The final conceptual approach is organized around images of performance. Performance approaches place considerable emphasis on bodies in motion - the ways in which individuals and groups are engaged in negotiation about cultural meanings and practices. ‘‘Rituals and religious ceremonies,’’ as Dougherty and Kurke write in their introduction to a volume on Cultural Poetics, ‘‘are inseparable from what we now call politics, subject to negotiation from above and below’’ (1998: 5; also Goldhill 1999). There is overlap between performance approaches and the work of Foucault, as suggested by the Foucauldian inspired edited volume Before Sexuality that seeks to explore the ‘‘cultural poetics’’ of sexuality (Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin 1990: 4). I would describe performance approaches as a more general rubric inspired variously by cultural anthropology (e. g. Victor Turner), sociology (e. g. Erving Goffman), semiotics (e. g. Mikhail Bakhtin), linguistics (J. L. Austin), phenomenology (e. g. Hannah Arendt), philosophy (e. g. Nietzsche), literary analytic approaches of New Historicism and cultural poetics (e. g. Stephen Greenblatt), andfeminist theory (e. g. Judith Butler). Common to performance approaches are theatrical metaphors of social and political drama, the political stage, and political performance that remind us ‘‘that any drama includes an audience that participates in the action and so forces us to look beyond the elite, the powerful, those on stage’’ (Dougherty and Kurke 1998: 5). Instead of the Weberian focus on politics as the exercise by the state of legitimate domination, politics is more local, contextual, and appears in a variety of guises: burial and cult sites, myths, festivals, art, monuments, landscapes, economic exchange, crowds and public assemblies, literary and historiographic texts, conduct, and the theater itself (see Gibert, this volume, chapter 28, and Further Reading below). This evidence emerges as an artifact of material culture that is structured by, and in turn serves as ‘‘a force in informing social behaviour and in negotiating relations of power and dominance’’ (Alcock, Gates, and Rempel 2003: 358).
If there is a common tone to these works, it is of political processes that, for contemporaneous participants, are much less determinant, more open to interpretation and misinterpretation, and more fluid. The politics of prestate societies, such as the Homeric world, take on new complexity when we identify politics not by way of a particular set of institutional attributes tied to specific functions but as a field in which questions of community organization are raised, determined, and implemented (Hammer 2002). Interpretations of the ancient economy focus less on stripping away the distortions of the evidence in order to ‘‘figure out how the economy ‘really’ worked’’ than on viewing the distortions themselves as giving insight into the ‘‘economy’’ as ‘‘a category of representation’’ in which actors are ‘‘manipulating evocative symbols within specific performance contexts’’ (I. Morris 1994: 356, 351). Even tyranny is reinterpreted. Rather than viewing rituals and ceremonies as propaganda manufactured and controlled by leaders, one can interpret rituals, such as the procession of Peisistratus, as forms of two-way communication in which the people are ‘‘alert, even sophisticated actors in a ritual drama’’ (Connor 1987: 46; also McGlew 1993; Sinos 1998; Raaflaub 2003b; Ober 2003; Morgan 2003: ix on tyranny as a ‘‘conceptual force’’ rather than its ‘‘historical instances’’).
In Roman studies, we move from the careful scrutinizing of law and procedure to, as Millar writes, the ‘‘open-air’’ where the people assemble, listen to speeches, and respond (1998: 1; also Millar 1984, 1986). The conception of the Roman political system itself changes from a ‘‘tightly controlled, ‘top-down’ system’’ to one in which ‘‘rival conceptions of state and society, and rival policies as regards both internal structures and external relations, were openly debated before the crowd in the Forum’’ (Millar 1998: 6-7). A whole new brand of scholarship has begun exploring spectacle - ‘‘the visible component of all rituals and public acts’’ - as a way in which the people participate in, and experience, the political and cultural world (Feldherr 1998: 13; see Kraus 1994; Slater 1996; Chaplin 2000; Kraus and Woodman 1997; M. Jaeger 1997; Leigh 1997; Boyle 2003). As Potter writes, in arguing against de Ste Croix’s view that the decline of democratic institutions in Rome spelled the end of popular power, ‘‘The exercise of authority in the ancient world was highly theatrical, and for the performance of power to succeed, it was necessary for the audience to be drawn into the act, to be made to feel a part of the action’’ (Potter 1996: 131).
The point is not to deny that there are differentials of formal and informal power, or even that elites seek to control the meanings ofthe spectacles. In fact, scholars have demonstrated how such spectacles and performances transmitted authority (as the authority relations are reenacted) (Feldherr 1998), how orators sought to shape the meanings that were interpreted (Vasaly 1993), how such spectacles were used for elite representation (Hcilkeskamp 1995), and how such performances were structured by ideology and limited to competition among ‘‘alternative rhetorical personae’’ (Morstein-Marx 2004: 15, 276-7). The point is that these meanings can never be controlled once and for all because there is always an audience engaged in interpretation. The effect of the audience can be to shape and alter what is actually said (as the actor anticipates and adjusts to the audience), to come up with interpretations that are themselves unintended by the actors, and to form a collective identity (and some power) in the role as interpreter.
Not surprisingly, such approaches provide a more expansive understanding of ways different groups, such as women, may have participated in politics, whether through protests, legal advocacy, political networks and elections, the succession and the transmission of legitimacy, poetic and theatrical performance, and day-to-day interactions (see Sissa, this volume, chapter 7; Hallett 1984; Bauman 1992; Savunen 1995; Corbier 1995; Stehle 1997; Katz 1999; essays in Fraschetti 2001). Perhaps some of the excitement of employing these performance approaches points to their weakness; one can too easily read fluidity, freedom, and indeterminance where there are, in fact, profound structural constraints to action. As Richlin comments, in responding to the tendency of New Historicists to see subversion in everything, ‘‘Political gains have been made by means of confrontation, not by inverted commas’’ (Richlin 1992: xxvi). We come full circle in the contributions of different approaches to politics: bodies in motion must ultimately have backbones.
World History
