#performance of identity

[liveonphows-blog]

Paints Extracted From Video

Paints Extracted From Video

This article is dedicated to Meredith Lynn, a painter and drawer that has a full experience in what is called ‘fine arts’. She has been working in different projects that gather ideas like identity, performance of individuality, historical & life events, and many others. Here’s a brief bio and artist statement: My work is concerned primarily with the constitution and performance of identity. I…

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[shrinkrants]

In this paper, I will present two instances of cultural mirroring, one event which I call a “definitional ceremony,” the other an inscribed text, a self-portrait of a collectivity. Both of these are found in a highly self-conscious community which continually interprets, depicts, and performs its self-determined reality; both forms are strikingly symbolic and can be unpacked to elucidate the community’s understanding of itself; and both are reflecting surfaces and reflexive, demonstrating the creators’ consciousness of their own interpretive work. The cases I cite, ceremony and inscribed text, were exceptionally successful in the persuasions about the reality they asserted. Their success may be judged by the fact that they reached beyond convincing and moving their own members about the claims they made. They succeeded in interesting and captivating outsider-witnesses as to the validity of their interpretations. These outsider-witnesses—anthropologist and the media—served as further reflecting surfaces, broadcasting, re-presenting what they had been shown, and thus enlarging the people’s original interpretations and giving them a greater public and factual character than they had in their primary form. By pressing into service others who believed, to restate their versions of themselves, they amplified their claims. The people involved eventually succeeded in bring about actual changes, in reversing to some degree their political impotence and invisibility, by the canny deployment of their symbols, consciously manipulated; by their skillful operation on public sentiments; and by their sheer conviction that although they understood their manipulations fully, they were innocently, utterly correct. Ultimately, they displayed “facts” of their life and their meaning, knowing full well that the facts they portrayed were about life not ast was but as it should have been.

Barbara Myerhoff. “Life Not Death in Venice”: its second life. In The Anthropology of Experience edited by Victor Turner and Edward Bruner, University of Illinois Press, 1986.