Experiential and Performative Anthropology in the Classroom (original) (raw)

As indicated by its subtitle, the book recapitulates and updates the Turner's foundational work on the subject of ritual and performance. Each new generation of cultural scholars returns to ritual as a focus of study, and for good reason; ritual allows tacit cultural truths, contradictions, and conundrums to be artfully embodied and spectacularly performed. And there are no two scholars more qualified to bring us this timely text. Pam Frese and Susan Brownell were students of the Turners and they have continued to advance the field. Supplementing seminal essays by Victor and Edith Turner are chapters by ritual scholars who share their own time-tested teaching techniques, each of which is either adapted or adaptable to the contemporary world in which our ritual experiences are almost always electronically/digitally mediated in some form or fashion. Frese and Brownell share their wealth of research and teaching experience as well, drawing essential connections between field and classroom while demonstrating the integral relationship between ritual theory and methodology. In reading this book, we remember not just how to teach ritual, from an intellectual perspective, but why to do so, drawing on the entire body and full range of senses. I often quote the line "writing about music is like dancing about architecture" in my classroom. Frese and Brownell remind us that "dancing about architecture" is not only reasonable and common, but that ritual and performance are at the heart of what it is to be human. The book is also a reminder that not all things can be reduced to "text." At a time when all disciplines seem to be rediscovering care and affect, scholarly writing on those subjects often remains as dry, cold, and dispassionate as ever. Frese and Brownell's writing is refreshingly clear, substantive, and insightful. Their book will be as useful to the seasoned professor as it is accessible for undergraduate and graduate students. The latter will benefit not only through learning about the history, theory, and ethnographic methods as applied to ritual, but also they will gain directly applicable knowledge as instructors-in-training. Trained mostly through text and talk, graduate students often need a great deal of coaxing and scaffolding in order to experiment with embodied, multimodal, multimedia, and performative forms of expression, communication, and research. Experiential and Performative Anthropology in the Classroom will help students to move beyond their comfort zones in order to reinvent the future of ethnographic research and teaching."