Choreography and Ceremony: The Artful Side of Action

• Authors: Wendy James
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

"Actions" are normally thought of as taken by individuals. But to understand their quality, it is not enough to classify them from the perspective of individual psychology (rational vs. emotional, technical vs. artistic, etc.). We need to grasp their relation to those forms of collective life which have a historical existence independent of specific individual action (institutions, the conventions of social gathering, the organizing principles of games, architecture, music, ritual, etc.). This paper focuses on what characteristics such forms of collective life share, not what seems to separate them (eg. into sacred vs secular, technology vs creative art). The main features emphasized are their choreography, that is their enactment within commonly understood patterns of a spatial and temporal kind, as well as rules of interactive movement; and their ceremonial character, something which can be found in simple situations such as a conversation or a meal, though much more intensely in major religious ritual. A particularly resonant image for these enactments of social life is the dance. Because there is a ceremonial aspect to all social interaction, the paper argues that individual action, necessarily oriented to the social context, always has an "artful" side (however habitual or technical). The paper draws on the writings of Wittgenstein on action, and those of Collingwood on language and art, to shape the argument. Illustrations are provided of the "artful" employment of language (especially by actors on the stage), the "artful" side of material culture, and from the author's own ethnographic studies, the significance of dance among Sudanese refugees in Ethiopia.

Keywords

EN

actions; individual action; collective forms; choreography; ceremony; dance; language

• Publisher: Sciendo
• Journal: Human Affairs
• Year: 2007
• Volume: 17
• Issue: 2
• Pages: 129-137

Dates

published

2007-12-01

online

2007-12-17

Contributors

author

Wendy James

• St. Cross College, University of Oxford, 61 St. Giles Oxford, OX1 3LZ, UK

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Identifiers

DOI

10.2478/v10023-007-0012-y