to describe how gender is constructed in the 1990s. Butler argued that gender is an ongoing and socially constructed process, which proceeds through a continuous series of performative acts, from, for example, the utterance of “It’s a boy!” on through a person’s lifetime. Performativity, then, is the process of subject formation, which creates that which it purports to describe and occurs through linguistic means, as well as via other social practices. Following Butler, the concept of performativity has been richly explored in anthropological studies of gender and sexuality. Scholars of ritual have also used the concept of performative action and performativity very productively, looking at how rituals work performatively to have effects on the world. Other types of performances have been also analyzed from a performative viewpoint. In the late 1990s, anthropologists and other scholars studying economies began to consider economic performativity, or how the practices of economists and other financial experts are not simply descriptive of their subject but also serve to shape it. Not surprisingly, given the concept’s initial conceptualization as linguistic in nature, linguistic anthropologists in particular have found the concept analytically useful. A number of challenges and issues have characterized scholarly debates about performative language and performativity. These include the role of actors’ intentions and issues of agency, the importance of context, the iterability or repeated versus spontaneous nature of performative action, and the effects of social roles and distributions of power across participants.
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  5. Foundational Texts
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  7. How To Do Things with Words (Austin 1962) is the foundational text on performative language: here Austin introduces and elaborates on the differences between constative or descriptive language and performative language and eventually moves to describe all linguistic acts as belonging to three types: locutionary (language that describes), illocutionary (language that does things in the world), and perlocutionary (language that is the effect of that doing). In other words, performative force, or the ability to “do things with words” was expanded to cover a much broader range of linguistic activity than the discrete speech acts of promising, swearing, betting, etc. Authored by a student of Austin’s, Searle 1969 developed these categories into what has been known as “speech act theory”; Benveniste 1971 similarly expounded upon speech act theory with a focus on efficacy and speaker roles. Butler 1990 and Butler 1993 are key texts in the development of performativity as a social process as related to gender, sex, and sexuality; Butler 1997 theorized the politics of performativity in speech. In a work that is a key text in science and technology studies, Lyotard 1984 argued that doing science includes a degree of performativity.
  8.  
  9. Austin, John L. 1962. How to do things with words. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ. Press.
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  11. Introduces the concept of performative as opposed to constative language and laid the foundations of speech act theory. Discusses the locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary functions of language. Felicity conditions and infelicitous failures are both the subject of much theorizing.
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  13. Benveniste, Emile. 1971. Analytical philosophy and language. In Problems in general linguistics. Translated by Mary Elizabeth Meek, 231–238. Coral Gables, FL: Univ. of Miami Press.
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  15. Explores and expands Austin’s concept of performatives to stress the importance of considering performative efficacy and power vis-à-vis participant roles and how particular speech acts are contextualized. For Benveniste, performatives depend on the authority of the speaker and are inherently reflexive in nature.
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  17. Butler, Judith. 1990. Gender trouble: Feminism and the subversion of identity. New York: Routledge.
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  19. Butler’s approach to gender builds on the work of Foucault to theorize gender as the product of social activity. Initial discussion of performativity from Austin’s performative speech as it relates to gender, how it functions via iterability (or repetition) and does not rely on the intention of the actor.
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  21. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” London: Routledge.
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  23. Further elaboration of how gender performativity works through the ongoing process of repeated acts of “doing gender,” which functions to make these actions appear essential or natural. In appearing to be the elaboration of biological sex, the performativity of gender in turn (re)inscribes sex on the body in particular ways.
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  25. Butler, Judith. 1997. Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. New York: Routledge.
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  27. Develops the performativity of political discourse, working from various examples of hate speech and other types of public discourse in which power is enacted. Shows that resignification of such speech is always possible, although it occurs within complex historical and social interrelationships.
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  29. Lyotard, Jean-François. 1984. The postmodern condition: A report on knowledge. Translated by Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi. Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press.
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  31. Portrays science as a language game, building on Wittgenstein’s concept of language games, which depends on the performativity of language about scientific discovery (people describing it as true make it true), so as to justify its financing.
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  33. Searle, John. 1969. Speech acts: An essay in the philosophy of language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  34. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9781139173438Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  35. Fleshes out and elaborates Austin’s work to develop speech act theory, in particular how different types of utterances have different types of relationships to and effects on the world. Discusses how the illocutionary force of speech depends on uttering the right words, in the right way, under the right circumstances.
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  37. Reviews
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  39. Although no one comprehensive review of performativity exists, various scholars have offered various types of overviews. Hall 1999 offers a concise and useful summary of how performativity has been taken up in anthropology, particularly linguistic anthropology. As part of an overview of linguistic anthropological writing in 2011, Ball 2012 discusses works that used performativity to analyze ritual. Morris 1995 provides an early and insightful review of how performance theory and performativity have been taken up in the anthropology of sex and gender, describing performativity as “both generative and dissimulating” (p. 573). Bauman and Briggs 1990 (see also Performance and Performativity) reviews work that has brought performance and performative action together, while Bauman 2005 provides a cogent and concise review of how performativity and intertextuality—social constructed connections across instances of text and discourse—are connected. Lee 1997 (cited under Subjectivity) offers a broad and penetrating look at the philosophical roots of performativity and how it may be enriched by approaching it semiotically.
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  41. Ball, Christopher. 2012. Boasian legacies in linguistic anthropology: A centenary review of 2011. American Anthropologist 114.2: 203–216.
  42. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01419.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  43. Part of a series of articles in American Anthropologist that survey works in the various anthropological subfields for that year. Contains a section that reviews linguistic anthropological works that approached ritual activity as performative.
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  45. Bauman, Richard. 2005. Commentary: Indirect indexicality, identity, performance. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15.1: 145–150.
  46. DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.145Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  47. Insightful but brief discussion of articles that appear in this special issue dedicated to intertextuality, focuses on how this concept may help to understand how performativity functions across contexts, thus demonstrating how iterability might be shown ethnographically.
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  49. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59–88.
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  51. Both a review article of anthropological work that has focused on performance and an important programmatic statement of how such work should proceed. Includes a discussion of works that have looked at the performative potentials of performance.
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  53. Hall, Kira 1999. Performativity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9.1–2: 184–187.
  54. DOI: 10.1525/jlin.1999.9.1-2.184Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  55. Brief but useful review of performativity. Traces the concept back to its roots in Austin and Searle and later Butler. Looks at how anthropologists, and especially linguistic anthropologists, have developed the concept and particularly how they have sought to apply it cross-culturally.
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  57. Lee, Benjamin. 1997. Talking heads: Language, metalanguage, and the semiotics of subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press
  58. DOI: 10.1215/9780822382461Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  59. Traces performativity through its roots in philosophy and how it has been expanded and taken up, particularly in anthropology. Extremely comprehensive and detailed treatment of its subject.
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  61. Morris, Rosalind C. 1995. All made up: Performance theory and the new anthropology of sex and gender. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:567–592.
  62. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.003031Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  63. Reviews performance, practice, and performativity, tracing how they have come into use in anthropology via performance studies and the study of ritual as a response to limits of structuralism, which made it difficult to theorize agency, change, and plurality. Reviews several ethnographic accounts of performativity of gender and sex.
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  65. Critiques of Performativity/Performatives
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  67. Various substantive critiques of performatives and performativity have been offered on a number of grounds. In a critique that has importantly shaped how performative language and performativity have been taken up subsequently, Derrida 1982 critiqued Austin’s concept of performative or illocutionary language and Searle’s take on this concept in speech act theory for its dependence on speaker intention. Derrida maintained that performative efficacy instead resides in the iterability or repeatability of such utterances, as well as in the differences that emerge across these repetitions that characterize any speech act. Rosaldo 1982 also challenged speech act theory for its focus on speaker intention, though on the grounds that its conceptualization of intention is ethnocentric and will not be relevant across all cultural contexts. Gardner 1983 critiqued the use of performative action to analyze ritual. Schep 2012 argues that performativity, for all its analytic usefulness, has become hegemonic within gender and sexuality studies, squeezing out the possibility of developing alternative frameworks. Miyazaki 2005 queries economic performativity’s ongoing focus on quantification as producing economies, while Graeber 2012 argues that using performativity to analyze economic and other activity may present certain paradoxes.
  68.  
  69. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. Signature event context. In Margins of philosophy. Translated by Alan Bass, 307–330. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
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  71. Seminal critique of performative potentials of speech as relying on intention. The meaning of a signature, like a speech act, is dependent both on its replicability across iterations as well as the differences that characterize any particular iteration. Context per se is irrelevant and unknowable. This has been published in a number of edited collections.
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  73. Gardner, D. S. 1983. Performativity in ritual: The Mianmin case. Man 18.2: 346–360.
  74. DOI: 10.2307/2801439Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  75. Analyzes work that approaches ritual as performative, such as Tambiah 1979 and Ahern 1979 (both cited under Ritual). Critiques the use of performatives to explain rituals and gives an alternate ethnographic analysis of a Papua New Guinean initiation ritual.
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  77. Graeber, David. 2012. The sword, the sponge, and the paradox of performativity: Some observations on fate, luck, financial chicanery, and the limits of human knowledge. Social Analysis 56.1: 25–42.
  78. DOI: 10.3167/sa.2012.560103Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  79. Discusses what he calls the “paradox of performativity”—that performative activity must hide its performative nature in order to be efficacious—in order to critique scholars who, in his view, embraced the performativity of economics too thoroughly and thus implicated themselves in the recent financial crises, linking this to a particular type of politics as representation.
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  81. Miyazaki, H. 2005. The materiality of finance theory. In Materiality. Edited by Daniel Miller, 165–181. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  82. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386711Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  83. Maintains that the performative approach to economics assumes that quantification materializes an economy and urges analysts to consider that it may also or instead produce other effects.
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  85. Rosaldo, Michelle Z. 1982. The things we do with words: Ilongot speech acts and speech act theory in philosophy. Language in Society 11.2: 203–237.
  86. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404500009209Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  87. A touchstone in anthropology. Critical take on speech act theory as ethnocentric and culturally specific, especially in its dependence on individual intention and sincerity as felicity conditions. Provides an ethnographic exploration of the use of speech acts in Ilongot social life to show that it depends on Western views of personhood and intention.
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  89. Schep, Dennis. 2012. The limits of performativity: A critique of hegemony in gender theory. Hypatia 27.4: 864–880.
  90. DOI: 10.1111/j.1527-2001.2011.01230.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  91. Thought-provoking critique of Butler’s theory of performativity and gender, which he describes as having a hegemonic hold over gender and sexuality studies. He claims that Butler’s theory has become a case where theoretical discourse silences its object of inquiry, and its universality leads to exclusion.
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  93. Performative Ethnography
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  95. Congruent with other movements to consider ethnographic writing as situated, and stressing the importance of the author and the process of writing itself as a form of knowledge production, various scholars have looked at ethnographic writing as performative. Fabian 1990 proposes that anthropology itself shift from doing what he calls “informative ethnography” to “performative ethnography,” focusing more specifically on the power and productivity of cultural performances in their research as well as how writing ethnography is a productive force in itself. Kondo 1997 explicitly takes up ethnography as performative and explores how ethnography is a political act, both in terms of doing research and writing. Casteneda 2006 outlines the principles of thinking of fieldwork as performative.
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  97. Casteneda, Quetzil E. 2006. The invisible theater of ethnography: Performative principles of fieldwork. Anthropological Quarterly 79.1: 75–104.
  98. DOI: 10.1353/anq.2006.0004Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  99. Describes ethnography as performative, both in terms of ethnography as a methodological approach and as a form of writing. Focuses primarily on how doing fieldwork is performative and on how focusing on performances helps to illustrate this.
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  101. Fabian, Johannes. 1990. Power and performance. Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press.
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  103. Programmatic text that argues for the value of looking at performance as a lens to culture where representations of self and other are produced. Views ethnography itself as performative.
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  105. Kondo, Dorinne. 1997. About face: Performing race and Theater. New York: Routledge.
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  107. Collection of critical essays that expands on Fabian’s concept of performative ethnography and poststructuralist views of performativity as producing change in the world. Explores various types of performances of racialized and gendered identities in order to argue that ethnography is an active tool of representation and thus always a potentially political act.
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  109. Subjectivity
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  111. Perhaps the most important and resonant insight in Butler 1990 and Butler 1993 (cited under Foundational Texts) was to link performativity to subject formation. Subjectivity in this light is an ongoing process in which subjects, through their words and actions, continuously produce themselves and others as subjects within particular social, cultural, economic and political constraints. Hall 1999 (cited under Reviews) reviews how scholars have debated the balance of repetition and agency as captured by Butler’s conceptualization of performativity. Khurshid 2012 links gender and cultural conceptions such as “wisdom” through a focus on the performativity of subjectivity. Lei 2003 looks at how gendered and racialized subjectivities are performatively produced in tandem. Kulick and Schieffelin 2004 posits the paradigm of language socialization as the way to consider how particular subjectivities are produced during childhood, filling a gap in Butler’s theory that generally does not consider the details of socialization and enculturation that underpin how performativity works. Lee 1997 (cited under Reviews) links performativity and semiotics to consider how subjectivity is produced. Pacheco 2010 looks at the performativity of classroom interactions, while Axel 2004 uses performativity to analyze diasporic subjectivities.
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  113. Axel, Brian Keith. 2004. The context of diaspora. Cultural Anthropology 19.1: 26–60.
  114. DOI: 10.1525/can.2004.19.1.26Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  115. Explores how diasporic Sikh subject formation occurs via a mediated performance of poetry, contextualizing the use and meaning of “I” (what he calls the “enunciative subject”) within the poem. Asks the analytically provocative question: what is context when we talk about diaspora?
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  117. Hall, Kira. 1999. Performativity. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 9.1–2: 184–187.
  118. DOI: 10.1525/jlin.1999.9.1-2.184Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  119. Details concisely how Butler’s theorization of performativity conceptualizes subjectivity.
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  121. Khurshid, Ayesha. 2012. A transnational community of Pakistani Muslim women: Narratives of rights, honor, and wisdom in a women’s education project. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 43.3: 235–252.
  122. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1492.2012.01176.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  123. Ethnographic analysis of how Pakistani women construct their subjectivity through building a local conceptualization of wisdom.
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  125. Kulick, Don, and Bambi B. Schieffelin. 2004. Language socialization. In A companion to linguistic anthropology. Edited by Alessandro Duranti, 349–368. Malden, MA: Blackwell.
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  127. Overview of language socialization research, which argues that the language socialization paradigm can answer criticisms of both Bourdieu in terms of habitus and Butler in terms of performativity, by ethnographically uncovering and documenting processes of socialization.
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  129. Lee, Benjamin. 1997. Talking heads: Language, metalanguage, and the semiotics of subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  130. DOI: 10.1215/9780822382461Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  131. Discusses Austin’s original conceptualization of the concept, its roots in Frege’s work on mathematical logic, how it was debated by scholars such as Searle and Derrida, as well as how Peirce’s semiotics may be brought to bear on how performativity functions to construct and maintain subjectivity.
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  133. Lei, Joy L. 2003. (Un)Necessary toughness? Those “loud black girls” and those “quiet Asian boys.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 34.2: 158–181.
  134. DOI: 10.1525/aeq.2003.34.2.158Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  135. Analyzes the production of gendered and racialized subjectivities among young African American women and young Asian American men, building on Butler’s theory of performativity and differentiating between performance (a particular iteration) and performativity (the effects on ongoing iterability).
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  137. Pacheco, Mariana. 2010. Performativity in the bilingual classroom: The plight of English learners in the current reform context. Anthropology and Education Quarterly 41.1: 75–93.
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  139. An ethnographic study in bilingual classrooms, which shows how subjectivities are formed through classroom interactions of various types.
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  141. Gender, Sex, and Sexuality
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  143. Gender, sex, and sexuality have often been theorized together, although some analysts argue against this approach. Briefly, gender may be described as the social and cultural norms, ideologies, and practices that adhere to maleness and femaleness (or additional categories); sex may be seen as the biologically based categorization of bodies; and sexuality, sometimes also called sexual identity, may be the identity categories and sets of norms, practices, and ideologies connected to sexual desire. In Butler 1993 and Foucault 1990 all three are socially constructed via discourse of various kinds (verbal, embodied, gestural, written, etc.) rather than naturally occurring, although the relationship among them is variously debated. It was through Butler’s use of Austin that performativity or performance theory came to be seen as the analytic mechanism for understanding how gender, sex, and sexuality are constructed. Indeed, Butler 1993 (cited under Foundational Texts) importantly argued that sex, far from being a biological “given” was the reading back of gender onto the body. Morris 1995 (cited under Reviews) provides a useful review of how performance theory has been applied in anthropological studies of gender and sex. Cameron 2005 provides an insightful overview of language, gender, and sexuality research.
  144.  
  145. Butler, Judith. 1993. Bodies that matter: On the discursive limits of “sex.” New York and London: Routledge.
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  147. Theorizes on how gender, sex, and sexuality are performatively constructed, as well as interrelated.
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  149. Cameron, Deborah. 2005. Language, gender, and sexuality: Current issues and new directions. Applied Linguistics 26.4: 482–502.
  150. DOI: 10.1093/applin/ami027Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  151. Overview of language, gender, and sexuality research that includes a good description of the postmodern turn within this research that centered on uptake of Judith Butler’s conceptualization of gender as performative and thus what someone does rather than what they have.
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  153. Foucault, Michel. 1990. The history of sexuality: An introduction. Vol. 1. New York: Vintage.
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  155. Foundational text on the socially constructed nature of human sexuality and sexual identities. Argues against the so-called repressive hypothesis to maintain that sexuality is instead a central preoccupation and discourse in Western society and connected to the rise of capitalism and the bourgeoisie.
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  157. Morris, Rosalind C. 1995. All made up: Performance theory and the new anthropology of sex and gender. Annual Review of Anthropology 24:567–592.
  158. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.an.24.100195.003031Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  159. Traces the emergence of “performance theory” as applied to gender and sex (from Butler, via Foucault), through two anthropological scholarly traditions: feminist social constructionist scholarship and practice theory. Looks at theorizations of drag, which build on Butler’s view of the performativity of gender as involving reproduction of an ideal gendered body that is always beyond reach.
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  161. Gender
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  163. Anthropological work on gender and performativity has been done across cultural contexts to explore how performativity works and what its analytical and ethnographic limits might be. Tsing 1993 looks at shamanic practices among the Meratus Dayak to explore how gender is differently performed and enacted in this group, while Strathern 1988 emphasizes the indeterminacy of performative action in producing gendered subjects. Approaching gender as performative has been a particularly productive frame for linguistic anthropologists. Hall and Bucholtz 1995 is a collection of research-based analyses of language and gender, many of which use performativity. Cameron 1997 is a classic article on how gender may be performatively constructed through a variety of linguistic means. Kulick 1993 considers the performativity of affect in constructing gender. Boellstroff 2004 explores the performativity of waria (male-female) gendered subjectivity in Indonesia. See also Sexuality, as there is much overlap in this work.
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  165. Boellstroff, Tom. 2004. Playing back the nation: Waria, Indonesian Transvestites. Cultural Anthropology 19.2: 159–195.
  166. DOI: 10.1525/can.2004.19.2.159Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  167. Explores the performativity of waria (male-female) gendered subjectivity, which “haunts” maleness in Indonesia. Also looks at how this is involved in producing proper Indonesian womanhood and manhood through how waria, in their work in beauty salons, make up particular men and women (cutting hair, doing make-up, etc.).
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  169. Cameron, Deborah. 1997. Performing gender identity: Young men’s talk and the construction of heterosexual masculinity. In Language and masculinity. Edited by Sally Johnson and Ulrike Hanna Meinhof, 47–64. Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.
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  171. Frequently cited article that clearly explains Butler’s conception of performativity and how it may be applied to linguistic data to analyze how gender is constructed. Focuses on a transcript of a group of young men talking and shows how they use gossip and other linguistic practices usually regarded as feminine to construct masculinity.
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  173. Hall, Kira, and Mary Bucholtz, eds. 1995. Gender articulated: Language and the socially constructed self. New York: Routledge.
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  175. Collection of linguistic anthropological and sociolinguistic essays on the relationship between language and gender. Introduction provides useful description of performativity as useful analytic for studying language and gender and intertwined social processes. Several of the essays explore this in particular cultural contexts, particularly those by Barrett and Hall. The latter is frequently cited.
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  177. Kulick, Don. 1993. Speaking as a woman: Structure and gender in domestic arguments in a New Guinean village. Cultural Anthropology 8.4: 510–541.
  178. DOI: 10.1525/can.1993.8.4.02a00050Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  179. Considers a type of conflict talk found in a Papua New Guinean village used exclusively by women to look at how such affective performances help to produce culturally specific images of femininity and masculinity.
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  181. Strathern, Marilyn. 1988. The gender of the gift: Problems with women and problems with exchange in Melanesia. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  182. DOI: 10.1525/california/9780520064232.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  183. Emphasizes the indeterminacy of performative action in producing gendered subjects, as well as how this process is imbricated with other “becomings” such as age, rank, and power. Suggests that exchange may be part of these processes as well.
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  185. Tsing, Anna. 1993. In the realm of the diamond queen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  187. Analyzes shamanic practices among the Meratus Dayak to explore how gender is performed and enacted in this group. The work considers the relationship of gender and sex/genitality and how these are linked to ritual practices and relative positions of power.
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  189. Sexuality
  190.  
  191. Much of the work on performativity and sexuality has been linguistically oriented, including the coalescence of what has been labeled “queer linguistics.” Livia and Hall 1997 is an early edited volume that contains a useful introductory essay on the topic; a number of its research-based essays look at performativity and sexuality. Kulick 1998 is a popular, oft-cited text that analyzes the social and linguistic practices of travesti (Brazilian transgendered prostitutes) from a performativity standpoint. Bucholtz and Hall 2004 situates performativity at the heart of queer linguistics in their discussion of the relationship between language, sexual identity, and sexuality and is an implicit critique of Cameron and Kulick 2003 and Kulick 2000, which argue that the study of language and sexuality should place desire, rather than identity, as central to its analysis. Cameron and Kulick 2003 also provides an extremely useful overview of how performativity has been used to study gender as well as sexuality. Valentine 2007 provides an analysis of the emergence of the category “transgendered” and critically discusses performance and performativity. Hall 2005 focuses on the performance of sexual identities and desire as intertextually produced. See also Gender, as there is much overlap in this work.
  192.  
  193. Bucholtz, Mary, and Kira Hall. 2004. Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society 33.4: 501–547.
  194. DOI: 10.1017/S0047404504334020Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  195. A response to and critique of the desire approach to language and sexual identity advocated by Cameron and Kulick 2003 and Kulick 2000. Advocates for the utility of treating identity in studies of language and sexuality and discusses how performativity has been usefully applied in queer linguistics.
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  197. Cameron, Deborah, and Don Kulick. 2003. Language and sexuality. New York: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  198. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511791178Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  199. Relatively short textbook that comprehensively covers the topic of language and sexuality historically, analytically, and ethnographically, including a cogent description of performativity. Argues that desire should be at the heart of studying language and sexuality, nor is sexuality synonymous with sexual identity: a collapse that they maintain characterizes much previous literature on the topic.
  200. Find this resource:
  201. Hall, Kira. 2005. Intertextual sexuality: Parodies of class, identity, and desire in liminal Delhi. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15.1: 125–144.
  202. DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2005.15.1.125Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  203. Looking ethnographically as various performances of kotis and hijras (Indian transgendered identity categories) as performances of sexual identities and desire, which are produced via intertextual connections to other performances. Shows how class and sexuality intersect.
  204. Find this resource:
  205. Kulick, Don. 1998. Travesti: Sex, gender and culture among Brazilian transgendered prostitutes. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  206. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226461014.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  207. A rich ethnographic account of the social, linguistic, and bodily practices that travesti (Brazilian transgendered prostitutes) undertake in order to be feminine while engaging in the sexual practices that make them men. A comprehensive illustration of what a performativity approach may bring to studying sexuality.
  208. Find this resource:
  209. Kulick, Don. 2000. Gay and lesbian language. Annual Review of Anthropology 29:243–285.
  210. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.29.1.243Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  211. Review of research on language and sexual identities, which advocates for a move from framing such research as language and sexuality to language and desire, in order to capture all of what cannot be said (or done) that performativity (in Butler’s conceptualization of it) includes. Building on Derrida, Kulick stresses that performatives work because they are quotable.
  212. Find this resource:
  213. Livia, Anna, and Kira Hall, eds. 1997. Queerly phrased: Language, gender and sexuality. New York: Oxford Univ. Press.
  214. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  215. Important collected volume on queer linguistics. Performativity appears in numerous articles, especially the introduction by Livia and Hall, as well as Livia’s and Hall’s own chapters.
  216. Find this resource:
  217. Valentine, David. 2007. Imagining transgender: An ethnography of a category. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  218. DOI: 10.1215/9780822390213Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  219. Ethnographic study of transgendered populations in New York City that addresses gender performance and performativity (one chapter is organized around three drag balls), although his main concern is with the linguistic and political economic and material rather than with the performative per se, as he sees “performativity” as often the shadow of “identity.”
  220. Find this resource:
  221. Performance and Performativity
  222.  
  223. A number of scholars have contemplated the relationship of performance to performativity. Austin maintained that performance weakened the potential for performative force (a promise within a play does not count in the same way as a promise backstage, for instance). Various anthropologists, however, have argued against this and explored the performative potentials of performances of various types (see also Ritual). In his edited volume, Bloch 1975 offers an early and controversial piece arguing that oratory has performative force. Hymes 1975 stressed the importance of studying performance as emergent social action. Bauman and Briggs 1990 (cited under Reviews) illustrate how anthropologists, particularly those who study language (ethnographers of language), took up the philosophical concept of performative speech and applied it to different types of cultural contexts, noting its lack of fit and reconfiguring alternatives to explain cross-cultural differences in how performative and illocutionary force more generally works. Such concerns broadened into the study of the pragmatics of language use. Kulick 2003 explicitly differentiates between performance as event and performativity as process, and Morris 1995 (cited under Reviews) critiques work on gender and sexuality that focuses on performance over performativity. Pennycook 2003 and Pennycook 2006 analyze how rap performances produce various racial and gender identities. Similarly, Alim, et al. 2010 looks at rap duels as a site where racial and ethnic subjectivities are formed. Jones and Shweder 2003 considers how the successful performance of a magic trick depends on the performative nature of the talk that surrounds it. See also the Oxford Bibliographies Online article Performance Studies for a rich overview of performance and performance theory.
  224.  
  225. Alim, H. Samy, Jooyoung Lee, and Lauren Mason Carris. 2010. “Short fried-rice-eating Chinese MCs” and “Good-hair-havin Uncle Tom niggas”: Performing race and ethnicity in freestyle rap battles. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 20.1: 116–133.
  226. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2010.01052.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  227. Looks at how hip-hop rap duels help to produce (perform) race and ethnicity in various ways. Builds on work by Richard Bauman and Alastair Pennycook, as well as Judith Butler. The reiterative stylizations of hip hop performances—specifically in this case, “styling the Other”—are what produce race.
  228. Find this resource:
  229. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59–88.
  230. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  231. Points to limits of viewing performative or illocutionary force as transparent in the meaning of the words. Emphasizes that illocutionary force may reside within a number of formal features of language in use, perhaps especially within performances of various types. Underlines importance of Bakhtin’s work on genre to understand illocutionary effects.
  232. Find this resource:
  233. Bloch, Maurice. 1975. Political language and oratory in traditional societies. New York: Academic.
  234. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  235. Contains Bloch’s controversial piece about performative force of oratory speech or political rhetoric in “traditional” societies being related to the constraints on expression this style imposes on performers.
  236. Find this resource:
  237. Hymes, Dell. 1975. Breakthrough into performance. In Folklore: Performance and communication. Edited by D. Ben-Amos and K. S. Goldstein, 1–74. The Hague: Mouton.
  238. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  239. Classic study within ethnography of communication of how social structures are emergent in social action and performance.
  240. Find this resource:
  241. Jones, Graham, and Lauren Shweder. 2003. The performance of illusion and illusionary performatives: Learning the language of theatrical magic. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 13.1: 51–70.
  242. DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2003.13.1.51Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  243. Analyzes the performativity of language within a magic trick, which “describes”—or supplies a convincing narrative about—the sensory/material aspects of a magic trick, such that what could be meaningless gestures become meaningful actions.
  244. Find this resource:
  245. Kulick, Don. 2003. No. Language and Communication 23:139–151.
  246. DOI: 10.1016/S0271-5309(02)00043-5Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  247. Uses three case studies to explicate the performative force of “no”: cases of sexual harassment, the homosexual panic defense, and S&M sexual play. Stresses that performance, as a discrete event in which a subject participates, is one dimension of performativity, which is an ongoing process through which the subject emerges.
  248. Find this resource:
  249. Pennycook, Alastair. 2003. Global Englishes, Rip Slyme, and performativity. Journal of Sociolinguistics 7.4: 513–533.
  250. DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9841.2003.00240.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  251. Uses performativity to analyze the use of English among Japanese rappers and as a way to suggest new ways of studying so-called Global Englishes so as to better analyze the performance of particular types of rap around the world and the performative efficacy of such performances.
  252. Find this resource:
  253. Pennycook, Alastair. 2006. Global Englishes and Transcultural Flows. London: Routledge.
  254. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  255. Book-length treatment of Pennycook’s work on Global Englishes and rap performers, particularly Japanese rappers. Chapter 4 contains a very useful exploration of the differences between performance and performativity.
  256. Find this resource:
  257. Ritual
  258.  
  259. The study of ritual as producing effects on the world took up Austin’s concept of the performative as a way to link performances and the effects they produce. Turner 1967 is an early illustrative example of considering the social force of rituals and their symbolism (as well as a pleasurable read), while Turner 1984 explicitly considers the performativity of ritual. Tambiah 1979 lays out a performative approach to ritual; Ahern 1979 is similarly concerned with describing the various illocutionary forces at work in ritual. Strother 2000 links the performativity of objects and utterances to their use within particular ritual contexts. Fleming and Lempert 2011 is the introduction to an interesting collection of articles on taboo language, which explores its performative force. Manning 2012 looks at the performativity of a Georgian drinking ritual. Although Bauman and Briggs 1990 sought to move the analysis of ritual beyond considering it as mere iteration, Haeri 2013 argues for the efficacy of repetition for ritual performativity.
  260.  
  261. Ahern, Emily M. 1979. The problem of efficacy: Strong and weak illocutionary acts. Man 14.1: 1–17.
  262. DOI: 10.2307/2801637Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  263. Looks at how illocutionary force works in Chinese ancestor rituals and differentiates between strong illocutionary acts, such as requests, and weak ones, such as wishes.
  264. Find this resource:
  265. Bauman, Richard, and Charles L. Briggs. 1990. Poetics and performance as critical perspectives on language and social life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19:59–88.
  266. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  267. Argues that rituals are efficacious not just because they are iterations of previous rituals, but also because they are performances composed of particular genres that include and build upon certain poetic conventions and expectations.
  268. Find this resource:
  269. Fleming, Luke, and Michael Lempert. 2011. Introduction: Beyond bad words. Special Issue: The Unmentionable: Verbal Taboo and the Moral Life of Language. Anthropological Quarterly 84.1: 5–13.
  270. DOI: 10.1353/anq.2011.0008Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  271. Collection of articles that explores the performative force of taboo speech. Introduction considers how taboo is strongly performative, as well as the gradient nature of performativity. Discusses how the performative force of taboo language might reside in the material forms of the performative signs themselves.
  272. Find this resource:
  273. Haeri, Niloofar. 2013. The private performance of Salat prayers: Repetition, time, and meaning. Anthropological Quarterly 86.1: 5–34.
  274. DOI: 10.1353/anq.2013.0005Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  275. Argues for the efficacy of repetition for rituals such as private prayers with no audience, an efficacy linked to a variety of other contextual features of the performance. Ethnographic focus is Iranian Muslim women’s private prayer rituals.
  276. Find this resource:
  277. Manning, Paul. 2012. The Semiotics of drink and drinking. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
  278. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  279. The chapter entitled “Wine” discusses the performativity of the Georgian supra, a ritual in which wine is drunk, a feast is consumed, and social relationships and hierarchies are enacted.
  280. Find this resource:
  281. Strother, Zoe S. 2000. From performative utterance to performative object: Pende theories of speech, blood sacrifice, and power objects. RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics 37:49–71.
  282. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  283. Links the performativity of objects and utterances to their use within particular ritual contexts. Good review of literature on African rituals as performative.
  284. Find this resource:
  285. Tambiah, Stanley J. 1979. A performative approach to ritual. London: British Academy.
  286. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  287. Text of the 1979 Radcliffe-Brown Lecture in social anthropology. Illustrative of his work on the performativity of ritual, this text focuses on how rituals help to instantiate the transformations they describe. Rituals thus balance structure and flexibility, predictability and spontaneity: they reenact the past, producing effects for the future.
  288. Find this resource:
  289. Turner, Victor W. 1967. The forest of symbols: Aspects of Ndembu ritual. New York: Cornell Univ. Press.
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  291. Collection of Turner’s essays on Ndembu rituals and how they function symbolically. It is through their symbolism that they are connected to and produce effects within the world.
  292. Find this resource:
  293. Turner, Victor. 1984. Liminality and performative genres. In Rite, drama, festival, spectacle: Rehearsals toward a theory of cultural performance. Edited by J. J. MacAloon, 19–41. Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues.
  294. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  295. Ritual as involving certain amount of creativity as well as producing states of liminality. Performative genres—certain categories of performative activities—such as ritual, are both iterative as well as variable.
  296. Find this resource:
  297. Economic Performativity
  298.  
  299. In the late 1990s and early 2000s anthropologists who study finance and economies, as well as other scholars interested in “socio-economics,” began to view economic activity as performative. That is, they started to recognize and theorize the various ways in which certain people’s language about markets and other economic activity was not just descriptive but helped to shape this activity. In this view, economic value is performatively produced through the words, actions, and gestures of those involved in markets of various sorts, especially global capital and stock markets. Callon 1998 is widely regarded as the introduction of the concept of economic performativity. Maurer 2006 is a review essay about the anthropology of money that includes a useful discussion of economic performativity. Holmes 2009 presents the concept “economy of words” to analyze and ethnographically describe the performative activities of central banks and bankers, while Holmes 2013 is a book-length treatment and elaboration of the same topic. LiPuma and Lee 2002 connects economic performativity with processes of circulation, while Miyazaki 2005 (cited under Critiques of Performativity/Performatives) seeks to expand how the performativity of quantification may work and what it may produce. Mackenzie, et al. 2007 is an edited volume addressing the performativity of economic activities, and Guyer 2004 focuses on the performativity of money in Africa.
  300.  
  301. Callon, Michel. 1998. Introduction: The embeddedness of economic markets in economics. In The laws of the markets. Edited by Michel Callon, 1–57. Oxford: Blackwell.
  302. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  303. Introduces and elaborates on the concept of economic performativity, specifically theorizes that quantification helps to produce economies.
  304. Find this resource:
  305. Guyer, Jane. 2004. Marginal gains: Monetary transactions in Atlantic Africa. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  306. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  307. Explores how money works in Western Africa, focusing on the modern popular economy there. Part 3 in particular focuses on performances and the performativity of money and its use and circulation.
  308. Find this resource:
  309. Holmes, Douglas. 2009. Economy of words. Cultural Anthropology 24.3: 381–419.
  310. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01034.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  311. Introduces the concept “economy of words” to analyze and ethnographically describe the performative nature of central banks and bankers in particular. Draws on linguistic anthropological literature to emphasize how communicative practices create contexts in which economies are linguistically modeled and intertextually connected to other contexts in this process.
  312. Find this resource:
  313. Holmes, Douglas. 2013. Economy of words: Communicative imperatives in central banks. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press.
  314. DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226087764.001.0001Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  315. Book-length elaboration of the concept “economy of words.” Provides a rich ethnographic illustration of how the performative language of central bankers works to shape national and international markets. Shows that such talk about markets does not just describe them but also helps to produce and shape them.
  316. Find this resource:
  317. LiPuma, Edward, and Ben Lee. 2002. Cultures of circulation: The imaginations of modernity. Public Culture 14.1: 191–213.
  318. DOI: 10.1215/08992363-14-1-191Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  319. Seeks to give a cultural account of circulation as a site of both meaning making and value making. Sees circulation and exchange as not simply transmitting values and meanings but also helping to produce them performatively.
  320. Find this resource:
  321. Mackenzie, Donald, Fabian Muniesa, and Lucia Siu, eds. 2007. Do economists make markets? On the performativity of economics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  322. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  323. Edited volume engaging with economic performativity, in which the various chapters take up the concept. Some embrace and discuss economic performativity while others critique it. Introduction provides a good overview of this field, and a chapter by Callon reviews the concept’s efficacy and usefulness.
  324. Find this resource:
  325. Maurer, Bill. 2006. The anthropology of money. Annual Review of Anthropology 35.15: 36.
  326. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  327. Review of the anthropology of money, which includes an overview of the scholarship of economic performativity, which he traces to Callon 1998.
  328. Find this resource:
  329. Miyazaki, H. 2005. The materiality of finance theory. In Materiality. Edited by Daniel Miller, 165–181. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  330. DOI: 10.1215/9780822386711Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  331. Building on and expanding the concept of economic performativity to consider what economic processes such as quantification (which has been at the heart of investigations into economic performativity) might produce beyond just economies.
  332. Find this resource:
  333. Politics and the Power of Performativity
  334.  
  335. The application of a performativity perspective to analyze various types of power dynamics and structures illuminates how power works on a variety of scales, from the global and national, to that of everyday interaction. This type of performative power reaches beyond the immediate effects on participants, due to how particular interactional contexts are connected and embedded within infrastructures of power (such as systems of government) and linked to particular material presences (such as armies, money, and property). Caton and Zacka 2010 demonstrates how the infamous photographs produced at Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War did not just document abuse but were also performative forms of abuse. Graeber 2012 (cited under Critiques of Performativity/Performatives) argues that politics is performative but must hide this fact in order to be efficacious. Tsing 1993 (cited under Gender) analyzes power as produced through gendered activities during ritual practice. Schein 1999 provides an ethnographically rich account of how ethnicity and belonging to the nation-state are performatively enacted, while Boyer 2013 presents the political performativity of the “Best Party” in Iceland, who balanced parody and serious politics to challenge the political status quo.
  336.  
  337. Boyer, Dominic. 2013. Simply the best: Parody and political sincerity in Iceland. American Ethnologist 40.2: 276–287.
  338. DOI: 10.1111/amet.12020Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  339. Presents the political performativity of the “Best Party” in Iceland, which brought problematized the line between political sincerity and parody through their mode of public performance.
  340. Find this resource:
  341. Caton, Steven C., and Bernardo Zacka. 2010. Abu Ghraib, the security apparatus, and the performativity of power. American Ethnologist 37.2: 203–211.
  342. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2010.01250.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  343. Analyzes the photographs taken of the Abu Ghraib abuses in Iraq as performative. These photographs, in both their creation and circulation, were not simply representations or evidence of abuse but also part of how that abuse was instantiated.
  344. Find this resource:
  345. Graeber, David. 2012. The sword, the sponge, and the paradox of performativity: Some observations on fate, luck, financial chicanery, and the limits of human knowledge. Social Analysis 56.1: 25–42.
  346. DOI: 10.3167/sa.2012.560103Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  347. Presents politics, both broadly and more narrowly conceived, as performative in nature, helping to create the power differentials and social inequalities that it describes.
  348. Find this resource:
  349. Schein, Louisa. 1999. Performing modernity. Cultural Anthropology 14.3: 361–395.
  350. DOI: 10.1525/can.1999.14.3.361Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  351. How a national minority group, the Miao in China, engaged in performative reflexivity during a wedding feast, reflecting on their marginalized but protected place within the modernizing nation-state.
  352. Find this resource:
  353. Tsing, Anna. 1993. In the realm of the diamond queen. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
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  355. Rich ethnographic treatment of the Meratus Dayak. Focuses on ritual practices that contribute to power differentials, as shamans enact positions of power that perdure outside of the ritual setting.
  356. Find this resource:
  357. Performativity in Institutional Settings
  358.  
  359. Anthropologists have looked at how various types of institutions such as schools, courts, and various types of agencies may be usefully approached from a performativity perspective in order to see how power flows—or does not flow—across different forms of structures and organizations. Barrera 2013 posits the performative potentials of court cases to enact “transparency,” while Enriquez 2014 looks at how different types of classroom skills are performatively produced. Carr 2009 and Carr 2011 look at the performativity of language in addiction treatment centers. There is a recent growth in literature that looks at the practices of science as performatively powerful but also constrained by various types of institutions it is produced in. Peregrine 2013 is a brief though enlightening piece, which draws on Lyotard’s conception of science as performative in shaping public policy, and Hodžić 2013, a complex but rewarding piece, traces how the cultural boundaries of science helped to performatively constrain a World Health Organization report on female genital mutilation. Bauer 2013 uses performativity to link epidemiology, genomic research, and their policy effects.
  360.  
  361. Barrera, Leticia. 2013. Performing the Court: Public Hearings and the Politics of Judicial Transparency in Argentina. PoLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review 36.2: 326–340.
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  363. Analyzes a court case in Argentina about environmental violations as performative, in that it not only showed that the Argentinian Supreme Court had become more “transparent” but that it was also instantiating transparency.
  364. Find this resource:
  365. Bauer, Susanne. 2013. Modeling population health: Reflections on the performativity of epidemiological techniques in the age of genomics. Medical Anthropology Quarterly 27.4: 510–530.
  366. DOI: 10.1111/maq.12054Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  367. Builds on Callon’s and Mackenzie’s model of economic performativity to look at the doing of epidemiology as generative of knowledge production and a particular social relationality.
  368. Find this resource:
  369. Carr, Summerson. 2009. Anticipating and inhabiting institutional identities. American Ethnologist 36.2: 317–336.
  370. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01137.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  371. Focuses on the language used during addiction therapy and specifically the “anticipatory interpellation” of how addicts in therapy seek to create and take on particular subject positions. Such linguistic activities help to create addicts as particular subject positions vis-à-vis the agencies that treat them.
  372. Find this resource:
  373. Carr, E. Summerson. 2011. Scripting addiction: The politics of therapeutic talk and American sobriety. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.
  374. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  375. Uses Austin’s concept of performative language to explore how local language ideologies constrain who can do things with words, when, and to whom. Carr shows both how those in treatment learn to “flip the script” and use these ways of speaking to their advantage, as well as what is at stake in mastering such practices.
  376. Find this resource:
  377. Enriquez, Grace. 2014. Embodiments of “struggle”: The melancholy, loss, and interactions with print of two “struggling readers.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly 45.1: 105–122.
  378. DOI: 10.1111/aeq.12050Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  379. Uses concept of performativity to consider how roles such as “good” or “struggling” readers are enacted and embodied in a public middle school in New York City. Contains a brief but informative overview of performance theories of education.
  380. Find this resource:
  381. Hodžić, Saida. 2013. Ascertaining deadly harms: Aesthetics and politics of global evidence. Cultural Anthropology 28.1: 86–109.
  382. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01174.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  383. Examines World Health Organization practices around the production of a report on the safety issues surrounding female genital cutting as a way to analyze knowledge production and science. Looks at how the cultural boundaries of science are produced through performative iterations of what science is, does, and can (and does) know.
  384. Find this resource:
  385. Peregrine, Peter Neal. 2013. Science and narrative in the postmodern world. American Anthropologist 115.4: 642–655.
  386. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  387. Draws on Lyotard’s conceptualization of performativity, which sees narrative and other descriptions of scientific practices and discoveries as producing the underlying value of scientific knowledge. Both narrative knowledge and scientific knowledge have performativity in that they have power to effect change in the world (here, in terms of public policy). Part of a “vital topics” forum on evidence and the public interest.
  388. Find this resource:
  389. Semiotics and/of Performativity
  390.  
  391. Although Turner focused on the symbolic dimensions of ritual, a number of scholars are now engaged in bringing a semiotic perspective to bear on understanding performativity more specifically, generally drawing on the semiotics presented by Peirce 1955. Many of these are looking specifically at the semiotics of brands and branding, also drawing on Derrida to look at brands’ performative and citational nature. Nakassis 2012 argues for charting the specific ways in which the performativity of brands works across cultural contexts, while Lury 2004 looks at brands and market performativity, and Pang 2008 connects performativity and consumer desire. Manning 2012 (cited under Ritual) charts the semiotics of performativity in his work on drinks and drinking. Fleming 2011 is part of a special journal issue on taboo language (collection cited under Ritual) that looks at the performative functioning of naming taboos. Wilf 2013 considers the performativity of a form of music software, and Jones 2012 draws on Peirce’s concept of the diagram to look at agency and faith in Evangelical magicians’ performances of magic tricks.
  392.  
  393. Fleming, Luke. 2011. Name taboos and rigid performativity. Anthropological Quarterly 84.1: 141–164.
  394. DOI: 10.1353/anq.2011.0010Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  395. Uses a number of ethnographic cases to demonstrate the performativity of name taboos, which he argues flows from their potential indexical entailments and the referential force of personal names.
  396. Find this resource:
  397. Jones, Graham M. 2012. Magic with a message: The poetics of Christian conjuring. Cultural Anthropology 27.2: 193–214.
  398. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2012.01140.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  399. Explores how Evangelical Christian magicians produce iconic resemblances between Christian messages and conjuring effects in their performances of magic tricks. Shows that displays of virtuosic agency (“I fooled you!”) must be tempered by ongoing displays of faith.
  400. Find this resource:
  401. Lury, Celia. 2004. Brands: The logos of the global economy. London: Routledge.
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  403. Discusses market performativity, which pivots around brands and in turn both shapes market discourse and, through consumption, feeds back to shape marketing discourse.
  404. Find this resource:
  405. Manning, Paul. 2012. The semiotics of drink and drinking. London: Bloomsbury Academic.
  406. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  407. Discusses the semiotics of performativity, particularly in the chapter on wine, considering the complex interplay of semiotic meaning making and social activity that make up the supra, which is a culturally important event.
  408. Find this resource:
  409. Nakassis, Constantine V. 2012. Brand, citationality, performativity. American Anthropologist 114.4: 624–638.
  410. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1433.2012.01511.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  411. Analyzes brands as performative and citational (drawing on Derrida 1982, cited under Critiques of Performativity/Performatives and Butler 1993, cited under Foundational Texts). Argues that we should investigate how citationality and performativity work and interrelate, not assume (as he asserts Butler and Derrida do) that they are ideal types and always function the same way across contexts. The performativity of brands is unstable and prone to disruptions of various sorts.
  412. Find this resource:
  413. Pang, Laikwan. 2008. China who makes and fakes: A semiotics of the counterfeit. Theory, Culture, and Society 25.6: 117–140.
  414. DOI: 10.1177/0263276408095547Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  415. Looks at the Chinese production of counterfeit goods to examine how brands performatively constitute—and continuously defer—consumer desire.
  416. Find this resource:
  417. Peirce, Charles. 1955. Philosophical writings of Peirce. Edited by Justin Buchler. New York: Dover.
  418. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  419. Collected essays written by Peirce, outlining and explaining his semiotic theories, which have been used to elaborate how performativity functions in everyday interaction and ritual contexts.
  420. Find this resource:
  421. Wilf, Eitan. 2013. From media technologies that reproduce seconds to media technologies that reproduce thirds: A Peircean perspective on stylistic fidelity and style-reproducing computerized algorithms. Signs and Society 2.1: 185–211.
  422. DOI: 10.1086/671751Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  423. Looks at technologies that generate musical styles. Conceptualizes performativity as a Peircean “Third,” which is a generative principle built on bringing things into relation with one another to produce meaning. As people interact with robots and other technologies that produce “Thirds,” they performatively bring about the sentience or style (generative capacity) of that technology.
  424. Find this resource:
  425. Performativity of Documents and Writing
  426.  
  427. The performative potentials of documents and other types of texts have garnered substantial anthropological attention. Such work considers both the contexts in which documents and texts are produced and utilized, as well as how they are used in various ways by particular actors in order to explore how documents may do things in the world, even if they are understood by their users “simply” to describe various aspects of the world. Such work often looks at documents within bureaucracies, such as in Hull 2003 and Hull 2012, both of which focus on documents within government bureaucracies in Pakistan. Cody 2009 presents an ethnographic examination of the use of signatures and petitions in Indian bureaucracy. Faudree 2012 considers the deployment of the Requerimiento, a 16th-century Spanish text, and how it was used and circulated during the Spanish conquest of the new world. Lee 1997 (cited under Reviews) discusses the Declaration of Independence as a performative document, and Houston 2004 reviews how archaeologists are starting to consider texts they excavate as having performative potentials. Vaisman 2014 looks at the performative construction of gender in writing during Computer Mediated Communication.
  428.  
  429. Cody, Francis. 2009. Inscribing subjects to citizenship: Petitions, literacy activism, and the performativity of signature in rural Tamil India. Cultural Anthropology 24.3: 347–380.
  430. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1360.2009.01035.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  431. Builds on Derrida and Austin to look at tensions within the semiotic structure of the signature between what he calls constative representation and performative creation. This tension means signatures can produce citizens but also may reproduce certain citizens’ marginality vis-à-vis the state.
  432. Find this resource:
  433. Faudree, Paja. 2012. How to say things with wars: Performativity and discursive rupture in the Requerimiento of the Spanish conquest. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 22.3: 182–200.
  434. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1395.2012.01152.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  435. Looks at the Requerimiento, a 16th-century Spanish text, and how it was used and circulated during the Spanish conquest of the new world. Explores how its indeterminacy and use were instrumental in how it worked to performatively transform indigenous peoples into Spanish colonial subjects. Describes felicity conditions as “shared pragmatic conditions.”
  436. Find this resource:
  437. Houston, Stephen D. 2004. The archaeology of communication technologies. Annual Review of Anthropology 33:223–250.
  438. DOI: 10.1146/annurev.anthro.33.070203.143724Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  439. Describes a growing recognition that reading can be performative. Archaeologists are beginning to recognize certain written objects or artifacts as cues for performance that could have had particular situationally embedded performative properties.
  440. Find this resource:
  441. Hull, Matthew. 2003. The file: Agency, authority, and autography in an Islamabad bureaucracy. Language and Communication 23:287–314.
  442. DOI: 10.1016/S0271-5309(03)00019-3Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  443. Discusses how documents help to produce the worlds they describe, focusing on the material presence of certain documents and how they are produced and circulated.
  444. Find this resource:
  445. Hull, Matthew. 2012. Government of paper: The materiality of bureaucracy in urban Pakistan. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.
  446. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  447. Analyzes the performativity of files, plans, and documents of all kinds in shaping the world, a process that rests on the materiality of these forms as well as how they function semiotically.
  448. Find this resource:
  449. Lee, Benjamin. 1997. Talking heads: Language, metalanguage, and the semiotics of subjectivity. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press.
  450. DOI: 10.1215/9780822382461Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  451. Although the entire text focuses on performativity, in the last chapter that Lee focuses specifically on the performativity of documents, building on Derrida to outline the performativity of the Declaration of Independence, which culminated in its signing. Distinguishes between oral and textual forms of performativity, and how this document functioned performatively within its historical context to create “we the people.”
  452. Find this resource:
  453. Vaisman, Carmel L. 2014. Beautiful script, cute spelling and glamorous words: Doing girlhood through language playfulness on Israeli blogs. Language and Communication 34:69–80.
  454. DOI: 10.1016/j.langcom.2013.08.006Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  455. Analyzes the performative construction of gender in writing during Computer Mediated Communication on Israeli blogs, focusing specifically on digital typography, deviant orthography and morphology, and lexical borrowing.
  456. Find this resource:
  457. Performing Culture
  458.  
  459. A number of anthropological studies have looked at the performativity of culture and/or cultural practices. These include pieces that make some sort of distinction between unmarked mundane cultural practices, and when certain practices, linguistic or ceremonial perhaps, or objects come to signify what is particular or unique about a culture or group. Finnegan 1969 is a classic article, linking Austin’s concept of performative speech to the production and maintenance of social relationships, as is Foster 1989 (originally published in 1974), which uses Austinian notions of the performative to analyze a culturally specific storytelling event. Wilk 2006 differentiates between cooking and cuisine as producing different types of culture in the Caribbean, while Jackson and Ramirez 2009 notes that certain objects and practices may be utilized as performative of indigenous culture. Guano 2007 discusses how class and gender are performed in Italian public street culture. Whiteley 2003 notes the sociolinguistic performativity of Hopi language, particularly in terms of certain origin myths, while McIntosh 2005 looks at the performativity of code-switching practices among the Giriama in Kenya.
  460.  
  461. Finnegan, Ruth. 1969. How to do things with words: Performative utterances among the Limba of Sierra Leone. Man 4.4: 537–552.
  462. DOI: 10.2307/2798194Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  463. Classic article using Austin’s concept of performative speech to explore how certain verbal interactions among the Limba in northern Sierra Leone produce and maintain social relationships.
  464. Find this resource:
  465. Foster, Michael. 1989. When words become deeds: An analysis of three Iroquois long-house speech events. In Explorations in the ethnography of speaking. 2d ed. Edited by Richard Bauman and Joel Sherzer, 354–367. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Univ. Press.
  466. DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511611810Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  467. An early look at the efficacy and functionality of performativity as embedded within particular cultural contexts. Originally published in 1974.
  468. Find this resource:
  469. Guano, Emmanuela. 2007. Respectable ladies and uncouth men: The performative poetics of class and gender in the public realm in an Italian city. Journal of American Folklore 120.475: 48–72.
  470. DOI: 10.1353/jaf.2007.0011Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  471. Demonstrates how the passeggiata, or social strolling that characterizes much of Italian street life, performatively constructs class and gender in Genoa.
  472. Find this resource:
  473. Jackson, Jean E., and María Clemencia Ramírez. 2009. Traditional, transnational, and cosmopolitan: The Colombian Yanacona look to the past and to the future. American Ethnologist 36.3: 521–544.
  474. DOI: 10.1111/j.1548-1425.2009.01177.xSave Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  475. Focuses on a land dispute in Colombia over land claimed by an indigenous group, the Yanacona, as it tries to gain official status. This process involves displaying certain objects, like staffs, or engaging in certain practices as performative of Yanacona culture.
  476. Find this resource:
  477. McIntosh, Janet. 2005. Baptismal essentialisms. Journal of Linguistic Anthropology 15.2: 151–170.
  478. DOI: 10.1525/jlin.2005.15.2.151Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  479. Analyzes code-switching practices as performative of particular language ideologies and identities within Giriama (Kenya) rituals and everyday speech practices.
  480. Find this resource:
  481. Whiteley, Peter. 2003. Do “language rights” serve indigenous interests? Some Hopi and other queries. American Anthropologist 105.4: 712–722.
  482. DOI: 10.1525/aa.2003.105.4.712Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  483. Discusses the “sociolinguistic performativity” of Hopi language, which literally brings the world into being and has a material effect upon it in everyday speaking. Performativity is considered as a general process of becoming or creating.
  484. Find this resource:
  485. Wilk, Richard. 2006. Home cooking in the global village: Caribbean food from buccaneers to ecotourists. New York: Berg.
  486. Save Citation »Export Citation »E-mail Citation »
  487. Ethnographic and historical account of food and cuisine in Belize. Differentiates between cuisine—which performatively produces culture as a group of practices that represent a particular group—and cooking, which constitutes the everyday and unmarked practices and ingredients that make up what and how a group eats.
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